With New York leading the game by a single run in the bottom of the 11th inning, the opposition Washington Senators loaded the bases with one out, and sent up rookie pinch hitter Cliff Bolton.

[3][4] After rejoining Nashville at the outset of 1934 and resuming his successful minor league managerial career, Dressen was called to Cincinnati to manage the last-place Reds on July 29, 1934.

In 1939, a year after MacPhail became president and general manager of the Dodgers, he named fiery shortstop Leo Durocher player-manager and Dressen as his third base coach.

But when MacPhail resigned in October 1942 to rejoin the armed forces and was succeeded by Branch Rickey, Dressen was fired from Durocher's staff — reportedly because he refused to eschew betting on horses.

Dressen's Dodgers, unlike his Reds of a decade and a half before, were a perennial contender in the National League, with a lineup that included five future members of the Baseball Hall of Fame — Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson and Duke Snider.

Brooklyn charged into first place early in the 1951 season, while the New York Giants — led since July 16, 1948, by Durocher himself — struggled (despite the callup of the 20-year-old rookie Willie Mays).

With Sal Maglie, Larry Jansen and Jim Hearn anchoring their starting rotation — and (according to some accounts) with a "spy" stealing signs from their center-field clubhouse at their home field, the Polo Grounds[8] — the Giants won sixteen in a row in August and 37 of their last 44 games (.841) while the Dodgers went 26–22 (.542) over the same period.

In the ninth inning of the decisive third game at the Polo Grounds, Dodger starting pitcher Don Newcombe had a 4–2 lead and two men on base when Dressen decided to go to the bullpen, where Carl Erskine and Ralph Branca were warming up.

Dressen summoned Branca, whose second pitch to Bobby Thomson was hit into the lower left-field stands for a three-run homer, a 5–4 Giants win, and a National League pennant — Baseball's "Shot Heard ‘Round the World".

Dressen kept his job in 1952 (Sukeforth resigned, while denying that the Branca decision was a factor in his departure[9]) and for the next two seasons, the Dodgers dominated the National League, winning 201 regular-season games and capturing the pennant by margins of 4+1⁄2 and 13 lengths.

Fresh from winning the 1953 pennant with 105 regular-season victories, Dressen decided to publicly demand a three-year contract from O’Malley instead of the customary one-year deal the Dodgers then offered their managers.

[12] Alston went on to sign 23 consecutive one-year contracts with O'Malley, while winning seven Nationals League pennants, four World Series championships, and eventual induction in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Dressen returned to Oakland to manage the Oaks in 1954 while he sorted out his big-league future, then was hired to replace Bucky Harris at the helm of the Washington Senators, who had gone 66–88 to finish sixth in the eight-team American League in 1954.

On September 30, 1954 (Season 5, Episode 3), Dressen himself appeared on the Groucho Marx quiz program, You Bet Your Life, and predicted that the Senators would finish in the first division (fourth place or higher).

But the star players around them, including regulars Del Crandall, Joe Adcock, Bill Bruton, Wes Covington and Johnny Logan, and ace starting pitcher Lew Burdette, began to tail off in production, and the Braves' farm system could not keep up.

In 1962, Dressen returned to the minor leagues—yet remained in the Braves' organization—when he was named the skipper of the Toronto Maple Leafs of the Triple-A International League, who had a working agreement with Milwaukee.

[17] He rallied the Tigers to a 55–47 record for the remainder of 1963, a first division finish in 1964, and was mentoring many of the key players who won the 1968 World Series for Detroit, including Denny McLain, Willie Horton, Mickey Lolich, Dick McAuliffe, Bill Freehan and others.