It's a Beautiful Day, Let's Play Three
Reviewing the Tri-Cornered Game of 1944 for the Fifth War Loan Drive of World War II.
Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
. . . The triumphant Brooklyn Dodgers weren’t around for the finish of the legendary Tri-Cornered Game of 1944—they left the Polo Grounds after the eighth inning to make a trip to Chicago for a doubleheader against the Cubs.
. . . The pre-game festivities included an appearance by the United States Coast Guard Band—introduced by then-strictly radio and film comedian Milton Berle.
. . . A pre-game fungo batting contest for distance was won by 19-year-old Dodger pitcher Cal McLish—the switch-hitting pitcher hit one that was recorded to have traveled 410 feet.
. . . In a regular season still impacted by roster depletions thanks to World War II, 1944 saw the Yankees finish third in the American League, the Dodgers finish seventh in the National League, and the Giants finish fifth in the NL. (The World Series was, of course, the only all-St. Louis Series—the Cardinals defeating the Browns in six games—in major league history.)
Leading Off
“The Diamond Sport is Going Completely Haywire Tonight”
The Tri-Cornered Game of 1944
By Paul Jackson
Opening the Fifth War Loan Drive with his Fireside Chat on June 12, 1944, President Roosevelt reminded Americans that the nation’s progress was a whole-team, whole-league effort:
What has been done in the United States since those days of 1940…in raising and equipping and transporting our fighting forces, and in producing weapons and supplies for war, has been nothing short of a miracle. It was largely due to American teamwork–teamwork among capital and labor and agriculture, between the armed forces and the civilian economy–indeed among all of them. And everyone—every man or woman or child- who bought a war bond helped–and helped mightily!
FDR should only have known how right he’d be re-proven at the Polo Grounds later that month.
Last month, we wrote about some doings of the New York War Bonds Sports Committee, who pulled out all the stops with multi-sport spectacles and enlisted All-Star exhibitions to try and entice Americans to open their wallets and help finance World War II. The WBSC’s weirdest doing, though, happened on June 26, 1944.
For one strange night, the Polo Grounds became “a three-ring circus,” “a free-for-all” featuring “lunacy under the lights.” In a game like no other, the New York Giants hosted the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers in an exhibition of three-way baseball.
The idea emerged from the brain of one of the New York business leaders supporting the war bond drive in the city. After reportedly consuming a midnight snack of lobster thermidor, pickles, and spumoni, Stanley Oshan wondered what a single baseball game featuring three teams might look like. When he couldn’t figure it out, he found a professor of mathematics who could.
Professor Paul A. Smith of Columbia University devised a relatively simple system. In it, each team batted and fielded six times overall, changing stations every half-inning. The winner would be the team that finished with the greatest number of runs scored. New York’s three major league clubs would be the test subjects.
The trio of Hall of Fame managers—Leo Durocher (Dodgers), Mel Ott (Giants), and Joe McCarthy (Yankees), promised to field their best possible teams for the cause, despite the fact that this was a midseason exhibition game dreamed up by someone suffering from digestive distress. Following Smith’s calculations, the contest proceeded as follows:
First inning: Dodgers vs. Yankees
Second: Dodgers vs. Giants
Third: Giants vs. Yankees
Fourth: Dodgers vs. Yankees
Fifth: Dodgers vs. Giants
Sixth: Giants vs. Yankees
Seventh: Dodgers vs. Yankees
Eighth: Dodgers vs. Giants
Ninth: Giants vs. Yankees
The game would be held at the Polo Grounds, the largest sports facility in New York. War bond purchases were required for entry: $25 for a bleacher ticket; $100 for a reserved seat; and $1000 for a box seat. Those were steep prices, but this event captured people’s imagination as few fundraisers had.
Fifty thousand New Yorkers came to root for their teams, buying $5.5 million in bonds for the privilege. New York’s mayor Fiorello La Guardia threw in an additional $50,000,000 purchase made by employees of the state of New York before throwing three ceremonial first pitches.
As the home team, the Giants got their dugout to themselves, meaning the visitors had to share the other, with Durocher at one end of the bench and McCarthy seated as far away as possible. Some lucky members of the over-capacity crowd were directed to find seating on the grass around the dugouts and do their best to stay out from under foot.
Professor Smith’s assistance was needed at the official scorer’s table, and he was reported to have tracked the goings-on using a score card and a slide rule. Each half-inning the public address announcer would inform the crowd who was playing whom.
Perhaps the Dodgers were destined to do well in a “round-robin” format. No one scored off a Brooklyn pitcher all night, and “the Flock” battered their opponents with singles, pulling away early with a run in the first (off the Yankees) and two more in the second (off the Giants). After that, no one scored until the Dodgers came up for their last try in the eighth inning, adding two more runs off the Giants.
After the eighth inning concluded, the crowd began to filter out–the Dodgers were done for the day. The Dodgers left, too, hurrying to catch a train bound for their next stop in Toledo, Ohio. The ninth became a one-inning battle to save a little face.
The Yankees managed a measly run, while the war-depleted Giants walked away with a goose-egg. After an unexpectedly up-tempo two-hour and five-minute affair, the victorious (and absent) Dodgers were declared “War Bond champions,” by a score of 5-1-0.
It was fitting, 27-year-old Dick Young wrote in the New York Daily News: “When screwier games are invented, the Dodgers will win them. True to their noble tradition, the batty Brooks ran off with the wackiest diamond battle ever conceived.” Manager Durocher agreed: “This game was made to order for us.”
A unique scorecard of the game, autographed by all the players, was auctioned off, and the Bond Clothing Stores bought $1 million in war bonds to claim it. With that, the sold-out game had raised an impressive $6.6 million for the Fifth War Loan Drive.
When the loan drive ended on July 8, Americans had given $20.6 billion, exceeding the target goal by over $4 billion. All of that money became a loan the United States government would turn into “guns, planes, ships, and tanks, bound for Rome, Cherbourg, and Saipan.”
“Nothing made too much sense,” Arthur Daley wrote in his New York Times valedictory, “but it certainly made plenty of dollars.”
Paul Jackson writes about baseball, history, and culture on Substack at Project 3.18 and on Instagram. He has previously written for ESPN.com. Paul can be reached via email at pjacks2@gmail.com.
Extra Innings: He Said It, We Didn’t
We got a great crowd. For the players in the game, what was happening was very strange: three teams playing in one nine-inning game. But you couldn’t beat the cause. In New York, the newspapers were all writing about it.—Ralph Branca, then eighteen years old and the third Dodger pitcher of the game.
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HERE’S THE PITCH is published daily except Sundays and holidays. Benjamin Chase [gopherben@gmail.com] handles the Monday issue with Dan Freedman [dfreedman@lionsgate.com] editing Tuesday and Jeff Kallman [easyace1955@gmail.com] at the helm Wednesday and Thursday. Original editor Dan Schlossberg [ballauthor@gmail.com], does the weekend editions on Friday and Saturday. Former editor Elizabeth Muratore [nymfan97@gmail.com] is now co-director [with Benjamin Chase and Jonathan Becker] of the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America, which publishes this newsletter and the annual ACTA book of the same name. Readers are encouraged to contribute comments, articles, and letters to the editor. HtP reserves the right to edit for brevity, clarity, and good taste.