Events & Discoveries

NOT WITH A BANG

Despite rumors that there would be some inflammatory playing of the organ by Miss Gladys Goodding, Walter O'Malley bravely attended what was assumed to be the last Brooklyn Dodger game at Ebbets Field on the crisp, chill evening of September 24. Rumors about Miss Goodding's program turned out to be accurate, for her third number of the evening was California, Here I Come, and others ranged all the way from Que Sera, Sera to After You've Gone. However, far from inflaming the crowd, the selections seemed to soothe it like so many lullabies.

The final game drew 6,702 spectators (about half the number at the Polo Grounds five days later—see page 62), who seemed to regard the occasion as just another ball game. Here and there, older fans recited lineups of other days and spoke of great Dodger names like Wheat, Vance, Grimes, Carey, Bissonette and Stengel. (Ol' Case played in the first game at Ebbets Field on April 5, 1913, before a crowd of 25,000.) Only a few voices referred at all to the fact that Brooklyn was losing its team, and they blamed not Mr. O'Malley but "those politicians who been taking their free passes all these years and giving nothing in return."

In pregame ceremonies, Mr. Happy Felton went through his last television program for the kids, and he made a brave and generally successful effort to be happy about it. A speaker presenting gifts to Campanella, Hodges and Koufax thanked the crowd over the public-address system for making the occasion "such a resounding success," and he concluded his speech with "Goodnight, mother," a literal remark, it turned out, addressed to his own mother and not to Ebbets Field.

Commenting on the crowd's calm acceptance of the occasion, a scholar in the right-field stands quoted T. S. Eliot's line about the world ending "not with a bang, but a whimper." But only Emmett Kelly, the sad-faced clown, performing for the last time, looked as though he might be able to manage even that much.

However, after the game, a few teenage girls were observed in tears as they waited for a final glimpse of their heroes. In the clubhouse, these heroes—presided over by Pee Wee Reese, seated in his armchair as usual—expressed perfunctory regrets as they lunched on barbecued crab.

As the last of the crowd filed out of the park, the T. S. Eliot scholar buttonholed people and desperately reminded them that the last Brooklyn batter, Gil Hodges, had struck out. "Do you see?" he cried. "Baseball dies at Ebbets Field, not with a bang—but a whiffer."

Nobody got it.

BOUNCE AVERAGES (FINAL)

Coming down the stretch, National and American League umpires, no doubt affected by the new baseball statistic (bounce averages) created here this season, behaved very much like sluggers competing for the triple crown. Final bounce averages for the men in blue show a definite tendency during the last days of the season to go for what would be the equivalent of the extra-base hit, i.e., to go for the manager. (In this first season of compiling bounce averages, no additional points have been awarded for the managerial bounce, but thought must certainly be given to the possibility of MBAs for managers as well as PBAs for players next season.)