ABSTRACT
On August 11, 1951, a pleasantly seasonal Saturday, both the Giants and the Dodgers were playing at home. Up at the Polo Grounds, Robin Roberts shut out Leo Durocher's team in less than two and a half hours, moving his Phils to within a game and a half of second-place New York. Across the river in Ebbets Field, it took even less time for Ralph Branca to outlast a number of Braves pitchers, including one named Spahn-who took the loss--in an 8-1 rout. Joe Sheehan of the New York Times said that the Giants, having already been "knocked completely out of sight as a pennant contender by the Dodgers earlier in the week ... found themselves in danger of being evicted from their long-tenn tenancy of second place."! The Dodgers' win, which put them a startling thirteen and a half games in front, was the first baseball game ever televised in color; if you didn't have a color wheel to stick in front of your set, you could have caught it either at Columbia Broadcasting Systems (CBS) headquarters at 485 Madison Avenue or on the main floor at Gimbel's on Herald Square. An estimated ten thousand fans did catch that first colorcast, either at one of those two locations in the city or by using their converters at home. The fact that the Dodgers lost the second game of their doubleheader that day, reducing their lead to a mere thirteen, seemed absurdly irrelevant; Charley Dressen's unbeatable team was already in the World Series, and it had arrived there in living color, like Dorothy landing in Oz.
