The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (12 page)

Except in 1947. Then, wrenched by abdominal pains, Musial batted only .225 in Brooklyn. Double Musial’s Brooklyn hits, have him bat, say, .450 at Ebbets Field, and the pennant race would have been a different story. Color it Cardinal red.

This was an interesting, not entirely attractive Dodger team. When Durocher was banished in April and Joe McCarthy turned down Branch Rickey’s offer to step in, sixty-two-year-old Burt Shotton became manager. Plodding, slow, methodical, Shotton talked to Ed Stanky and Dixie Walker and Pee Wee Reese and Hugh Casey, the shrewdest Dodger veterans, and absorbed a crash course in players around the league. He insisted that he was too old to climb into uniform and, as I’ve noted, managed entirely from the dugout. There he kept a record of each play in scruffy scorebooks.

Scoring ballgames employs universal symbols, as many know. Each position is assigned a number so that, for example, 6 to 3 is a ground out, shortstop to first. Shotton had his own symbols, F for fly and O for making an out, hardly as precise as the accepted hieroglyphs. All game long, every day, Shotton made odd vague notes in his book. Dick Young was no admirer. “With that goofy scorebook,” Young said, “no wonder the old bastard is always one out behind the other manager.”

As Young suggested, Shotton was not as quick as Durocher nor as assertive as Durocher, for that matter. He walked away from episodes that a more forceful man would not have tolerated. He simply ignored the terrible racial tension tormenting Jackie Robinson.

On a train ride to Boston early in the season, Robinson was invited into a club car poker game. He accepted happily. Hugh Casey had been drinking and could not see his cards well enough to play them properly. Casey lost money on every deal for twenty minutes. Finally he said to Robinson:

“Jackie, man! Am I in lousy luck today! Got to change my luck, boy. Back home in Georgia when my poker luck ran bad, Jackie boy, I’d jes go out and rub me the tits of the biggest, blackest nigger woman I could find.” Casey leaned forward and rubbed his teammate’s head.

Robinson went into shock. His vision blurred. His throat parched. He felt a jumble of anger and hurt. No one else at that poker table said anything. Robinson recovered — the whole episode lasted perhaps twenty seconds — and shook his head. Then he said to Casey in an even voice: “Just deal, man. Just deal.” Manager Shotton took no action, none at all.

In one game in May, Enos Slaughter ran across first base and planted spikes in Robinson’s right foot. Slaughter later made a mini-career out of denying the deed, but Robinson said, “He denies it? I still feel his spikes. They hurt like hell.” Indeed, in that same game, after the spiking, Robinson remarked to Stan Musial at first, “I wish I could punch the son of a bitch in the mouth.”

“If you did,” Musial said, “I wouldn’t blame you.”

Slaughter is not the only man who would rewrite history, as I learned when I tried to run down the charge that Joe Garagiola also tried to spike Robinson in 1947. “Let me tell you about
my
Robinson incident,” Garagiola said grandly one morning in 1991 in his office at NBC. “I was hitting, like, .356 [for the Cardinals] at the end of May 1950. That year, 1950, is the only year I still wish I could have finished playing because everything that could happen right was happening right. I was hitting the ball hard at least twice every game.

“We’re going to play the Dodgers and I figure I sit. You know I hit left-handed and Preacher Roe, that great old lefty, was going for Brooklyn. But all of a sudden Eddie Dyer has this meeting and says to me, ‘Kid.’ He didn’t know my name. ‘Kid, you’re catching because you’re hot.’

“First time I’m up we got runners on first and second and I get the bunt sign. Don’t believe it the way I’m hitting. But there it is.

“I make a lousy bunt. Robinson is playing second. He has to come over and cover first base. I have to bust my ass or else I bunt into a double play. It had been drizzling. Getting to first, Robinson fell. If you’re beatin’ a double play, you don’t care if the guy is black, white, or polka dot.

