The Boys of Summer (23 page)

Cox dropped to a stool. He sat facing the locker, and the pumpkin-colored wall beyond. He looked around. The horse face was expressionless, but the eyes showed huge and sorrowful. “It don’t matter none,” he said.

“I didn’t quote you, Bill.”

The large eyes gazed. Cox had been hurt in war and hurt by life, and although he played third base with glorious courage, the other part, the hours off the field, were forever wounding him more deeply. They made him afraid. So he kept his distance, held his tongue and drank his beer. “It’s all right,” Cox said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

Sure, Cox told me with his eyes. Say what you want. One night I let my guard down and look what happens. But it don’t matter none. You’re a writer, no worse, no better than the rest. That’s how things are, that’s things and people. Abruptly, Cox said loudly, “Okay!” Then he extended his right index finger and made the gesture. Fuckit. He had had enough truck with humanity. The best third baseman on earth folded his small black glove into his pocket and hurried toward the safety of the field.

Bavasi issued a statement that “reports of dissension have been exaggerated.” Jackie Robinson said in a burst of diplomacy, “I’m the one who should be upset. I’m being forced out of my position.” Carl Erskine said, “Race relations on the
team are a model the whole country could learn from.” The story had cut clean. Dressen’s utility plan worked perfectly. That season Cox played a hundred games, mostly at third, but also at short and second, and batted .291, the highest average of his major league life.

In April a bakery hired Admiral Byrd, the Antarctic explorer, to push sales of frozen bread. J. Fredd Muggs, a chimpanzee clothed in rubber pants, made his debut on Dave Garroway’s dawn television program. And in Washington, D.C., Charlie Dressen canceled plans to remake Joe Black, the pitcher. “I told him,” Charlie said, after an exhibition game with the Senators, “to pitch like he did last year.”

“But what about the screwball and the fork ball and the change-up?”

“He don’t throw none of them any good.”

The classic flaw of Dodger management—manipulating pitchers toward ruin—gaped again. I sat beside Black as the team flew to La Guardia Airport. “Sophomore jinx,” he said glumly. “It’s got me.”

“You don’t believe in jinxes.”

“How else can you figure it? I pitched, right? Did everything the man said. Fast ball high. Curve ball low. Ask Camp about my control. Now I been throwing so many damn things I don’t know if I can control anything.”

“It’ll work out,” I said. It never did. A man needs touch, concentration, poise, confidence as well as strength, if he is to be a great pitcher, and Joe Black was a great pitcher in 1952. To all these elements, Dressen added doubt, like a solvent of lye. The saddest spectacle of the 1953 season was watching Joe Black recede. The outward mansion never changed. The man remained warm, perceptive and fiercely determined to do well. But now his fast balls moved to the center of the plate and became high doubles, and the small, sharp curve, breaking at
belt level, was driven on a long, low line. Clem Labine became premier relief pitcher, and in the autumn of 1953 Joe Black, last year’s proud gladiator, pitched one inning during the World Series. It was the last inning of an already lost game. He allowed a run.

This season the Dodgers came of age. Carl Erskine won 20 games. Every regular batted higher than .300, except for Cox (.291), Gilliam (.278) and Reese (.271). As lead-off man, Gilliam drew 100 bases on balls, only 5 fewer than Stan Musial. He hit 17 triples, and led the league. Reese, now thirty-five, stole 22 bases. Duke Snider hit 42 home runs. Roy Campanella hit 41. The Yankees of 1927, with Ruth, Gehrig and the rest, a benchmark of batting power, scored 975 runs. The 1953 Dodgers scored 955. The Dodgers were measurably superior in the field. They completed 38 more double plays and made 77 fewer errors. The Dodgers of 1953—not the pitching staff but the eight men in the field—can be put forth as the most gifted baseball team that has yet played in the tide of times.

Curiously, the season began with stumbling. Dressen experimented with his pitching staff and the Dodgers lost as often as they won, and Walter O’Malley called a press conference and said that he expected the team to win consistently. “In the past,” he said, “sentiment has entered into decisions made by this office. Such will no longer be the case.”

