Branca, pitcher of ‘Shot Heard ‘Round the World’ fame, dies

Baseball has lost one of the game’s enduring gentlemen, who lived for more than 60 years with a most conspicuous yet somewhat unwarranted smudge on his pitching reputation. Ralph Branca, the losing pitcher in one of baseball’s most famous games, is dead at age 90. The game — no, American society — is diminished by the loss of a man of such integrity, heart and strength. We haven’t often seen the likes of Branca since the day that labeled but didn’t change him, nor are we likely to see many of his kind again.

Former big league manager Bobby Valentine, Branca’s son-in-law, shared the news Wednesday morning on Twitter.

He threw the pitch that resonated throughout the land; therefore, he is forever connected to the man who hit it from Coogan’s Bluff into the consciousness of all generations of baseball loyalists and to a time when baseball was, in every way, the national pastime, if not the country’s sports obsession. The pitch was the focal point of Branca’s life as the public sees it, the scarlet letter that didn’t necessarily fade in the years that followed. But neither the pitch nor the profound loss it prompted in 1951 became the theme of his life.

Branca lived a prosperous, comfortable and content life, rising above the narrow identity the world would have affixed to him. He handled the circumstances in such a way that he developed a reputation as a caring, forgiving and tolerant man of charm and grace and emerged as something of a hero in the epic baseball episode, “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World.”

One of the greatest guys to ever throw a pitch or sing a song is longer with us. Ralph Branca Passed this morning.

— Bobby Valentine (@BobbyValentine) November 23, 2016

One of the greatest guys to ever throw a pitch or sing a song is longer with us. Ralph Branca Passed this morning.

Because of the home run, Branca, the Brooklyn Dodger, and Bobby Thomson, the New York Giant, are linked as strongly as peanut butter and jelly, Hope and Crosby and gin and tonic. A most casual observer aware of one undoubtedly is equally familiar with the other. Even now, after both have passed, they remain two sides of one unique and conspicuous coin.

In the years that followed Thomson’s three-run home run, by which the Giants completed a four-run comeback to beat the Dodgers and win the National League pennant — “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” — the pitcher and hitter developed a friendship that withstood time, rumors, speculation, and finally, an unsettling truth. The Giants had stolen the Dodgers’ signs during the three-game playoff and Thomson might have benefited from the electronic surveillance when he pulled Branca’s high inside fastball over the left-field fence in the Polo Grounds for the most famous final-pitch home run.

Nonetheless, the two remained friends until Thomson’s death in 2010.

Nine years earlier, Branca gained unwanted confirmation about the circumstances that led to the home run, that espionage was, in fact, a part of the Giants’ strategy. And he learned he had some unfinished griping in him, too. But his friendship with Thomson remained steadfast. Branca had come to know and like his one-time adversary after the fact. A man with so big a heart and so genuine and warm a smile was incapable of developing, much less holding, a grudge.

“When I got to meet Thomson — I’d met him a few times, at the golf course, charity events, award dinners in the city; you know, sports awards,” Branca said in 2011, “we started doing card shows together. I didn’t do a card show until late 1984. Bobby had been doing them earlier, and one of the promoters got both of us together where we signed together. And while we waited for the place to open we’d talk. I realized he was a decent guy, he had pretty decent ideas about life, had his priorities correct.”

Branca came to see Thomson as “only the private,” explaining, “The generals made the decision. Horace Stoneham, the owner, and the Giants front office — they agreed to the deal. They hired an electrician to hook up a buzzer system from [manager] Leo Durocher’s office in center field to the bullpen in right-center to the dugout on the first-base side. Leo and his first lieutenant, Herman Franks, concocted the deal and presented it to Stoneham, and Stoneham [approved] it. They were the generals who made the decision.

“The two leading ballplayers on the team were Eddie Stanky and Alvin Dark, they were … the guys who talked people into it. I roomed with Stanky when he was in Brooklyn, and he was a very devout Catholic, went to church every week, said his prayers at night. I’d see him. I blame them, for that, because Bobby, as I said, he was just a foot soldier, taking the orders and doing what they said.”

Branca was a bright and sincere man whose kinship others treasured. “As good and decent a man as God ever put on this earth,” Thomson said in 2002, months after the two had marked the 50th anniversary of their shared moment.

They had made scores of public appearances over the years as an entry, beginning with their starring in a skit at the annual winter dinner staged by the New York chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America in January 1952. Each stood behind a cardboard image of himself. Branca began singing “Because of You” with appropriately revised lyrics. Thomson followed with different customized lyrics. Then Branca strangled the Thomson cutout.

The playful strangling, without the cutouts, was repeated dozens of time over the years.

A week after their debut as an act, the two reprised the song for a national audience on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and in 2001 they returned to the writers’ dinner and performed again. “It’s always been easier for me than it’s been for Ralph,” Thomson said that night. But Branca, who loved to sing and sang quite well, gave no public indication of being bruised, angry or offended. He smiled throughout and hugged his partner.

Branca never allowed the smudge to matter much in a lifetime he characterized years later as happy. “Life has been good,” …

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