Pinstripe Empire (52 page)

Ditmar claimed umpire Larry Napp heard the exchange and told White Sox manager Al Lopez about it, but Lopez turned and walked away.

Martin played the next day in Kansas City, going 1-for-4 in a Yankee win. The fifteenth was the trade deadline. His name wasn’t in the lineup that day; Richardson was playing second. Billy decided to sit in the bullpen, but in the seventh inning, Stengel walked over and said, “Billy, can I talk to you?”

“I followed the old man into the clubhouse,” he said in his autobiography with Phil Pepe, “and Arnold Johnson, the owner of the Kansas City club came in a few moments later.”

Casey is talking to me and he’s having trouble getting the words out.
He couldn’t even look me in the eye. But I knew what was coming.
     “Billy,” he said, “you’re going to Kansas City … I couldn’t …
Mr. Johnson, let me tell you about this kid, he’s one of the best …”
     “You don’t have to say nothing,” I barked at Casey, cutting him
off sharply. “I’ll play for you, Mr. Johnson. I won’t dog it on you.”

(Lee MacPhail claimed he was the one who told Billy, as Stengel didn’t have the heart.)

“I was crying,” said Martin. “Mantle came over to me later and he was crying. Ford started crying. We got on the team bus to go back to the hotel and everybody on the bus was real quiet. They all knew. I saw Bobby Richardson
sitting by himself, so I slipped into the seat next to him and said, ‘You’re going to be the second baseman now, son. Carry on the tradition.’ “

Martin wore an Athletics uniform against the Yankees the next day. The biggest crowd of the season in Kansas City turned out. He went 2-for-5 and scored three runs.

Everyone felt terrible. It began eighteen years in the baseball wilderness for Martin, always carrying the Yankees in his heart, always feeling betrayed by Stengel, who he felt could have stopped the trade. He was, after all, “Casey’s boy.” They didn’t speak for years. Ford and Mantle were like his brothers.

Billy would play for six teams before embarking on a managerial career that would eventually take him back to New York long after Weiss, Stengel, Topping, and Webb had departed. Much has been made of the times he was fired as Yankee manager, but his first “firing” was really on June 15, 1957, as a player, and he never got over it. He was never the same player again. More than anyone else, he basked in the Yankee uniform, and it inspired him to achievements far beyond his natural abilities.

WITH SHANTZ’S 2.45 ERA leading the league, earning him Comeback Player of the Year honors, Sturdivant going 16–6, Kubek winning Rookie of the Year, and Mantle winning his second straight MVP Award, the Yankees won their third straight pennant and the eighth for Casey.

A spectacular defensive moment during the season found Bauer, deep in right center, unable to glove a long drive—but in position to slap it bare-handed to Mantle, who briefly bobbled it but held on for the putout. “That’s a play we’ve been working on,” said Bauer.

Mantle’s .365 season, his career high, did not include a repeat of his Triple Crown, as his homers fell from 52 to 34 and his RBI from 130 to 94. This was enough for Weiss to send him a contract for 1958 with a $5,000 pay cut and, during negotiations, a threat to be traded. Eventually Mick got a raise to $75,000, but his distaste for Weiss was forever sealed.

Weiss was a distant figure who didn’t like to know the players personally. “I never even met him,” said Richardson. “His assistant Roy Hamey was assigned to deal with all but a few of us.”

The Yankees took on the Milwaukee Braves in the ’57 World Series, MVP Hank Aaron having led them to their first pennant since moving from Boston in 1953. The Yanks had never faced the Braves before, but when Ford
beat Warren Spahn 3–1 in the opener at Yankee Stadium, it looked like business as usual for New York.

Game two featured Lew Burdette against Shantz. Few remembered that Burdette had actually once been Yankee property, traded to the then–Boston Braves for Johnny Sain. Although playing in the Yankee system for five seasons, he had only made two relief appearances for them in 1950 before moving on. On this day Burdette, who was often accused of throwing a spitball, stopped the Yanks 4–2 to even the series.

Game three was a homecoming for Kubek, a graduate of Bay View High in Milwaukee. Tony rose to the occasion with two homers and a single and drove in four as the Yanks won 12–3.

Spahn won game four, going the distance in a ten-inning, 7–5 Milwaukee win when Eddie Mathews hit a walk-off homer off Grim; then Burdette won his second in game five with a 1–0 win over Ford.