Dressen squirmed and perspired at O’Malley’s side, but by the end of June the Dodgers had seized first place by defeating the Milwaukee Braves, 11 to 1. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were electrocuted at Sing Sing. Elizabeth II was crowned. President Eisenhower sent Fleur Cowles as his representative and Mrs. Cowles wore a plain dress, she said, “so as not to detract from the Queen.” Someone marketed a vodka containing chlorophyll, “to take your breath away and fool your wife.” Although Senator Robert A. Taft died at sixty-three and Lavrenti Beria was condemned at fifty-five and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy
continued to rage, it did not seem to be a troubled summer. By late July the Dodger lead was seven and a half games.

There was no hazard now, except for memory. The Dodgers still remembered the Giants and 1951. Then one day in August, Dick Young asked Charlie Dressen about Leo Durocher’s team.

“The Giants is dead,” Dressen said.

Young wrote a one-column box, and “The Giants is dead” became a familiar quotation. Young beamed, but Dressen grumbled. “I coulda give it to him the other way,” he said. “I can say, ‘The Giants are dead.’ I know that, too. And next time that’s what I’m gonna do.”

Through the hot months, the Dodgers played phenomenal .800 baseball. They clinched the pennant in Milwaukee on Saturday, September 13, when Erskine defeated the Braves, 5 to 3, in a game punctuated by three Milwaukee errors. Dave Anderson, a young reporter who had succeeded Harold Burr on the Brooklyn
Eagle,
wrote the best lead. “The Milwaukee Braves,” he began, “died with their boots.”

“Two-to-one they change it on you,” Young said.

“If not the deskman, then the printer,” I said. “I’ve tried to get ‘cerebration’ into the
Tribune
four times this season and it’s always come up ‘celebration.’”

Anderson grinned, but turned less cheerful when he saw a copy of the
Eagle.
Someone indeed murdered his pleasant pun. His published story read, “The Milwaukee Braves died with their boots on.”
On.
Not even Dante conceived an inferno for sodden copyreaders.

No Dodger team before had won two pennants in a row. No National League team before had clinched a pennant so early. That bright September even the McCarthy wickedness waned. Lucille Ball confessed that she had registered as a Communist during the 1936 elections to please “my radical grandpa.” No one seemed to care very much, and “I Love Lucy” persisted as the most popular program on television.

Sal Maglie never hit Carl Furillo in the head, but another Giant pitcher, Ruben Gomez, plunked his wrist. Furillo trotted to first, paused and, ten seconds later, charged at Leo Durocher in the Giant dugout. Durocher met him and the men rolled on the ground. Furillo clamped Durocher’s skull in his right arm. The top of the bald head turned purple. Monte Irvin, Jim Hearn and several other husky Giants pulled Furillo off Durocher. One of them stamped Furillo’s hand, cracking a bone. Furillo could not play again until the World Series. He had been hitting .344. His average stayed there and he won the batting championship. In this Brooklyn season even the injuries were advantageous. At last, not next year but now, the Yankees were ready to be taken.

In the first inning of the first game of the World Series at the Stadium, the Yankees knocked out Carl Erskine and scored four runs. A day later, Mickey Mantle walloped a two-run homer off Preacher Roe and the Yankees led, two games to nothing. A number of writers composed leads around the theme: “It looks like Chuck Dressen’s Dodgers is dead.”

My father telephoned after the second loss and began: “Somehow your friends have the unerring knack of playing bad baseball when they most need to play good baseball.”

“I didn’t figure Roe would lose. I don’t understand it.”

“Who’s pitching tomorrow?” Gordon asked.

“He has to come back with Erskine.”

My father grunted concurrence. “And you’ll be on the front page?”

“That’s the rules. We’re back in Ebbets and I write the lead story in Brooklyn.”

“Well, try to spell Erskine’s name correctly.”

“O-i-s …”

“The ‘oy’ is silent,” Gordon said, then—citing a line from some forgotten vaudevillian—“like the cue in billiards.”

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“Good luck, son.”

Erskine set a World Series strikeout record in chilly sunshine the next day, October 2, 1953. I sat between Rud Rennie, a courtly man who professed boredom with all things but pretty women, and Red Smith, who approached sports with resolute, professional irreverence. In passionate silence, I rooted for Carl. During the eighth inning, with the World Series, the ball game and the record still in doubt, a number of spectators left. My stomach was knotted. As I made notations in the scorebook, my hand shook. “Why in the world,” I said, trying to keep my voice low and steady, “would anybody leave a ball game this exciting right now?”

“Numerous reasons,” Rud Rennie said. “Their feet may be cold. Mine are. They may want a drink of something more than beer. I think I’d like a highball. They may want supper. Did you think of that? It’s getting pretty close to suppertime. Or, somewhere they may have a young lady waiting.”