“I tried to step over Jackie’s legs. He lifted up and clipped me. I landed on my shoulder. I could never swing right after that. I had to have my shoulder wired. I still remember lying on the ground in terrible pain . . .

“I still get mail at the
Today
show. How could you have spiked Robinson in 1947? I didn’t spike Robinson. The only contact I had with him was 1950. I busted my career
not
spiking him.”

It is a risk to substitute memory for truth. Let me recount a picture caption from
The Sporting News
of September 24, 1947. (And let me repeat that I asked Garagiola about ‘47. Sidewinding to 1950 was his idea.)

The
Sporting News
caption reads:

QUICK THINKING
by Umpire Beans Reardon broke up an incipient rhubarb between the Dodgers and the Cardinals at Sportsman’s Park, [St. Louis] September 11. Jackie Robinson (left) and Joe Garagiola (right) exchanged words when the Brooklyn first baseman came to the plate in the third inning after the St. Louis catcher had stepped on Jackie’s foot, ending a double play in the previous frame. Coach Clyde Sukeforth rushed from the bench to push Robinson away from Garagiola and, in turn, was vigorously pushed by Reardon who thus drew attention away from the Robinson-Garagiola flareup.

The Brooklyn bench gave Garagiola a going-over all night and members of both clubs stepped dangerously close to rivals’ tootsies. But no toes were cut off, although Ed Stanky took off his shoe to make sure.

Above this caption is a picture. Garagiola is raging at the umpire, Beans Reardon, who has an uplifted hand that seems to say peace. Robinson is watching with his palms pressed together as though in church. Lest there be combat, his bat rests at the ready against one thigh.

This episode is literally unforgettable. Garagiola wants me, and you, to believe that at the very least he has forgotten it.

The Dodgers were one fine baseball team, with a manager who could not leave the dugout. Ralph Branca, twenty-one, won twenty-one games. He threw hard and his curve ball snapped like a flag in March. Joe Hatten was a pretty good left-hander. Vic Lombardi, a five-foot, seven-inch left-hander, could win some games, without throwing hard enough to dominate. Hard-drinking Hugh Casey was the best relief pitcher on earth.

As we’ve observed, the Cards started poorly. Boston was a good team, featuring, as Boston writers reminded everyone, Spahn and Sain and two days of rain.*

Mostly what happened was that the Dodgers got out front by seven games and held on. A tall right-hander, Ewell Blackwell at Cincinnati, became the best pitcher in the league. But his team was weak. Dixie Walker hurt a hand and a young outfielder replaced him. That enabled rookie Duke Snider, facing Blackwell, to strike out five times in a single game.

“This young man is going to be a great one,” Rickey told Harold Rosenthal of the
Herald Tribune
.

“He just struck out five times,” Rosenthal said.

“He has steel springs for legs.”

“Five strikeouts.”

“Harold, this young man, who will be a great one, has no idea of what the strike zone is. My solemn responsibility is to instruct him.”

The Dodgers had a lot of talent. They learned to live with and to admire Robinson.

Pitchers hit Robinson with fastballs six times in his first thirty-seven games. Once a week he had to take a 90-mile-an-hour baseball in the ribs or in the arm. And he was agile. He was hard to hit.

If Robinson complained, no one heard him. He played the game.

The Boys of Summer, like the Bronx Bombers, were coming to birth.

On September 23 before a Giants game, the Dodger management staged Jackie Robinson Day at Ebbets Field. The park sold out. Ballplayers crowded to home plate.

Describing this, Robinson said, “There to honor me was Ralph Branca of New York and Joe Hatten of Iowa and Clint Hartung of Texas and even . . . Dixie Walker of Alabama.

“I looked at the Dodger box. It was all so beautiful. Democracy. Decency. Sanity. My wife, Rachel, in the Dodger box was crying.”

Tears of joy in the bloodshot blue eyes of Larry MacPhail.

Tears of joy in the clear dark eyes of Rachel Robinson.

It was going to be quite a World Series.

