Yankees and Dodgers ready to provide baseball with another essential chapter

The day had gone perfectly, as far as the citizens of Brooklyn were concerned.It was the fifth of October but felt like the Fourth of July, partly because of the unseasonably muggy 85-degree day, mostly because much of the afternoon had been a 2 ½-hour civic celebration. The local nine, the Dodgers, had rallied from an early 3-0 hole thanks to the hitting heroics of Jimmy Wasdell and Pete Reiser.

Now, in the ninth inning, relief pitcher Hugh Casey had retired Johnny Sturm on a grounder to second and Red Rolfe on a comebacker, and he’d gotten two quick strikes on Tommy Henrich.The Dodgers were about to win, 4-3, and tie the 1941 World Series, two games apiece. Later in his career, Henrich would earn a forever nickname, “Ol’ Reliable,” much of that thanks to his exploits in another Yankees-Dodgers World Series.

But here he waved helplessly at a Casey breaking pitch that, for all times, everyone on both sides agreed, was wetter than the Gowanus Canal.But there was a problem: The spitter hadn’t just fooled Henrich, it foiled Dodgers catcher Mickey Owen, too.It skipped to the backstop.

Owen retrieved it.Henrich dashed to first.

And if you think that Citi Field specializes in ominous foreboding … well, that New York National League prescience was hatched in this moment, 4:35 p.m., as a game the Dodgers already believed they had won was now very much in doubt. Two hitters later, the Yankees had a 5-4 lead, on the way to a 7-4 victory. “I blew it,” Owen said later, disconsolate, lying on his stomach on the trainer’s table.“I blew the game.

And I may have blown the World Series.” It was the moment that Yankees-Dodgers became an essential part of baseball, of American life.At first it was a New York thing: the teams would engage in Subway Series in 1941, ’47, ’49, ’52, ’53, ’55 and ’56.

Later, when the Dodgers hightailed it west, it became a cross-country phenomenon and a bicoastal rivalry renewed in 1963, ’77, ’78 and ’81....