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Turn back the clock 1962: when the Giants lost a heartbreaker to Yankees: after a down-to-the-wire pennant race with the rival Dodgers, San Francisco bowed to New York in an exciting World Series

Baseball Digest, Oct, 2002 by David Bush

THE GIANTS' 1962 SEASON, 40 years later still the team's San Francisco high point, is most remembered for how it ended.

Willie McCovey's line drive to Bobby Richardson, the final out of the seventh game of the World Series, has the historical clout of a Big Event. Everyone old enough to have followed the team knows where they were at that time, that day. The younger fans have heard the story so often they feel like they saw it live.

In one of the greatest of pennant races, the Giants battled the Dodgers through a confrontational ride that saw them take the league lead in May, fall seemingly hopelessly behind and then pull even on the last day of the regular season.

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Then came a bizarre three-game playoff, won by the Giants with an inelegant four-run rally in the ninth inning of the final game. Barely making it home through a mob of delirious fans that greeted them at the airport, the Giants opened what was a stirring World Series against the New York Yankees the next day, only to see it extended by three consecutive rainouts between Games 5 and 6.

"We hadn't been rained out all year and then we get it in the World Series," said pitcher Billy Pierce. "It really was a strange season."

For their fifth season in San Francisco and third at Candlestick Park, the Giants fielded what is probably still their strongest West Coast roster.

"In 1954 in New York, we won it all," recalled Willie Mays. "But in '62 we had the best all-around type of team that I ever played on."

But it was a strange mix. Five members of the '62 Giants would reach the Hall of Fame, but two were first basemen and getting Willie McCovey and Orlando Cepeda in the lineup simultaneously was difficult. McCovey played in just 91 games.

"I was a three-position man that year," McCovey said. "When Cepeda didn't play, I played first base. When Harvey Kuenn didn't play, I was in left field. In the World Series, because left field in Yankee Stadium was so tricky, I played right field for the first time in my life."

One Giants pitcher won 16 straight games, another went 13-0 at Candlestick, but they weren't the two pitchers who went to Cooperstown.

The late Jack Sanford, who won 24 games, recorded 16 victories in succession after beginning 6-6. He followed his regular season with a spectacular World Series--a 1.93 ERA in three Pierce (15-6) was 13-0 at home and had a shutout in the playoff opener. He saved the final playoff victory and waited out the rain to win Game 6 of the Series and force Game 7.

Pierce was acquired the previous winter along with reliever Don Larsen from the White Sox in a deal that cemented the team.

"I couldn't get anybody out in spring training," Pierce said. "But once we got to Candlestick, it was better. It was a good park if you are a little bit older and have a bit of control, which you have to, in pitching the right-handers inside and the left-handers outside, so they couldn't hit the ball where the wind was blowing, predominately to right field."

Billy O'Dell was second to Sanford on the club with 19 victories, but it was Juan Marichal (18-11 that year) and Gaylord Perry (3-1 in 13 games as a rookie) who went on to the Hall of Fame.

This was early in the era of the transistor radio, that newfangled contraption that enabled man to be in two places at once, albeit one of them vicariously. Chronicle columnist Herb Caen mentioned more than once the number of earphones in place during an opera. And when his 49ers duties caused him to miss the Giants' final scheduled game of the season, announcer Lon Simmons followed the action via radio, as did most of the Kezar Stadium audience.

"When Mays hit the home run to put the Giants ahead, the Minnesota Vikings were just coming out of the huddle and there was this tremendous roar from the fans," Simmons said. "And the Vikings stopped dead. `Are these football fans or not? We are getting a standing ovation just coming out of the huddle?'"

Many heroics led to that final day. The Giants had started fast then slumped, the first of their many June swoons. In early August, they lost to a pitcher on the expansion Mets named Roger Craig to fall five and a half games behind.

The Giants' spirit showed in the first of seven August meetings with the Dodgers when McCovey's three-run pinch homer beat L.A., 5-4. San Francisco won six of those seven games but still entered the final week four games behind.

"We thought we were done," said O'Dell. "You might say you've got a chance, but you can't really believe it."

The Giants made up ground on the stumbling Dodgers slowly. They were still two games behind with three left and one back entering the final day.

Mays' homer beat the Houston Colt .45s and the Giants finished with 101 wins. "I was really excited when I hit that home-run, "Mays said. "But I was the captain and I didn't want to show my emotions. I can't be jumping around."

The real celebration had to wait, because the Dodgers were still playing, and had not yet lost. "We were just hanging around the clubhouse listening to the Dodgers," said catcher Tom Haller, who would become the team's general manager in the 1980s. "We didn't know if we would just go home or come back."

Turn back the clock 1962: when the Giants lost a heartbreaker to Yankees: after a down-to-the-wire pennant race with the rival Dodgers, San Francisco bowed to New York in an exciting World Series

Baseball Digest, Oct, 2002 by David Bush

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