The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (13 page)

That first year in Brooklyn, Reiser was beaned twice, cracked into the cement center field wall head first, and still led the league. Next year he ran into another wall head first. “We were in the twelfth inning, no score, two outs, and Enos Slaughter hit the ball at Sportsman’s Park, St. Louis. I caught it and hit the wall and dropped the damn ball. I had the instinct to throw it to Pee Wee Reese, and we just missed gettin’ Slaughter at the plate, and they won, 1 to 0.

“I made one step to start off the field and I woke up the next morning in St. John’s Hospital. My head was bandaged. I had an awful headache.” He would suffer dizzy spells for the rest of his days.

Playing for an army team in 1943, Reiser dove into a hedge running down a fly. Behind the hedge was a ten-foot ditch. He landed on his right shoulder. His throwing arm was never the same. When he came out of the service and returned to the Dodgers, Pistol Pete, dizzy spells, gimpy arm, and all, stole thirty-four bases, the best in the league by twelve. Among the thirty-four he stole home seven times. That was 1946, a year in which Reiser knocked himself out again trying for a diving catch, dislocated his left shoulder, ripped muscles in his left leg, and broke his left ankle. “Pete,” Dixie Walker told me once, “was just the damnedest, son-of-a-bitchin’ best ballplayer in the world. Or woulda been, if only he hadn’t played so son-of-a-bitchin’ hard.”

On October 1, 1947, at hazy Yankee Stadium, Reiser suffered episodes of vertigo. He told nobody. It was not his way to complain. He wanted to play. The other center fielder was Joe DiMaggio. Maybe Pete felt he had something special to prove.

When autumn came, the outfield at the old Yankee Stadium posed harsh problems for the defenders. Autumn sunlight splashed into the fielders’ eyes. The three-tiered stands behind the plate seemed dark and vague. Everybody smoked in those days and the smoke and the haze and the autumn light made it difficult for an outfielder to pick up the ball as it left the bat, even if the outfielder was not suffering from bouts of vertigo, which Reiser was. Dizzy and queasy, Pete had to face a dreadful chiaroscuro.

Game two went terribly for him. In the third inning George Stirnweiss hit a line drive just over Eddie Stanky’s head into right center. Reiser broke late and never caught up with the baseball. He reached it on two bounces but it deflected off his glove and rolled behind him. Stirnweiss was credited with a triple. Reiser was puffing a little and looking grim when John Lindell, two batters later, hit a long fly to straightaway center. Essentially a routine out. But Reiser could not pick up the ball this time, either. He started in, turned awkwardly, ran and lunged, and the ball bounced a few feet beyond him. “DiMaggio puts that in his pocket,” someone said.

“Two DiMaggios pocket it,” someone else answered. “Joe and Dom both make that play.”

Another triple. Another ball Pete Reiser played into a triple. The Yankees took a 2 to 1 lead.

Dixie Walker opened the fourth inning for the Dodgers by lining a rocket into the lower stands in right. Tie score.

Billy Johnson led off the Yankee fourth with another long high fly to center field. Reiser started late yet again, backed up awkwardly, and, as the ball was descending, he tripped and fell backwards. The ball struck his glove and glanced off it. Another triple. A third triple. Phil Rizzuto lifted a fly to left field and Gene Hermanski, not suffering from dizzy spells, just an uncertain outfielder, lost sight of the ball. It dropped in front of him, almost landing on a great toe. Johnson scored and Rizzuto had a gift double. Then, in the fifth inning with a runner on second base, Reiser let a ground single go through his legs, for a two-base error. After that when Reiser caught an easy fly, some in the crowd of 69,865 cheered sarcastically. “Hey, lookit that. Pete Reiser didn’t drop the ball.”

The Yankees won the game for Allie Reynolds, 10 to 3, and the press was less than kind. “The Dodgers,” Rud Rennie wrote, “reverted to the style of play that has made Flatbush famous in song and story. And the Yankees slaughtered them.” Red Smith called Reiser’s performance “a re-birth of vaudeville.

“Pete,” Smith wrote, “had appalling difficulties with the sun on fly balls, and on ground balls too, for that matter. This at least will be spared when the carnival moves on to Ebbets Field for Game Three. The sun no longer shines in Brooklyn.”

Reiser would play parts of five more seasons, but that sunny October day at the Stadium was really the end. He couldn’t play much after that. The best prospect Leo Durocher ever saw was washed up at the age of twenty-eight.

Reiser, a trim five foot eleven in his youth, began to drink heavily. He put on a round belly and flapping jowls. In 1952 he played thirty-four games for Cleveland. He stole one base and batted .136.