*A mythic bookmaking establishment created by the
Herald Tribune’s
Stanley Woodward. Real betting lines were available in the composing room of the
Tribune
from a printer who was wired, so to speak, to what was then called the Syndicate. Such activity, quoting odds and placing bets, was respectively immoral and illegal. Protecting the printer and other guilty parties, Woodward invented a gambling house, safely across the extradition barrier of the Hudson River. When a vice president of the newspaper protested Woodward’s use of odds in his column, the editor responded: “I’ll stop running betting odds on the day you stop running stock market tables.”

*MacPhail was responding to Red Smith, who wrote tartly that MacPhail was more a circus promoter than a baseball man.

*A countercomment on Berg’s view is offered by the baseball scholar Bill Deane, senior research associate at the Hall of Fame. “Without Williams,” Deane says, “the Red Sox wouldn’t have been playing any big games in the first place.” Another savvy sportsman, the noted attorney (and retired amateur shortstop) Charles Rembar, says Deane’s point does not touch Berg’s argument. “It only means Williams was good enough to get to the last round before losing.” I report these remarks knowing that they may set in motion debates that will continue till sunup, when there’s nothing left to drink but Aunt Ada’s Apricot Liqueur.

*York, himself a devout drinker, was coming apart at the age of thirty-three. That June the Red Sox traded him to Chicago. He was out of the major leagues by the next year.

*Etten was famous for trying to batter Joe Trimble, a reporter for the
Daily News
. When Etten signed for $17,500 to play in 1946, Trimble wrote: “The $500 is for Etten’s fielding.” Subsequently on a Yankee trip, Etten chased Trimble through a number of Pullman cars with ferocious intent. Trimble escaped injury by locking himself inside a women’s lavatory.

*Actually, Berra, though unread, possesses significant intelligence. As a catcher, he had to call 120 pitches a day. He mixed them in shrewd, calculating ways. On trains he liked to play a version of gin rummy called Hollywood in which scores have to be computed in three columns simultaneously. Berra could keep perfect score for Hollywood gin without making notes. He used only his sometimes maligned head.

*Warren Spahn, the great left-hander, won twenty-one games. Johnny Sain, a right-hander with a fine sinker, won another twenty-one. The Braves’ number three pitcher, Charles Henry “Red” Barrett, won eleven games and lost twelve.

It wasn’t tough at all. It was just like eatin’ spaghetti.

— Pinch hitter Harry Lavagetto, after delivering the most dramatic pinch hit in history

T
HE CITY WAS THE CAPITAL
of the world. The war-dimmed lights burned bright again from Coney Island clear to Westchester and the streets were safe and subway crime was less than deadly.

“Expectorating on Platform Prohibited!” warned signs in all the stations. “Violators Guilty of Misdemeanor!” Spitting in a subway station, like smoking in a subway station, drew a five-dollar fine in night court, if you were dumb enough to let matters go that far. Generally a spitter or a smoker got the cop to drop charges for a deuce. Two dollars cash. Indeed, police officers frequently approached subway smokers with the venal greeting: “Five bucks, buddy, or two?” Most of us, who spat and smoked, supported our local police.

The parks were tranquil. The word
mugging
had not yet entered the language. Roads and bridges were beautifully maintained. Infrastructure, as in today’s jargon, “crumbling infrastructure,” was still strictly a military term. We were safe and optimistic and prosperous and peaceful in our New York, the capital city of the world.

True, the new mayor was a crook. But few realized that. A glow, sometimes roseate, sometimes volcanic, lingered at City Hall in the wake of the great Fiorello H. La Guardia, mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945.

