1956 World Series: The Yankees Take Their Revenge

October 10, 1956. Ebbets Field. The sun was out, the Brooklyn faithful were loud, and the New York Yankees were three outs from winning their 17th championship. Johnny Kucks -- a 24-year-old right-hander who'd been nine years old when the two clubs first met in October -- had just finished his eighth inning of shutout baseball. The score was 9-0. The Dodgers had three hits. Somewhere in the Brooklyn dugout, Jackie Robinson was waiting for his last at-bat in the major leagues, though nobody knew it yet.

The Yankees had come here for a reason. Brooklyn had beaten them in seven games the year before -- the only World Series the Dodgers ever won -- and the Bombers hadn't forgotten it. This wasn't just a championship series. It was a settling of accounts.

The Setup

The 1956 Yankees didn't need much motivation to be great, but having lost to Brooklyn in 1955 gave them something extra. Mickey Mantle had spent the summer winning the Triple Crown -- .353 average, 52 home runs, 130 RBI -- and his first MVP award. Whitey Ford went 19-6. Yogi Berra drove in 105 runs. The Yanks finished 97-57, nine games clear of Cleveland. They weren't a team you had to talk into caring about October.

Brooklyn matched them stride for stride in the National League. Manager Walter Alston's Dodgers -- Roy Campanella, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese, and Robinson -- won 93 games and clinched the NL pennant on the final day of the regular season, edging Milwaukee by a single game. Don Newcombe, the Cy Young and NL MVP winner, had gone 27-7. The defending champions arrived as the defending champions -- confident, talented, and aware that the Yankees owed them one.

It was the seventh time these two clubs had met in the World Series (1941, 1947, 1949, 1952, 1953, 1955, 1956), and the Yankees had won five of the first six. Brooklyn had broken through in 1955 -- "next year" finally arriving after decades of October heartbreak. The question in 1956 was whether that breakthrough had changed something, or whether it was just the exception that proved the rule.

Games 1 and 2: Brooklyn Makes a Statement

The Dodgers answered that question fast.

Game 1, October 3 at Ebbets Field. Sal Maglie -- "The Barber," 39 years old and pitching on earned spite -- took the ball against Ford. Mantle jumped on the first pitch he liked and put the Yankees up 2-0 (he'd hit home runs all October; this wasn't a shock). Then Maglie locked it down. He fanned 10 batters, completed the game, and Brooklyn won 6-3. Ford was the losing pitcher. The Series was off to an uncomfortable start.

Game 2, October 5, still at Ebbets Field. The Yankees staked Don Larsen to a 6-0 lead -- Berra crushing a grand slam off Newcombe in the top of the second inning -- and Larsen promptly gave most of it back. He couldn't get through two innings, and when the Yankees' relievers couldn't hold the lead either, Brooklyn erupted for six in the second (capped by Duke Snider's three-run homer), and Don Bessent worked the final seven innings in relief to close out a 13-8 Dodgers win. (Larsen starting Game 2 in the first place, giving up a 6-0 lead in less than two innings, then throwing the greatest game ever pitched four days later: one of October's all-time whiplash stories.)

Two games in Brooklyn. Two Brooklyn wins. The Yankees were staring at a 2-0 series deficit, and the defending champions were feeling it.

Games 3 and 4: The Turnaround

The Series shifted to Yankee Stadium, and the Bombers found their footing on familiar ground.

Game 3, October 6. Ford went back to the mound with something to prove after the Game 1 loss. Enos Slaughter -- 40 years old, acquired from Kansas City late in the season, a man who ran out every ground ball like it might be his last -- put the Yankees ahead for good with a three-run homer in the sixth inning. Ford completed the game, scattering eight hits and allowing three runs, and the Yankees won 5-3. One game back.

Game 4, October 7. Tom Sturdivant was dominant. He went the distance in a 6-2 Yankees win, holding Brooklyn to six hits. Mantle hit a home run -- his second of the series. Hank Bauer went deep too. Carl Erskine started for the Dodgers and took the loss. The series was tied at two games apiece.

Four games in, and Stengel's club had thrown two complete games in a row. Brooklyn's offense, which had erupted for 19 runs in the first two games, had suddenly gone quiet. Something had shifted. The Yankees were playing Yankees baseball: shutdown pitching, clean defense, timely power. The Dodgers were pressing.

Game 5 was the swing game.

The Perfect Game

October 8, Yankee Stadium. Don Larsen -- the same man who couldn't get through two innings four days earlier -- threw the only perfect game in World Series history. Twenty-seven batters. Twenty-seven outs. No hits, no walks, no hit batters. Berra caught every pitch. Mantle saved it with a backhanded running catch in the fifth inning that turned a Gil Hodges drive into the out that preserved perfection.

It gave the Yankees a 3-2 series lead.

