The Dodgers lead the Yankees 2-0 heading into the bottom of the 6th inning. Southpaw Johnny Podres, who had beaten the Yanks 8-3 in Game 3, has held the Bronx Bombers to just four hits.
Manager Walt Alston tells Podres as he leaves for the mound, "They got to catch us. We don't have to catch them." Even though it is only the sixth inning, Alston makes a defensive switch that proves to be a game-saver for the Dodgers. Junior Gilliam moves from LF to 2B to replace Don Zimmer. Alston sends fleet Cuban Sandy Amoros out to LF. Sandy bats lefthanded but, more importantly as it turns out, throws lefthanded.
Podres makes Dodger fans in the crowd of 62,465 groan by walking the leadoff man, Billy Martin, on four pitches. Alston has Clem Labine and Don Bessant working in the bullpen but stays with his lefty. Gil McDougald drops a bunt down the third base line. Podres' throw to first is too late. The potential tying runs are just that quickly on base. With Yogi Berra, the Yanks' toughest hitter (with Mickey Mantle reduced to pinch hitting because of a leg injury) coming up, SS PeeWee Reese comes to the mound. Reese asks, "You all right, Johnny?" Podres nods. Then Alston and C Roy Campanella arrive. Walt asks his catcher, "Has he still got it?" Campy tells his pitcher, "Take it easy now." Then to the manager: "He'll be all right."
In his own words, Johnny "threw a pitch that was high out over the plate, a fastball that had something on it, and he (Berra) didn't get around too good on the ball, and he sliced it to left field ... At first when the ball went up, I wasn't concerned. In fact, when he hit it, I bent over and picked up the resin bag and said to myself, "Well, there's one out. But then I looked back, and I could see the ball keep slicing toward the line." The crowd has risen to their feet. Would the fly go into the stands for a HR, slice foul into the stands, be held up by a left-to-right wind and drop for a double, or be caught? Amoros, playing Berra to pull as instructed by the dugout, races fearlessly over from LCF and, at the last moment, sticks out his right gloved hand and spears the ball. Then, just as remarkably, he stops before careen­ing into the low fence. Hearing Reese yelling for the ball, Amoros turns and throws straight at the chest of Pee Wee, who stands just inside the 3B line at the back of the infield dirt. Having taken a peek at the runners while awaiting the throw, Reese whirls and fires a strike across the diamond to 1B Gil Hodges, who stretches his entire 6'1" height to double McDougald by a hair. A few feet further left and Berra's fly would have landed foul in the stands. A few feet further out and it would have landed in the bleachers for a three-run homer.
Asked after the game how he caught the ball, Amoros answered in his Cuban accent. "I don't know. I run like hell. ... I kept my eyes on the ball ... never looked anywhere else. It stayed up just long enough to fall into my glove ... I never hit the fence, but I was only this far from it" (holding his hands about 20" apart).
Yankee 2B Jerry Coleman, watching from the dugout, recalled: "We just couldn't believe it. In the dugout, we just shook our heads. There's no way he should have made that catch. There was no way he should have been playing Yogi so close to the outfield fence. It was a great play, but at the same time it was also a colossal fluke."
Podres: "My juices were really flowing after that."
Johnny retired the next batter, RF Hank Bauer, on a groundout to end the inning.
The Dodgers were unable to give Podres any more runs in the last three innings. But he didn't need any more. In the 7th, Mantle pinch hit with two out and a man on base, but Johnny got him on a pop up to Reese.
In the 8th, Amoros made another fine play, cutting off Phil Rizzuto's liner in LCF to hold him to a single. After an out, Phil went to 3rd on McDougald's bad hop single to bring up Berra again. But Yogi hit a short fly to RF, and Hank Bauer struck out.
When the Yanks went down in order in the bottom of the 9th, the Dodgers had their first World Series championship in franchise history.
In addition to the celebrations in Brooklyn and across all boroughs of New York City, hun­dreds of joyous Cubans gathered in Amoros's hometown of Havana in the city's Central Park.

Watch a video of the Amoros catch near the end of the 1955 World Series highlights.