Pancreatic cancer killed La Guardia on September 20, 1947, and grief for this fiery part-Jewish, part-Italian American original was tangible and intense.
Herald Tribune
reporters recorded tributes to La Guardia from Herbert Hoover; George C. Marshall; Arturo Toscanini; Trygve Lie, secretary-general of the United Nations; Andrei Vishinsky, a customarily choleric Russian who was deputy foreign minister of the Soviet Union; and Eddie Rickenbacker, the old World War I fighter ace, now a devout right-winger and president of Eastern Airlines. Said Henry Agard Wallace, who would soon run for president from the left: “The people of the world have lost a friend when they needed him most. He was the most colorful, beloved figure in American politics and his loss is our greatest tragedy since April 12, 1945. First Roosevelt — now Fiorello. The fighters are taken from us when we need them most, but the fight must go on.”

Everyone agreed with that, but there was significant confusion over what fight it was that Americans should be fighting. To Hoover and Rickenbacker we were up against “godless, atheistic communism,” pronounced, by people like Rickenbacker and Hoover, “common-ism.” The Russians did not develop an atomic bomb until 1949, and in 1947 some felt that a sane U. S. foreign policy would have us atom bomb the Soviet Union into history. Millions would die, but, the right-wingers said, what was so terrible about sending atheists to hell?

Henry Agard Wallace was talking about a different vision: a parliament of man, a federation of the nations, and food for the hungry everywhere. Harry Truman snapped that Wallace was naive. Besides, the Russians
always
broke their promises. Clare Boothe Luce, beautiful, shrill, and cutting as a shard of glass, derided aid for developing nations as “milk for every Hottentot.” And that, said Mrs. Luce, was “Globaloney.”

The United Nations met in temporary quarters, an old World’s Fair building in Queens that has since evolved into a skating rink. Speaking with Gallic passion and remarkable foresight, Georges Bidault, the foreign minister of France, stood up in Queens and said that the developing conflict between the United States and Russia “imperils the very life of the United Nations.” Bidault cited rancorous speeches on the Flushing Meadow floor, mouthed recently by Marshall and Vishinsky.

Bidault’s comments were headlined on the front page of the
Sunday Herald Tribune
nine days before a great World Series began. Four columns to the right, a corollary
Tribune
headline announced:

43 FROM HOLLYWOOD SUBPOENAED
BY HOUSE UN-AMERICAN INQUIRY
COMMITTEE TO HEAR BOTH SIDES ON
COMMUNISM, PARNELL THOMAS SAYS
;

Gary Cooper, Goldwyn, Disney,
Eric Johnston Among Those Called

So it was begun, the American witch-hunt, our very own, very homegrown Inquisition. Gary Cooper, Walt Disney, and Robert Taylor told tales of a red menace that curdled their true-blue Yankee Doodle blood. Eventually, it turned out that John Parnell Thomas, the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, was less honest even than Mayor William O’Dwyer of New York. Thomas was jailed in 1950 for putting relatives who did no work, who never even visited Washington, on his personal, tax-supported payroll. But before this crass porky politican was locked up in the federal correctional institution at Danbury, Connecticut, he had broken good men and women, wounded others, and conducted the overture for Joe McCarthy.

Yet in the bright October of 1947, few dark thoughts clouded the New York skies or outlook. Red Barber wrote in a memoir that the 1947 World Series was “the greatest Series ever played.” It was that, of course, and more. Along with the World Series of 1952 and the World Series of 1955 and the World Series of 1991 and, uh, oh yes, the World Series of 1905 and 1934 and . . .*

To call any Series, or any ballgame, the “greatest ever played” is sophomoric. None of us has seen every Series, much less every game, and even if we had, we’d still be adrift, trying to quantify words like
great
and
exciting
. So much depends not only on the game but on the viewpoint and criteria and possibly the digestion of the observer. Personally, I’ve seen the greatest ballgame ever played at least five times on five different occasions. The Greatest Series Ever is suitable for debating in sports bars but warrants no more sober consideration than the tabloid headline that it is. What one reasonably can say is this: The 1947 Series was very wonderful and very exciting. It kicks up controversy and rocks passions to this day.

