Pinstripe Empire (53 page)

Bullet Bob set down the Braves with one run and two hits in 6
⅔
innings, nailing down a 6–2 win and the Yankees’ eighteenth world championship—Stengel’s seventh and last. Skowron’s three-run homer in the eighth sealed the win, as well as Turley’s position as the game’s reigning pitching star.

“I think this World Series might be the greatest thrill I ever experienced in baseball,” wrote Lee MacPhail in his memoir. Lee left the Yankees as player personnel director after the season to join the Orioles and succeed Paul Richards as general manager, adding the club presidency title a year later. “Feelings were aroused in Milwaukee, as someone in the Yankee party had reportedly referred to Milwaukee as a ‘bush town.’ All over the city there were figures of Yankees hanging in effigy.”

IN 1959 THE Yankees unveiled a new $300,000 scoreboard, replacing their existing one after nine seasons. That one was sold to the Phillies and reassembled at Connie Mack Stadium, where it remained in use as a hand-me-down until Veteran’s Stadium opened in 1971. The new scoreboard, designed by Lon Keller (creator of the top-hat logo) and underwritten by Ballantine, included the first “message board” in the major leagues, eight lines long and eight characters across, each letter having to be keyed in separately. The nimble fingers of the team’s chief electrician, George Schmelzer, would punch out messages throughout the games, none of which could be
preprogrammed as a computer would allow today. The Yankees would get fifteen seasons of use out of this board, using the top line in its final season to show the up-to-the-minute batting average of the hitter.

BY YANKEE STANDARDS, 1959 was a disaster: third place. It was the lowest finish of the Stengel era, and when the Yanks lost to their Detroit nemesis Frank Lary on May 20 (Lary was 28–13 lifetime vs. New York), the
New York Post
headline said it all: YANKS HIT CELLAR.

They spent eleven days there, mired in eighth place. Finally, Turley shut out the Senators on May 31 to raise them from last. From there to the end of the season, they were a decent 61–52. But the first two months defined their year. The White Sox, managed by Al Lopez, wound up with the pennant.

There would be fleeting moments when it looked like all was well, but Ford had his first double-digit-loss season, Mantle hit just .285/31/75, and Turley fell to 8–11, 4.32, which was viewed as the big reason for the drop-off. On the bright side, Berra set a catching record with 148 consecutive errorless games, going back to ’57, Richardson hit .301, Duren had a 1.88 ERA, Duke Maas went 14–8, and they pulled off a nice trade (with the A’s, of course), getting Hector Lopez and Ralph Terry for Kucks, Sturdivant, and Lumpe. Lopez, a poor-fielding third baseman from Panama, moved to left and gave the Yankees some solid seasons and some memorable World Series games as well. The Yankees thought he was twenty-six when they got him; it turned out he was twenty-nine.

An emotional moment for the Yankees came on May 7 when they flew to Los Angeles to play a benefit game against the Dodgers, the Dodgers’ net proceeds to go for Roy Campanella’s costly rehabilitation. (The Yankees kept their share, but figured their presence had obviously produced a big crowd and allowed the Dodgers to make big money.) A baseball-record 93,103 fans packed the Los Angeles Coliseum, and between the fifth and sixth innings, everyone held a lit match or flicked a lighter as the stadium lights were doused. Reese wheeled Campy onto the field on an enormously dramatic day in baseball history for a much-beloved figure.

This was the Yankees’ first trip to the West Coast since spring training of 1951. The game found most of the fans dressed casually: open shirts, bareheaded, sport clothes. It was still unthinkable that that would become East Coast style, but over the next five or six years, fans going to Yankee Stadium began to shed their business attire and bring a more casual
appearance to a day at the ballpark. The days of men in suits and hats and white shirts was coming to a close as America relaxed its dress code.

A minor event during the season would prove to be a sports milestone. On Friday evening, July 17, Ralph Terry no-hit Chicago through eight innings in a 0–0 ballgame. This was the first year that WPIX was saving game highlights on something called videotape for use on the postgame
Red Barber Show
.

White Sox outfielder Jim McAnany led off the eighth and promptly broke up the no-hitter by dropping a single in front of Siebern in left center.

On the air, Mel Allen asked his director, Jack Murphy, if the base hit could be played back right then, as opposed to waiting for the postgame show. The WPIX tape engineers quickly rewound the moment, and on the air went the McAnany single, with Mel explaining that viewers weren’t watching another single, but a replay of the hit that broke up the no-hitter.

