Sample Chapter
World Series
The Giants have a proud World Series tradition, including five championships and some of the greatest moments ever witnessed in the Fall Classic. Yet the team’s World Series experience has also forced fans to swallow some bitter pills, and a world championship has eluded the otherwise-storied team since it moved to San Francisco.
In all, the Giants have played in 17 World Series, more than all but two other teams—and those two teams, the New York Yankees and the Dodgers, are among the Giants’ most hated rivals. Even more painful, the Giants have lost more World Series than any other team except the Yankees, and they have not won since 1954. That drought puts them behind only the Chicago Cubs (since 1908) and the Cleveland Indians (since 1948).
Nevertheless, the Giants’ championship history began positively. From 1884 to 1890, the winner of the National League faced off against the winner of the American Association in a World’s Championship Series. In 1888 and 1889, with some of the most talent-stacked teams of all time, the Giants won the series.
In 1888 the Giants faced the St. Louis Browns in a best-of-11 series. The Giants clinched after eight games, and the teams played two more exhibitions. Right-hander Tim Keefe won four games in the series and allowed only two earned runs in 35 innings. As a team, the Giants stole 38 bases in the 10 games, led by shortstop John Montgomery Ward’s 6; Ward also batted .379.
In 1889 a rivalry was born. The Giants defeated Brooklyn, six games to three, the year before the latter team joined the National League. Giants hurlers Tim Keefe and Mickey Welch—having logged 364 and 375 innings, respectively, during the season—were out of gas heading into the series, and Brooklyn won three of the first four games. But pitchers Ed Crane and Hank O’Day took over, and the Giants won five straight to take the title. Ward batted .417, first baseman Roger Connor hit .343 with 12 RBI, and second baseman Danny Richardson hit three home runs in the nine games.
The formation and growth of the American League after the turn of the century led to the establishment of the modern World Series in 1903. Cy Young’s Boston Red Sox of the American League defeated Honus Wagner’s Pittsburgh Pirates in the inaugural series. The next year, the Giants won the NL pennant but sat out the series because manager John McGraw and owner John T. Brush refused to recognize the new league’s legitimacy.
By 1905, with prodding from Brush, a new set of rules established a series that even McGraw could live with: a best-of-seven format, umpires from both leagues, and revenue sharing. The Giants won another pennant and faced Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics in the World Series. Giants star Christy Mathewson turned in the greatest pitching performance ever seen in the Fall Classic: three complete-game shutouts, with 18 strikeouts and 1 walk in 27 innings, all accomplished in a six-day span. Only one Athletics player made it as far as third base against Matty.
Mathewson and McGraw led the Giants to three straight series from 1911 to 1913, but the Giants didn’t win any of them. The A’s were the victors in 1911 and 1913, while the Red Sox won in 1912.
Although Mathewson was good in 1911, he was not the untouchable force he had been in 1905. He won the opener but lost his next two starts, including an 11-inning, complete-game loss in Game Three. A prolonged rainstorm delayed the series for six days—a precursor to long rain delays in the 1962 series and the 10-day earthquake delay in 1989.
The 1912 series was one of the most dramatic ever, with four games decided by a single run and one game ending in a tie. The Giants ultimately lost on one of the most famous fielding errors of all time. With the series tied at three wins apiece, New York nearly won the decisive game, holding a 2–1 lead in the tenth inning of Game Eight with Mathewson on the hill. Then center fielder Fred Snodgrass dropped a Clyde Engle fly ball for a two-base error. A great catch on the next play did not redeem him; a Tris Speaker single won the series for the Sox.
The A’s took their rematch with the Giants four games to one in 1913, as injuries depleted the Giants’ lineup. Mathewson threw a 10-inning shutout in Game Two to even the series, but Philadelphia swept the next three, with Hall of Famer Eddie Plank outdueling Hall of Famer Mathewson 3–1 in Game Five.