Afterwards, coaching and managing in the minor leagues, Reiser was dominated by bitterness and drink. He lost his last bush league job, managing St. Petersburg, for drunkenness. When they told him he was through, ol’ Pete called a final team meeting.

The young players rallied round, wondering what message the great Pete Reiser could offer to help them on with life.

“I jes got one thing to tell you guys,” Reiser said. He paused and ran a finger along his teeth.

“None of you sonsabitches is ever gonna make the major leagues.”

The greatest prospect of his time died a forgotten man when he was sixty-two years old. The record book lists the date of his death as October 25, 1981.

How little the record book tells us. The great Pete Reiser died years and years before, in the hazy October sunlight at Yankee Stadium.

Surely it is worth remembering that once, before Willie, Mickey, and the Duke, there was a kid called Pistol Pete.

As Durocher liked to remind people, mister, this was a guy who could do it all . . .

Joe DiMaggio sat silently in the Yankee clubhouse, shirtless and puffing a cigarette. Younger players were making noise, triumphant noises, but DiMaggio was quiet.

“That was rough out there on Reiser, wasn’t it?” Bob Cooke of the
Tribune
asked.

“It’s always like that in the fall,” DiMaggio said, matter-of-factly. He wasn’t gloating. He was just saying how it was. “It gets a lot darker around home plate and the haze settles in from all those smokes. It’s no cinch to see a fly ball coming out of those shadows.”

“You didn’t have any trouble yourself,” Cooke said.

“Don’t you worry about the old boy. I’ve been playing in this park for a long time.”

The Reliable Jersey House quoted the Yankees to win the Series at 1 to 8. That is, you would have to put up eight dollars on the Yankees to get back one, when and if they sent the Dodgers home. The great confrontation, the Fall Classic, was turning into an October fizzle.

On Thursday, October 2, Mohandas K. Gandhi marked his seventy-eighth birthday and said, with what bystanders called “a terrible weariness,” that the masses in India were violent despite his pleas for peace. “Friends had hoped I would live to be 125,” Gandhi said, “but I have lost all desire to live long. I do not want to go on living at all while hatred and killing fill the atmosphere.”

That same day Mueller Macaroni of Jersey City, New Jersey, one of America’s largest pasta houses, was reorganized as a nonprofit corporation with all its net income earmarked for New York University Law School. Under sharp questioning, an attorney named John Gerdes, of 1Wall Street, conceded that “technically, yes. I can’t deny it. This does put NYU law school in the spaghetti business.”

At Ebbets Field, in a shabbily played and intensely exciting game, the Dodgers defeated the Yankees, 9 to 8. It was not purists’ baseball but it was a festive Flatbush day. Barred from managing, Leo Durocher was attending all the games, officially as a fan, accompanied by his actress bride, Laraine Day. “The slightly musical organization known as the Dodger Symphony [actually a reasonably competent four-piece band] materialized in the lower stands and serenaded Mr. and Mrs. L. Durocher with ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,’” Red Smith reported. “Mr. Durocher arose and shook the leader’s hand. Mrs. Durocher, a music lover, blushed.”

The Dodgers tore into the Yankee starter, Bobo Newsom. “As soon as the attack began,” Smith wrote, “the species of fauna described as typical of Brooklyn began coming out of the woodwork. With half the capacity of Yankee Stadium the joint shuddered with twice the noise. Colored balloons floated from the stands. A blimp rode overhead, almost obscuring Bobo Newsom in its shadow. The joint was jumping.”*

Joe Hatten managed to subdue the Yankees in the first. George Stirnweiss whaled a line drive off the right field wall. Dixie Walker played the carom deftly and held Stirnweiss to a single. Then Tommy Henrich bounced into a double play and Lindell grounded out.

The Brooklyn crowd made throaty noises as the Dodgers came to bat. Stanky bounced out to Newsom. Jackie Robinson lined a single to center. As he took his daring, hopping lead off first, the crowd began to bellow. The rooting was palpable. Come on, Jackie. Come on, big guy. Steal these Bronx bums blind.

Yogi Berra was not catching for the Yankees. He had thrown a ball away the day before and he had failed to catch a pop fly near home plate. “Worst World Series catching I ever saw,” grumbled the tall patriarch Connie Mack. Bucky Harris had heard of Connie Mack. He benched Berra for the rookie, Sherman Lollar.

