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History lesson Remembering the Subway Series
By Evan Kanew, CNNSI.com
NEW YORK -- In a time of five-cent subway tokens, it became a customary rite of autumn. The championship of America's national pastime was decided among three teams that shared one city, and its network of intersecting train tracks. In 1921, the first Subway Series matched the Giants against the Yankees, two teams that shared a home field at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan until the House that Ruth Built, Yankee Stadium, was erected in 1923. The last Subway Series was in 1956 featuring those Bronx Bombers and their arch-rival Dodgers of Brooklyn. In those days, if you were a New Yorker of that era, you were either a Giants fan... A Yankees fan... Or a Dodgers fan. Exclusively. "There was sort of a sense not of a civil war, but of an urban war," says historian Roger Kahn. "A tripartite urban war, it was emotionally impossible to root for more than one of those teams." The Subway Series divided not only radio audiences, friends and coworkers throughout the city, but families, as well.
Like the Meusel brothers. Emil played for the Giants and Bob suited up for the Yankees. They may have been brothers under their respective uniforms, but they were rivals in the World Series games of 1921, '22 and '23. With the construction of their stadium complete, Bob Meusel's Yankees captured the first true Subway Series in 1923, as the Bronx Bombers blossomed into baseball's untouchable dynasty -- a four-decade run that barely skipped a beat from Babe Ruth to Joe DiMaggio and on to Mickey Mantle. Thirteen intra-city classics were infused with neighborhood passion and timeless baseball. As they vied to snatch the World Series title from the Bronx, the Dodgers and Giants produced some of the most memorable moments in the annals of New York baseball. Bobby Thomson's shot heard 'round the world lifted the Giants over the Dodgers in a playoff for the right to meet the Yankees in the 1951 Subway Series. Despite Thomson's heroics, the Yanks took the 1951 fall classic in six games. The following season, the Dodgers resumed the chase, and their run of futility. Not until 1955, sparked by a fleet infielder named Jackie Robinson, would the Dodgers finally best their Bronx rivals to win Brooklyn's only world title. "I remember [Dodgers' shortstop] Pee Wee Reese saying to me, 'When you lose all those games, and I played in every inning of every one of those games, you're not just losing to the Yankees. Something else is going on. You begin to say to yourself, what is wrong with me? What kind of a person am I?' " The following season the Yankees would avenge their loss in stunning fashion. In Game 5, not a single Dodger reached base against Don Larsen. The perfect game remains the only no-hitter in post season history, as the Yankees went on to win the series in seven games. "After the 1956 Series in which the Yankees defeated the Dodgers four games to three, I thought there would be a 1957 Series in which the Dodgers defeated the Yankees. It came in the autumn. The World Series belonged in New York as the maple trees turned, as the days crispened and as the sky turned that wonderful marble blue it gets in autumn. You thought it would be here forever." But it was not to be. Two years later the Giants were in San Francisco, and the Dodgers were in Los Angeles. The Yankees had the town to themselves until the arrival in 1962 of the Mets, a team whose uniform combined Giant orange and Dodger blue, but whose prevailing image in its early days was that of a lovable loser. Both teams have since tasted failure and success, but it has taken nearly four decades for their fortunes, like New York's web of subway tracks, to intersect.
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