Going to a ballgame was different more than half a lifetime ago. The Series of ‘47 was televised but camera lenses were primitive. Even if you owned an early television set by Admiral or DuMont, reception was chancy. Passing aircraft and electronic glitches troubled the picture. If you did own a television set, you could watch the Series at home, all right, but you’d see a lot of it through visual static, blur, and snow.

Some trekked to Yankee Stadium on the night of September 29, with jackets and blankets, prepared to camp out until morning. It would be an uncomfortable wait. The temperature that night dropped to 42. But queuing in the dark was the only way ordinary fans could be sure of getting into the Series. Reserved seats, sold only in strips for three or four games, ran to a whopping $24 a strip.

The Yankees opened the bleacher gates at nine
A.M.
Within twenty minutes every seat was filled. Later, in midmorning, 7,000 holders of standing room tickets swarmed into the park. The crowd would total 73,365, but sportswriters later complained that the grandstands, as opposed to the bleachers, were full of wealthy types, not ball fans. The Stadium crowd, they said, was rich and dull.

Ralph Branca started for the Dodgers. He was big, rangy, hawk-nosed, strong, and, at the age of twenty-one, coming off the season of his life. He had won twenty-one games, including several big ones. His fastball snarled, his big curve snapped. Still moving toward a baccalaureate at NYU, young Branca had the world before him. There was not a better youthful pitcher on earth.

“And I was confident,” Branca remembers. “I was twenty-one and I was confident that I could beat the Yankees. I’d beaten all the good clubs in the National League. I’d struck out Stan Musial with the bases loaded. I wasn’t afraid at all. And I went out there, big crowd and all, and I pitched four perfect innings.”

Spec Shea of Naugatuck started for the Yankees and, after getting Eddie Stanky on a fly ball, walked Jackie Robinson. With Pistol Pete Reiser, the plagued and gifted center fielder, batting, Robinson stole second. “He didn’t steal it off the pitcher,” Berra says. “I didn’t get rid of the ball good. Robinson stole that one off me.” Reiser bounced slowly to the mound and Robinson fled for third.

He couldn’t make it. You can’t go from second base to third on a bounder back to the pitcher. Shea threw to Billy Johnson, the third baseman, and Robinson stopped short. No one could stop shorter than Jackie Robinson. Johnson chased Robinson toward second, where Phil Rizzuto waited. Another short and dusty stop. George Stirnweiss ran over from his second base spot to help. Spec Shea ran behind third to back up. Robinson dodged and lunged, dodged and lunged. By the time Rizzuto finally was able to tag out Robinson, Reiser had slid safely into second base.

Technically, Robinson had made a bad play. But he had shown the Yankees basepath magic. The Yankees, if not rattled, were impressed. Dixie Walker lined a hit to left, Reiser scored, and the Dodgers led, 1 to 0.

In Ring Lardner’s phrase, the Yankees didn’t molest Branca none. Soft flies, strikeouts, grounders. In the third inning, Robinson drew his second base on balls. He led far off first, making small, aggravating hops. Shea moved to pick him off first base with four straight throws. Then he balked.

Robinson had not made a hit but he was dominating. Pete Reiser flied to Tommy Henrich and the Dodgers failed to score. But they held their 1 to 0 lead and Branca was overwhelming. He struck out John Lindell. Rizzuto popped to left. Branca struck out Spec Shea. That was his third inning.

George Stirnweiss looked at a third strike, a big, snapping curveball. Henrich flied out. Berra struck out swinging. That was Branca’s fourth inning. He was pitching perfect baseball. Branca says that he has replayed what happened next “maybe five hundred times.

“I knew I was dominating. I knew I had a perfect game and then in my youth — I’m a twenty-one-year-old kid from Westchester County pitching a perfect World Series game ten miles from home at Yankee Stadium — in my youth I get excited. I start pitching too fast, not taking enough breathing time between throws. I start overthrowing and with that I get a little wild . . .”

