Once upon a time, when the home field clubhouses of the Giants and Yankees were separated by 1,350 feet instead of 3,065 miles, they made house calls on each other only when it truly, madly, deeply counted.
Six times in three decades, between 1921 and 1951, they teed off in World Series that captured a nation’s complete and uncluttered sporting imagination. The Giants won the first two, lost the next four and decamped for the left coast, where they bided their time for the penultimate rematch. It came on a balmy San Francisco October afternoon in 1962 when Willie Mays doubled into the right field corner in the ninth inning, Matty Alou – fearful of Roger Maris’ arm – held up at third base and 6’4” Willie McCovey strode, with his usual quiet, elegant menace, to the plate.
McCovey had tripled two innings earlier, only to be stranded at third base. This time, he wasn’t thinking of a landing spot in the body of water that one, much later day would bear his name, just to somehow get hold of a Ralph Terry fastball and drop it into right field. He rode the first pitch far, but foul, down the line. The second came inside but McCovey adjusted mid-swing, extending his arms and smashing a bullet toward second base. Yankee second baseman Bobby Richardson took one swift step to his left, stabbed out his glove, and that was it.
It would be almost 40 years until the Giants and Yankees met again in earnest (well, relatively), on June 7, 2002. By then, SPORT magazine – the revered, national bible of sports storytelling since 1946 – had taken a hiatus.
Today, we at SPORT are back, celebrating baseball’s Opening Night 2026 and the 68th meeting between two of the five most storied teams in the game’s brilliant, implausible history, with both the Yankees and Giants fervently hoping this will be a sneak preview of their eighth World Series meeting this fall, and first since 1962.
The Yankees have won 23 of the 43 Series games the teams have played (one, in 1922, ended in a 10-inning tie, on dubious account of darkness), and 16 of 24 in inter-league competition, none larger than October 16, 1962 when Terry bested the strapping lad from Mobile and the Yanks claimed Game 7, 1-0.
A few weeks later at a luncheon in Greenwich Village, SPORT editor Al Silverman would hand Terry the keys to a brand new white 1963 Chevrolet Corvette, making him the eighth recipient of the SPORT MVP Award, inaugurated by SPORT magazine in 1955 as the first-ever celebration of the top playoff performer in any of the big four leagues. Terry was the fifth Yankee – and fourth Yankee pitcher – to win the award, and yet only one of those (Whitey Ford) made it to the Baseball Hall of Fame; Don Larsen (1956), Bob Turley (1958) and Terry were truly men of the moment, winning an average of 96 career games but each excelling come one particular October.
For Terry, any different ending against McCovey would have landed him in permanent infamy. After all, it was his fastball down the middle two years earlier that Bill Mazeroski smacked over the ivy-covered left field fence at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field to lift the Pirates past the Yankees 10-9 in the ninth inning of Game 7, often cited as both the most dramatic moment in Series history and the greatest home run ever.
Two years and three days later, none other than Joe DiMaggio strode into the winner’s clubhouse he’d once owned and yelled at a champagne-downing Terry, within earshot of SPORT writer Arnold Hano, “You can forget that Pittsburgh thing now, Ralph!”
“Thank God,” Terry sighed a bit later. “It’s rarely in a man’s life that he gets a second chance.”
Some wisdom from a 26-year-old kid from Big Cabin, Oklahoma, right?
Mazeroski passed away in February, McCovey in 2018, Terry in 2022; the headline on the latter’s obituary in The New York Times read, “Ralph Terry, Yankee Hurler Redeemed by One Pitch, Dies at 86.”
The grand old game has evolved significantly over the past six-plus decades, with the pace of innovation quickening in just the past five. During SPORT’s original publication run from 1946 to 2000, baseball’s only two major rule changes were the lowering of the mound from 15” to 10” (in 1969) and the advent of the designated hitter in the American League (in 1973). Since 2022, when SPORT returned to begin publishing special editions, baseball has introduced a dizzying array of changes, from the National League adopting the DH, to the pitch clock, larger bases, infield shift restrictions, ghost runner and this season, the Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) Challenge System.
Another major element of the game’s freshened face is an enhanced focus on storytelling, with Netflix’s streaming of Opening Night, the Home Run Derby and the Field of Dreams game this season a major element. Picking up where their immersive docuseries The Clubhouse: A Year with the Red Sox (featuring dugout cameras following the team through all 162 games) left off, Netflix will bring the 2026 baseball season to real-time, vibrant, pulsating life, witnessed by a global audience on a single platform for the first time.
At SPORT, where we are celebrating our 80th anniversary in 2026 and a pioneering mindset and perpetual focus on deep, rich storytelling have always been our calling cards, we are proud to connect with today’s premier media innovator to celebrate the game we know and love with this Collector’s Edition.