The Chicago White Sox won the first two games of the 1917 series, and the Giants roared back to win the next two. The tide turned in Game Five, however, when Chicago rallied from a 5–2 deficit with three runs in the seventh and three more in the eighth. The White Sox won Game Six, 4–2, thanks in part to some sloppy Giant defense. Sox star Eddie Collins was caught in a rundown but somehow got between third baseman Heinie Zimmerman, who had the ball, and home plate. Collins outran Zimmerman and scored, sealing the win.
With a new influx of talent, John McGraw had a new dynasty in the making in the 1920s, capturing four straight pennants from 1921 to 1924. In three of those World Series, the Giants faced another emerging dynasty, the New York Yankees. Because the Yankees were the Giants’ ballpark tenant, every game of the 1921 series was played at the Polo Grounds. This was also the last year of a three-year experiment in which the series was a best-of-nine contest, as well as the first year the series was broadcast on radio. McGraw, a committed devotee of old-style, scratch-out-runs baseball, hated Babe Ruth, the new star who blasted the unheard-of total of 59 home runs that year. The Yankees won the first two games and then went up three games to two, but after Ruth was hurt in Game Five, the Giants swept three straight to win the series. Yankee ace Waite Hoyt pitched 27 innings and gave up no earned runs, but he lost the clinching eighth game on an unearned run in the first.
The teams met again in 1922, and this time the Yankees could manage only one tie in the best-of-seven set. The Bambino batted a mere .118 while Heinie Groh (.474) and Frankie Frisch (.471) paced the Giants offense. Irish Meusel drove in 7 runs for the Giants, once again besting his brother Bob of the Yanks.
In 1923 Yankee Stadium opened across the Harlem River from the Polo Grounds, and although the Giants’ Casey Stengel delivered the first World Series home run in the “House That Ruth Built”—a game-winning, inside-the-park homer in the ninth inning of Game One—Ruth belted three home runs in the series while leading the Yankees to a six-game triumph.
The Giants returned to the series in 1924, their fourth straight and McGraw’s last. The Washington Senators broke the Yankees’ lock on the AL pennant and took on the Giants in one of the most tightly contested World Series of all time. Art Nehf, who had won the seventh games in 1921 and 1922, out-dueled Senators legend Walter Johnson in Game One, as the Giants scratched out a 12-inning win with President Calvin Coolidge in attendance. The teams took turns beating each other, never by more than three runs. In Game Seven, Johnson pitched four innings in relief, and the Giants’ Hall of Fame infield of Bill Terry, Frankie Frisch, Travis Jackson, and Freddie Lindstrom suffered bad hops and hard luck as the Senators won in 12 innings.
McGraw ultimately turned his team over to his star, Terry, after the 1932 season, and Terry had the Giants playing October baseball again in 1933 in a rematch with the Senators. McGraw watched from the stands as the new Giants royalty—“King” Carl Hubbell and “Prince” Hal Schumacher—shut down the Senators. Hubbell, the league MVP, gave up no earned runs and won two games, and Mel Ott hit .389 with two home runs.
The Giants were back in the series in 1936 and 1937, but they lost to the Yankees both years. The baseball world thrilled at the prospect of Hubbell facing Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio in 1936, and while the Giants ace beat the Yankees in Game One, Gehrig reached him for a homer in Game Four, and the Yanks coasted to a six-game victory. The Yanks were even more dominant the following October. The Bronx Bombers outscored the Giants 23–3 through the first three games. Although Hubbell won Game Four, that was the Giants’ lone win, and the Yanks had their second of what would be four straight championships.
The Giants didn’t make it back to the World Series for 15 years, but they returned in style. Written off as dead in 1951, they made a stirring comeback from 13½ games out and finally overtook the Dodgers with Bobby Thomson’s “Miracle at Coogan’s Bluff.” “We had done the one thing we wanted to do,” Giant star Monte Irvin later wrote, “and that was to beat the Dodgers. Everything else was a plus.” But the team still had a World Series to play, against their old nemeses, the Yankees. The 1951 series featured the October debuts of Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, as well as the finale for DiMaggio. The Giants won Games One and Three but couldn’t hold their lead, and the Yankees won in six.
