Forty months. Three and one-third years. Mom died that long ago or, if you prefer, that recently. If I have learned anything at all since she died it is that time can feel both fleeting and endless simultaneously. The two concepts are not mutually exclusive.
If you were not fortunate to have known my mother, then I feel for you. You missed one of the greats. Mom was a great not because she aspired to have her name illuminated by the klieg lights but because she knew that life's biggest, most important moments are not lived in the shadow of the spotlight's glow or in the cacophonous din of the crowd's roar. She knew that substance is what mattered. It was who you were and what you did when no one was looking that proved your true measure. It was a yardstick by which she was never anything other than the tallest person I have ever known or shall ever know.
Mom died in the sixtieth summer following the great westward migration of her beloved Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. Although Mom was an ardent Brooklyn Dodgers fan, once Walter O'Malley moved them out of Brooklyn at the end of the 1957 season, she never cheered for them again. If you ever asked Mom how many times the Dodgers have won the World Series, irrespective of the year in which the question was asked, her answer remained the same: One.
My parents were both devout New York National League baseball fans. WPK, Sr. was as pissed about his Giants vacating the Polo Grounds, which they did too at the end of the '57 season, in favor of San Francisco, as Mom was about the Dodgers. Each became a New York Mets fan when the Mets replaced the Giants and the Dodgers as New York City's National League club in time for the 1962 season. They never replaced the Dodgers in Mom's heart, even though she cheered for them. The Mets never evoked the same passion in her. Nothing close to it, in fact.
Ralph Branca pitched in the major leagues for twelve seasons, from 1944 through 1956. He spent most of his career with the Dodgers, including 1947 when, on Opening Day at Ebbets Field, he did what many other players refused to do, and lined up on the field next to Jackie Robinson, who was making his debut as the first African-American player in the major leagues. Branca was a good pitcher for the Dodgers, being named a National League All-Star in 1947, 1948, and 1949, during which period he was 48-26.
It was on this date, sixty-nine years ago, in the bottom of the ninth inning of the third and deciding game of a playoff for the National League pennant against their hated rivals the Giants, Ralph Branca threw what is arguably the most famous pitch in the history of major league baseball...
...and assured Russ Hodges a place for time immemorial in the pantheon of classic home run calls.
Branca left the field that day, defeated, and destined to be known forever as the pitcher who gave up "The Shot Heard 'Round the World" to Bobby Thomson of the Giants. Were he not a man of substance, a man of character, it is likely that would have in fact been his fate - to be resigned to the scrap heap of history as a pathetic footnote.
As he had demonstrated years earlier, when standing with Jackie Robinson on Opening Day at Ebbets Field was an unpopular move with the home fans and with more than one or two of his Dodger teammates, Ralph Branca's shoulders were strong enough to keep him upright even as the world collapsed around him. He died in late November, 2016. He was ninety years old. He was the last living member of the 1947 Dodgers team on which Jackie Robinson played as a rookie. On October 27, 1972, Branca stood up for Jackie Robinson one final time. He was a pallbearer at Robinson's funeral.
Sixty years after her beloved Bums left Brooklyn for southern California, Mom still lived by the principles that had guided her her whole life and that had drawn her to her hometown team and to players like Ralph Branca. She too had shoulders strong enough to hold her upright and to keep herself and her family going even as the world collapsed around her. She taught her children that believing in the power of "Wait Til Next Year!" did not mark one as a fool or a romantic but, instead, revealed one to be a person of determination, strength, and character.
You cannot beat a person who will never give up. Much like her beloved Brooklyn Dodgers and the star-crossed right-handed pitcher whose number "13" lit up the gloaming as he walked off the mound in the Polo Grounds on that late afternoon sixty-nine years ago today, she did not always win. But she never lost.
Not once.
Not ever.
Love you, Mom, and miss you terribly. It is a good thing that you are the one from whom I inherited my shoulders.
-AK
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