1951 Brooklyn Dodgers

Not long ago, the Houston Astros were going to the World Series. They had stormed through the first five months of this baseball season with such a mix of hitting and pitching that a deep march into October was assumed. On the afternoon of 26 August, they beat the Yankees 6-2 at Yankee Stadium. Catcher Evan Gattis hit a home run and Collin McHugh struck out eight in six and a third innings. They were 71-57 and in first place by five and a half games in the American League West.

Since then, they have won just 12 games and are barely clinging to the last wildcard spot. They have had a tremendous collapse. But they are hardly alone. Many teams before them have tumbled from seemingly insurmountable late-season leads.

Nothing the Astros do the rest of this year will match the humiliation of the 1951 Dodgers, who looked destined to for what was becoming an almost annual World Series matchup with the Yankees across town. When they beat the Giants on 9 August, they went up 12½ games on New York (a lead they would push to 13 a few days later). But then the Giants started winning. And winning. And winning. They won 16 in a row in August, and another eight at the end of the season to finish the year tied with Brooklyn.

A three-game playoff was held to see who would win the National League. Each team won a game and in the third Brooklyn had a 4-1 lead going into the ninth inning, when the Giants got a run and then two more baserunners. Ralph Branca came in to pitch to Bobby Thomson.

Then this happened.

The Shot Heard Round the World

There are many storylines that stretch from that moment. One is that the 1951 Giants were actually the 2000s Patriots and may well have cheated their way to the pennant.. Another is how six years later, Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley convinced the Giants to join him in moving to the West Coast and ending New York’s golden age of baseball.. And if you haven’t read the first 49 pages of Don DeLillo’s Underworld, which is set during Thomson’s home run and is so vividly told that it was made into its own novella, Pafko At The Wall, then you must today.

But my favorite story is how Branca and Thomson later became friends, bonding over the moment that linked them forever.

1995 California Angels

In a year shortened by a labor stoppage, the then-California Angels tore into mid-summer with an explosive lineup of young star players like Jim Edmonds and Tim Salmon. As the Angels thundered through the early weeks of August, talk turned to the World Series that continued to elude the franchise. Could 1995 finally be the year?

On 16 August they were 10½ games up on second-place Texas. Then disaster. The Angels started losing, and no one could figure out why. Some point to shortstop Gary DiSarcina’s thumb injury in early August. Others say the team’s failure to trade for star pitcher David Cone – who would later help the Yankees on their late-decade World Series runs – left the Angels without the top starter they needed. Or maybe they just had the misfortune of being in the same division as as a Seattle Mariners team who decided to have the run of their lives.

But twice in the final two months the Angels had nine-game losing streaks. This coincided with a 27-15 run by the Mariners and left California scrambling to win their last five games just to set up a one-game playoff for the division title. The game was played in Seattle. At the time, the Mariners were a franchise on the brink. A vote to fund a new baseball stadium was going down, and the team was threatening to move after 18 unspectacular years.

In a delicious irony only baseball can deliver, the playoff pitted Angels pitcher Mark Langston – once a Mariners star who was traded away in 1989 — and the man for whom he was traded: Randy Johnson. The game wasn’t close. Johnson struck out 12 and the Mariners won 9-1.

1964 Philadelphia Phillies

Of all the great collapses in baseball history, this might be the most mystifying. Back before playoffs took over sports, baseball had two leagues with no divisions. The winner of each league went to the World Series and everyone else went home. Philadelphia had not fared well under such a system and the fact the Phillies of 1964 were in first place by 6 ½ games with 12 to go was momentous. There was no way Philadelphia could blow that.

But since this is a Joy of Six on great baseball collapses, you know the Phillies did.

They lost 10 straight games, the first seven of them at home, and fell out of first place with six games left in the season. Since all great collapses are usually matched by another team’s great run, it’s important to note the St Louis Cardinals went 10-3 in that period, including three straight over Philadelphia in the season’s last week to seal the Phillies demise.

Much of the blame for the Philadelphia implosion is placed on manager Gene Mauch, who panicked even before the lead dissolved. In mid-August, he used his best pitcher, Jim Bunning, on two days rest against the Houston Colt 45s, who were one of the worst teams in the league. The decision has been debated for more than 50 years since. Bunning didn’t pitch well that day and it set a precedent for Mauk to use Bunning and his other top pitcher, Chris Short, on two days rest as the Phillies collapsed. The two lost five games in the fatal 12-game stretch.

