This season's spectacular collapse of the New York Mets is much like that of the 1951 Brooklyn Dodgers, the team felled by Bobby Thompson's "shot heard around the world". Today's New York Times makes the comparison, including a passage about the reaction in Brooklyn Heights to the Dodgers' loss:
The New York Times: When the Losers Were Loved…: The Dodgers may have blown a pennant. But unlike the Mets’ final loss, defeat did not raise doubts about their character and worth.
This is not to say that Brooklyn was happy. In the moments after Thomson’s home run against Ralph Branca, Brooklyn swung between melancholy and bursts of rage. In front of the Dodger offices on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, a man paced before the scoreboard drawn on the window and cried out: “I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!”
The banquet manager of the Towers Hotel on Clark Street calculated that the hotel had just lost $30,000 from the 500 extra guests, the 100 booked rooms and the party in the Pedro Room that the team had reserved to celebrate its pennant. “We are very miserable,” he said.
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