Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (21 page)

Statistics are not always the best gauge of players, but in Parnell’s case they are unusually revealing. In 1949 his earned-run average at home was 2.59, and on the road it
was 3.02; for his career, his Fenway earned-run average was just slightly under his road one.

The Yankees were leading 3-2 in the seventh, a narrow margin in Fenway on a day when Raschi was in the process of giving up 12 hits. Again it came down to DiMaggio against the Red Sox pitcher. Stirnweiss had singled. Rizzuto had made the second out of the inning. Then Henrich had singled. Parnell stepped off the mound to think for a minute. He essentially called his own pitches. He did not trust catchers to do it because he did not think they had a feel for pitching; they could not, for example,
feel
the ball and know that the stitches on each ball are different, and as the stitches are different, the pitcher’s finger control is different. Parnell liked to take each ball, feel the stitches, and then make his own decision.

On this day his best pitch was his fastball, and he decided to go with it. The one thing he was not going to throw Joe DiMaggio was a change-up. As a rookie he had been in the bullpen during a series in the Stadium, and DiMaggio had come to the plate. Bill Zuber, a veteran pitcher, called Parnell over. “Kid,” he said, “whatever you do, don’t throw this guy a change. If you do, he’ll hit it into the third deck.” A few innings later, the Red Sox were in trouble. Zuber went into the game with DiMaggio up and men on base. To Parnell’s amazement, Zuber threw a change. DiMaggio hit it into the third tier. It hooked foul at the last moment. Zuber pitched again. Another change. Again DiMaggio jumped on it, and this time it carried into the third tier, fair. That was the game. Afterward, Parnell saw Zuber in the locker room hitting his head against the wall, saying, “Dumb Dutchman! Dumb goddamn Dutchman! I tell the kid not to throw the change and then I do it myself! Dumb goddamn Dutchman!”

DiMaggio was a great hitter on a tear, and if Parnell was going to win, he wanted to win with his best pitch, and if
he was going to be beaten, it might as well also be with his best pitch. His first pitch was a fastball just where he wanted it; DiMaggio lifted a high foul to the right side of the infield. Parnell breathed a sigh of relief. Billy Goodman was playing first, and the ball hit the heel of his glove and dropped out. Strike one. Parnell came back with the same pitch. Again DiMaggio fouled it off, this time with a squiggly little ball near the plate. Parnell began to feel very confident because he had DiMaggio 0-and-2. This time he decided to make him go fishing, and threw just off the outside corner. Another batter behind in the count might have gone for it. DiMaggio did not. Ball one. Parnell decided to waste another one, this time on the inside. Again DiMaggio did not bite. Parnell did not want to come in to DiMaggio on a 3-and-2 count and so he threw his best fastball. With a great hitter like DiMaggio, finally you challenged him. DiMaggio, who had been waiting for a fastball, killed it. The ball hit the steel towers in left field. For the next five minutes Parnell was sure that all Joe DiMaggio could hear was the cheers of the crowd, while the only thing
he
could hear was the steel ringing from the impact of the ball. Over Fenway flew a small biplane trailing a banner that said:
THE GREAT DIMAGGIO.

It made the score 6-2. Raschi finished the game, and the Yankees swept the series. DiMaggio, in three games, had absolutely demolished the Red Sox: four home runs and nine runs batted in. It was the sweetest of all returns, and after that game, in the madness of the Yankee locker room, DiMaggio walked past Jerry Coleman and grinned, which was unusual; it was as close as he ever came to boasting or gloating. “You can’t beat this life, kid,” he said.

In the broadcast booth Mel Allen was ecstatic. As he had for more than a decade, he was relaying over the airwaves that day his affection—reverence, even—for DiMaggio. “His fourth home run!” he shouted when DiMaggio hit the last
one off Parnell. “What a comeback for Joe!” It was, he noted years later, one of the greatest performances he had ever witnessed, and it was achieved by a player he admired more than any other.

Once when Allen’s parents came to New York to visit him, he gave them tickets to a game. Afterward his mother said to him, “Son, I think today I finally understood why I’ve heard so much about DiMaggio and why he means so much to you.” “Why is that?” he asked her. “Well, I just watched the way he trotted onto the field, and he was different from the others—he did it so regally,” she answered.

