The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (11 page)

Nice to have the sporting press citing Hindi —
pajama
and
thug
are better-known Hindi words — but not terribly accurate. For MacPhail’s Bronx juggernaut was really less massive than it appeared. The Yankees constantly needed patching and repair.

The field leader, trim, soft-voiced former infielder Bucky Harris, had become famous in 1924 when he directed the Washington Senators to a pennant. He was twenty-seven and earned the nickname “the Boy Manager.” He won again in 1925. After that, in seventeen seasons managing American League teams, Harris never finished higher than third. Thirteen times his teams at Washington, Detroit, and Philadelphia finished in the second division. By 1943, he dropped out of the major leagues. In the harsh charge of some journalists, Bucky Harris was a proven failure.

He was also well spoken, intelligent, and ingratiating. He went to work in Buffalo for a couple of years before MacPhail brought him back. Red Barber wrote: “Bucky ran a happy ball club in New York. He managed quietly and didn’t raise his voice. He had a group of grown men and treated them as such.” That was one way of looking at matters. Another way was less kind. Harris was no disciplinarian.

He was not notably familiar with the characters and talents of his players. He had to rely on MacPhail for constant guidance, but MacPhail amid all the drinking, and on the way to self-destruction, was putting together one final, brilliant year, an outstanding farewell to the game.

Early, to acquire Allie Reynolds, he had given up Joe Gordon to Cleveland, reasoning that the less talented infielder, George “Snuffy” Stirnweiss, could play second and hit well enough. Gordon smacked twenty-nine home runs for Cleveland, but the Indians finished just over .500. Snuffy Stirnweiss was indeed good enough for a Bronx ballclub armored with Reynolds.

As the Reliable Jersey House reported accurately, via Stanley Woodward, first base seemed a problem. Nick Etten, the incumbent, couldn’t hit much anymore and had not been distinguished for his work with a glove.* George McQuinn was a journeyman who had spent eight seasons with the St. Louis Browns, nobody’s pantheon team. After employing McQuinn for a year in Philadelphia, Connie Mack released him. MacPhail acquired McQuinn for nothing, and suddenly as June arrived with rare days and blossoming roses, old journeyman George McQuinn was hitting better than Williams, DiMaggio, or Henrich. Ol’ Journeyman George briefly was the leading American League batsman at .381.

Yogi Berra could pound a baseball. In 1946 at Newark he batted .314 and hit fifteen home runs in half a season. MacPhail promptly promoted him. When the veteran catcher Aaron Robinson went down with a painful back, Berra became the starter. He was marginal defensively but he learned fast and he covered up for imperfections with consistently punishing swings. (“The
guy fields
with his bat,” Dick Young maintained.)

Charlie Keller, the beetle-browed veteran from Maryland, “has the most powerful swing in baseball,” MacPhail boasted in a paid advertisement in the
Herald Tribune:
“King Kong Keller slams out those home runs.” Like Aaron Robinson and unlike the super ape, Keller developed back miseries, which would destroy a fine career. He was well enough to play in only forty-five games in 1947. To replace him, MacPhail anointed tall John Lindell, a converted pitcher and an off-season policeman in the town of Acadia, California.

Was ever a juggernaut such a thing of shreds and patches?

Pitching is the mystery within the enigma. “Pitchers,” the other ballplayers say, “ain’t athletes.” They don’t work every day. They are a mass of phobias, beyond understanding, and aches that not even that greatest of baseball liniments, Atomic Balm, can ameliorate. “Pitchers are like women,” one old ballplayer says. “They’re impossible.” And like women they are singularly essential to the survival of a group. Pitchers are half-mad. Good baseball men know that. And knowing it, they resign themselves. As with women, the sensible way to deal with pitchers is to love ‘em. An imperfect choice, but the best available.

MacPhail found a great jewel, a diamond stud, in Allie Reynolds. MacPhail and Harris more or less stumbled upon the excellence of lefty Joe Page. They had a grand veteran in Spud Chandler and fine young fireballers in Bill Bevens, a big righthander from Oregon, and Frank Shea, the Nugget. But Bevens had wild, wild days and age suddenly overtook Spud Chandler and tough Frank Shea was wincing when he threw. Arm trouble.

MacPhail reached into the Yankee farm system and plucked Vic Raschi up from Portland in the Pacific Coast League. Big, glowering Raschi pitched ninety-seven complete games for the Yankees during the Era. A fine pitcher; a superb competitor.

