August Night’s Ghost Still Haunts Dodgers

The game is never over till the final out. That’s one of the oldest cliches in baseball. It’s not often true. Some games are over by the third inning. But some are not over with two out in the ninth and an eight-run lead. As Yogi Berra has said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

It isn’t often you can pinpoint a game in which a team lost the championship. The romance of baseball tells of the time Bobby Thomson hit the home run that became The Miracle Of Coogan Bluff in 1951 and snatched the pennant from the Dodgers. But the Dodgers had a 13 1/2-game lead in mid-August of that season; so there must have been a passel of winnable games they let slip by even to have to get into a playoff in the first place.

If the Dodgers blow the division championship this year--no longshot, by any means--you can probably point to a shocking day in August, when, in perfect position to come up on the league-leading Reds’ blindside and get them ready for a late-season sacking, the Dodgers let it all get away. They had an 11-3 lead over the Phillies that night going into the ninth inning.

It was a watershed game. A sportscaster that night had already put up a graphic on the screen showing the Dodgers creeping to within 4 1/2 games of the Reds with that “win.” That game was in the bag. Pennant-contending teams don’t blow eight-run leads in an inning.

The Dodgers did. When the smoke had cleared that night, the score was, incredibly, Philadelphia 12, L.A. 11. They didn’t even need extra innings.

No dramatic, Thomson-like home run, but that game could very well be The Night the Dodgers Lost the Division Title. Certainly, a team that goes into the ninth inning with an eight-run lead and turns out to have its backs to the wall cannot be expected to recover the rest of the way. That is a ghost in the closet that will never let you sleep.

It was a major league blowout, but baseball has had them before. Probably the most famous one was in the 1929 World Series when the Philadelphia Athletics were playing the Chicago Cubs at home and leading the Series two games to one. But the A’s were behind in the fourth game, 8-0, as they came to bat in the seventh inning.

That game looked over before the final out, but Philadelphia had a super team that year. They tell the story of the time in Yankee Stadium, the A’s were rallying against the Yankees and the Yankee manager wanted a relief pitcher. The bullpen in Yankee Stadium is out of sight of the dugout, and he called by phone. In the bullpen, reliever Henry Johnson, who had just bought a hot dog, took the call. “Johnson, go in and relieve Pipgras,” the manager instructed. “Who’s coming up?”Johnson asked suspiciously. “Cochrane, Simmons and Foxx,” was the answer. Johnson put down his hot dog and turned to the other residents of the bullpen. “Don’t touch that hot dog,” he growled. “I’ll be right back!”

That afternoon in the World Series of ‘29, lots of pitchers were right back.

It all began when Al Simmons, who had led the league in runs batted in (with 157) that year, led off with a home run. Jimmy Foxx, Bing Miller, Jimmie Dykes, Al Boley and Max Bishop all singled. Out went starting pitcher Charlie Root. Mule Haas greeted reliever Art Nehf with an inside-the-park home run.

It went on like that. When the inning was over, so, too, for all intents and purposes, was the game and the World Series. Simmons, Foxx and Dykes each had collected two hits in the inning, Miller (naturally) had been hit by the pitcher the second time he came up, and the A’s won the game, 10-8. The Cubs, demoralized, went quietly, losing the Series four games to one. Any major rally relies on defensive errors, mental or mechanical. For the Cubs, the comeback turned on the erratic behavior of their center fielder.

Hack Wilson was a great hitter. He still holds the league single-season home run record (56) and the major league RBI record (190). But he was also a heavy drinker. They tell the story of the time Manager Joe McCarthy supposedly wanted to teach Wilson a lesson. He dropped a worm in a glass of water. It wriggled contentedly. He dropped it into a glass of gin. It curled up and died. “What does that tell you, Wilson?” he demanded. “If you drink gin, you won’t have worms,” the outfielder cheerily commented.

Mule Haas’ pivotal inside-the-park home run in that game was probably more the result of Hack’s hangover than Haas’ bat. Accounts of the day say the ball was eminently playable, a routine fly. With Wilson in the outfield, there was probably no such thing as a routine fly ball.

Dodger coach Joey Amalfitano knows the folly of assuming a big lead means a big win. Some years ago, Joey was coaching in Chicago for the Cubs when they trailed the Phillies, 17-6, in a late inning. A Chicago baserunner, Mike Vail, somehow found his way to third base with no one out. “Go in on any hit ball, we need the runs,” Amalfitano advised him. The batter then hit a double-play ball to the shortstop who, with an 11-run lead, ignored the runner and got the sure two outs. Vail stood there watching. Amalfitano couldn’t believe his eyes. Vail looked up. “You didn’t want me to go in on that, did you?”

“Oh, no,” Amalfitano said sarcastically. “We didn’t need the run. We already got six.”

Incredibly, the Cubs tied that score. In fact, it was 22-22 going into the ninth inning when Mike Schmidt won it for the Phillies with a home run. “If Vail had gone in on that double-play ball, who knows? We might have won,” Amalfitano says with a sigh.

The Dodgers might have won the division title if they could have hung on to that 11-3 lead. Of course, you never can be sure. In a championship football game years ago, which turned out to be a 73-0 victory for the Chicago Bears over the Washington Redskins, a fan tried to console the losing quarterback, Sammy Baugh, whose receiver had dropped a sure touchdown pass on the opening drive. “If he had caught that, it might have turned out differently,” he soothed.

“Yeah,” Baugh said, “it would have been 73-7.”