September 2, 1950: Newcombe Silences the Giants

Today in 1950 · Saturday, September 2, 1950

Dodgers pitcher Don Newcombe, as pictured in the Los Angeles Mirror in September 1950, during his 19-win season

Dodgers pitcher Don Newcombe, as pictured in the Los Angeles Mirror in September 1950, during his 19-win season · Los Angeles Mirror, 1950, published without copyright notice, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On this day in 1950, the oldest rivalry in baseball got a masterclass. At Ebbets Field, Brooklyn's Don Newcombe threw a complete-game three-hit shutout at the New York Giants, winning 2-0 before 15,410 fans. Larry Jansen took the loss, and the whole thing was over in two hours and two minutes — a Saturday afternoon's work, tidily done.

Newcombe, in his second big-league season, was on his way to 19 wins for a Dodger team stocked with Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Duke Snider and Gil Hodges — still chasing the young Phillies at the top of the National League, in a race that would famously come down to the season's last day.

Dodgers-Giants in September, Ebbets Field full, the pennant on the line: for baseball fans, this was 1950 exactly as they would remember it.

Also on this day

  • In Korea, the North Korean 'Great Naktong Offensive' entered its second day — the opening of the Pusan Perimeter's darkest week, as attacks fell on nearly every sector of the line.
  • Israel carried out the forcible relocation of thousands of Bedouins toward the Sinai frontier region.

🎵 On the radio that week: America’s No. 1 song was “Goodnight Irene” by Gordon Jenkins and The Weavers (Billboard best sellers) — Billboard's top record of 1950, topping the sales, jukebox and disc-jockey charts alike. That sound never really left — we recreate 1950s doo-wop and slow-dance ballads every week: read the stories behind our songs or listen on the lovesong1950s channel.
🎬 At the movies: “Sunset Boulevard” kept filling houses, with silent-era legends — Erich von Stroheim, Buster Keaton, Cecil B. DeMille — playing versions of themselves.
⚾ In sports: The Labor Day standings showed the Phillies a comfortable seven games up on Brooklyn, and the Yankees clinging to a two-game AL edge with Detroit and Boston charging.

Sources: Retrosheet box score: Dodgers 2, Giants 0 (Sep 2, 1950) · US DPAA: the Pusan Perimeter · US Army: one of the forgotten war's bloodiest battles · US Army official history, ch. XXIV · Wikipedia: September 1950 · Billboard best-seller charts, 1950 (issue scans) · Variety National Boxoffice Survey, 1950 (Lantern scans) · Retrosheet 1950 game logs and box scores. Every fact above is drawn from the records linked here — no dramatization, no invented details.

More from this series: Today in 1950 — the daily archive · every post from September 2026

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