A Remarkable Player in Remarkable Series

The single greatest moment of American sports in the 1900s?

It’s a long list, but a lot of people would put down Oct. 13, 1960, faster than you can say Bill Mazeroski.

The odds that any baseball-playing boy would one day hit a home run to win a World Series are, what, a billion to one?

Mazeroski, who learned to play the game on the ballfields of Wheeling, W.Va., did it, 39 years ago today, giving Pittsburgh its first World Series championship in 35 years.

Mazeroski, though, was only the final hero in one of the most remarkable Series games ever played.

Rocky Nelson gave the Pirates a 2-0 lead in the first inning with a home run, and the Pirates increased that to 4-0 after two innings.

Home runs by Bill Skowron in the fifth inning and Yogi Berra in the sixth helped the Yankees take a 5-4 lead, which they increased to 7-4 in the eighth. But Pittsburgh’s Hal Smith hit a three-run home run in the bottom of the eighth and the Pirates scored five runs to retake the lead, 9-7.

New York got two in the top of the ninth for a 9-9 tie, setting the stage for the wildest street party in Pittsburgh history.

In the bottom of the ninth, on the second pitch from Ralph Terry, Mazeroski hit a high drive that carried over the ivy-covered left-field wall in Forbes Field.

Mazeroski, who never hit more than 19 home runs in any one of his 17 seasons, said the 1-and-0 pitch was a high fastball. Terry said only: “I don’t know what it was. . . . Whatever it was, it was the wrong one.”

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Also on this date: In 1903, nine months after the National League agreed to recognize the American League as a major league, the first World Series was played. It ended 96 years ago today, with Boston beating Pittsburgh, 3-0, to win the eight-game series, five games to three. Attendance: 7,455. . . . In 1975, Swede Risberg, one of the players implicated in the Black Sox scandal of the 1919 World Series, died in Red Bluff, Calif., on his 81st birthday. . . . In 1971, Pittsburgh beat Baltimore, 4-3, in the World Series’ first night game. . . . In 1970, Baltimore’s Dave McNally became the first pitcher to hit a grand slam in the World Series.