Mauk would manage for two more decades, often with solid finishes, but only once would he finish first. That was in 1986, with the Angels, who were within a strike of beating the Red Sox to go to the World Series. Then reliever Donnie Moore threw a fastball to Dave Henderson...

1978 Boston Red Sox

The irony of today’s baseball, with its wildcards, is that the Red Sox stumble of 1978 would have been irrelevant now. Boston won 99 games that year, had a powerful lineup that included MVP Jim Rice and a deep starting rotation led by a man who would become more famous as a closer, Dennis Eckersley. In a deeper postseason, Boston might have won their first-round series and found themselves in the World Series.

Red Sox pitcher Bob Stanley in 1978. Photograph: Todd Gipstein/Corbis

In 1978 there were no wildcards, however: just the hated, brawling, dysfunctional Yankees, who stole away Boston’s beautiful summer.

Much of what anyone remembers of that year is Bucky Den’s home run in the one-game playoff for the American League East division. And yet so much went wrong for the Red Sox in those final weeks, when a nine-game lead over New York went away. It wasn’t as if Boston didn’t play well in late August and September: the Red Sox finished the season 21-20 – hardly an all-out collapse. But one weekend in early September doomed the Red Sox as they frantically tried to hold off the Yankees. This was a four-game series against New York at Fenway Park. By its end, the series was known as the Boston Massacre.

The Yankees won all four games, and they weren’t even close. The combined score was 42-9, Boston had made 12 errors, and the two teams were tied for the division lead. The Red Sox were able to stay in first place for two more days before falling into second on 13 September, where they stayed until managing to tie the Yankees for first on the last day, leading to the fateful playoff and Bucky Dent.

2007 New York Mets

No list of baseball heartbreak would be complete without the Mets. But 2007 was especially devastating, even by Mets standards, because a blown seven-game lead on 12 September not only kept them from winning the National League East – it knocked them out of the playoffs completely.



They went from being 21 games over .500 to packing boxes for the winter, mainly because they won just five games over the season’s final three weeks. No team in baseball history had held a lead of seven games on 12 September and failed to make the postseason … until the 2007 Mets.

It’s hard to know just what happened to the Mets that year. They didn’t seem to know themselves. Their troubles started with a three-game sweep by eventual division-winner Philadelphia. But there were also five losses in six games to fourth-place Washington. And yet the Mets found themselves tied with the Phillies for the division lead on the season’s final day. Future Hall of Famer Tom Glavine started for the Mets. They had to feel they had a good chance to at least force a playoff with the Phillies.

Then Glavine gave up seven runs in the first inning. He only got one out. A sold-out crowd at Shea Stadium booed one of the greatest pitchers in the last half century off the mound. It was, well, just very Mets.

1993 San Francisco Giants

How can a team that won more games in a season than only 33 others in baseball history be on this list? In today’s configuration, the 1993 Giants would have skated to an easy National League West title. In Barry Bonds’ third MVP season, they led the West by nine games on 10 August, and seemed destined to storm into the playoffs as one of the greatest teams baseball has seen.



Rod Beck in 1993. Photograph: Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images

Then in a three-week stretch from late August to early September, they lost 15 of 21 games including eight in a row, while the Atlanta Braves, boosted by a mid-season trade for first baseman Fred McGriff, rolled past the Giants and into first. What followed was a fantastic sprint to the finish, with San Francisco going 14-3 and Atlanta 10-5 over the final two weeks. With a game left in the season, both teams were tied for first at 103-58.

The Braves, playing three hours before the Giants, beat Colorado to win their final game. Needing a victory in Los Angeles to keep their season alive, Dodgers catcher Mike Piazza hit two home runs and Los Angeles won 12-1, giving the division to Atlanta.

It was baseball’s last great pennant race. The next season was the first under the current three-division configuration. In that arrangement – with the Giants and Braves in different divisions – they both would have made the playoffs easily. But it might not have mattered. The Giants’ top two pitchers, John Burkett and Billy Swift, were exhausted. Both complained at season’s end that their arms were dead. Even without a great collapse during the season, a postseason stumble might have awaited.