Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (32 page)

The new schedule of starting and relieving was easier for Kinder; he seemed able to pitch one day and go to the bullpen the next. “I’ll just go out there and snooze a bit,” he told the other pitchers. “But make sure they wake me up in time to throw four warm-up pitches.” So, with their backs to the wall, the Red Sox engineered the winning streak they needed—going on for ten games.

On September 24, the Yankees went back to Fenway for a two-game series. They brought with them a two-game lead, but it was not as good as the one-and-a-half-game lead they had come with last time. The reason was that they had been four games up on Boston on the losing side then, and now they were only two games up. Boston had in reality cut two games off their lead. The heroes were, of course, Kinder and Parnell. In the month of August, when the pennant race began, they had both been 6-0. Now, in September, Kinder was 5-0 and Parnell 4-1. That meant that since the beginning of August they were a total of 21-1.

In the first of the two games Kinder went against Lopat. The Yankee third-string catcher, Ralph Houk, had known Kinder well at Binghamton—they had roomed together there. The night before the game, Houk ran into Kinder. Ellis had a certain ritual to his nights; he would hit certain bars, often starting at the Kenmore. There he found Houk, his old minor-league buddy. Off they went, defying normal levels of alcoholic intake as well as the commissioner’s rules against fraternization with opposing ballplayers. Well after midnight, changing locales but not drinks, it became clear to Houk that this was nothing short of a marathon. But it was a good thing, Houk decided, because even if he was sacrificing himself, a reserve catcher, he was taking out the star pitcher of the Red Sox. Ever more willingly he accepted
Kinder’s suggestions that they try yet another place. Their evening ended in daylight. Later, Houk arrived at the ball park sluggish and the worse for wear. He detailed the previous evening’s debaucheries and assured his teammates that they would have no trouble with Kinder. Houk was wrong. Kinder shut out the Yankees on a six-hitter, his third victory over them that season, his eighteenth win in a row as a starting pitcher. Jim Turner, the Yankee pitching coach, kept notes on both his and the opposition’s pitcher in every game. About Kinder he noted in his diary: “Good fastball at times. Good fast and slow curve. Very good let-up fastball. Good control and good with men on bases. Made most hitters hit breaking ball or let-up fastball. Then would sneak fastball. Very good pitcher.”

That victory in the 147th game brought Boston back to within a game of the Yankees. The 148th game, Parnell thought, was crucial. It would take place in Fenway. If Boston won, the two teams would be even. If the Yankees won, they would be two games up. With so few games left, the difference would probably be decisive.

That day Parnell felt comfortable. He was pleased with his speed and with the movement of the ball. He did not need to overthrow. He stayed in front of the hitters all day long. Four hits and three walks—that was all he gave up. Jim Turner graded him high: “Good fastball and curve. Very good control. Keeps curve low. Good in clutch. Outstanding pitcher this year.” It was his twenty-fifth win of the season.

There were 6 games to play for both teams, and after 148 games they were dead even.

Never was Phil Rizzuto more important to the Yankees. McCarthy had been known to say, “We don’t win on power, we win on defense.” The key to that defense was Rizzuto. “You want to know the key to our team,” Billy Johnson, the third baseman, once told Ted Williams, “it’s that little
guy there. Without him we’re just another team. You have to be with us to know, because what you see once in a while we see every day.” To Johnny Pesky, his opposite number on the Red Sox, he was in those years “the best shortstop I’d ever seen. He was so quick, with extraordinarily quick feet, he could always make the plays. He was the best shortstop of the era—he held that team together the way Pee Wee Reese held the Dodgers together.”

The Yankee regulars were very much aware of Rizzuto’s value. It was understood that since he was small and physically vulnerable, Rizzuto had to be protected. If any opposing player went into second hard at him, the Yankee players would immediately retaliate against the opposing infielders and the Yankee pitchers would throw at the offending player. Earlier that year, Pesky had taken Rizzuto out in a play at second. The next time DiMaggio was up he singled. DiMaggio turned at first, never hesitating, and raced for second, though it was obvious he had no chance. He laid a savage block on Doerr as revenge.

