Blast From The Past: Miller, Hiller and Haller 1962

One of the great things about following a a really good team, especially one that wins a pennant or championship is everybody has fun.  Fun fun!  Quirky fun!  Winning is fun!  The Giants teams of 2010-2014 generated a ton of fun, quirky nicknames, songs and memes.  Giants fans will never forget  Panda, The Baby Giraffe, the Don't Stop Believin' song, Brian Wilson's "sweet cleats", Big Time Timmy Jim, Matt Cain fans wearing horse head masks.  I could go on and on. Losing is not fun!  Nobody is making up fun nicknames about Giants players these days!  The pennant winning Giants of 1962 had regular players with similar sounding last names:  Stu Miller(RHP), Chuck Hiller(2B) and Tom Haller(C).  Those three player would be immortalized in a song, ironically written by an obsessed Dodgers fan, a song about the Dodgers.  More on that later.  First, who were are those players with the similar sounding last names?

We already profiled Stu Miller in a prior post so we won't go into too much detail about him.  By 1962, he was used exclusively as a reliever and was as close to being the Closer as teams got in those days, leading the team with 19 Saves.

Chuck Hiller was a lefty hitting second baseman with no power and "iron hands" who had terrific bat-to-ball skills and walked more than he struck out.  He also endeared himself to managers, especially ones like Alvin Dark, with non-stop hustle and a passion for the game.  1962 happened to be Hiller's career season as he slashed .276/.341/.334 in 679 PA.  Besides the song, he is best remembered for hitting a grand slam HR in the World Series, the very first in World Series history by a National League player.  He only hit 20 HR's in his entire regular season MLB career!

Tom Haller was an athletic, lefty hitting catcher who had played QB on his college football team.  Despite a promising minor league career, he struggled in his MLB debut in 1961 with a .145 BA in 73 PA.  Al Dark saw something in his bat and put his faith in him.  While he would eventually become the Giants primary catcher, he split time with Ed Bailey in 1962 which proved to be a productive combo with 35 HR's between them, 18 by Haller in 332 PA.  In addition to being an excellent lefty hitting catcher with power, he was a smart pitch caller with a rifle arm which he used to limit Maury Wills on the basepaths.

The Giants and Dodgers were bitter rivals from New York days and the rivalry seemed to only intensify after the move to west coast cities whose residents didn't like each other much either.  The fact that both teams were successful and competing head-to-head for pennants almost every year contributed to the intensity.  Into this craziness, and yes fun, stepped a famous entertainer named Danny Kaye.  Kaye was a singer, songwriter, actor, comedian with a peripatetic personality which showed through in his songwriting and entertaining style.  Kaye was from Brooklyn but his career was now based in Hollywood and he was even crazier about the Dodgers than he was in the rest of his life, which is.... saying something.  He reportedly was known to play recurring alter-ego characters at family get-togethers, which he never played for audiences, for as long as 2 hours at a time, which must have been.....exhausting for his family!  

Sometime during the 1962 season, Danny Kaye made up a song which was meant to be a cheer for the Dodgers, a taunt to the Giants and essentially a summary of a game he had simulated in his own mind.  SABR historians have scoured boxscores for plays that correlate with those described in the song, such as Frank Howard bunting, and have found nothing that comes close to matching.  The song became a hit.  Vin Scully loved it and took every opportunity to refer to it during broadcasts until the day he retired.  The official title of the song was the Dodger Song, but ironically, it was actually more about the Giants than the Dodgers and the most memorable line involved an internal rhyme on the names Miller, Hiller and Haller, so much so that it might be better known as the Miller, Hiller, Haller Song!

And now, I present to you the key portion of the Miller, Hiller, Haller song:

.....Maury Wills at bat.
Hit it for me once
Stu Miller throws
Maury Bunts
Cepeda runs to field the ball and Hiller covers first
Haller runs to back up Hiller, Hiller crashes into Miller
Miller falls and drops the ball and Conlan calls "safe!"

Yeah Maury!
Gilliam up
Miller grunts
Miller throws
Gilliam bunts

Cepeda runs to field the ball and Hiller covers first.
Haller runs to back up Hiller, Hiller crashes into Miller
Miller falls, drops the ball and Conlan calls "safe!"  Yeah Conlan!
Willie Davis gets a hit and Tommy does the same
Here comes Mr Howard with a chance to win the game.

Hit it once
Big Frank bunt?
Cepeda runs to field the ball, so does Hiller, so does Miller
Miller hollars "Hiller", points to Miller with a fist
and that's the Miller, Hiller, Haller hallelujah twist!.....

So, what do you call it when someone is a fan of one team but wishes he was a fan of the other team? Yeah, I think Danny Kaye had a bad case of Giants envy!

*Player biographical information taken from SABR biographies linked to the left.  Statistics taken from Baseball Reference also linked to the left.  Biographical information for Danny Kaye taken from Wikipedia.