Source: http://ift.tt/s4oliE --- Wednesday, November 23, 2016
Quote: Branca, pitcher of 'Shot Heard 'Round the World' fame, dies Three-time All-Star won 21 games for 1947 Dodgers Excerpts: Baseball has lost one of the game's enduring gentlemen, who lived for more than 60 years with a most conspicuous yet somewhat unwarranted smudge on his pitching reputation. Ralph Branca, the losing pitcher in one of Baseball's most famous games, is dead at age 90. *** He threw the pitch that resonated throughout the land; therefore, he is forever connected to the man who hit it from Coogan's Bluff into the consciousness of all generations of Baseball loyalists and to a time when Baseball was, in every way, the national pastime, if not the country's sports obsession. The pitch was the focal point of Branca's life as the public sees it, the scarlet letter that didn't necessarily fade in the years that followed. But neither the pitch nor the profound loss it prompted in 1951 became the theme of his life. *** In the years that followed Thomson's three-run home run, by which the Giants completed a four-run comeback to beat the Dodgers and win the National League pennant -- "The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!" -- the pitcher and hitter developed a friendship that withstood time, rumors, speculation, and finally, an unsettling truth. The Giants had stolen the Dodgers' signs during the three-game playoff and Thomson might have benefited from the electronic surveillance when he pulled Branca's ...
from Baseball http://ift.tt/2g55nuU
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