Back in New York, Turley came through with a 3–2 victory in game six to even the series and to set the stage for a deciding game seven. A crowd of 61,207 turned out as Burdette, working on two days’ rest, took on Larsen, the World Series MVP of the year before.

It was the Braves’ day. They scored four in the third and wound up winning 5–0 as Burdette won for the third time, a feat accomplished only twice before in World Series play.

THE CLOSE OF 1957 marked a lot of changes for New York baseball. Jerry Coleman, just thirty-three, retired to become assistant director of player development. He would work in the front office for five years, become a Yankee broadcaster for seven, and then move to San Diego, where he would become a legendary Padres announcer. “Being a Yankee was never a job,” he reflected. “It was a religion.”

Another who moved on after ’57 was first baseman Joe Collins, thirty-four, who was sold to the Phillies but chose to quit. “If I can’t be a Yankee, I don’t want to play this game anymore,” he said, even though he lived in Union, New Jersey, and a shift to the Phillies would not be of great geographic upheaval.

First-base coach Bill Dickey would retire in spring training of 1958, going home to Little Rock, Arkansas, to become a securities dealer for Stephens and Company. Denver manager Ralph Houk would replace him as first-base coach.

The biggest change of all was the departure of the Dodgers to Los Angeles and the Giants to San Francisco. This shocking development, removing two classic teams from the nation’s biggest market, left New York alone to the Yankees.

No doubt some felt the Yankees would now scoop up National League fans and enjoy box-office success as never before. But the fans were hardly willing to cheer for their archrivals. And the Yankees, knowing better, made no extraordinary effort to win them over. They could find Yankee Stadium if they wished. No associations were formed with former Dodgers and Giants other than providing a television program for Roy Campanella, the great Dodger catcher who was paralyzed in an auto accident before he could ever move west. Campy, once he had sufficiently recovered, hosted a show between games on doubleheader days.

In 1958, with the New York territory all to themselves, the Yankees’ attendance actually dropped seventy thousand from ’57.

IN ’58, RYNE Duren became the Yankees’ first pure “closer” since Joe Page. Stengel had managed by using Reynolds as a starter-closer, with different pitchers filling the role each season. Now, in the hard-throwing, control-challenged right-hander who came over in the Billy Martin trade, Casey would have his man.

Duren wore what were always described as Coke-bottle eyeglasses. The Yankee Stadium ritual of scaling the low right-field bullpen fence, glancing at the auxiliary scoreboard to check the situation, tossing the warm-up jacket to the waiting batboy, kicking the dirt off his spikes against the rubber, and then firing his first warm-up pitch into the backstop (to frighten the waiting hitter) gave him high style points. The fact that the twenty-nine-year-old rookie would save 20 games, win another six, record a 2.02 ERA, and strike out 87 in 76 innings was a most welcome surprise. He had shown nothing along the way to make anyone think this was coming.

He was, unfortunately, also a bad drunk. At the same time that milkshake-drinking Richardson and Kubek were establishing themselves, Duren was trying to fit in as a guy who liked his liquor. But players who respected guys who could “hold their liquor” saw the distinction. He wasn’t one of them.

His most notorious moment was aboard the Yankees’ pennant-celebratory train in ’58, in which he knocked a cigar out of coach Ralph Houk’s hand. (The Yanks still took trains on occasion; they were one of the last to go
all-airline, as neither Weiss nor traveling secretary Bill McCorry was a big fan of airline travel. This was an odd thing about Weiss, who’d nearly been killed in a train wreck in 1923.) Houk, Duren’s manager in Denver who had bailed him out of overnight lockups on more than one occasion there, reacted by punching Duren and opening a cut over his eye. The moment was witnessed by several Yankee beat writers, who uncharacteristically reported it the next day.

But so long as he was going well—and to everyone’s amazement, he was—such incidents could be swept under the rug. It was when he stopped going well that his baseball career wound down rapidly. After his career, Duren cleaned up, got active in AA, and by the 2000s actually looked more fit and healthy than most of his teammates.

Stengel juggled his pitching staff throughout the season, calling on a trio of forty-one-year-olds—Sal Maglie, Virgil Trucks, and Murray Dickson, plus twenty-nine-year-old Duke Maas—to augment the regular rotation. He still preferred to spot-start Ford, generally keeping him out of Fenway Park, which was tough on left-handers. Whitey would have preferred working on a regular rotation, as he won only 14 games in ’58, half of them shutouts, posting a 2.01 ERA, the best of his career.