And that was the birth of instant replay.

The fifties were the era when television coverage of baseball was expanding the game to new audiences. A center-field camera, introduced in 1957, became usable once its lens was long enough to see the pitcher-catcher action; then it became the primary pitch camera. Lenses kept bringing the view closer and closer to the player’s faces, until 70:1 ratio lenses showed every skin pore. The station began broadcasting the games in color in 1965. Cable TV made rabbit-ears antennas and bad reception obsolete in the early eighties. By the late eighties every game of every team was televised, meaning no plays were ever missed, no highlights lost. By 2009, games became available on computers and handheld devices.

ONE AFTERNOON, JUST after Labor Day, Harry Craft was seeing the handwriting on the wall and his days as Athletics manager dwindling. He happened on Stengel during batting practice and mentioned, “If you have an opportunity, you ought to try to get my right fielder. Maris is much better than his numbers show; he’s a terrific ballplayer.” Craft, who had managed Mantle in the minors, would find that he was making a very good contribution to the Yankees’ future with this scouting report. Of course Roger Maris, being an Athletic, may have simply found his turn in line to go to the Yankees anyway. Parke Carroll was ready to do business, and on December 11, the Yankees were able to swing the deal. They traded Bauer, Larsen, Siebern, and Marv Throneberry to the Athletics for Maris, Kent
Hadley, and Joe DeMaestri. Bauer, a great Yankee in his time, knew that younger players replaced older ones in well-run organizations, and the fact that he lived near Kansas City made the deal okay with him. As it was, he got to be a player-manager for the A’s, starting him on a managerial career that took him to a World Series with Baltimore.

Ah, but the sweet-swinging Maris, he of keen defensive skills, a strong arm, good baserunning instincts, and more power in his bat than was realized at the time, was the key. He would prove to be just a terrific addition.

Weiss sent Mantle a contract for 1960 calling for a $17,000 pay cut. Mickey had to hold out for two weeks in spring training before settling for a $7,000 cut.

ROGER MARIS WAS A SENSATIONAL Yankee, but a poor match for New York. Raised in Fargo, North Dakota, a state that had produced only five major leaguers by the time he debuted, he seemed very comfortable playing for Kansas City and would, in fact, maintain his winter home there during his Yankee years. The glare of the spotlight would be gentle in 1960, his first Yankee season, as he raised his game to new levels.

At age twenty-five, Maris was a shining star. Seemingly out of nowhere, he led the league in RBI and slugged 39 home runs, just one behind Mantle for the league lead. He won a Gold Glove (he played left field throughout spring training, but Casey opened the season with him in right, and there he stayed), and then nosed out Mantle for the league’s MVP Award, getting 225 votes to Mantle’s 222, although Mantle had ten first-place votes to Roger’s eight.

Mantle was important in helping Maris transition to the Yankees, as he too was still a middle-America kid at heart, a little awkward in the bright lights but now, as a ten-year veteran, a mature mentor to Roger. People were already calling them the M&M Boys and posing them in photos together. Seventy-nine home runs together was an impressive showing.

IT WAS ALSO during the 1960 season that Howard began to catch more often than Berra, with Yogi seeing more action in left field and Johnny Blanchard taking Howard’s place as the backup catcher. Clete Boyer took over at third. A key addition to the Yankees turned out to be a Puerto Rican screwball pitcher and former National Leaguer named Luis Arroyo.
Arroyo, thirty-three, had been pitching for the Havana Sugar Kings. The takeover of private industry by Fidel Castro forced the Sugar Kings to hastily move to Jersey City, and Arroyo was purchased by New York on July 20. (Twenty-four of thirty players from that roster made it to the majors.) He made 29 appearances for the Yanks, went 5–1 with seven saves, and positioned himself to succeed Duren as the ace of the bullpen.

IN 1960 THE affable Bruce Henry, who had been business manager of the Richmond Virginians, a Yankee triple-A club, succeeded Bill McCorry as traveling secretary.

