Mark Melancon steps back in time with pilgrimage to Polo Grounds

It was a little chilly perhaps, but as the fans gathered in upper Manhattan, it was still a beautiful afternoon for a ballgame. You could almost hear the vendors and smell the food and see the uniformed ghosts of Carl Hubbell and Bobby Thomson and Willie Mays waft up from Coogan’s Bluff across the street.

The home plate of the Polo Grounds is now in the middle of an apartment complex on the west bank of the Harlem River, but the members of the New York Giants Preservation Society have been asked to assemble at the foot of the legendary John T. Brush Stairway to connect the past to today, May 8.

That’s the same day Hubbell pitched a no-hitter down below in 1929. The same day the New York…