Daring Play: How a Courageous Jackie Robinson Transformed Baseball

Daring Play: How a Courageous Jackie Robinson Transformed Baseball — page 7
pressure of a World Series When Brooklyn’s starting lineup for Game 1 was announced September 28 Robinson was in it playing third base The Dodgers scored first getting two runs in the top of the second inning Robinson contributed with a triple and then scored on a single by Don Zimmer The Yankees tied the score in the bottom of the inning In the third Brooklyn scored again only to see the Yankees once again tie it Over the next three innings the Yankees took a three-run lead The score was still 6-3 in the eighth when Robinson came to the plate with one out and a man on first He once again faced the Yankees Whitey Ford one of the top pitchers in the game Robinson hit a ground ball that third baseman Gil McDougald could not field cleanly Robinson reached second on the error then went to third on a sacrifice fly The sacrifice had scored the runner ahead of him so now with the score 6-4 and two outs Robinson looked at home plate just 90 feet 27 meters away Robinson later wrote that he stood on third base thinking this could be his last year in baseball his last chance to help Brooklyn win a World Series and defeat their New York rivals I suddenly decided to shake things up Robinson wrote It was not the best baseball strategy to steal home with our team two runs behind but I just took off and did it