Robinson’s big lead rattled Newsom, who fell behind as he pitched to Pete Reiser. When the count reached 3 and 1, Robinson stole second. The ball got through Rizzuto, and Robinson took a few steps toward third. Stirnweiss backing up the play flipped to Rizzuto, who tagged out Robinson.

Reiser walked. With Dixie Walker batting, he raced for second, but Lollar’s accurae throw to Rizzuto caught him. Then Reiser could not rise. He had jammed his ankle. He felt better after a while but the pain came back and he had to leave the game (and the Dodger starting lineup) a little later.

The Dodgers broke out in the second. With one out Gene Hermanski walked and scored when catcher Bruce Edwards doubled off the left field wall. Reese singled to left center, scoring Edwards. After a fly ball, Joe Hatten singled Reese to second. Both advanced when Lollar mishandled a low pitch. Eddie Stanky doubled them home.

Harris lifted Newsom for Vic Raschi, and Robinson lined a missile into right. Henrich scooped it on a bounce and held Stanky at third.

Reiser was the next hitter, but by now he could barely walk. Shotton sent Carl Furillo in to hit for Reiser, a move sportswriters questioned. The criticism of Furillo, then twenty-five years old, was that he couldn’t do much with tough righthanded pitchers. Raschi was one tough right-handed pitcher. The sporting press buzzed querulously and Furillo slammed an outside fastball off the scoreboard in right. Stanky and Robinson ran home and the Dodgers led, 6 to 0.

The Yankees came back with two runs in the third inning. The Dodgers scored one more. The teams clawed at one another through the day. DiMaggio hit a long two-run homer in the fifth. Berra, whose Series batting average up to this point was nothing, literally .000, went in to bat for Sherman Lollar in the seventh inning, at which point Lollar’s Series average was .667.

Before the second-guessing of Bucky Harris could gain much footing, Berra cracked a fastball over the scoreboard in right field. The score was now Dodgers 9, Yankees 8. Shotton finally sent for his glowering, guzzling relief star, Hugh Thomas Casey, out of Buckhead, Georgia. The game came down to a fascinating eighth inning.

Tommy Henrich walked and Lindell singled him to second base. No one out, a one-run game, and Joe DiMaggio coming up to bat.

“What would you do now, if you were Hugh Casey?” Red Smith said to Rud Rennie.

“DiMaggio’s swing is grooved,” Rennie said. “He’s got two hits already. I’d walk him. Third base is empty. Walk DiMaggio, load the bases, and pitch to George McQuinn.”

That wasn’t the way Hugh Casey played the game. He snapped a curve ball across the outside corner. Strike one. Another curve missed wide. One and one.

DiMaggio was looking for a third curve, but Casey fooled him with a fastball, up and in. DiMaggio started an awkward swing, then tried to hold up. The pitch hit his bat and rolled to Stanky, who tagged Lindell in the basepath and tossed to Jackie Robinson. DiMaggio was doubled up by thirty feet. Henrich, the tying run, moved to third, but there he stayed as Robinson made a nice play on George McQuinn’s hard bounder. The Yankees did not threaten in the ninth. The Dodgers won, 9 to 8, after three hours and five minutes of play, up to then the longest game in World Series history.

DiMaggio neither shunned the press nor granted usable interviews. He sat smoking and cursing himself for taking a half swing into a double play.

“You hit a good homer, Joe,” Harold Rosenthal said, trying to shake free a quote.

“Fuck that,” said the Yankee Clipper. “We got beat.”

On May 3, 1947, Branch Rickey had dealt the Pittsburgh Pirates five shopworn Dodger ballplayers for $300,000* and an obscure five-foot, six-inch left-hand-hitting outfielder named Albert Francis Gionfriddo, from the metropolis of Dysart, Pennsylvania. The Dodgers owned a rich supply of young left-hand-hitting outfielders: Duke Snider, George Shuba, Dick Whitman, Marv Rackley, all of whom seemed to be better ballplayers than Al Gionfriddo. No one could understand why Branch Rickey wanted him. Then someone was struck with a punch line. Rickey was bringing Gionfriddo in from Pittsburgh because he needed somebody to carry the money, the three hundred grand.
^†

By 1991, Al Gionfriddo had evolved into a delightful and spirited party of sixty-nine, residing in Goleta, California, just outside Santa Barbara, where he supported himself by selling golf clubs and fishing lures he crafted with sure hands. “I know you want to talk about the catch,” he said, when I came calling. “Red Barber called it the impossible catch. Joe DiMaggio said it was better than the catch Willie Mays made in 1954. Joe D. said it was the best catch in Series history. I’m not arguing with that. Heck, I
made
the catch. But can I tell you something else, first?”