Willie & Me Read Free Page B

alive at all if not for me. It’s true. What happened was that when Uncle Wilbur was a boy back in 1919, he caught influenza and was probably going to die. Millions of people died in that epidemic. As it turned out, I was traveling back to 1919 to see Shoeless Joe Jackson of the Chicago White Sox. I was taking flu medicine myself at the time, and I had it with me when I bumped into my great uncle at the ballpark. They didn’t have any medicine to treat the flu back then. So I gave him mine, and when I got back to the present day, Uncle Wilbur was alive. He recovered because of the flu medicine I gave him.
    But that’s a story for another day, too.
    Uncle Wilbur is not a huge baseball fan like me, but I showed him the plaque my dad had given me as a birthday present.
    â€œDid you ever hear of Bobby Thomson?” I asked.
    â€œSure,” he replied. “He hit the Shot Heard Round the World. It was 1951. Dodgers and Giants. I remember. Everybody who was alive back then remembers. But it wasn’t Thomson who I remember so much. It was the other guy, Ralph Branca.”
    â€œWhat about him?”
    â€œThat one lousy pitch ruined Branca’s life,” he told me. “The guy had a decent career. He was a good pitcher. Big guy. But for the rest of his life, the only thing anybody knew about him was that he threw that one lousy pitch. He lost the pennant for the Dodgers. He was the all-time biggest goat in baseball history. Ya couldn’t help but feel sorry forthe guy. Everybody did.”
    After we cleaned up the paper plates and stuff, I went upstairs. I wasn’t tired yet, so I started leafing through a few of my old baseball books. That guy Kenny at the card show pretty much had his facts right. The Giants had been having a terrible season, and then they turned it around in the last few weeks and caught the Dodgers on the last day. They won the pennant when Bobby Thomson hit the homer off Ralph Branca in the final game of the three-game playoff. It happened at the Polo Grounds in New York, a ballpark I knew well.
    I looked up Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca in The Baseball Encyclopedia , this thick reference book that has the statistics on every player who ever made a major league appearance. Neither of them were superstars. Thomson had a lifetime batting average of .270, and he only reached .300 one year. He never hit more than thirty-two homers in a season. He was good, but not great. Branca had an 88–68 lifetime record, and he topped twenty wins in just one season. Neither of those guys had Hall of Fame numbers. But because of that one lousy pitch in 1951, they were famous.
    I opened up my laptop and did a Google search for both of them. All I had to type was “Ralph B” and Branca came up as the third listing. There were two and a half million results. It wasn’t so easy with Bobby Thomson because there are lots of Thomsons out there, some of them spelled with a P in the middle.
    I went to Google Images and searched for “Ralph Branca.” There were lots of photos of him. He was a handsome guy, with jet-black hair, bushy dark eyebrows, and a big nose. One of the pictures grabbed my attention, and it was repeated over and over again. It was a photo of Branca taken minutes after he gave up the Shot Heard Round the World.
    He still has his uniform on and he’s sitting on the steps of the Dodger clubhouse with his elbows on his knees and his hands together, almost like he’s praying. His head is bent way down. You can’t see his face, but you don’t have to. The guy was obviously crushed. He had just experienced the worst moment of his life. He was only twenty-five years old. But he probably knew right then that he would be remembered for throwing that one lousy pitch—and nothing else—forever.

    It was the worst moment in Ralph Branca’s life.

    I picked up the plaque that my dad had given me and looked at the two cards through a