I bit a lip. Here I was the junior man, the lead-story writer to be sure, but the junior man, and I had to play the kid. I stretched, in contrived nonchalance, and placed my chin against a wet palm as the ninth inning began.

Red Smith called my name. “Would you pass me a piece of copy paper, please,” he said. A stack of yellow Western Union paper already stood before him.

“Huh? Oh, sure, Red. Here.”

Holding his hands at eye level, Smith used the paper to wipe sweat from his palms. “This,” he announced, “is a brute of a ball game.” Rud Rennie gazed toward center field, eyes filmed as by a nictitating membrane.

I had perhaps forty minutes to compose a story. It came quickly:

Back from the dead yesterday came Carl Erskine, Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella. Erskine blazing his way to a strikeout record,
Robinson and Campanella supplying the punch and the revitalized trio driving the Brooklyn Dodgers to their first 1953 World Series victory, a bitterly earned 3-to-2 triumph over the New York Yankees.

A crowd of 35,270 fans, largest ever to squeeze and elbow its way into Ebbets Field for a series contest, came to see a game the Dodgers had to win. They saw much more. They saw a game of tension, inescapable and mounting tension, a game that offered one climax after another, each more grinding than the one before, a game that will be remembered with the finest.

It was a predominantly Brooklyn crowd, which was fitting because it was a Brooklyn day. Robinson, the power behind the first two runs, and Campanella, who powered home the winning run with an eighth-inning homer off Vic Raschi, made amends for weaknesses in the first two games. But Erskine, unable to last beyond the first inning in the first game, held center stage and the Erskine role was most dramatically enacted.

Fans Mize for Record

The soft-spoken twenty-six year old Hoosier, a twenty-game winner for the Dodgers this season, struck out fourteen Yankees, a record, snapping by one the standard set by Howard Ehmke, of the Philadelphia Athletics, when he beat the Chicago Cubs in the first game of the 1929 World Series.

Four times Erskine struck out Mickey Mantle, the Yankee center-fielder and most-advertised star. Four times he struck out Joe Collins, the Yankees’ first baseman. Once he struck out Johnny Mize, the home-run slugging pinch hitter, and once was enough. That was in the ninth inning and that was the strikeout that broke the record.

The Dodgers won the next day, tying the series, but after that content fled from Brooklyn. The Yankees won the fifth game, when Mantle, batting lefthanded, lined a screwball into the upper left-field stands. Casey Stengel’s Yankees became the first team to win five consecutive world championships on October 5 at the Stadium, when Billy Martin, who had saved the ‘52 Series, slammed one of Clem Labine’s good sinkers on a low line up the middle for a single in the last half of the ninth inning. Gil McDougald had straightened past third and was nearly
home. Snider stuffed the ball into his hip pocket and ran from the field, his head bobbing. Long afterward he thought, “I should have thrown. Suppose McDougald had fallen down.”

The Dodger clubhouse was sepulchral. The men sat in front of the strange lockers in the large alien carpeted dressing room. Reporters and photographers burst in. If you knew the players and saw them silent, humiliated, it was like crashing into a sick room. Photographers popped bulbs. Reporters hurried to Carl Furillo, who had tied the game by rocking a home run off Allie Reynolds in the ninth. “I showed ‘em,” Furillo said. “I showed ‘em I could come back after breaking that hand.” This black-haired powerful man was dominated by his private triumph. Five minutes after losing the Series, he was issuing victory statements. Everywhere else the men, with whom I had traveled for two years, and whose vitality I so enjoyed, were motionless and sorrowful and waxen.

“Nice try,” I said to Reese, who sat head down on a three-legged stool. There was no swivel chair for him at the Stadium. Reese looked up, recognition in his eyes and hurt. “That’s all it was,” he whispered and lowered his head again, foreclosing conversation.

“Good to see you hitting,” I said to Robinson. Jack had taken off his gray uniform shirt. A roll of fat collared his neck. He shook his head. Jowls stirred. “I’d trade every fucking hit if we could have won.”

Labine had removed his baseball cap and slumped on the locker stool, head between his arms, with only the light-brown crew cut visible. His chest moved oddly, and when I came closer, I heard sobs issuing from this man who above all things was proud of his poise. Duke Snider caught my eye. “I still say we’re the better team,” he said.