The season both National League clubs in New York played somewhere else.
The ground
The Polo Grounds sat in a hollow in upper Manhattan below a rock outcrop called Coogan's Bluff, from which people watched for free. It was shaped like a bathtub: two hundred and seventy nine feet down the left field line and four hundred and eighty three to centre.
Those dimensions are the reason both of the moments below happened there.
1951
The Giants were thirteen and a half games behind Brooklyn in August and caught them. The season ended level and was decided by a three-game play-off.
In the ninth inning of the last one, Brooklyn led four two. Bobby Thomson hit a three-run home run into the left field stands, which were close enough to reach. The commentary, in which Russ Hodges shouts the same sentence four times, is better known than the footage.
1954
In the eighth inning of the first game of the World Series, with the score level, Vic Wertz hit a ball to centre field that in most grounds would have been gone. In the Polo Grounds it had well over four hundred feet to travel.
Willie Mays ran with his back to the plate, caught it over his shoulder, and turned and threw before he had stopped. The Giants won the game and swept the series.
The move
Horace Stoneham had been considering Minneapolis. Walter O'Malley, who was taking Brooklyn to Los Angeles, needed a second club to go west with him for the schedule to work, and persuaded him to choose San Francisco instead.
The two decisions were taken together. New York was left with one team.
After
The Polo Grounds was demolished in 1964. There are flats on the site.