The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (15 page)

Here was how he made his first World Series start while Branca, the best Dodger starting pitcher, sat on a bench.

Barney walked George Stirnweiss on five pitches. Right-handed Clyde King began warming up in the Dodger bullpen, down the right field line. Tommy Henrich cracked a double off the wall in right center. Knowing Furillo’s arm, Stirnweiss stopped at third.

Barney walked Johnny Lindell on four pitches. He struck out Joe DiMaggio on five pitches. George McQuinn — Harris had not benched him, after all — tapped to Barney, who tossed home, forcing Stirnweiss. Barney struck out Bill Johnson. Two walks; one hit; two strikeouts; no runs. Something was happening every minute.

Aaron Robinson was catching for the Yankees. Harris did bench Berra, but only for one day. After that Yogi played two games as an outfielder. Harris was too smart to bench the Berra bat.

Shea handled the Dodgers easily. In the second inning, Aaron Robinson slammed a long fly that Furillo caught at the wall in right center field. Barney walked Rizzuto. He wild-pitched Rizzuto to second base. Rizzuto tried to steal third but Bruce Edwards’s throw caught him. Spec Shea lined out.

With one out in the third inning and the game still scoreless, Barney threw four straight balls to Henrich. Then he walked Lindell. DiMaggio bounced into a double play, ending the flurry.

Someone in the press box remarked that Barney was playing with disaster, using DiMaggio to get his important outs. Someone else observed the Dodger Symphony tootling through the stands. All the musicians wore threads and patches — part of the act — except for the second cornetist. He sported clean pressed slacks and a neat bright yellow sweater. “It could be,” Harold Rosenthal remarked, “that the feller’s tramp clothes are at the cleaners.”

The Dodgers weren’t hitting Shea. Then with two out in the fourth, Barney walked Aaron Robinson and Phil Rizzuto. Basic Barney. Now the Yankee pitcher came up. Barney pressed. Trying to throw a strike, he let up on a fastball. Shea lined it to left field. The Yankees led, 1 to 0.

Then in the fifth with one out, DiMaggio stopped playing Barney’s fall guy. He slammed a high drive three rows deep into the upper stands in left. One batter later, Rex Barney was gone.

The Dodger rally came in the sixth. Gionfriddo pinch hit and drew a walk. With one out, Reese walked. Robinson cracked a low drive up the middle that glanced off Spec Shea’s glove and carried into center field. Gionfriddo scored and when DiMaggio threw to third, trying to get Reese, Robinson advanced to second. Home run or not, DiMaggio was having a rocky day. He turned things around a bit by running down Gene Hermanski’s long fly for the third out.

It came down again to the ninth inning. The Yankees led, 2 to 1, as they had the day before. Bruce Edwards singled. The pitcher Vic Lombardi ran for Edwards. Furillo bunted the tying run to second. After a fly out, Cookie Lavagetto pinch hit for the second day in a row.

He took an inside fastball for a strike.

Ball one. Low.

Ball two. Outside.

Ball three. Outside.

The noise level at Ebbets Field rose mightily.

Spec Shea threw a fastball past Lavagetto. Three and two. The game was on the line.

Shea threw another fastball. Lavagetto swung and missed. Heroism in the batter’s box is a sometime thing. At the request of photographers, DiMaggio kissed Spec Shea in the Yankee clubhouse.

The Series was moving back to the Bronx. The Yankees led, three games to two.

Some of these wonderful games came down to an inning. Others to a single at bat. Now, game six came down to what everyone called “the Catch.”

“Dammit,” said Al Gionfriddo forty-four years later, when he was sixty-nine. “I didn’t even think to keep the ball. I made the catch and Carl Furillo says somethin’ nice and I’m runnin’ in with Carl, you know, all excited. I made the catch and saved three runs and like a fool I drop the ball at the pitcher’s mound. I’m the first hitter next inning. They give me a big hand. I foul the first pitch into the seats. That’s the ball!

“Some fan got it. Maybe he kept it. Maybe he never knew that was the ball I saved a home run with, and saved the Dodgers.”

These teams pounded each other. The Dodgers scuffed Allie Reynolds for two runs in the first inning, two more in the third on successive doubles, cuffed by Reese, Robinson, and Dixie Walker.

The Yankees knocked out the journeyman left-hander Vic Lombardi with four in the third. They went ahead in the fourth when Berra, now a right fielder, singled home Aaron Robinson.

