How's That Garbage?
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He got to the ballpark that morning and found the newspaper lying on a trunk in the clubhouse.
The headline said the Dodgers were over the hill. Underneath it, quotes from Tom Sheehan, the Giants' chief scout: Jackie was too old, Campy was too heavy, and Carl Erskine couldn't win anymore with the garbage he was throwing.
Mark the date
May 12, 1956
Ebbets Field — Erskine no-hits the Giants, 3-0, on the Game of the Week
Sheehan wasn't making it up out of nothing. Erskine's arm had been bothering him. He was 3-3 on the season, 29 years old, three years past what he considered his best work, and he knew it.
May 12, 1956. Ebbets Field. Erskine no-hit the Giants, 3-0. The closest thing New York got to a hit came in the middle innings when Willie Mays scorched one to Jackie Robinson's left at third and Robinson somehow picked it clean and threw him out. The game went out live on the Game of the Week. Erskine was told years later it was the first no-hitter ever carried on national television.
When the last out landed, Robinson shook his hand, then took off toward the Giants dugout holding the clipping and shouted at Sheehan, "How's that garbage?"
Two more things worth knowing. Erskine is the only pitcher who ever threw two no-hitters in Ebbets Field, and he didn't find that out until a writer told him decades later. And in his own telling of the best afternoon of his career, the loudest voice in the ballpark wasn't his.
He died in April 2024 at 97, the last of the Boys of Summer.
