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Johnny Podres, Series Star, Dies at 75
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Johnny Podres, who became a celebrated figure in the storied history of the Brooklyn Dodgers in October 1955, when he pitched them to their only World Series championship, died Sunday at a hospital in Glens Falls, N.Y. Podres, who lived nearby in Queensbury, N.Y., was 75.
Johnny Podres last June. He beat the Yankees twice in 1955.
His death was announced by his wife, Joan, who said he was being treated for heart and kidney problems and a leg infection.
Podres was hardly a star on a team with Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges and Duke Snider in the lineup and Don Newcombe and Carl Erskine on the pitching staff. He had been injured twice during the ’55 season and he had a modest record of 9-10 for a team that won the National League pennant by 13 ½ games.
But at 3:43 p.m. on Oct. 4, 1955, Podres proved the man of the hour for Dodgers fans, whose unrealized quest for a World Series championship had been embodied in the refrain “Wait til next year.”
Going into the 1955 season, the Dodgers had won seven pennants and had lost seven times in the World Series. They had been beaten by the Boston Red Sox in 1916, the Cleveland Indians in 1920, and, most painful of all, by the Yankees in 1941, ’47, ’49, ’52 and ’53.
The powerful team that came to be known as the Boys of Summer seemed destined to fall short again in 1955, losing the first two games of the World Series to the Yankees. But Podres won Game 3 on his 23rd birthday, giving up seven hits in an 8-3 victory at Ebbets Field. The Dodgers won the next two games at home, but lost at Yankee Stadium in Game 6.
In a duel of left-handers, Podres was matched against Tommy Byrne in Game 7 at the Stadium. The Dodgers had a 2-0 lead, both runs driven in by Hodges, but in the sixth inning the Yankees had runners on first and second with nobody out when Yogi Berra hit a fly ball toward the left-field line that seemed about to drop for a double. Sandy Amoros, who had just come into the game, replacing Jim Gilliam in left field, saved the day for Brooklyn. After a long run, he reached out for a one-handed catch, then made a relay to Reese, the shortstop, who threw to Hodges, doubling Gil McDougald off first base.
Podres had been effective with his changeup early in the game. As the autumn shadows began to approach home plate, making it tougher for batters to see the pitches, he turned to his fastball. He stopped the Yankees the rest of the way, completing an eight-hitter by retiring them in order in the ninth inning. When Elston Howard grounded to Reese for the final out, Podres was mobbed, and Brooklyn erupted in ecstasy.
“There was a hell of a party that night at the Hotel Bossert in Brooklyn,” Podres told Donald Honig in “The October Heroes.” As Podres recalled it: “Boy, the champagne! There was one guy there who kept telling me he’d been waiting for this since 1916.”
Podres was named the most valuable player of the World Series.
“I guarantee, there was more celebrating in Brooklyn that day than there was for the end of World War II,” Buzzie Bavasi, the Dodgers’ general manager at the time, said a half-century later.
Podres was born and raised in Witherbee, N.Y., in the Adirondack region where his father mined iron ore. He grew up a Dodgers fan, listening to Red Barber’s broadcasts, signed with the Brooklyn organization out of high school and made his debut with the Dodgers in 1953.
He won 9 games as a rookie, 11 in his second season, then endured a disappointing summer in ’55. He injured his shoulder and later sustained bruised ribs in an incident that, as baseball lore would have it, could happen only in Brooklyn. He was struck by the Ebbets Field batting cage while groundskeepers were moving it during a pregame workout. But then came the October of his lifetime.
Podres became a leading pitcher for the Dodgers in the years that followed. He led the N.L. in earned run average, at 2.66, and shutouts, with six, in 1957, the Dodgers’ final year in Brooklyn, and was a consistent winner when they moved to Los Angeles. He had an 18-5 record in 1961 with a league-leading winning percentage of .783. He pitched in four World Series and he was an All-Star three times.
Podres was traded to the Detroit Tigers in 1966, and also pitched for the San Diego Padres. He had a record of 148-116 in 15 major league seasons.
He was later a pitching coach for the Minnesota Twins and the Philadelphia Phillies.
In addition to his wife, Podres is survived by his sons, John Jr., of Queensbury, and Joseph, of Fort Myers, Fla.; and his brothers, Thomas, of Watervliet, N.Y., and Walter, of California.
Byrne, his pitching opponent in Game 7 of the ’55 World Series, died last month at 87.
For all of Podres’s achievements, his day in the sun would always be that afternoon at Yankee Stadium in October 1955.
“Sometimes when I’m home doing nothing, I’ll put the video in,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer 50 years later. “I get the feeling that I’m young again. What a time that was.”
01-15-2008, 07:26 AM
Johnny Podres Died Sunday
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