To the Yankee pitchers there was something special about Rizzuto’s ability to anticipate the ball and make the play. He had come up to the majors eight years earlier, and he was in his prime in 1949. Those who watched the Yankees and Boston every day thought him the most-valuable player in the American League. (He came in second in the voting. Ted Williams won while he and Joe Page split the ostensible Yankee vote and came in second and third. The next year he did win the award.) No one valued Rizzuto more than the Yankee pitchers, off whose earned-run averages he was saving a half-run or more. “I remember when I first came up for the Yankees and in my first inning someone hit a shot which went right by me which was going out over second like a rocket,” said Frank Shea. “I thought ‘base hit,’ and never even followed the ball. Then I heard the crowd roar and I looked around and saw that Rizzuto had made the play quite easily, and I thought to myself, ‘Welcome
to the big leagues, Spec.’ ” Vic Raschi admired the suppleness with which Rizzuto seemed to make every play. His arm was not very strong—in fact, it was almost weak—so he had to play in rather than deep, which meant giving up the angles. Even so, his throws to first had a unique softness. A typical Rizzuto play, Raschi thought, was always close at first, the ball reaching the first baseman’s glove just a split second before the runner touched the bag. This was true not just on hard plays, but on the easy ones as well. Raschi could usually hear the pop of the ball entering the glove, and then a split second later the slightly softer sound of the runner hitting the bag. Always a cliff-hanger, Raschi thought, and yet he always makes the play. For Whitey Ford, the ball going to first seemed to travel so slowly that it looked like a parachute opening.

Some of the first basemen, of course, hated that style; they were sure they were going to be spiked. They were always complaining about the lateness of the throws. That was about his only liability, other than the fact that he could not jump very well.

“Phil, you’ve got to jump,” Coleman would tell him after a close play at second.

Rizzuto would answer, “Jerry, I
did
jump.”

When Rizzuto finished high school in Brooklyn he had been a good enough all-around athlete to earn college scholarships at both Columbia and Fordham. These were not just for baseball but for football as well. Rizzuto, a high school quarterback who weighed 135 pounds, took one look at the Fordham linemen and decided to end his football career. There were three baseball tryouts in New York: Bill Terry of the Giants took one look at his size and didn’t even let him go up to bat; Casey Stengel of the Dodgers told him to go get a shoe-shine box, a remark neither forgotten nor forgiven; then the Yankees, with Paul Krichell, the famous scout, in attendance, offered him a minor-league contract for $65 a month. Rizzuto, never much given to
holdouts, asked for a little more. The Yankees held a meeting and decided to sweeten it to $75. With that he chose baseball.

Throughout his career Rizzuto loved to play the ingenue. When he had played in the minors in Kansas City, his teammates took him, in the great Southern tradition, on a snipe hunt. They went into a field at night and left him there with a giant sack. He was to hold it open and catch the snipes that they would drive into the field. Then, of course, they took off. It was the oldest gag in the book.

He was the primary victim of the Yankees’ locker-room jokes. The pranks on Rizzuto were not unlike those played at a prep school, and indeed Rizzuto knew what was expected of him by his teammates, and he played to it. Because he was afraid of practically anything that moved, gags often involved some live animal being hidden in his clothes or belongings. It could be simple: Frank Shea putting a live snake in a handsome gift-wrapped box that looked like it contained jewelry and was addressed, “To my sports idol, from Jenny”; or Shea chasing him on the field with a live lobster. Or it could be more complicated: a group of players filling his bunk on the train with five crabs. The entire team would wait up for his screams as he came tearing down the aisle in his pajamas. Once Lindell, knowing that Rizzuto was particularly afraid of birds, got hold of a live bird and tied it to the inside of a drawer where Rizzuto put his valuables every day when he dressed for the game. When Rizzuto put his hand in the drawer, the bird moved and Rizzuto not only fled the room but refused to put his things in the drawer for three days.

Once the Yankees were in Detroit and it rained heavily, forcing a delay. Finally the sun came out and the game was played. During the fifth inning, as the Yankees came in from the outfield, Lindell beckoned to Bobby Brown, the third baseman. “You won’t believe what I’ve got here.” He pulled some thirty nightcrawlers out of his back pocket. They had
been coming to the surface after the rain, and he had dutifully collected them. In those days, when the players left the field to bat, they left their gloves on the field. Lindell managed to get Rizzuto’s glove and stuffed the fingers with his enormous worm collection. The other players were onto the gag and held Rizzuto up for a minute as the Yankees went back out on the field. That way he would be a little late getting back to his position and the explosion would come in full view of the crowd. Everyone was ready as Rizzuto got to shortstop. On came the glove. It was like someone had given him an electric shock. He threw the glove high into the air and did what looked like an Indian war dance. Both teams were incapacitated with laughter.

