Pitching to the Pennant by Joseph Wancho

Author:Joseph Wancho [Joseph Wancho]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 978083245877
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2014-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

34.

Dave Pope

Tom Heinlein

AGE G AB R H 2B 3B HR TB

33 60 102 21 30 2 1 4 46

RBI BB SO BAV OBP SLG SB GDP HBP

13 10 22 .294 .354 .451 2 2 -

Although he spent just two full seasons in the Major Leagues, Dave Pope played in one of the most memorable games in baseball history. It was the game that featured “the catch,” Willie Mays’s spectacular play on a ball hit by the Cleveland Indians’ Vic Wertz in the eighth inning of Game One of the 1954 World Series, with the score tied 2–2 and runners on first and second, that saved the game for the New York Giants. Two innings after “the catch,” in the bottom of the tenth inning, Pope, playing right field for the Indians, could only wonder what might have been after having leaped for a fly ball hit by Dusty Rhodes that landed just beyond his reach down the right-field line and into the seats for a game-winning home run. The Giants went on to sweep the series from the Indians in four straight. “There was just a slight breeze out there that day towards the stands,” Pope recalled. “If the wind had not been blowing, I believe I would have caught the ball. After all, the ball just hit on top of the cement. . . . When you look at a hit like Dusty Rhodes’s, which was what—200-and-something down the right field line? And when you think of a 250-foot home run and you think of a 410-foot out, it’s just something that doesn’t seem to match. But that’s the way the game goes.”1

David Pope was born on June 17, 1921, into a family of fifteen children, in Talladega, Alabama. His father, Willie, was a farmer and married to Sussie, according to the 1930 U.S. Census. Pope’s family moved north to Liberty, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, when he was young and he grew up there. As a youth he practiced baseball in a way he had for years thought was unique until he discovered later in life that he was not alone, that he was in fact in good company. “I . . . didn’t think that anyone else had even experienced what I did in my young days—in my childhood days—and that is hitting bottle caps and broomsticks. I listened to [Hank Aaron] and he said that he did, that’s the way he learned to hit, also.”2

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