For decades we Yankee fans were subjected to the sappy drivel about the great rivalry between the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants baseball teams. The Yankees were almost blamed for the Dodgers and Giants leaving New York for California after the 1957 season. The move to California ushered in what I consider the golden age of New York baseball: 1958-1961 when the Yankees were the city's only MLB team. Ah, those were the days!
However, the many bitter NL fans and writers deluged us with junk about the teams that had left and attacked the Yankees at every turn. As mentioned in my previous post, a common insult was that rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for U.S. Steel: cold, corporate, calculated, devoid of colorful characters. Hey, I was just rooting for the home team. I was ten years old.
Plus, how corporate and uncolorful were: Yogi Berra, Billy Martin, Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford and, of course, Casey Stengel? It was the big lie of New York sports in those years, that and the GREAT RIVALRY.
For a rivalry to be great both teams really need to be good at the same time. For instance the rivalry between the Yankees and Red Sox is another fiction because since the Yankees started winning in 1920 both have been good for only three periods: 1948-1950, 1975-1978, and all but about three seasons from 1999-2010. Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Mickey Mantle never played a meaningful game against the Red Sox.
NOTE: See my correction in post:
Did Mantle play any meaningful games against the Red Sox? WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2011
The Dodger-Giant rivalry supposedly peaked in the 1950s, highlighted by the tie in 1951 in the NL, which resulted in three extra regular season games between the two teams to decide the NL pennant and who would play the Yankees in the World Series.
Game 1: Monday, October 1, 1951, Ebbets Field Attendance: 30,707 Giants 3, Dodgers 1
Game 2: Tuesday, October 2, 1951, Polo Grounds V Attendance: 38,609 Dodgers 10, Giants 0
Game 3: Wednesday, October 3, 1951, Polo Grounds V Attendance: 34,320 Giants 5, Dodgers 4. Giants score 4 in bottom of ninth.
The Giants win the pennant!
The Giants win the pennant!
The Giants win the pennant!
They're going crazy!
They're going crazy!
Blah, blah, blah.
We heard it ad nauseam. In 1962 we heard it more than what had been done by a Yankee the previous season: Roger Maris breaking Babe Ruth's single season home record.
Note the attendance. Ebbets Field held about 36,000. The Polo Grounds held about 52,000. So where the heck was everybody? Empty seats for each game were about: 6,000, 13,000, 18,000. There were actually fewer fans at deciding game three than at game two. What the heck?
Now get this. The grab ass apologist answer that you get from old time Dodger and/or Giant fans is that these games were played on weekdays, they had to work, that times were tough. Hey, it was not the depression of the 1930s. This was during the post WWII economic boom.
Then, now get this one, when confronted with the fact that game 1 of the 1951 World Series was played Thursday, October 4, 1951 at Yankee Stadium in front of 65,673 you get the astonishing and undocumented claim that Yankee fans were rich stock brokers. I've actually heard that claimed by multiple otherwise intelligent lawyer friends within the last year or two. WOW!
game 1: Thursday, October 4, 1951 at Yankee Stadium 65,673 Giants 5, Yankees 1
game 2: Friday, October 5, 1951 at Yankee Stadium 66,018 Yankees 3, Giants 1
game 3: Saturday, October 6, 1951 at Polo Grounds 52,035 Giants 6, Yankees 2
game 4: Monday, October 8, 1951 at Polo Grounds 49,010 Yankees 6, Giants 2
game 5: Tuesday, October 9, 1951 at Polo Grounds 47,530 Yankees 13, Giants 1
game 6: Wednesday, October 10, 1951 at Yankee Stadium 61,711 Yankees 4, Giants 3
Irony does not even begin to to describe the position in which Met fans find themselves. What you say, the hypocrisy of the father should not be visited upon the son? Met fans of all ages are drenched in the team history, or rather lack of it, and the richer history of the teams that came before.
The Mets have been a colorless forgettable franchise with ever changing uniforms and team colors, endlessly searching for an identity, even basing their new ballpark on the long gone and deservedly forgotten Ebbets Field, which was a crumbling mess when abandoned, and honoring in their new park, not a Met, but a Dodger: Jackie Robinson. This inspired by principal owner Fred Wilpon, a young Dodger fan in the 1950s, the Met who benefited most from the corruption of the criminal Bernie Madoff and the corporate welfare of MLB, Inc.
As mentioned in my previous post: the chickens have come home to roost. They always do.
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