Finally, in July, working under a theory that no team can have too much experienced pitching, MacPhail signed the swaggering veteran Louis Norman “Bobo” or “Buck” Newsom. A strong, imbibing right-hander who had come up with the Dodgers in 1929 and crashed before the stock market, Newsom became the most traded ballplayer in history. Here in order are the teams for which Bobo Newsom had pitched: the Dodgers, the Cubs, the St. Louis Browns, the Washington Senators, the Boston Red Sox, the Browns (again), the Tigers, the Senators (again), the Dodgers (again), the Browns (again, again), the Senators (again, again), the Philadelphia Athletics, the Senators (again, again, again), until on July 11, 1947, Washington released Newsom. MacPhail signed him forthwith. Newsom promptly won four ballgames in a row.

What was there about the Bronx, people wondered. The air? The water? The three-tiered Stadium? No one knew, so some composed essays on the Yankee mystique.

“We just had real tough players,” Bobby Brown says. “Every day we thought we were gonna win. I don’t want to get
too
psychological. You have to hit the ball and catch the ball and throw it. But beyond physical skills, emotions are terribly important. You will not succeed in the major leagues if you go to bat saying to yourself, ‘I just hope I don’t strike out.’

“And on this team, which didn’t have all the skills in the world, people did not go to bat like that. People went to bat saying to themselves, ‘Damn, I’m gonna hit a home run.’

“DiMaggio and Henrich, of course, but the rest of us, too. Lindell and myself and Billy Johnson. It seemed to flow from our best players. You knew DiMaggio and Henrich were watching and you wanted to look good in their eyes.

“I was a cardiologist, not a shrink, but can I give you a cross-disciplinary opinion?

“There was never a mentally tougher team than the 1947 Yankees.”

I called him Bob; older people called him Brownie. He seemed to be the quintessential good scout. He was handsome, rangy, gray-eyed, soft-voiced, well bred, a little stiff, and he could hit. He was trying to balance a career in the major leagues and a career in medicine and some of the writers thought that was kinda funny. Some of the writers were most comfortable with simpletons.

Here was a cum laude science student, and whom did the Yankees room him with on the road? Yogi Berra. Lawrence Peter Berra. Cum laude only at hitting bad balls into the cheap seats.

One night, in a forgotten hotel room, Brown sat at the desk studying his pathology text. Berra lay supine with a comic book. After a while, Brown closed the text. Farewell for now to tissues of the dead.

“You finish your book?” Berra said. “I just finished mine.”

Brown nodded. The pathology text had run 1, 132 pages.

“Say,” Berra asked, “how did
your
book come out?”*

Within the civility and the electric intelligence, Brown was a ferocious competitor. I remember a game in Boston when the opposing pitcher took a dust mote in the iris. The catcher tried to remove the speck and failed. An umpire tried. Finally the Red Sox trainer succeeded with a cotton swab. Through all this, the pitcher’s discomfort was obvious. But the batter, Robert W. Brown, M.D., never moved to help.

“Bob,” I said later over a beer. “The guy was suffering. What about the Hippocratic oath?”

“When I’m batting, and the pitcher is in trouble, fuck the Hippocratic oath.” Brown spoke without malice and, given the context, with elegance.

He would bat 1.000 in the 1947 World Series. He pinch hit four times and walked and singled and hit two doubles and batted in three runs and scored two more. The way Oakland Raider football linemen ate cars, Bobby Brown devoured Dodger pitchers. “They had a lot of strong young fastball pitchers,” he says. “Great strong young arms. As it happened, we were one hell of a fastball-hitting team.”

In a subdued Park Avenue office, brightened by a mix of baseball photos, Bobby Brown, clutch hitter, cardiologist, and now president of the American League, permits himself a smile, remembering old wars that he has won. “I suppose the medicine took away a bit from my baseball career. I was always studying or working as an intern and showing up late for spring training. No manager really likes that. Down toward the end, as I was getting to be thirty, an excellent residency opened at Stanford. Right smack in the middle of a season. I told the professor I wanted to finish out the year. Figuring my baseball salary and a World Series share, I was looking at about $20,000 more, if I was allowed to keep playing for the Yankees and start the residency in October.”

The professor, J. K. Lewis, a prosperous Bay Area cardiologist, was not intensely sympathetic. “The residency begins in June,” he said. “That can’t be changed. But about the $20,000 . . .”

“Yes, Dr. Lewis?” Bobby Brown said.

“In twenty years you’ll never miss it.”