The full story belongs to the dedicated account of that afternoon. What matters here is what the perfect game did to the series -- and to Brooklyn. The Dodgers had won 93 games, had the reigning Cy Young winner starting in two days, and had beaten the Yankees the year before. Now they were down 3-2 and had been made to look helpless by a journeyman pitcher who'd given up a 6-0 lead in his previous start. It wasn't just a loss. It was a particular kind of humiliation.

Games 6 and 7

Brooklyn wasn't finished. Game 6, October 9 at Ebbets Field: Clem Labine answered the perfect game with a masterpiece of his own. The right-hander threw ten shutout innings against Bob Turley -- who was extraordinary in the loss, striking out 11 batters across ten innings while yielding just four hits -- and Jackie Robinson drove a walk-off single to left in the tenth to end it. Brooklyn 1, Yankees 0. The series was tied again. Game 7 would settle everything.

October 10. The rubber game. Walter Alston handed the ball to Newcombe, who'd won 27 games during the regular season but had been knocked around in two World Series starts. Stengel countered with Kucks, who hadn't been anything but reliable all postseason.

It wasn't close.

Berra put it away early. He hit a two-run homer to right in the first inning off Newcombe -- Berra's second home run of the series after his Game 2 grand slam. He hit another two-run shot in the third. Elston Howard led off the fourth with a solo homer, and that was it for Newcombe -- five runs, knocked out without retiring a batter in the fourth. Bill Skowron hit a grand slam off Roger Craig in the seventh to make it 9-0. Kucks was surgical -- three hits, zero runs, no drama. The Dodgers went quietly.

In the ninth inning, with two out, Kucks looked in at Jackie Robinson -- 37 years old, wearing a Dodgers uniform for the last time. He struck him out. That was the last at-bat of Robinson's major league career, though the announcement wouldn't come until January: he was traded to the Giants in December but retired rather than report. The strikeout that ended a Yankees championship was the final moment of a career that had changed American baseball forever. Robinson never got to leave on his own terms.

Berra finished the series with three home runs and 10 RBI -- a personal best for him in October (and he had 14 World Series appearances to compare against). He'd hit the grand slam in Game 2, the two home runs that won Game 7. The NL MVP and Cy Young winner, Newcombe, gave up eight of those 11 runs personally. As Berra had made a habit of doing to Newcombe across October matchups, he simply owned him.

The End of Something

The Dodgers moved to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. The 1956 World Series was the last time Brooklyn wore that name in October. The Ebbets Field crowd that watched Kucks close out Game 7 was watching the end of something they didn't know was ending.

For the Yankees, it was the restoration of order -- or what felt like order. They'd lost to this exact Brooklyn roster the year before, in a Game 7 at Yankee Stadium, and it had stung. The 1956 championship was cleansing. The 17th title in franchise history. The sixth for Casey Stengel's dynasty, which had now won six championships in eight seasons.

The last Subway Series until 2000. The last World Series for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The last at-bat for Jackie Robinson. Three endings compressed into one October afternoon, all delivered by a team that had come to Brooklyn for exactly one thing.

They got it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who won the 1956 World Series?

The New York Yankees defeated the Brooklyn Dodgers four games to three. The Yankees trailed 2-0 after two games at Ebbets Field, then won four of the final five games -- including five consecutive complete games from Games 3 through 7 -- to claim their 17th World Series title.

Who pitched the perfect game in the 1956 World Series?

Don Larsen threw the only perfect game in World Series history in Game 5 on October 8 at Yankee Stadium. He retired all 27 Brooklyn Dodgers batters in a 2-0 win. Yogi Berra caught every pitch. The achievement stands as the greatest single-game performance in World Series history -- no pitcher in any postseason game has matched it since.

Was this Jackie Robinson's last World Series?

Yes. Robinson appeared in six World Series with the Brooklyn Dodgers (1947, 1949, 1952, 1953, 1955, 1956), winning once in 1955. His final at-bat in the major leagues came in Game 7 of the 1956 Series, a strikeout against Johnny Kucks to end the game. He was traded to the Giants that December but retired rather than report.

What was Yogi Berra's role in the 1956 World Series?

Berra was the Yankees' most dangerous hitter. He hit a grand slam off Don Newcombe in Game 2, then hit two home runs in the clinching Game 7 -- both off Newcombe again. He finished the series with three home runs and 10 RBI. He also caught Don Larsen's perfect game in Game 5, calling every pitch without a single shakeoff.

Was the 1956 World Series the last for the Brooklyn Dodgers?

Yes. The Dodgers moved to Los Angeles after the 1957 season, making the 1956 World Series the last October played under the Brooklyn name. The Dodgers won only one World Series as the Brooklyn Dodgers -- in 1955, the year before this series -- and lost their final Fall Classic to the same Yankees team that had beaten them five times before.