While the Dodgers enjoyed the luxury of a charter plane flight home, the 1949 National League pennant race changed course. With head-to-head competition complete, the Dodgers and Cardinals entered the last lap on parallel tracks. Blocking their way to the finish line were teams with seemingly little to play for, probably looking forward to the end of a long season. But teams with nothing to play for also have nothing to lose. And even if they had no chance for postseason play, some players and sometimes entire teams had extra motivation to be a spoiler – to deny the contenders a place in the World Series. Regular season games of this magnitude are rare today, but when there was only one winner, they could and often did, have a major impact on the final result.
On paper, the Cardinals appeared to have the easier path to the pennant. St. Louis would play sixth-place Pittsburgh twice and cellar-dwelling Chicago five times. Brooklyn, on the other hand, had two games with fourth-place Boston and four against the third-place Philadelphia Phillies. The quality of the opposition didn’t matter much on Saturday, September 24 when both teams won easily. Form also seemed to be holding on Sunday when the Cards handled the Cubs with little difficulty and the Dodgers led Philadelphia 3-1 after seven innings. Brooklyn might have had a larger lead but for Phillies catcher Andy Seminick. Demonstrating how much a player with little to gain could hurt a contender’s chances, Seminick short-circuited two Doger threats by picking runners off base. But Brooklyn led 3-1 behind Ralph Branca who had limited the Phils to five hits and one run while striking out nine.
Any other time, Seminick’s performance would have been the story, but the New York City newspapers jumped on the so-called “bogus blister.” Shotton claimed that when he questioned catcher Roy Campanella, the Brooklyn receiver said the blister was limiting Branca to his fastball and he was losing his effectiveness. Branca disagreed which reportedly led to “words” between the two battery mates. Needless to say, as Tommy Holmes wrote in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “the second guessers are having a field day.” Anticipating the worst Dick Young of the Daily News, no fan of Shotton, predicted if Brooklyn lost the race, the manager's “guess,” would go down in Dodger history “as one of the greatest human skulls of all time.”
Sunday's results marked another dramatic shift in both teams' outlook. With St. Louis ahead by 1 ½ games and only five games to play (four for Brooklyn), the Globe-Democrat's front page proclaimed “The Cards close in on the pennant.” Equally confident, the Post-Dispatch published the so-called "magic number." Any combination of four Cardinal wins and Dodger losses would give St. Louis the flag. The newspapers’ confidence was shared by the Cardinal players who dubbed their train to Pittsburgh, the “pennant special.” Manager Eddie Dyer agreed, telling reporters “It looks like we’re going to make it.” Also encouraging was word that World Series tickets had arrived in St. Louis. Permission from the Commissioner’s office to "print the tickets" was an old September baseball tradition that no longer exists. In a far less technology-enhanced world, processing World Series tickets was labor intensive. In St. Louis, it took 15 clerks until midnight to process 115,000 requests for just over 31,000 tickets.
The Dodgers' announcement of World Series ticket sales a few days later seemed “a shallow formality” to Dick Young. The dramatic swing from optimism to gloom set in right after the loss to the Phillies with the Eagle proclaiming Brooklyn was now “virtually counted out of [the] pennant race.” Tommy Holmes agreed the outlook was bleak, comparable to “climbing up the Palisades on skates.” Roscoe McGowan took an equally negative, but more poetic approach, with his “Elegy Written in a Brooklyn Ballpark.” Some of his sophisticated New York Times readers likely understood the literary allusion but didn’t appreciate it. Less intellectual Cardinal fans reading the article, which was reprinted in the Globe-Democrat, may not have gotten the allusion but loved the sentiment.
Although some of the Cardinal fans' optimism consisted of hopes and dreams, another party, far more objective, also liked St. Louis’ chances. Oddsmakers made the Cardinals a 6-1 favorite to win the pennant while the odds were 4-1 against Brooklyn. Whichever team won, they had to do so on the road. St. Louis would visit sixth-place Pittsburgh for two games before finishing the season with a three-game series at last-place Chicago. Brooklyn had a more difficult path. After two games at fourth-place Boston, the Dodgers would travel to Philadelphia for their last two games. Just how difficult the third-place Phillies could be, was fresh in the Dodgers' minds. While only one of the league’s eight teams (13%) would play in the postseason, 75% played games that mattered in the season’s last week, and 50% on the final weekend. It’s unlikely a similar percentage of modern teams do so even with three wild cards.
While the Pirates were destined to finish sixth, 12 games under .500, the Pittsburgh club didn’t lack talent or motivation. Especially dangerous was Ralph Kiner who threatened Babe Ruth’s home run record before ending the season with 54 round-trippers. Perhaps more importantly, Pittsburgh had "an intense hate” for the Cardinals because of the beaning of their teammate Stan Rojeck and Enos Slaughter’s hard slide into Pirate second baseman Danny Murtaugh. Also not lacking motivation was pitcher Murry Dickson who St. Louis sold to the Pirates in January. Cast off to the purgatory of sixth place, Dickson had already beaten his former team four times in 1949.
Even if the Cardinal players took the Pirates seriously, it did them little good. St. Louis lost the opener 6-4, largely due to a Pittsburgh grand slam home run not by Kiner, but a “shot” off the bat of rookie Tom Saffer that hit the foul pole. It was just the Pirate rookie’s second homer of the season, and he hit only four more in his 262-game major league career. The decisive blow reminded anyone who needed reminding that unsung players on poor teams sometimes wreak havoc with a contender’s pennant hopes. The next game was rained out, but a day of rest made no difference. Dickson finished his revenge tour with a 7-2 win the following day. For the season, the exiled Dickson went 5-3 against his former team but only 7-11 against the rest of the league.
The rain on Wednesday, September 28 also wiped out the Dodgers contest in Boston. For the Cardinals, the rainout only meant delaying their game one day, but in Boston, the Dodgers now had to play a doubleheader. A game back of St. Louis, the Dodgers faced the unenviable task of winning two games on one day against Braves aces Warren Spahn and Johnny Sain. The two led Boston to the National League pennant only a year ago and while they hadn’t been as good in 1949, they were still formidable foes. In the first game, Brooklyn countered with Preacher Roe coming off his brilliant two-hit shutout of St. Louis a week ago. The Dodger left-hander was equally dominant this time, throwing eight shutout innings (17 in a row) before allowing two meaningless runs in the ninth. Meaningless because the Dodgers offense exploded for nine runs, led by three-run homers from Snider and Furillo.
Now trailing St. Louis by just one-half game, the Dodgers faced an additional foe in the second game, rain and cold weather that made the field as “dark as a pocket.” Wasting none of the limited time available, the Dodgers blasted Sain for five runs in the first and added three more against his replacements in the second. With the weather their only hope, Boston began stalling, but the umpires would have none of it, completing the required five innings for an 8-0 Brooklyn win. Once again with their backs to the wall, the Dodgers had more than met the challenge, making Spahn and Sain “look like third stringers” in the process. This time, however, the clutch performances didn’t just keep Brooklyn in the race. The Dodgers were now in first place by one-half game and in control of their own destiny. Wins in the last two games in Philadelphia guaranteed Brooklyn nothing worse than a tie for first place.
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