Allen’s and DiMaggio’s careers were twined; radio as a prime instrument of sports communication, and Mel Allen as one of its foremost practitioners, ascended at the very moment that Joe DiMaggio did. And both were in New York, the city from which much of America’s broadcasting originated and where its great advertising firms and communications companies were headquartered. The Yankees were the dominant team, and Mel Allen amplified that dominance. With a soft, almost silky voice, and a natural feel for the microphone, he not only brought the fan into the Stadium but also projected a sense of intimacy with the players; Allen made the fan feel as if he were a part of the greater Yankee family. He would begin by painting a word portrait of the crowd that day, or of the way the players looked. He used the crowd noise with great dexterity, letting it infect the listener at home with excitement. “The big crowd,” he would say, “is roaring on every pitch.” He used the crowd noise, in his own words, as a chorus. You could not, he warned, ever beat it, so you tried to anticipate it, get the essential call in just ahead of it.

Television would be different in many ways, not least of all for the athletes. In the beginning it seemed to bring them greater fame, but in time it became clear that the fame was not so much greater as quicker. More often than not, it also evaporated sooner. For soon, of course, television would
produce overkill: too many seasons of too many sports overlapping, too many athletes whose deeds were played and replayed endlessly on videotape. As radio was an instrument that could heighten the mystique of a player, television eventually demythologized the famous. It is no coincidence that DiMaggio’s fame was so lasting, and that he was the last great hero of the radio era.

DiMaggio became something of a television huckster much later in his life. But his fans, looking at this gray-haired figure selling a bank or coffee, did not resent him for doing this. Because when DiMaggio had played, his fans were left with nothing but the deeds. Back then they listened to the deeds and created in their minds a man as heroic off the field as on. Radio, after all, demanded the use of the fan’s imagination as television did not.

It was DiMaggio’s good fortune to play in an era when his better qualities, both athletic and personal, were amplified, and his lesser qualities simply did not exist. If he did something magnificent on the field, he was not on Johnny Carson the next night, awkward and unsure of himself, mumbling his answers as a modern athlete might. Rather, he had Mel Allen to speak for him. It was the almost perfect combination: his deeds amplified by Mel Allen’s voice.

He was raised Melvin Israel in small towns in Alabama, where his parents, with marginal success, ran the local dry-goods stores. Mel Israel’s mother wanted him to be a concert violinist, but somewhere along the way he got sidetracked. He was bright and precocious and went to the University of Alabama, where he picked up both an undergraduate degree and a law degree. He also wrote for the school newspaper, and made the public address for the Alabama football team as well as broadcast their games for a Birmingham radio station (the station had asked Frank Thomas, the football coach, for someone who could announce the games, and Thomas, not knowing there was a
difference between being the PA announcer and a broadcaster, had suggested Mel Israel).

When he graduated from Alabama in 1936, he went to New York, more on a lark than anything else. But radio was in the back of his mind. He stopped by a new network called CBS for an audition. He had heard stories of these auditions—they were said to be held in a small, dark room without windows. There he would be told to improvise and describe some imaginary scene. (This turned out not to be true.) He was supposed to go back to Alabama and teach speech for $1,800 a year. But the people at CBS were impressed, and they offered him a job at $45 a week—some $500 more a year than Alabama was offering. They also requested he change his name because a Jewish name might become a hindrance to his career.

He accepted the CBS job, much to the annoyance of his father. Julius Allen Israel felt that he had sacrificed for this young man’s education, and that a career as a lawyer was more proper. “All you’re going to do on radio is talk,” his father warned. What was worse was the imminent change of name: “What’s so bad with Mel Israel?” To appease him, he took his father’s middle name. Thus did he become Mel Allen. He promised his father he was going to do this only for a short time. “You’ll never come back,” Julius Israel said prophetically.

Allen’s first job was doing organ selections on the mighty Wurlitzer on a morning show. There was precious little baseball on radio at the time. In 1937 radio did the Opening Day game and the World Series, but not the regular-season games. Other cities might broadcast their baseball games, but not New York—because there were three teams, and because the owners were all traditionalists who feared that radio would draw fans away from the park. They made a three-way agreement to ban virtually all broadcasting of games.

