Pat Kannar walked through Gate 13 before finding her seat between home plate and first base, behind the box seats in the lower grandstand. She didn’t know it yet, but she was one of thousands of fans charmed enough to witness one of the most legendary moments in sports history.
Kannar, then 15 years old, sat in the wives’ section of the Polo Grounds. Her boyfriend, Bill Leonard, was a Giants bat boy, and he got her into so many games the ushers knew her name. Giants manager Leo Durocher’s wife, movie star Laraine Day, was situated nearby.
“I felt very special,” Kannar, now Pat Leonard, told KNBR.
That specific day, Oct. 3, 1951, Leonard was especially thrilled to be in the ballpark. It was a school day, but even at her parochial high school, the teachers understood how big of a game this was: Game 3 of a three-game playoff to decide which New York team will face the Yankees in the World Series. Leonard was excused from class.
So there she was as the Giants fell behind 4-1 entering the ninth inning. Don Newcome had pitched eight brilliant innings, but shortstop Alvin Dark led off with a single. He advanced from first to third on a Whitey Lockman single, and scored on Don Mueller’s single. After foul out from Whitey Lockman drove in Dark with a double, and Mueller slid into third — injurying his ankle in the process.
Dodgers manager Chuck Dresen replaced Newcombe with Ralph Branca as Thomson stepped to the plate as the game-winning run.
Leonard will never forget what happened next.
“When it happened, when Thomson — who was my hero — hit the home run, I had tears of joy,” she said. “That’s the only way I could explain it. I’m sure I hugged whoever was next to me. That I don’t remember. One of the wives. But screaming and yelling and crying at the same time, because it was such a surprise. Such an exciting time.”
The Polo Grounds wasn’t completely packed that night; World Series tickets had already been sold out, so many fans assumed this one was as well. And with the three-game playoff being the first nationally televised sporting event ever, millions watched on the televisions and more tuned in on the radio.
Leonard was one of 34,320 fans in attendance who saw Thomson’s “Shot Heard Round The World” win the Giants the pennant 70 years ago today. The 5-4 Giants win broke countless hearts that day, and two hearts even stopped from the shock, according to “The Echoing Green” by Joshua Prager.
As the years pass, fewer and fewer people are around to tell the story firsthand.
Willie Mays was there, of course. Then a 20-year-old rookie, the Say Hey Kid was on deck. He thought Branca, who allowed a home run to Thomson in Game 1, would walk him to the vacated first base.
“I wasn’t nervous,” Mays told MLB in 2018.
Broadcaster Vin Scully, in his second year announcing for the Dodgers, was on hand but not working.
Famous writer Doris Kearns Goodwin, a then-eight-year-old die-hard Brooklyn Dodgers fan, was at her Rockville Centre, New York home watching the game on a 10-inch table console television. Her sister Charlotte, though, was in attendance at the Polo Grounds.
Frank Sinatra, a friend of Giants manager Leo Durocher, was at the game. He went with famous actor Jackie Gleason drinking during the day before settling into their seats. At the time of the home run, Gleason — a Dodgers fan — nervously threw up on Sinatra, distracting the musician and causing him to miss Thomson’s homer.
Most in attendance on Oct. 3, 1951 weren’t celebrities.
Walter Dubler, then a 15-year-old Dodgers fan, walked up to the gate with a few friends and bought tickets. His general admission tickets put the group in the upper left field stands, which hung directly over the left field wall. Towering pop flies, even if they weren’t hit especially hard, could land in the upper deck, while lower, better-hit drives would crash into the lower deck for home runs.
“The Polo Grounds was very, very eccentric,” Dubler said. “It wasn’t meant for baseball.”
The Dodgers were a tragic organization when Dubler was growing up, he said. Unfortunate things always seemed to happen to them. So even when Brooklyn led 4-1, Dubler and his friends were nervous.
“When Thomson hit the home run, all we could see up there was a ball coming to the outfield,” Dubler said. “You could not tell from where we were if (Andy) Pafko was going to catch it or if it was going into the stands. So what I saw, you think of this cinematically, what I heard was a lot of excitement. That was my first sign of bad news. But then I saw Eddie Stanky running out of the dugout to embrace Leo Durocher.”
Across from a devastated Dubler, likely too far away to see without a telescope, were all the overjoyed Giants’ players’ wives — sitting behind the box seats in the lower grandstand with Leonard.
Said Leonard: “Now, what I remember, Bill Leonard, the bat boy, went home after the game — he lived right near the Polo Grounds. Within walking distance. He went home and I went home. Never, ever realizing what that day would mean in baseball history. No way. We didn’t realize it.”