Broomsticks & Bobby (One Sixty-Two: Day 123)

Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day One Hundred Twenty-Three: Edgar Renteria, San Francisco Giants (via Bobby Thomson)

In 1951, my grandparents lived with my mom in an apartment on Victory Boulevard in Tompkinsville, a working-class neighborhood on the North Shore of Staten Island. Their landlords, Mr. and Mrs. Nellis, lived above them and rooted passionately for the Brooklyn Dodgers. My grandparents gave them a hard time in September of ’51, as the New York Giants stormed back from 13½ games back to force a three-game playoff with the Dodgers for the National League pennant.

On October 3rd, when Bobby Thomson hit a three-run home run in the ninth inning of the deciding Game 3, my grandparents couldn’t help themselves. They picked up a broomstick and started banging on the ceiling. They, like almost all of New York, had been following this pennant race closely. Thomson’s home run had them whooping and hollering, while it had their landlords sobbing. Neither landlords nor tenants were alone in their reactions.

Bobby Thomson died a week ago at age 86, and he spent a lot of time over the last 59 years of his life talking about that home run. Not many people know what it’s like to electrify the world with one swing. But Thomson knew.

There have been players who’ve experienced the thrill of ending a postseason series with a game-winning hit. Bill Mazeroski and Joe Carter have clinched World Series titles with home runs, while Aaron Boone has, like Thomson, launched his team into the Fall Classic with one. Luis Gonzalez, Edgar Renteria and Gene Larkin have clinched world championships for their teams with singles. All of these hits are among baseball’s most exciting moments ever.

But when you’re talking about New York City in 1951, it’s a bit different from Minnesota in 1991, Miami in ’97 or Phoenix in 2001. There has never been a more fascinating setting for baseball than Gotham in the 1950s, as countless sports writers and historians have explained through books and articles over the years. And to think that of the three New York baseball teams, one was already in the World Series in October ’51, while the other two were playing a three-game series in order to get there and face the Yankees. That’s a level of excitement never experienced before, and never since.

I met Bobby Thomson once, while covering the unveiling of a postage stamp that commemorated his famous home run. Thomson seemed humble, reserved, and still in love with the game of baseball. He seemed to understand just what his “Shot Heard Round the World” meant to people, but he also surely knew that he would have never gotten the chance to hit such a historic homer were it not for so much amazing baseball played that season by Giants and Dodgers players alike.

To the people of New York, Thomson’s homer brought tears of joy, tears of sadness, screams of all kinds, and pandemonium in the city that never sleeps. It led to broomstick-knocks from the apartment below you, as your tenants shouted with joy while you covered your face to hide from the truth.

Bobby Thomson brought the frenzy of 1950s New York City baseball to its nirvana. He delivered it, savored it, and heard about it for six decades afterward. It was the kind of day that you don’t mind reliving for the rest of your life. Or telling your grandkids about. It was, most assuredly, the kind of day you remember forever.