Branca, working relief, held off the Yankees fairly well into the sixth. Then the Dodgers broke through for four runs and an 8 to 5 lead. As a defensive measure, Shotton sent Gionfriddo to left field in the bottom of the sixth.

Joe Hatten replaced Branca and quickly pitched into trouble. Allie Clark hit a sharp line drive that Reese flagged down. Stirnweiss walked. Henrich poled a long drive to right that sailed into the stands a few feet foul. Then he popped out. Berra singled. Hatten was being pounded. Now this staggering left-hander was called upon to pitch to DiMaggio, among the best right-handed batters of all time.

If Shotton was not comatose, he was dozing. He had Hugh Casey in the Dodger bullpen. He let Hatten pitch to DiMaggio. A home run, and DiMaggio was swinging hard, would tie the game. In left field, Al Gionfriddo knew that. He knew DiMaggio would be trying to pull the ball against a left-handed pitcher. Gionfriddo moved toward the left field foul line.

In doing that, he also moved closer to home plate. The left field foul pole at the Stadium was 301 feet away from home. Dead left was a kind of box. If you shaded a man to pull, you played him shallow. A deep fly down the left field line was out of reach, except to customers in the stands who would have had to put down their beer cups to catch it.

Gionfriddo shaded DiMaggio left. Some have criticized him for playing shallow, but those were ignorant of Yankee Stadium geography. Nobody tells what happened next more vividly than the principal, Gionfriddo.

“DiMaggio comes to bat and we were leading 8 to 5, and they had two men on base and there were two outs and I’m playing him to pull, which was in close. It had to be.

“He hits the ball to left center. Very deep. I mean Joe really hit it. He took some swing.

“At Yankee Stadium, the left field bullpen, where the visiting relief pitchers warmed up, there were these gates that the relief pitchers walked through when they went in to pitch. The gates were metal, with an iron frame. Something between three and four feet high.

“I picked DiMaggio’s ball up good. He hit it high and deep toward those iron gates. I didn’t think I had a chance. I’m maybe three hundred forty, three hundred fifty feet out. Next to those gates, there’s a sign, big capital letters. It says; 415 FT.

“I put my head down and I ran, my back was toward home plate and you know I had it right. I had the ball sighted just right.” After all these years, Gionfriddo laughs in gorgeous triumph.

“The ball is going at the bullpen gate and I look over my left shoulder. My back is to the plate. Over my left shoulder. I am left-handed. I throw left. So the glove is on my right hand. I see the ball coming and as the ball is coming in, I make a jump.

“Since I am left-handed I have to reach my glove, which is on my right hand, over my left shoulder. I do that. I jump and make the reach.

“I’m turning in midair. I’m turning and reaching and I catch the ball. I crash the gate. I hit it hard, against my right hip. I hold the ball.

“I’m with DiMaggio years later. We re talking to kids. Joe D. is a lot more famous than me.

“He tells the kids, ‘Al’s kind of small. You know a small guy has to work extra hard to make it to the major leagues.

“‘Some big guy’ — this is still DiMaggio talking — ‘he probably wouldn’t have ever
made
the Catch. A big guy woulda backed off and left it to go over the fence.

“‘But this little guy. He always had to work harder than anybody else. That’s the way it is in baseball. The little guys always have to work harder. So he was used to working, Al, this little guy, and he never gave up and he made the greatest catch that anybody ever made in the whole history of baseball.’”

Bald now, with wisps of white hair, Al Gionfriddo, a little guy who doesn’t want to brag, affects a shrug. “Anyway, that’s what Joe DiMaggio says.”*

The Dodgers won the sixth game, 8 to 6.

Shotton, dull, obdurate Burt Shotton, shuffled his lineup for the seventh game. And the first thing he did was bench Al Gionfriddo. He replaced him in left field with Gene Hermanski, in turn replaced by reserve infielder Eddie Miksis. And before long Miksis was playing a fly ball into a triple.

Bench Gionfriddo? After the greatest catch in history? If there is a God and God follows baseball, He noticed that Gionfriddo was benched. Surely Burt Shotton was foredoomed.

Al Laney, an elegant journalist, wrote a fine paragraph in the
Herald Tribune
. “This extraordinary World Series of 1947, which has provided perhaps more thrills and more hysteria than any other, finally came down to a pleasant, sunny afternoon on which people could sit back and enjoy an ordinary ball game without having their nerves worn raw or their emotions too heavily involved. This was a straight-forward game with reason and logic in it and never once did panic sit up and make a noise.”

