What Johnny Podres did for Brooklyn

Somehow I missed the news that Johnny Podres died last month. When I caught up, I found a story about how his teammates reacted, but nowhere did I see mention of how his death affected ordinary people. This great man’s passing deserves comment from someone who can recall the pure glee he brought us one fine afternoon in the Bronx 52 years ago when he was just 23. Johnny Podres was a major league pitcher who brought to fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers the single happiest day of their baseball lives. Glee? We could have walked on air. For it was Johnny Podres, a lanky leftie from Witherbee, N.Y. up in the Adirondacks, who pitched a honey of a seventh game in the 1955 World Series and brought a championship to Flatbush - finally, after seven post-season losses. But that was only part of it. The other part was that he beat the Yankees and Mantle and Berra and Rizzuto and all the rest of them. The Yankees had humiliated the Dodgers two years earlier, in 1953. And in ‘52. And in 1949 and ‘47 and 1941. Always the Yankees. Always the Dodgers would field some terrific teams and always the Yankees would come along to pick them apart in October. If you were a Dodger fan you could get a complex. Podres, this kid from the sticks, had had a mediocre season in ‘55: arm troubles. His record was 9-10. Still, he won the third game of that World Series and then the Brooklyn manager, Walter Alston, picked him to start Game 7. Could he do it again? Hold Mantle down? Control Berra? “Give me the ball and give me one run,” he is said to have told his teammates. Was he really that cool? God, I hope so. No one knows if he felt the hot breaths of 2 million people in Brooklyn hanging on his every pitch in that final game. He pitched like Olivier sounded, like Rita Hayworth looked. He gave up 2 walks. He struck out 4. He scattered eight hits. And he shut out the Yankees. Brooklyn didn’t give him that one run he asked for. Instead, the sainted Gil Hodges batted in two. And then it was over and Roy Campanella, our catcher, ran to the mound and swept Johnny Podres off his feet. We would never forget Johnny Podres and what he did for Brooklyn and for us. Two years later, the Dodgers moved out west someplace. Podres had to go with them. Later, we would toss in with the Mets. But when the Dodgers came to Flushing to play and Johnny Podres was pitching, no one who was alive in ‘55 could root against him. Now - like Jackie and Campy, Furillo, Reese and Hodges - Johnny Podres is dead, and the people who loved that Brooklyn team only slightly less than they loved their mothers are a little older. Until his retirement one year ago, Jeffrey Page was a reporter, and later a columnist, for The Record in Hackensack, N.J. He lives in Warwick.