In 1954 a powerhouse Cleveland Indians team took the AL pennant with a then-record 111 wins. The Giants came into the World Series as heavy underdogs. Another Giants miracle, and some timely pinch hitting, helped key another upset. In Game One at the Polo Grounds, with the score tied 2–2, Cleveland slugger Vic Wertz bashed a 440-foot drive to center field, a home run in nearly any other ballpark. Center fielder Mays turned his back to the plate and ran, snaring the ball over his shoulder in what many believe was the best catch in postseason history. In the tenth inning, pinch hitter Dusty Rhodes hit a 260-foot home run to win the game. Rhodes didn’t start any of the games, but he hit .667 with 2 home runs and 7 RBI as the Giants won in a four-game sweep.
It was a thoroughly remade Giants team, now based in San Francisco, that made the next trip to the World Series. The only player from 1954 still with the team was Mays, who had been joined by sluggers Willie McCovey and Orlando Cepeda. Again the foe was the Yankees, and again a tight series whipsawed, with the teams alternating wins. After the Yankees took Game One, McCovey hit a tape-measure home run off Ralph Terry in the second game, and the Giants won with Jack Sanford on the hill. In the Giants’ 7–4 win in Game Four, light-hitting second baseman Chuck Hiller delivered a grand-slam home run, the first by a National Leaguer in World Series history. Ultimately, the series all came down to Game Seven at Candlestick Park. The Yankees plated their only run when Tony Kubek hit into a double play in the fifth inning. In the seventh, McCovey tripled off Terry but was stranded. In the bottom of the ninth, Matty Alou reached on a bunt single, and with two outs, Mays smashed a double to right field. The wet grass slowed the ball, and a perfect throw from Roger Maris held Alou at third. Despite McCovey’s success against Terry, and with first base open, Yankee manager Ralph Houk let Terry pitch to McCovey. After blasting a long foul, McCovey uncorked a rocket line drive—right to second baseman Bobby Richardson. “I still say Richardson was playing me out of position,” McCovey said later. “Normally they had a shift toward first, but he was playing me more toward second. Ninety-eight times out of a hundred, I hit a ball like that, and I run for mayor and win.” Two months after the Yankees’ win, Charlie Brown exclaimed in a Peanuts comic strip, “Why couldn’t McCovey have hit the ball just three feet higher?”
McCovey believed the Giants had so much talent that they would return to the series every year. Instead, the team suffered its longest pennant drought, 27 years. In 1989, under manager Roger Craig, a team led by Will Clark, Matt Williams, Kevin Mitchell, and Robby Thompson brought the Giants back to the World Series. Once there, they faced their neighbors from across San Francisco Bay, the Oakland A’s. The Bay Bridge World Series is most memorable for the earthquake that broke the bridge and led to 63 deaths. Still, games were played. The A’s won the first two in Oakland. Then, after the quake disrupted play moments before Game Three—at 5:04 p.m. on October 17—the series took a 10-day break for the region to recover from the disaster. The A’s won the last two at Candlestick to complete the sweep. The Giants never held a lead in the series.
The Giants didn’t make it back to the World Series again until 2002. Behind a rejuvenated Barry Bonds—38 years old and having just won the second of four straight MVP awards—the Giants faced the Anaheim Angels, with both teams coming in as wild card entries in the playoffs. Bonds, who had a reputation for not hitting in the clutch, batted .471 with 4 home runs in his only World Series. His homer in his first at bat of Game One helped the Giants win, and his blast against closer Troy Percival in Game Two nearly brought the Giants back, but they lost 11–10. The Angels took Game Three, and then the Giants won a 4–3 squeaker in Game Four and a 16–4 laugher in Game Five. San Francisco carried a 5–0 lead into the seventh inning of Game Six—eight outs away from clinching their first title since 1954. But a historic Angels comeback led to a 6–5 Giants loss. The Angels won the clincher, 4–1, the following day. “The hardest thing,” said first baseman J. T. Snow about the Game Six loss, “was coming back into the clubhouse. They had moved the furniture, and there were plastic tarps over the lockers for a champagne party. A party was supposed to happen, and it never did.”