The year belonged to Bob Turley, who was 21–7 with six shutouts and a 2.97 ERA, all good enough to deliver the Cy Young Award to him at season’s end. With his no-windup delivery and blazing fastball, the handsome twenty-seven-year-old right-hander became one of the most marketable players on the team. Mantle, with his 42 home runs, was still at the top of picture packs sold to fans, of course.

Nobody appreciated this more than Manny Koenigsberg, who opened Manny’s Baseball Land on River Avenue in the late forties and who seemed to have a monopoly on Yankee souvenirs outside the ballpark until he retired in 1978. (The place later became Stan’s, but by then it had a lot of competition up and down the block.)

Manny was a visionary, capturing a market long before licensing took hold of the souvenir industry. He specialized in Yankee caps, yearbooks of all teams (official and unofficial), and all sorts of fifties souvenir items like thermometers, decals, pens shaped like bats, buttons, badges, banks, snow globes, picture packs, bobbleheads, and Topps cards. No trip to Yankee Stadium was complete without first stopping at Manny’s. (The “unofficial” yearbooks, first published in conjunction with the team, were issued by Jay Publishing, owned by John Jackson. The company ended with a 1965 American
Airlines crash just north of Cincinnati that took fifty-eight lives, including Jackson and Jack Flynn, who sold Yankee commercial time for WPIX.)

The 1958 season also saw the introduction of the character Yogi Bear by animators Hanna-Barbera, a clear move by the company to capitalize on Yogi Berra’s popularity without having to pay royalties. And while most people believed that Yogi had an ownership interest in Yoo-Hoo chocolate soft drink, he was simply paid an endorsement fee, and a small one at that. Still, his business deals were far more successful than Mantle’s, who never seemed to catch a lucky break.

On July 9, the day after the All-Star Game in Baltimore, Stengel, Webb, Mantle, Ted Williams, and other baseball people went to Washington to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, which was investigating baseball’s antitrust exemption. The hearings, led by Senator Estes Kefauver, were televised, and gave Casey the opportunity to put on a display of Stengelese the likes of which the Congressional Record had never seen. All it took was, “Mr. Stengel, you are the manager of the New York Yankees. Will you give us very briefly your background and views about this legislation?” To everyone’s amusement and to no one’s understanding, Casey went on for forty-five minutes and seven thousand words, much of it drowned out in laughter. When Mantle followed, he played his part well, simply stating, “My views are just about the same as Casey’s.”

THE YANKS LED wire to wire in ’58 and had a seventeen-game lead by early August. A bump on the pennant trail was a no-hitter thrown against them in Baltimore on September 20 by knuckleballer Hoyt Wilhelm, normally a relief pitcher. This was the sixth no-hitter against the Yankees in their history, and there would not be a seventh for forty-five years.

(Amazingly, Wilhelm would come close again a year later. On May 22, 1959, only an eighth-inning single by Jerry Lumpe kept him from doing it in consecutive years.)

The 1958 World Series, again against the Braves, was considered the most satisfying for those of the Stengel era. Even though it was a practice to give World Series rings only to the players and not to front-office people, the occasion of Bob Fishel’s sixty-fifth birthday in 1979 found him receiving (with Yankee approval) a ’58 ring. He had tears in his eyes as he explained, “This was the best of all the championships; I couldn’t have gotten a better gift than this.”

Things started poorly for the Yanks, as Spahn and Burdette won the first two games in County Stadium. Bauer saved the third game in Yankee Stadium, driving in all four runs in a 4–0 win behind Larsen and Duren, but then left fielder Norm Siebern lost two fly balls in the sun and the Braves won game four 3–0, Spahn besting Ford. It was 3–1 Braves.

Game five had Burdette poised to seal the world championship, but Turley beat him with a 7–0 shutout, as Howard made a clutch catch on his knees in left.

Game six had Ford and Spahn on the mound with just two days’ rest. Bauer’s fourth home run of the Series, coming in the first inning, ran his World Series hitting streak to a record seventeen (going back to 1956), but the Yankees needed a tenth inning and a save from Turley to even the series 3–3.

The next day it was Larsen against Burdette, two former World Series MVPs. The Yanks had a 2–1 lead in the third, but the Braves got two on and Stengel went to his bullpen to summon Turley, pitching for the third time in four days.