DiMaggio led off the fifth with a hard grounder to deep shortstop. Reese ranged far to his left and made a marvelous backhanded stop. But DiMaggio, who was thirty-two, still had fair speed. He beat the throw to first by a step. Base hit. Now a more experienced pitcher would have slowed his pace, deliberately. Losing a perfect game is a jolt. A man needs time to refocus.

Instead Branca remembers “just wanting to get the next guy out as quick as I could.” He walked George McQuinn on four pitches. He wanted to start Billy Johnson with a fastball on the fists, but still working too quickly, Branca lost the edge of his control. A fastball nicked Johnson. Bases loaded.

Branca threw a strike to John Lindell, whom he had struck out in the third inning. Then Lindell cracked a fastball down the left field line for two bases. DiMaggio and McQuinn scored. The Yankees led, 2 to 1.

Branca was still working too fast. He walked Rizzuto on five pitches, loading the bases for a second time. Bucky Harris sent Bobby Brown up to bat for Shea. Branca threw two outside pitches to Brown and Burt Shotton sent a coach to lift his rattled starting pitcher. A journeyman named Hank Behrman replaced Branca and walked Brown, forcing home another run. Before the inning ended, the Yankees had scored 5 runs. Joe Page, the free spirit whom sportswriters were calling “the Gay Reliever,” replaced Shea. “Page,” Red Smith wrote, “had no romp, but the confident lefthander got by. His manner said, ‘Gimme the ball and lemme at those Bums.’ “ The Yankees won the ballgame, 5 to 3.

Bucky Harris had outmanaged elderly Burt Shotton. Some Dodger players said as much. “That was a helluva move, lifting Shea and putting in Joe Page,” Ed Stanky said. “That won the game.”

Shea had been pitching adequately, against Branca’s perfection, and when he was scheduled to bat in the fifth the Yankees had taken that 2 to 1 lead. Thus Harris lifted his starting pitcher for pinch hitter Bobby Brown when the starter was
ahead
. “Bucky Harris,” Smith said, “had resolved to wring every last drop of blood out of his big inning.” In later years Casey Stengel perfected this sort of managing. Go for it! Don’t save pitchers and pinch hitters for the late innings. If a typhoon hits, we’ll never play them anyway. Go For It Now!

That tactic in 1947 was just about unheard of.

“You got to hand it to Bucky Harris,” Stanky repeated in the Dodger clubhouse.

“What about Shotton?” a reporter said to Pee Wee Reese. “Did he say anything before he let the writers in the clubhouse?”

“Yes, he did,” Reese said. “He said there would be another game tomorrow.”

Branca was the Dodgers’ best pitcher through 1947. In winning twenty-one games, he’d pitched 280 innings with a fine earned run average of 2.67. He had overpowering stuff.

Now — there is simply no accounting for this — the Dodger high command, Shotton, Rickey, and the rest, went into panic. Branca, the ace, did not get another start in the World Series. The kid had one bad inning and they quit on him.* Panic does not usually win a World Series. The Reliable Jersey House was favoring the Yankees 2 to 9. In other words, nine dollars bet on the Yankees to win the Series would return two dollars. The gamblers were not impressed with the performance under pressure of elderly Burt Shotton.

Wednesday, October 1, came up cool and hazy and the Dodger team appeared to disintegrate. At the center, the embodiment of the Brooklyn collapse was Harold Patrick “Pistol Pete” Reiser, who was coming apart at the age of twenty-eight.

Sometimes Leo Durocher used to say that Willie Mays was the best ballplayer he ever saw. Then, if he were feeling even a little contemplative, Durocher added: “Willie was, but Pete Reiser coulda been.”

In his first full season at Brooklyn, 1941, Reiser led the National League in doubles, triples, runs scored, slugging percentage, and batting average (.343). He could bat right-handed or left-handed and he could
throw
right-handed or left-handed. In full baseball uniform, wearing spikes, Reiser sprinted 100 yards in 9.8 seconds. Although he didn’t compete at track, Reiser was probably the fastest man on earth. He had it all, everything, and he was tough.