The Subway Series


		Torre watched the Subway Series in '56, now he's back

By Adrian Wojnarowski
Special to ESPN.com

NEW YORK -- The voice on the radio screamed, "THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT, THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT," and Joe Torre leaped into the air, rushed to his apartment window, and started screaming down to the Dodger fans on Avenue T in Brooklyn.

Where were they running? Where were they hiding?

The three Torre boys -- Joe, Rocco and Joe -- were the sons of a Giants fan, loyal to the old man's love for summer days in the Polo Grounds. Now, Bobby Thomson had gone deep on Ralph Branca in late September of 1951, and the glory of the Giants going to the Subway Series washed over him. The shyest kid in the neighborhood screamed so loud into the cool September air.

"Joe was younger and his friends were easier to find," his older brother, Frank, said. "When Thomson hit the home run, I jumped in my car and scoured the neighborhood for the Dodgers fans. But they all went underground. You couldn't find any of them."

They lived for the Subway Series. In those days, everyone did. The Shot Heard 'Round the World had disappeared into the Polo Grounds bleachers and it was New York, New York October again. In every corner of the city, including the imagination of a 11-year-old boy's mind, this had turned into a predestined passage of October. Every year, life came to a screeching stop.

"We were spoiled by it," Joe Torre remembered, and five years later, in the fall of '56, they wanted no part of it. Forty-four years ago, Frank was a young first baseman for the Milwaukee Braves, despondent over the final weekend of the regular season when his own World Series dreams dissolved into dust. Go to Yankee Stadium, watch Game 5 of the Dodgers-Yankees? The ache was still too raw.

"I told my brother that I wasn't in any mood to go myself because I thought [the Braves] should be in it," Frank said. "I was playing for the Braves and we had a two-game lead on the Dodgers with four to go, and we blew it in St. Louis. We lost three in a row.

"That's how the Subway Series happened in '56."

So, Frank made the call to the Braves general manger, John Quinn, scored a couple of comps, and told his little brother, Joe, to get a hold of a friend, a note to bring the sisters over at St. Francis Prep in Brooklyn and take those seats way high in the left field upperdeck. As a teenager, it was the most magical, memorable baseball day of his life, peering down on the perfection of Don Larsen. The Subway Series had stolen his heart again.

Back home, on Avenue T, Frank watched the game on a small RCA television. "He wasn't really jumping with joy initially about going, but he thanked me a million times after he went and saw the perfect game," Frank said. "He got home and he wanted to tell me everything."

Forty-four years later, Torre is the epicenter of the Series. There are sexy subplots, with those old Mets whiz kids David Cone and Doc Gooden, with Mets reliever John Franco, out of Brooklyn, reaching the Series for the first time at 40 years old.

Yet, it seems, the significance of the Subway Series runs deepest through Torre. He lived near Ebbets Field, cheered the Giants, played and managed the Mets, and finally found his way to World Series glory with the Yankees. He's the ultimate New York baseball man, in the ultimate New York baseball series. Nobody waited longer as a manager and player to get to a World Series -- more than 4,200 games -- and now they can't keep him out of it.

"I didn't want him to come back to managing [in 1995]," Frank said. "But when he told me he wanted to get to the World Series, I told him that this was the best place for it."

These Torres, they never go away from a most compelling October story. Frank lived to tell of his heart transplant in the 1996 World Series, an amazing tale of brotherly love between Joe and him that played out with the nation watching the Yankees beat the Braves and begin this magnificent run.

Frank leaned against a pillar in the Yankees clubhouse, the scent of champagne still thick in the air early Wednesday morning. He had to laugh. "For years, (Joe) came close but he had no cigar. But he's got plenty of cigars now."

"It was almost boring because the Yankees were there every year," Frank said. "Sometimes the Dodgers or Giants would slip in there, but that's probably why we disliked the Yankees as much as we did growing up. It was no fun. They won all the time."

Now, the Torres are having the time of their lives with it. Forty-four years later, Joe Torre comes back to the Subway Series, and wouldn't you know it --- that old Giants fan gets to watch Larsen throw out the first pitch again. Only now, Joe Torre comes down out of the leftfield upperdeck and into the Yankees dugout on Saturday, down into the middle of everything.

Adrian Wojnarowski is a columnist for the Bergen (N.J.) Record and a regular contributor to ESPN.com.