The Boys of Summer (20 page)

“I gotta think,” Dressen said in the clubhouse at the Polo Grounds. “Gotta get me a pitcher for tomorrow.”

“Is that the most important decision of the year?” I said.

“Yeah, kid. I gotta go home. I gotta think.”

Near midnight Dressen decided to start Preacher Roe, although the Polo Grounds, with its short foul lines, emphasized Roe’s wounding flaw. He threw home runs. “Ah don’t know why people git on me ‘bout my hitting,” he said. “Ah takes care of things the other way. Ah’ve
throwed
some of the longest balls in history.” Elwin Charles Roe, an Arkansas doctor’s son, had been to college and taught high school mathematics, but the role he liked to play was hillbilly. “Hillbilluh” he pronounced it.

His face was angular and his body was bony and he liked to puff a pipe. “You ever been in the Ozarks?” he asked once.

“What’s down there?”

“Hills,” Preacher said, “and hillbilluhs. Some say it’s quiet, but we like it.”

“What do you do?”

“Hunt. I got me some real fine pointers. You know about Mr. Rickey’s dogs after I had mah first real good year? Nineteen forty-nine, I believe it was, I won fifteen and lost only six. Led the league in winning percentage, I do believe.

“Well, that winter, I got back home and told myself, ‘Preach, you sure are a pretty good pitcher. Now it’s time you made pretty good money.’ So I set there, awaitin’ for Mr. Rickey to send me my contract. And each day I waited, I thought I ought to have a little more. When that ol’ contract finally came, I was gonna look for a comfortable sum.

“Contract never did arrive in the mail,” Preacher said. “ ‘Sted, down the road one sunny winter day come Mr. Rickey himself, driving a station wagon and makin’ a lot of dust. He pulled up and climbed out and joined me on the porch. The two of us set there a while, just rockin’.

“Then Mr. Rickey says, ‘Preacher, you’re a fine pitcher. You’re a wonderful pitcher.’ I thank him, and we’re still rockin’.

“ ‘Now, Preacher,’ Mr. Rickey says, ‘I don’t know what to do. I’m so proud of you, it’s like you were my own son.’ I thank him again. ‘Preacher,’ he says, ‘what should I pay you? It’s like paying my own son. But, look, I bought you a present.’

“Just then a couple of hunting dogs jump out of the back of the wagon. ‘They’re for you, Preacher,’ Mr. Rickey says. I sets to admirin’ them, and Mr. Rickey gets up, and reaches in a pocket and hands me a paper. ‘By the way,’ he says, ‘here’s your contract. The figure’s blank. Fill in what you think is right,
son.’

“After he’d gone, I commenced thinkin’ what a fine thing he’d done and how much trust he put in me and I took that original figure I had and knocked a thousand dollars off it. Day or so later I go hunting. I run the dogs up and down the hills and bagged me a mess o’ quail. Got back, thought some more. Knocked off another $2,500.

“Went hunting again. Had the best day ever. Brought the dogs into the yard, locked the gate and went out on the porch and commenced more thinkin’. All the great huntin’ an’ the great dogs and Mr. Rickey’s trust made me ashamed to be greedy. I took that contract and filled in a number $10,000 under my original figure. I got up offa the porch and walked down to the corner and put the signed contract in the mail.

“When I got home, those two huntin’ dogs had jumped the fence and taken off. They didn’t stop running till they got back to Mr. Rickey’s house in Brooklyn.”

Roe underplayed his talents. “I got three pitches,” he said. “My change; my change off my change; and my change off my change off my change.” In essence: slow, slower, slowest. But he could throw hard and, after watching for a while, one saw in this sharp-nosed, bony, fidgety man an absolute master of guile. Even his fidgeting was planned. It was an essential to his spitball.

When wetting a pitch, Roe touched his cap and his sleeve,
tugged his pants, dabbed his brow and, as his fingers rested at the forehead, he spat quickly into the heel of his hand. Then he pretended to pull his belt with his pitching hand. In the process fingertips touched wet heel. Now he was ready to throw the spitter.

We watched him from the press box through binoculars. In fidgeting, Roe
always
went to his forehead and belt, so we never could tell just when he “loaded” the ball. Nor did we know how he was doing it. Plate umpires, urged on by batters and opposing managers, sometimes demanded to see the ball. Whether it was wet or not, Preacher nodded and carefully rolled the ball the sixty feet to home. The evidence always dried in the dirt.