This role in some part was a protective device; he played along with their gags because they symbolized not just his role but also his acceptance. When he had first joined the Yankees he had been called Little Dago to DiMaggio’s Dago or Big Dago. The only time he resented being called Dago was when Leo Durocher used the phrase in a harsh way. Rizzuto knew that baseball was the first great American opportunity for the Italian immigrants. He had been an eighteen-year-old high school kid when DiMaggio had become the first Italian superstar. Rizzuto could remember going to the Stadium and sitting in the bleachers, which were filled with Italian immigrants. Most of them could not speak English and barely understood the rules of baseball. But they would wave flags and unfurl banners they had smuggled in.

When Rizzuto joined the Yankees himself, he thought that the Italian-American players were still feeling their way. The tone of a baseball locker room was still set by rural Southern boys who had their own language, and habits. It did not occur to them that
they
might be different, or that other Americans had different habits. But in that atmosphere, the Italians were different—they did not hunt or fish or chew tobacco. Most had grown up in homes where their
parents did not speak English. In a generation or two that would change, but for the moment the Italian players mostly kept to themselves and spoke on the one subject about which they were sure—baseball. That was one reason why Rizzuto enjoyed the teasing. It meant that he was not just a baseball player but a full-fledged American.

Rizzuto played in all but one game that season. He became the leader, and yet he was also the kid. If a few of the players went out to speak on behalf of the Yankees and they were given $50 apiece, he would say (for part of his role was that he was scared of Cora, his wife), “Now, I’m not going to tell Cora about this.”

They also continued to tease him about his glove. It was practically a museum piece. He had bought it for ten dollars when he first broke in. By 1949 it was perilously close to having terminal rot. Every year Harry Latina, who was the Rawlings glove man, repaired it. In addition, a shoemaker near the Stadium worked on it two or three times a year. It was a relic from an era when ballplayers used much smaller gloves, barely bigger than their hands. It had not only been filled with worms, but also bugs and chewing tobacco, the last mostly by Pete Suder and Nellie Fox, prominent Rizzuto tormentors from other teams. The clubhouse gag was that it should have gone to Cooperstown in 1918, the year Rizzuto was born. But Rizzuto loved it. Part of its appeal was superstition, because he had gotten it when he came to the major leagues. But also the glove felt right. Because it was so small, he could dig the ball out quickly. Once Bobby Brown lent him a newer and bigger glove, and, to the applause of his teammates, he even tried it. But then someone hit a grounder right to him and he could not get the glove down in time. He immediately called time, walked back to the dugout, and got his own glove.

With only six games left for each team, they met again in the Stadium. It was a sloppy game, and there were two
critical plays that decided it. Boston drove Tommy Byrne out before he got a man out in the first. Then the Yankees came back and rallied for six runs. They went into the eighth leading 6-3. Stengel had brought Page in during the fifth inning. But then in the eighth, he faltered. Tebbetts singled to right. Lou Stringer walked. With runners on first and second and no outs, and the count 3-and-2, Dominic DiMaggio hit a sharp line drive right at Rizzuto. Both runners were off and running, and the ball was hit like a bullet.
Triple play!
Rizzuto thought, timing his jump perfectly. He speared the ball and got ready to make the throw to second, warning himself not to rush it. But he looked over and the runners were still moving, not scurrying backward to their bases. That’s really dumb baserunning, he thought. He reached for the ball and it was not there. It had torn through the webbing of his glove. Boston tied the score at 6-6. Now, with only one out, Pesky was on third and Williams was on first with Doerr at bat. Doerr suddenly dropped an almost perfect squeeze bunt. Tommy Henrich, back in the lineup but playing with a corset, seemed to anticipate it. He made a perfect play, firing home to Ralph Houk, who was catching. The throw appeared to beat Pesky by several yards. But Bill Grieve, the plate umpire, called Pesky safe. Houk charged Grieve, Stengel charged him, and the Yankee bench charged him. But safe Pesky remained. At first Pesky thought he might have slipped by the tag, but later, when he saw a sequence of photos, there was no doubt in his mind that he was out. (Much later, when Houk was managing Boston, and Pesky was one of his coaches, one of the Red Sox players found the old sequence of photos. He pinned them up in the locker room with a note saying, “Ralph, was he really out?”) But the play counted, and Cliff Mapes was fined for yelling at Grieve, “How much did you have bet on the game?” Henrich was disgusted. After the game a reporter asked him if Pesky had scored. “Only a mole could have scored on that play,” he answered. The Red Sox won
7-6. Ellis Kinder had pitched the last two innings of shutout relief to secure the victory. With five games left, the Red Sox were in first place. No one joked about Phil Rizzuto’s glove in the locker room that night.