* * *

The Western world focused on the Series. But as the cold war gathered, Eastern Europe didn’t seem to care. The Soviet army was throwing a party near Budapest, Walter Kerr reported in the
Tribune
, with vodka toasts and great bowls of rich food, to demonstrate its peaceful intentions. “Toward the end of the evening, the Russian commander escorted his guests through his quarters, including a secret map room that showed the disposition of Soviet forces.

“An American officer, suspecting the display was not genuine, deliberately forgot his gold-braided hat. Three hours later he returned to pick it up.

“The entire ‘headquarters’ had vanished.”

The Bronx was mighty and would prevail. Shotton started Hal Gregg, who was, quite simply, not a winning major league pitcher. (His lifetime record: 40 won and 48 lost.) Even though Branca had pitched the day before, a better manager might have started him, saying simply, “Throw as hard as you can for as long as you can.” A genius manager, a Casey Stengel, might have started Hughie Casey. The Yankees didn’t care for Hugh’s slants at all. He was a hostile man who liked to knock down hitters. DiMaggio. Henrich. The great ones. Hughie Casey put them on their butts.

There was no quit in this dogged Dodger team. Swinging against Spec Shea in the second inning, Hermanski tripled around Berra in right field. Bruce Edwards, the stolid catcher, singled Hermanski home. Furillo singled Edwards to second base.

Bucky Harris lifted Spec Shea for Bill Bevens. Spider Jorgensen bounced a double into the right field stands and the Dodgers led by two runs. But Rizzuto singled home a run in the bottom of the second and the Yankees went ahead with two runs in the fourth. Johnson walked. With two out, Rizzuto lined a single to left. Bobby Brown hit for Bevens and doubled to left. Behrman replaced Gregg.

Where was Branca?

where was Casey?

Where was Shotton?

Behrman walked Stirnweiss on four pitches. Henrich singled Rizzuto home. The Yankees had a lead they would not relinquish.

In the top of that inning Bill Bevens had retired three Dodgers, with a man on first. The last of the three, Gregg, bounced to second. Following that pitch Bevens grabbed for his right shoulder. Few noticed.

Joe Page replaced Bevens in the fifth inning. Across the final five innings of this Series, Page allowed only one hit, Eddie Miksis’s one-out single in the ninth.

Experienced people can tell about such things. The Yankees were going to win. A crowd of sportswriters swarmed about outside the Yankee dressing room in the Stadium catacombs, while the ninth inning still was being played.

Abruptly Larry MacPhail, the hard-drinking Yankee boss, cleared a path among the writers. “If we win this,” he bellowed, and the Yankees were going to win this, “I’m outa baseball.”

“What’s that?” asked Harold Rosenthal of the
Tribune
.

“You heard me. If we win this fucking game, I quit.”

“Why, Larry?”

“Cause I wanna. That’s why. That good enough for you?”

Relaxed in comfort at what he calls “Varicose Villa,” a retirement community in northern New Jersey, Rosenthal remembers that moment with electric memory.

The
New York Times
of 1947 employed pedestrian writers to cover baseball. The paper’s passion for lively sports coverage had not yet been born. The best
Times
baseball writer, though far from the best in New York, was James P. Dawson. “Jimmy could write better than the other two dinosaurs,” Rosenthal says, “but writing wasn’t his forte. Eating was Dawson’s forte. His particular forte was eating free food.

“The Series is handout time. Free eats for everybody.

“So we’re standing under the Stadium stands, waiting to cover the winning dressing room, and Jim Dawson is eating the biggest free hot dog in the world.

“And MacPhail announces he’s quitting. For emphasis, he smacks Dawson in the back.

“I remember that. What I remember even more is James Dawson of the
New York Times
damn near choking on his seventeenth free hot dog. That is a Series record, I believe.”

The Yankees won the seventh game, 5 to 2.

At some cost, MacPhail stole the next day’s headlines from his team.

*Barber was an exemplar of restraint when broadcasting, but a typewriter did funny things to his self-control. Writing on Jackie Robinson across the season of 1947, Barber not merely blows his own horn but blasts his own tuba: “I had the microphone at Brooklyn when Robinson came. It was the hottest microphone any announcer had to face.” Working in liberal New Deal Brooklyn, where most people supported Robinson and where the corporation that hired Robinson also employed the announcers, all Barber had to do was watch his Confederate drawl. Hot mike? Barber held a piece of cake.