During the season, the Yankees also hosted the second of two All-Star Games, a bad idea, as it turned out, with only 38,362 paying customers buying into the two-game experiment.
¹⁵

The ’60 pennant race got a surprise entry with the emergence of the Baltimore Orioles, skippered by Paul Richards and with Lee MacPhail as general manager. A host of homegrown young players were turning the Orioles into a team that would be a model franchise for more than three decades, and they tested the Yankees’ will in ’60 by finishing just eight games out of first. It took a four-game sweep over Baltimore in mid-September to finally open up the race, the Orioles having arrived in New York just one game back. But wins by Ford over Steve Barber, Jim Coates over Chuck Estrada, and then a doubleheader sweep before 53,876 with Ditmar over Jack Fisher and Terry pitching a 2–0 shutout over Milt Pappas put the Yankees on a roll toward winning Stengel’s tenth pennant. Coates’s win, in relief, made him 12–3 for the season. The sweep opened up a fifteen-game winning streak to close the season. Even after the pennant was clinched and Stengel rested his regulars, the Yanks still won their last six. Among those who got to play then was Dale Long, who batted .366 in 26 games, another fine late-season pickup for the Yanks.

The Pirates won their first pennant since 1927 and would face the Yankees in the World Series. Stengel opted to start Ditmar in the first game at Forbes Field. Ditmar, 15–9, had been his big winner in ’60. The Yanks managed to win 97 games without any pitcher winning 16.

Ford, 12–9 and in everyone’s mind still the leader of the staff, continued at the top of his game. He had had six days off before game one.

Ditmar lasted just a third of an inning as the Pirates won the opener 6–4. The second-guessing had begun.

Turley started game two and got things even as the Yanks triumphed 16–3, pounding out 19 hits.

Ford started game three in Yankee Stadium and pitched a four-hit shutout, winning 10–0. Richardson, who drove in only 26 runs in the regular season, hit a grand slam in the first off Clem Labine and drove in two more in the fourth on a bases-loaded single. The six RBI in a game—and, ultimately, 12 RBI for the Series—were both new records, and they were still standing more than half a century later.

The Pirates won the next two and led 3–2. Ford then pitched another shutout, this one 12–0. So the three Yankee wins were 16–3, 10–0, and 12–0, and yet it was going to take a seventh game to decide the champion. And for this, neither Ford nor Ditmar would be available, Ditmar having lost game five.

The seventh game would by many measures be one of the most memorable in baseball history. It had everything, so it seemed, except a strikeout. It was the only World Series game ever played without one. (When a kinescope of the game recorded and saved by Bing Crosby emerged from his archives in 2010, it was hailed as a major historical find.)

This decisive game, October 13 in Forbes Field, had Turley starting against Vern Law. But Turley was removed in the second. At various times it appeared that home runs by Hal Smith or Rocky Nelson of the Pirates, or Berra or Skowron of the Yanks, might be game changers. The Yanks had a 7–4 lead in the last of the eighth behind great relief pitching, fielding, and even hitting from Shantz. But a potential double-play grounder to short hit a pebble and smacked Kubek in the throat, sending him to the hospital. The Pirates would rally for five runs and a 9–7 lead, the big shot being a three-run homer by Hal Smith, who had been part of the seventeen-player trade to the Orioles in 1954.

For years, many felt Jim Coates’s failure to cover first that inning on a grounder by Roberto Clemente was as costly as the freak “pebble play” on Kubek. But the ball was hit between where the second and first baseman would go for it, and Coates tried to field it before breaking to first. It was like a perfectly placed bunt, where all you could do was eat the ball.

“[The play] will always be remembered as a time of hesitation and indecision,”
wrote Coates in a 2009 memoir. “It has been the source of criticism, blame and second guessing over the years, of which a big part should be seen as undeserved once the details of the play have been properly reviewed.”

“We had Coates wrong on that one,” said Richardson after seeing the kinescope fifty years later. “He couldn’t be blamed after all.”

In the ninth, the Yanks rallied to tie the score when Mantle dove back into first to escape a double play. Nelson speared a hard shot by Berra; Mantle froze, not knowing if it was caught on a bounce or a liner. Instinctively, he dove to first, evading Nelson’s tag. Then McDougald, pinch-running in his final moment on a baseball field, was able to score and tie it 9–9. Had Nelson tagged Mantle, the game would have ended and Smith’s homer would have decided it.

Terry pitched the last of the ninth. On his second pitch, Bill Mazeroski homered over the left-field wall to give the Pirates the world championship. The most famous home run in Pittsburgh history and the first walk-off in a deciding World Series game had led to a shocking defeat of the Yanks, who had outscored the Bucs 55–27 in the Series. Many Yankee players, including Mantle, had tears in their eyes in the clubhouse.