But by 1939, when the agreement was finished, Larry
MacPhail had arrived in Brooklyn, the new owner of what was traditionally the weakest and poorest of the three teams. MacPhail enraged the purists—he put lights in the stadiums and broadcast his games. One of his first acts was to hire the immensely gifted Red Barber as his broadcaster and to do all his home games live. That opened up the broadcasting of baseball in New York.

Mel Allen had always hoped that it would happen. In 1937 and 1938 he had gone regularly to Yankee Stadium, where, seated in the back row, behind first base, as far from other fans as he could get, he transformed himself into Mel Allen, Secret Announcer. He would call the pitches, describe the crowd, talk about the players: “Well, folks, that brings up Lou Gehrig and Lou has one hit today, and his average is right at three-fifty and I know he’d like to push that average up just a little ...” If someone sat nearby, Allen would stop. But that was not really a problem. One of the first things an outsider realizes about New York, he soon decided, was that there are hundreds and hundreds of people who go around all day long talking to themselves. Sometimes he would watch the game and the crowd and think to himself, God, I would give anything to broadcast from here.

In 1939, the local CBS station secured a contract to do the Yankee and Giant home games, and Mel Allen became the assistant sportscaster for Arch McDonald. The job was open because McDonald’s previous assistant had referred to Ivory Soap as
Ovary
Soap. A year later, McDonald, judged too bucolic for New York, was back in Washington and Mel Allen was the principal broadcaster. The Yankees were in the final phase of their transition from the Ruth-Gehrig era to the DiMaggio era. Ruth had last played in 1934, and 1939 was to be Gehrig’s last year. In 1938 he seemed to be slowing down, but no one could believe at first that it was illness. Allen remembered being in the dugout the day that Gehrig asked to be taken out. Gehrig sat and cried. Lefty
Gomez went over and put his arm around him and said, “Don’t feel badly, Lou. It took twenty-one hundred thirty games to get you out, and sometimes it only takes fifteen minutes to get me out of a game.”

Sometimes during that season Gehrig would visit the team. On one occasion he came over to Mel Allen and told him how much he liked what Allen was doing. “You know, Mel,” he had said, “I never understood the importance of your broadcasts because I never got to listen, but now I’ve got to tell you that the one thing that keeps me going is hearing your broadcasts.” Allen excused himself, walked up the runway, and burst into tears.

The reward for what he was doing was never the money—in the early days he did not make very much, perhaps $15,000 a year. The real reward was in living a dream. This was the best of all possible substitute lives. He was wedded to the mike. That was his love. He never married. His family moved to suburban New York and he lived at home. His mother, a powerful personality, made clear to the young women who went out with him that if they were serious about her son, there was a hard road ahead. He was often seen in the company of stunning young women, but Tom Meany, the sportswriter, would always say, “Here comes Mel Allen with the future Miss Jones.”

Gradually he created a signature language. If there was a play that excited him, he would intone,
“How about that?”
A home run was not just a home run, it was a ball that he virtually rode—“Going, going ... it is gone.” Tommy Bryne was not just a pitcher who hit well, he was “one of those gooood hittin’ pitchers.” “How often is it,” he would say when a player led off the inning, “that when a player makes a spectacular play in the field he leads off the next inning.” If a pitcher had very little on a given day, Allen did not say that he was pitching poorly, he said instead that the pitcher had plenty of moxie. And he was always selling beer. No one did the transition from the game to commercial better:
“Little Phil made a great play on that last ball, and you’ll make a great play for yourself if you open up a Ballantine beer.” Between innings would come the full commercial: “If you’re listening in at your favorite tavern, don’t just say ‘one up,’ but be sure to ask the man for Ballantine. Enjoy the two B’s, baseball and Ballantine. As you linger over that sparkling glass of Ballantine beer, as you feel it trickle down your throat, you’ll say, ‘Ah, man, this is the life!’
Baseball
and Ballantine beer. And while we linger on this pleasant subject, folks, I’d like to remind you that it’s a smart idea to keep plenty of Ballantine on ice at home, to serve at mealtimes, to enjoy during leisure hours, so at your dealer’s be sure to look for the three rings. Ask him for Ballantine beer.” Listening, one could always sense his pleasure in every aspect of what he did.