San Francisco Giants tickets

Willie McCovey's titanic homer helped the Giants win 2-0. The Series moved to Yankee Stadium for the third game, where pitching remained the story. Starters Billy Pierce and Bill Stafford dueled to a scoreless tie entering the bottom of the seventh, when the Yankees scored three times in that inning on hits by Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. The Giants came back with two in the ninth, but Stafford managed to complete the game for a 3-2 Yankee victory.

San Francisco Giants Baseball team was cruising in Game 4 behind Juan Marichal, who had a 2-0 lead in the fifth inning. But the young pitcher was hit on the hand by a curveball while trying to execute a squeeze bunt and he was side-lined for the rest of the Series. The Yankees scored off two Giants relievers, but San Francisco (Giants schedule available) held out to win 7-3 on a grand slam by Chuck Hiller, the first slam by a National Leaguer in World Series history. The Yankees then won the fifth game on a dramatic eighth-inning homer by Rookie of the Year Tom Tresh.

The teams then returned to San Francisco with New York leading three games to two. But then the weather stepped in. Raging storms on the West Coast killed five people, knocked out power lines, destroyed homes, and delayed the World Series for three days. The postponement favored the Giants, allowing the pitching staff to get some rest after their exhausting pennant race. The field was in deplorable condition when Game 6 was finally played on October 15. It helped the Giants that they had Pierce pitching, as he had a 12-0 lifetime record at Candlestick Park, in part because the groundskeepers heavily watered down the left side of the infield when he pitched, which kept hard-hit grounders from reaching the outfield. With the entire field now soaked, Pierce held the Yankees to three hits, winning 5-2 and handing Ford his first World Series loss since 1958.

Both Ralph Terry and Sanford were brilliant in Game 7, though the Yankees scored a lone run on a double-play grounder. Losing 1-0, the Giants opened the bottom of the ninth with three consecutive bunt attempts. First, Matty Alou bunted for a hit. Then manager Al Dark ordered both Felipe Alou and John Hiller to bunt, but both failed and struck out instead. Mays stepped to the plate with two outs and doubled to right field, and Maris was able to cut off the ball before it reaches the wall to hold Alou at third. Now McCovey, the best left-handed power hitter in the National League, came up to face the right-handed Terry with the Series-winning run on second base. Yankees manager Ralph Houk had the option of either walking McCovey or bringing in a left-hander to face him with first base open. McCovey had homered off Terry earlier in the Series and had tripled off him in his last at bat. But stunningly, Houk allowed Terry-who had given up Bill Mazeroski's series-ending homer two years earlier-to face McCovey. It was one of the worst strategic decisions in World Series history. The Yankees' hearts lurched when McCovey hit a vicious liner that seemed destined to be a Series-ending single. But second baseman Bobby Richardson, playing in exactly the right spot, reached up and flagged it down. The impact nearly caused Richardson to lose his footing, but he held on to the ball, and the World Series was over. "To this day, I won't say he caught the ball," Marichal said. "The ball caught him."