A Playoff Might Have Been Fun

When the Dodgers crushed the Giants on Sunday, 12-1, it was widely believed that they had, in so doing, quashed the second one-game title playoff in National League history.

Until baseball went to divisions, you see, the National League had best-of-three game playoffs. There were, if memory serves, four of them. The American League favored a one-game playoff. There have been, I believe, two of them.

The Dodgers, interestingly enough, have been in all of their league’s pennant or division title playoffs. In 1946, they lost to the Cardinals; in 1951, they lost to the Giants; in 1959, they beat the Milwaukee Braves; in 1963, they lost to the Giants, and in 1980, in the league’s only one-game playoff, they lost to the Houston Astros. (The Boston Red Sox lost both American League playoffs.)

But the interesting fact of the matter is, this would not have been the second one-game shootout in the National League. The honor for the first should go to the 1908 pennant race between the Cubs and the Giants although, technically, their pennant game is listed as regular-season.

It had to do with one of the most-famous instances of baseball history, the Fred Merkle “bonehead” play.

The circumstances were these: the Cubs and Giants were in a tie for the pennant with a week to go when they met at the Polo Grounds. In that venerable edifice, it was common practice for fans to jump out onto the field once the game was over and approach the local heroes for pats-on-the-back, cuss-outs or general elbow-rubbing with the athletes. It behooved the player to sprint for the center field clubhouse at the final out or risk losing his cap, shirt, or glove to the adoring populace.

Accordingly, with the game in the bottom of the ninth inning tied at one and two out, the batter, Fred Merkle, hit a long single to right, advancing a runner, Moose McCormick, to third. When the next batter, an Al Bridwell, laced a single to center, McCormick crossed the plate with the winning run which would, as developments occurred, have won the pennant for the Giants. As McCormick scored, Merkle sprinted from first base directly to the clubhouse.

It had been done all year but, this time, the crafty Cub second baseman, Johnny Evers (as in Tinker to Evers to Chance), went in search of the ball. He knew that Merkle would be technically forced out at second and that would be the third out and the run would not count.

Evers called for the ball to be thrown in. But a Giant coach, Joe McGinnity, caught on--and he ran out and intercepted the throw from the outfield and threw the ball completely out of the ballpark.

The Cubs’ manager, Frank Chance, immediately went to the umpires’ dressing room and dragged them back out onto the field. He argued that, because of McGinnity’s interference, the game should be forfeited to Chicago.

The umps, in a Solomon-like resolution, would not go that far, but ruled that, indeed, Merkle was out and decreed that the game was a tie game and, should it be critical, it would have to be played off at the end of the season.

It was critical, all right. The teams ended the regular season tied, and in the one-game playoff--which wasn’t technically a playoff, but was in actuality--the Cubs won the game and the pennant, thus certifying Merkle as one of baseball’s earliest and most durable “goats.”

The record book shows simply “Chicago 99-55” and New York “98-56,” but it was a one-game playoff, any way you look at it.

A pity 1993 missed one. Because these bonus games have loomed large in the game’s lore and mystique. The 1946 St. Louis-Brooklyn playoff was uneventful because the Cardinals blew the Dodgers away rather easily in two straight.

But the 1951 playoff between the Dodgers and Giants was the stuff of legend. It climaxed in “the Little Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff” wherein Bobby Thomson hit one of the famous home runs of history as the Dodgers blew a 4-1 lead going into the bottom of the ninth in the third game.

In 1959, the pendulum swung the other way. In the deciding game against the Milwaukee Braves, it was the Dodgers who went into the bottom of the ninth trailing by three runs, 5-2. They caught up and, in the 12th inning, won the pennant on a throwing error.

In 1963, it was again the Dodgers’ turn in the barrel. They led by 4-2 going into the ninth inning of the decisive third game but four walks, an error, a wild pitch and an infield single off the pitcher’s glove later and the Giants had snatched another pennant out of the Dodgers’ duffle.

The ’80 playoff was a rout, the Astros winning, 7-1, but baseball is the poorer without these unscheduled histrionics. They are whipped cream in the coffee, wine with the dinner.

Who knows? We might have had a Bobby Thomson or Fred Merkle to write home about if we’d had a one-game tiebreaker this year. We might have had the two best lineups in the grand old game measuring each other at San Francisco. “Monday Night Football” might have lost the ratings game.

Did the Dodgers get even with the Giants for past indignities? Did they merely deprive the Giants? Or the rest of us?