Twenty years and many more had passed. Brown rose from behind his desk, eighteen stories above Park Avenue, and indicated an extraordinary montage photograph of the demolished shrine, the colossus of Brooklyn, Ebbets Field. Decades ago, in black and white, Brown has cracked a sharp drive to right field. “What’s interesting about this picture,” Brown says, “is not my hit, although that was plenty interesting to me, and still is. Rather, it’s that in this one montage, you can see seven Hall of Famers on the field.”

Joe DiMaggio and Berra are base runners. Considering the Dodger defense, a careful eye finds Roy Campanella, Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese. Coaching first base for the Yankees is Bill Dickey.

“I hit that ball good,” says Dr. Bobby Brown, the ballplayer.

Aaron Robinson wouldn’t fly. Neither would three others. And, of course, MacPhail relented and paid their train fare. DiMaggio’s leadership was essentially subtle. He was having a much better experience than his dreariness of 1946. Not in any sense a great year. He batted .315, with twenty homers and 97 runs batted in. Williams in Boston would hit .343, with thirty-two homers and 114 runs knocked across the plate. But at Yankee Stadium that season, Williams went nine for thirty-six, .250. DiMaggio hit .388 against the Sox.

The Yankees’ nineteen-game winning streak began on June 29 and when it ended on July 20, the pennant race was over. DiMaggio had ankle pain. Berra missed three weeks with a throat infection. Bone chips in the elbow finished Spud Chandler. Shea hurt his arm. Even Reynolds missed two weeks. But someone always picked up the slack and MacPhail always found the someone who could do that. For all the drinking and the tantrums, this was a bravura performance and on September 26, the last Friday of the season, MacPhail was asked to march to home plate before a game against the Senators.

“What for?”

“Just do it, will ya, Larry?” the broadcaster Mel Allen said.

DiMaggio and Rizzuto and Brown and the others stood silent as Allen handed MacPhail a seven-piece silver tea service. The players had gotten together for the inscription:

TO LARRY MACPHAIL
greatest executive in baseball,
whose zealous efforts were a major factor
in our 19-game streak and the winning
of the American League pennant.
From his Yankees, 1947

For once the Roaring Redhead was silent. But only briefly. Then he began to cry.

The Dodgers clinched their National League pennant on Monday, September 22, a day when they did not have to play ball. They were not scheduled. The Chicago Cubs split a double-header with the Cardinals in St. Louis that night. With the second game, the one the Cubs won, the Dodgers, as the saying is, backed in to the pennant. They stood seven and a half games out front, with seven left. The
Herald Tribune
reported:

Although it was past midnight when the news flashed from the midwest, Brooklyn immediately started a celebration. Flatbush Avenue was jammed with a mob that milled about, going nowhere and having a wonderful time. Focal point of the hilarity was the bar and grill operated by Hugh Casey, the Dodgers’ expert relief pitcher. Here most of the Dodgers players [but not Jackie Robinson or Pee Wee Reese] and their wives gathered to follow the progress of the Cardinal game by radio.

Seated in one booth at the tavern were Pete Reiser, Hank Behrman, Harry Taylor, Bruce Edwards, Vic Lombardi, Johnny Jorgensen and Hugh Casey. “We did it, we did it,” shouted Lombardi. “And we’ll take the series too,” yelled Taylor, outstanding rookie pitcher.

“Naturally, I’ll wire my congratulations,” Cardinal manager Eddie Dyer said in St. Louis. “I’d better not say more. It would seem like an alibi.”

On hearing that several Dodger fans said, “Natch.”

This was quite an extraordinary victory, only Brooklyn’s second pennant since the year 1921. Two factors, above others, made it possible. Jackie Robinson broke in with a wonderful year. He led the team in hits and runs and stolen bases. He rose above abuse in a triumph that lifted men and women everywhere. Then, on the Cardinal side, Stan Musial was sick. His infected appendix plagued him for the entire season — it was removed in October — and he had a perfectly wretched time trying to hit in Brooklyn. Healthy, in his prime, Stan Musial at Ebbets Field was the greatest hitter in the history of baseball. That is not theory or adolescent enthusiasm. Consider a number or two.

In eleven games at Brooklyn in 1948, Musial batted .522. Twenty-four hits, four homers, and seventeen runs scored in eleven games. In his twelve games at Brooklyn in 1949, Musial improved. He batted .535, with twenty-three hits, six homers, and nineteen runs scored. That is better than anyone can possibly hit major league pitching. Dodger fans called Musial “the Man,” as in “Uh-oh, two men on base and here comes the Man again.” At Ebbets Field the Man was Superman.