Andy Pafko, the All-Star outfielder who played on four teams that won the National League pennant but who also watched a once-sureBrooklyn Dodgers pennant disappear over a Polo Grounds wall in one of baseball’s most memorable moments, died Tuesday at a nursing home in Stevensville, Mich. He was 92.

Associated Press

Left fielder Andy Pafko and the Brooklyn Dodgers lost the National League pennant to the New York Giants on Bobby Thomson’s three-run, ninth-inning home run at the Polo Grounds on Oct. 3, 1951

His death was announced on the Major League Baseball Web site.

Swinging right-handed from a distinctive squatting stance, Pafko was an outstanding hitter with good powerover 17 seasons playing for theChicago Cubs, the Dodgers and the Milwaukee Braves.

In his second full major league season, he hit .298 and drove in 110 runs while playing center field for the 1945 Cubs, the franchise’s last pennant winner. One of the Cubs’ most popular players, he was voted an All-Star five times and hit 36 home runs in 1950, second in the National League, before being traded to the Dodgers in June 1951.

The first-place Dodgers led the New York Giants by 13 1/2 games in mid-August 1951, but the Giants caught them. On Oct. 3, in the finale of a three-game pennant playoff, Pafko was playing left field at the Polo Grounds when the Giants’ Bobby Thomson connected off the Dodgers reliever Ralph Branca in the ninth inning for a three-run, pennant-winning home run into the left-field stands.

Captured in a long-remembered photograph, Pafko was a helpless figure pressed against the wall and looking up as “the shot heard round the world” landed a few rows above him.

In Roger Kahn’s book “The Boys of Summer,” Pafko recalled Branca’s stroll from the bullpen to relieve the Dodgers starter Don Newcombe:

“Branca walked by me in left field. I hit him in the back. ‘Go get ’em, Ralph.’ But I was doubting. Branca threw a ball. Then came this shot. I started back. In Ebbets Field I might have gotten it. In the Polo Grounds it was gone.” (The Polo Grounds’ left-field fence was only 315 feet from home plate.)

The moment was “my biggest letdown ever,” Pafko said.

It turned out to be the stuff of literature as well. The novelist Don DeLillo described the scene in “Pafko at the Wall,” which appeared in the October 1992 issue of Harper’s Magazine. With minor changes, it became the prologue to Mr. DeLillo’s novel “Underworld,” published in 1997.

Pafko played for the Dodgers when the team won the pennant in 1952 but was traded to the Braves before the 1953 season, when the organization moved to Milwaukee from Boston. Pafko, who was from Wisconsin, became a mainstay in the Braves’ lineup with the future Hall of Famers Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews. During his tenure, the Braves won the World Series in 1957 and the National League pennant in 1958.

For several seasons Pafko played alongside Thomson, who had been traded to the Braves by the Giants in 1954, and they roomed together on the road.

“I had to ask him how he felt personally when he hit the home run,” Pafko once told The Journal-Sentinel of Milwaukee. “But he was such a modest guy, he didn’t want to talk about it.”

One of six sons of Czech immigrants, Andrew Pafko was born Feb. 25, 1921, in Boyceville, Wis., and grew up on a dairy farm there. He was signed by the Cubs out of a tryout camp and made his major league debut in 1943. He retired after the 1959 season with a career batting average of .285 and 213 home runs. He was later a coach for the Braves and managed in their minor league system.

Pafko’s wife, Ellen, died in 2000. They had no children. His brothers Mike, John and Lud died before him. He is survived by his brothers Frank and Edward.

Nearly 40 years after his last major league season, Pafko was astounded to learn that one of his 1952 Topps trading cards had sold for $83,870 at an auction in Washington. The card, found by a collector in an unopened pack for which he paid $1,000, according to Sports Collectors Digest, was in mint condition.

Pafko lamented with a laugh that he had received boxes of cards from Topps in the 1950s but never kept any.

“I just gave the cards to the kids in the neighborhood and they put them in their bicycle spokes,” he told The Associated Press. “And there went the money — click, click, click.”