Return to Sender

I’m always rooting for a Dodgers win, so is LA and so were the Brooklynites. So when the Dodgers where in the losing side of one of the best known moments in baseball history, it must have hurt. It did hurt! You can look it up in the books that where written about that October 3rd 1951. The day of ‘The Shot Heard Around the World’. Still, even if the Dodgers were on wrong end they will forever be one of the teams that played this historic ninth inning.

Gateway Z
I never knew Gateway cachet Z silk envelopes were a thing before I found them online. Envelopes with a color printed piece of silk with a baseball theme. Celebrating rookies, stadiums, cooperstown players and... famous happenings like the one in 1951.

The Envelope
This envelope, number 425 of 500, has a print of the Polo Grounds and the face of Bobby Thomson, a bum and some newspaper headlines. It ‘celebrates’ the 35th anniversary of the homerun. There are two stamps, one of which is from 1939 and celebrates the centennial of baseball. The date stamp, of course, is October third 1986. Below the stamps is the text:

1951 national league playoff
“The Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant!” Such were the the joyful shouts of sportscaster Rus Hodges as Bobby Thomson’s home run disappeared into the left field stands over Andy Pafko’s head. This home run remains as one of baseball’s most dramatic.

Autographs
Collector and dealer Carl Pettit was able to make this envelope even more interesting. While setting up at baseball card shows he got the John Hancocks of the leading men in this drama: pitcher Ralph Branca, home run hitter Bobby Thomson and the guy in the outfield who could only watch it fly into the stands Andy ‘at the wall’ Pafko. Pettit remembers Bobby and Ralph having a lot of fun together.

All in all a great piece with some awesome autographs of men who where a part of history. I must say, I’m glad I wasn’t born yet, because that loss would have been hard to swallow after a season where the boys were still 13 games up on August 11th.

Pafko at the Wall: Review

Imagine having a drone at the Polo Grounds at game three of the 1951 National League play offs, flying from one vantage point to the next. Catching dialogues, seeing the crowd in a partly empty stadium that still is filled with electricity and hope. You might get something like ‘Pafko at the wall’, a novella that reads like a 90 page poem.
Don DeLillo, famous author and multiple Pulitzer winner, sketches scenes of that faithful day, like no one else. If you want to feel, smell, see and be in the stands on that October 3rd 1951, read this piece.

Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra and others take center stage in a cast of extras. Among showers op ripped up pieces of paper and one boy who jumped the turnstiles, defeated the ushers and stadium cops to leave the game with a piece of history.
Then a dance commences between boy and man, focussing in a nine inch circumference red stiched sphere.

The whole thing is a shakespearean play, where the underdogs had to put across the message ‘it’s over, only when the fat lady sings’. And she sung her heart out.
More than 70 years later, a Dodger fan can still feel the pain, but it was never brought so painfully beautiful as in DeLillo’s novella.

If you want more from the lead actors of this play... read ‘The Echoing Green: the untold story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the shot heard around the world’. Reviewed here.