You never forget the first time.
I don’t remember the day (a Tuesday I missed school, it turns out) and I don’t recall the New York Yankees’ starting pitcher (Tommy Byrne).
But I remember Johnny Podres pitching all nine innings and Sandy Amoros saving the game when my team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, won their first World Series on Oct. 4, 1955.
If you think the White Sox and Cubs are an intracity rivalry, picture my neighborhood. Heck, picture my block . . . in Flushing, Queens, that year. We had Dodgers, Yankees and Giants fans each arguing for their “hometown” team.
World Series games were played in the afternoon and New Yorkers my age (12 going on 13) followed them by sneaking close to radios in school or by skipping classes to watch on TV.
Yankees fans celebrated a lot of championships. Giants fans had just won one in 1954. By contrast, my Dodgers were 0-for-7 in the World Series, losing to the hated Yankees five times.
So when the “Bums of Flatbush” lost the first two Series games at Yankee Stadium in 1955, it looked like another Fall Classic fall.
But after the Dodgers pulled off three straight victories at home in Ebbets Field and the Yankees rebounded to win Game 6 in the Bronx, the stage was set for a deciding Game 7 in Yankee Stadium. I got to stay home to watch on TV.
My memory of that game focuses on two plays. One was incredible, the other incredibly routine in most circumstances.
First, the incredible: Bottom of the sixth, Dodgers holding a 2-0 lead, Yankees on first and second, nobody out and the fearsome Yogi Berra at bat. Berra slices a ball deep to left field.
Amoros races toward the low fence, extends his gloved right hand as he nears the foul line and catches what looked like a certain game-tying double. So certain that Gil McDougald, the runner at first, was doubled off by Amoros’ throw and shortstop Pee Wee Reese’s relay. Podres then retired Hank Bauer on a grounder to short.
The routine play was Reese fielding Elston Howard’s grounder and throwing to first baseman Gil Hodges to end the 2-0 game and start the celebration.
For me, that included retelling the good stuff to my father, a doctor who had to work that day, when he came home. He had grown up with soccer in Austria. But that year, he learned baseball alongside his son.
The Dodgers and I have long since left New York. The Los Angeles Dodgers have won five World Series, one at the expense of the White Sox. I reveled in Kirk Gibson’s walk-off home run against the Oakland A’s in 1988, and I was in the ballpark when the Dodgers wrapped up that World Series behind Orel Hershiser’s gutsy pitching.
But my fondest World Series memory remains that seventh game in 1955.
After all, you never forget the first time.