In the first inning at the Polo Grounds, Roe seemed more nervous than usual. He could not stand in one place. Through binoculars you could see his lips moving. He was chattering to himself. Alvin Dark doubled. Whitey Lockman singled sharply, and for all Roe’s wiles, the Giants were ahead, 1 to 0.

But the team, whose courage was so frequently maligned, refused to die. In the second inning, Gil Hodges, pale with tension, stepped into one of Sal Maglie’s curves and hit it into the upper stands in left field. An inning later Reese slammed a line drive into the lower field seats. Shuba and Cox hit home runs in the seventh. And Preacher, having made two early mistakes, made no others. He showed the Giants fast balls at eye level, and broke arching curves around the knees. When they waited for the curve, he slipped hard sliders under their hands. When they set for spitters—his spitter dropped—he’d loose the fast one and break their timing. He faked a hundred spitballs. Perhaps he threw ten. Or perhaps five. Muttering, fidgeting, always two thoughts ahead of the batter, Roe did not give the Giants another hit until the ninth inning. The Dodgers won, 5 to 1. The lead was again back to five. The next afternoon Dressen tried another lefthander, Ken Lehman, who had recently
completed two years with the U.S. Army in Korea. Lehman was fair-haired, handsome and very bright. “I think,” he said, “I’m gonna sit next to Preacher, rub against him. Maybe some of that stuff will rub off on me.” But he was gone after one inning and two runs. Black relieved, expressionless and fierce. This day he did not back Giant hitters from the plate. Instead, he flattened them. At least three Giants barely ducked under fast balls. The Giants lost poise and power; behind Black’s ferocity the Dodgers pulled far ahead.

This was Durocher’s game, destroy the enemy, sow salt in the infield, and he was losing it. “Come on. In the ear. The big pitcher. Forty-nine. We’re gonna get him.” In the seventh inning, a Giant reliever threw toward Black, and missed. Black was backing away at the windup. His response an inning later was to deliver the single most terrifying pitch I have seen.

The object, supposedly, is to frighten, not to maim. Against a journeyman white outfielder named George Washington Wilson, from Cherryville, North Carolina, Black drew the perfect line. Wilson, who batted lefthanded, dug in his spikes, cocked his bat, and Black powered a fast ball at the body, shoulder high. Wilson ducked, in absolute if understandable panic, pulling his head down with such force that his baseball cap came off. The pitch sailed through narrow daylight, no more than a foot, between the cap and cranium of George Washington Wilson. He got up quickly, utterly ashen, and popped up the next pitch, with a quarter swing. The Dodgers won, 10 to 2. The pennant was sure. The Giant tide, like the questioners of the team’s courage, had at last been properly dammed.

On a Sunday afternoon in Boston, Joe Black, starting for the first time, overpowered the Braves and the Dodgers clinched a tie for the pennant. Five hundred fans met the team at Grand Central Station. They cheered as the players appeared through a runway and waved signs in the air. One read:
“FOR PRESIDENT, JOE BLACK, MOST VALUABLE PLAYER.”

The Dodgers secured the pennant in their next game, on Tuesday night, September 23, by defeating Philadelphia, 5 to 4. The starting pitcher, a slight, handsome righthander named John Rutherford, threw a grand-slam home run, but Shuba homered for the team and Snider, magnificent since the benching, drove in the winning run with a long double. My story cited the charges that the team never won big games and commented: “Perhaps. But they sure won a lot of little ones.”

“Hey,” Duke Snider shouted, as he sipped champagne in the clubhouse. “How was that goddamn perfect swing? How’d you like that one?”

“What was it you hit, Duker?”

“I hit a sinker, but it didn’t sink.” We laughed. “And in the World Series I’m gonna hit a screwball that doesn’t screw.”

“Whoop,” cried Campanella, wrapping an arm around my chest. “How’s that for fighting spirit?”

“We’ll take those Yankee bastards,” Robinson shouted.

“Son of a buck,” Carl Erskine said, with shining eyes.

Billy Cox waggled his finger and said, “Fuckit.”

A day later nine bottles of Scotch appeared in the press box, one for each man who covered the team. Joe Black had sent them with a note: “I know I threw the pitches, but the things you fellows wrote about me sure helped. Thanks.” The brand of Scotch he chose was important to him. Black and White.

Bob Cooke gave me three days off, dispatched me to a weekend football game at West Point and asked how I felt about writing the principal story on World Series games. “It goes outside,” he said. “Page one.”

“I’d like the lead on the games in Brooklyn.”

Behind eyeglasses Harold Rosenthal’s eyes looked merry.

“Might as well find out now,” he said, “if the kid chokes.”

