It’s with a heavy heart I pen this tribute to Ralph Branca, who died the day before Thanksgiving at age 90. He will be forever known for allowing the home run dubbed the Miracle at Coogan’s Bluff on October 3, 1951—“The Giants win the pennant,” over and over, and Branca splayed across the steps at the Polo Grounds sobbing.
Before I even knew what baseball was, I knew that story. It was whispered around our house like the tale of someone who had killed someone in a tragic accident. Ralph Branca lived near us in White Plains, at first in the neighborhood next to my aunt’s house, and then moved a couple miles closer to where I grew up. He overcame his inglorious moment and his injury-shortened career to become a successful life insurance agent, who was still going to the office every day and calling clients in his late 80s, which I saw in the documentary made on him, Branca’s Pitch. My mom and Ann Branca were best friends. When I hear Ann Branca talk even now, I can hear strains of my mother coming through her voice, even though my mother was from Birmingham and she from Brooklyn.
Ralph was not just the nicest person I knew in baseball, he was the nicest person I knew. And when it became known that the Miracle at Coogan’s Bluff was the endgame of an elaborate sign-stealing system instigated by Giants manager Leo Durocher and perpetrated by coach Herman Franks, along with assorted bullpen scrubs, I realized he had the most integrity of anyone I’ve known. Joshua Prager’s initial Wall Street Journal story about the scheme came to light 50 years after the Giants stole the pennant. And Ralph had never said a word despite people calling him for years at all hours to tell him what a bum he was. And he was married to the daughter of the Mulveys, part owners of the Dodgers at the time, so it wasn’t like losing the pennant to their closest rival was easy to forget.
Prager’s The Echoing Green is the story of that season, that game, and the life that Branca and Bobby Thomson lived in the years that followed and how it changed with the revelation about the sign stealing. The Brooklyn Dodgers may have moved, but the team never left the hearts of its fans. Just ask the Wilpons. When you think of best known Brooklyn Dodgers, you—or at least I—number them like so: 1. Jackie Robinson, 2. Gil Hodges, 3. Duke Snider, 4. Pee Wee Reese, 5. Roy Campanella, and 6. Ralph Branca. Ralph isn’t there on ballplaying merit with four Hall of Famers and a should-be Hall of Famer, but when it comes to integrity, he was cut from the same cloth.
The New York Times obit goes into great detail about Ralph’s life, his 16 siblings, finding out decades later that Ralph, a devoted member of our church, Our Lady of Sorrows in White Plains, had a mother who was Jewish and never told him about that or her family in Hungary had died in the camps during World War II. But I can tell you that in a family where everyone’s name began with an “M,” he never once called me by my brother’s name, which was more than my parents could say; he arranged for me to go to Vero Beach and meet Tommy Lasorda and play catch with Steve Garvey during spring training in 1979; he provided tickets to my first baseball game, box seats at Shea Stadium for Yankees Old Timers day (yes, the Yankees at Shea) where he and Thomson performed their shtick; he sang at my sister’s wedding, a smooth voice that had once resulted in a side light career in an era when ballplayers had to have other ways of making money; and he put up with requests from my friends for autographs whether it was at Camp Pelican or my wedding. My way of paying him back was to respect his privacy and I never one asked him to do business or an interview (though I admit, I did ask once).
But what mean the most to me were the phone calls. After almost every book I wrote, I got a phone call from Ralph Branca saying how he’d heard about the book in the news and how it sounded like a winner. And sometimes he said how much my mother would have been proud of me. The kind of answering machine message you don’t need to save forever, because it is forever saved in your heart.
The last time we spent much time together was in October 2013. My son was stunned to learn that we knew the pitcher who was first to welcome Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers in 1947. So after one of his congratulatory calls, I talked to him about his book, A Moment in Time, and how much I liked it. I asked if we might arrange a meeting with my family. He said he would love to, and insisted on paying. I went to lunch with him one day to talk baseball and family. The next day he signed balls and books and he and Ann told my children about the grandmother they never knew.
You can’t say they don’t make ballplayers like that anymore; they don’t make people like that anymore.
