Lore
- Branca originally wore the uniform number 12, but switched to number 13, one of the few players of that time to wear it, due to a long-standing superstition that the number brings bad luck. After the Shot Heard 'Round the World, he briefly returned to number 12, but then changed back to 13.
- On Opening Day 1947, which was also Jackie Robinson’s Major League debut, Branca lined up on the field beside Robinson, while other players refused.
- Ralph and Ann's daughter Mary married a future Dodger player, former manager of the Boston Red Sox, Bobby Valentine.
- Ralph was a contestant on Concentration starting in 1963, where he won 17 consecutive games. He appeared in Concentration's 1963 Challenge of Champions. (A Challenge of Champions episode with Branca from September 13 of that year is on YouTube.)
- In his final spring training appearance, Branca was relieved by Sandy Koufax, whose first major league strikeout was Thomson.
Read more about this topic: Ralph Branca
Famous quotes containing the word lore:
“OUR Latin books in motly row,
Invite us to our task—
Gay Horace, stately Cicero:
Yet there’s one verb, when once we know,
No higher skill we ask:
This ranks all other lore above—
We’ve learned “’Amare’ means ‘to love’!””
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences.... It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)