“What the hell does that mean?” I said. “And I can always write an AP lead.”

“Not for this paper, you can’t,” Cooke said.

“None of that ‘paced by the six-hit pitching,’ “ Rosenthal said.

“Yeah,” said Sol Roogow. “Rest in pace, get it?”

“The Series is nothing to worry about,” Cooke said. He began drumming his fingers on his desk, and looking about. “We’ve gone with you all year.” The fingers played a piano exercise. “The stories have to be eight pages long. Can you write an eight-page story in an hour?”

“And in English?” Roogow said.

Cooke’s drumming was making me nervous. “Yes,” I said. I wanted to get up and walk. “It’s no big deal.”

“No,” Rosenthal said heavily. “Front-page pieces are no big deal at all when you’re twenty-one.”

“Twenty-four.”

“Look,” Cooke said. “Don’t be fancy. Just lead with the most important things.”

Joe Black won the first game of the World Series, 4 to 2. Robinson, Snider and Reese hit home runs. No Negro had won a World Series game before, but I had learned the
Tribune’s
curious definition of importance. “Home runs and Joe Black,” I began a conservative story, “the combination which brought a pennant to Brooklyn yesterday …” I was confined to writing hits and errors.

The Series built through climaxes. Erskine, assigned to pitch the second game, stood tiptoe on a ladder to peer through a clubhouse window, at the weather and at the excited people outside. He lost his balance and fell, striking his head against a radiator. He fainted, revived, but was knocked out in the fifth inning. The scene shifted to the Stadium. Roe outpitched Ed Lopat. The Dodgers led, 2 to 1, in games. Then Allie Reynolds struck out ten and beat Black, who allowed only three hits, and the Series was tied.

There are no free tickets to a World Series game. Six hundred places are assigned to working journalists (most of whom really work), but everyone else—players’ wives, visiting baseball men and the Commissioner of Baseball—pays for his seat. That is a message I had to learn by heart. No sooner did the Dodgers win the pennant than telephone calls started. Someone had known me as a high school sophomore; someone else was a casual acquaintance ten years before. The brother-in-law of a girl I knew and the brother of a girl who had declined to go out with me and, inevitably, Dan Golenpaul of “Information Please” telephoned. Each call began in praise and ended in supplication. “I really enjoy reading you in the morning.” Pause. Inhale. “Say, do you think you can get me a pair for the Series? I’ll
pay
for them.”

“There are no free tickets to a World Series game.”

“Oh? Well, even so, I mean, could you help an old friend?”

I bought a pair for each game, at $6 a ticket, spending a total of $84, which was $12 more than my weekly salary. Then I offered the tickets to friends who had not called. Both strips were gone in a day. All Brooklyn panted for my tickets, but as it did, I made a modest economic discovery. Once $84 is removed from a checking account, to be repaid in multiples of $6, it is gone. Friends gave me cash and checks, but the small installments always dissipated. It was months before my account recovered. Whatever the arithmetic, $6 times 14 never equals $84.

I reserved Sunday tickets for my father and, with this grinding Series tied, telephoned to offer suggestions for his viewing. “I don’t know your exact location, but it’s somewhere behind the plate. Erskine’s going. Watch his change-up, but mostly watch that overhand curve.”

“I doubt if that will stop the big Yankee hitters.”

“When Carl is right, nobody hits him.”

“He’s small. Small pitchers tire.”

“We’ll see about that,” I said, without confidence.

Sunshine lit the concrete mass of Yankee Stadium on Sunday. Sunshine splashed across the infield and warmed the outfield grass. The crowd, which would number 70,536, arrived early. At first World Series audiences are weighted with people who have come to be seen by columnists, or to sell a client something between innings, or to make a deal while men lead from first and third. But the 1952 World Series, played entirely in New York City, had lost its novelty by Sunday. As Erskine snapped overhand hooks during warm-up, his stuff drew cries of admiration from the stands. It looked, someone remarked, as if the hucksters and the actresses had all gone off together. Today we had baseball fans. The
noise
they made, like sunshine, lit the scene.

The Dodgers peppered the Yankee starting pitcher, Ewell Blackwell, who had long since lost the edge of his sidearm fast ball. Snider lined a 420-foot home run. By the fifth, Erskine led, 4 to 0.

So quickly that there was no time to consider what had gone wrong, the Yankees scored five times. Erskine allowed a single, walked a man and gave up two other hits. Then Johnny Mize, a 220-pound man from Georgia, with astonishing wrists and cat eyes, lifted a home run into the lower stands in right. The Yankees led by 5 to 4.