Credit where it’s due, I found the video below at this MLB.com article.
This is nine minutes’ worth of various highlights from Ernie Banks’ career [VIDEO].
For this sleuthing exercise, we are concerned only with the first 14 seconds of the video. which shows Ernie hitting a home run in… now, what park is that exactly? It doesn’t look familiar at all, at first glance.
Advertisement
All we know on first look is that it’s a two-run homer, with someone scoring ahead of Ernie, and it’s a day game.
Racked my brains trying to figure out what park this was, and then I slowed the video down and got this screenshot:
It’s a little bit blurry and pixellated, but the first three letters of the home team are clearly “SAN.”
So this has to be San Francisco. But it’s not Candlestick Park, I would have recognized that right away.
That means this has to be Seals Stadium, where the Giants played in 1958 and 1959 after they moved from New York to San Francisco.
Ernie Banks hit five home runs at Seals Stadium, four in 1958 and one in 1959.
Advertisement
There are two more clues in the video. Here’s another screenshot:
There’s bunting on the wall in the outfield. You can also see this on the third-base line in the video, right after Banks hits the ball. This hints a special event, most likely Opening Day.
Lastly, that’s clearly a “2” on the scoreboard for the Giants in the second inning and for the Cubs in the fourth.
The Giants’ home opener, Tuesday, April 14, 1959, matches all these things, and you can understand why a film crew would have been at the ballpark on Opening Day, especially with Banks, the reigning NL MVP, as a visiting player. Felipe Alou, who later managed the Giants, had homered to give them a 2-0 lead in the second. Banks homered in the fourth, a two-run shot off Jack Sanford, to tie the game.
Advertisement
The two-run homer you see in this video was hit in the top of the eighth, breaking the 2-2 tie. George Altman (No. 21) scores ahead of Banks. No. 7 in the video, who you can see waiting at the plate for Altman and Banks, is Walt “Moose” Moryn, who was the next hitter.
The Cubs scored another run in the ninth. In the bottom of the ninth, the Giants loaded the bases with two out, but Don Elston struck out Bob Schmidt to end the game, which the Cubs won 5-2.
The Cubs briefly contended in 1959. After defeating the Braves July 28, they were 50-48, in fourth place but just 4.5 games out of first. They faded from there and finished 74-80, which was their second-most wins since 1946. Along the way, though, they helped knock the Giants out of the pennant race by sweeping them in a two-game series at Wrigley Field the last week of the season, both walk-off wins. The Giants had been in first place, two games ahead, with eight games remaining, but lost seven of those eight and finished third behind the Dodgers and Braves, who tied for the pennant. The Dodgers won a best-of-three playoff and defeated the White Sox in the World Series.
The Cubs finished 12 games out of first place (13, after the playoff). It was the closest they’d been to first place since the 1945 pennant year. If they’d had better pitching they might have been closer, but they had traded away Sam Jones in 1956 for a bunch of guys you’ve never heard of, and Jones had a spectacular year for the Giants in ‘59, going 21-15 and leading the NL with a 2.83 ERA. Jones finished second in Cy Young voting that year, and back then there was only one Cy Young winner for both leagues. The winner was Early Wynn of the White Sox, so Jones would have almost certainly been the NL winner had there been separate awards.
Advertisement
Such were the Cubs of the late 1950s.
This video is pretty cool — I don’t think I had ever seen it before. Just another little slice of Cubs history. For Ernie Banks, the homers hit that day were his first two of 1959, a year when he’d hit 45 and win his second straight MVP. For his career they were homers No. 184 and 185, of 512. The video, as noted, has quite a few other highlights of Ernie’s career.
