The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (16 page)

*“That was pretty bad for our ballclub,” Branca says, “but not as bad as 1951, when the team was totally mismanaged by that piece of dreck Charlie Dressen.”

*Numbers of writers for the New York newspapers adopted a patronizing tone when writing about Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and Ebbets Field. Smith, for example, never referred to Yankee Stadium as “a joint.” The Dodger ballpark was a forty-five-minute subway trip or a five-dollar cab ride from Manhattan, neither popular with sportswriters. As Duke Snider mentioned, a number of Dodger players, including Jackie Robinson, picked up on the patronizing and resented it. Smith went to his grave insisting that Brooklyn was a provincial outpost. He himself was bom in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

*Macmillan’s
Baseball Encyclopedia
lists a figure of $100,000. Dick Young of the
Daily News
said the true number was $300,000. My suspicion is that Young was more accurate than Macmillan.

+Rickey’s contract with the Brooklyn National League Baseball Club, Inc., provided that beyond salary he was paid ten percent of all player sales. He pocketed a snappy $30,000 on this one May deal. Some, notably Walter O’Malley, regarded the Rickey arrangement as a conflict of interest. It figured prominently in the O’Malley-Rickey shootout, down the lane.

*Fewest hits, most walks, longest stretch of no-hit pitching.

*Trying to sharpen Barney’s control, Rickey ordered the young man to throw with a patch on one eye, then a patch on the other. The experimenting did not cease. For mysterious reasons, at the age of twenty-five, Barney dropped out of the major leagues.

*DiMaggio saw Willie Mays’s famous catch at the Polo Grounds. “That was a great one, too,” he says, “but Mays had plenty of room. Running back, all he had to worry about was the ball. On my drive, Gionfriddo had to worry about the ball and those iron gates. He had to worry about running out of room, about getting hurt. With all that, I say he made the greater catch.”

I
MET LARRY MACPHAIL
for the first time five years after certain episodes that followed the 1947 World Series. “The wildest, rowdiest and most sensational affair ever staged,” J. G. Taylor Spink, the publisher of
The Sporting News
, wrote of these events in a front-page story that mixed hyperbole, hyperventilation, and — surprise! — tough, honest reporting.

The postbellum MacPhail I encountered on a cold March afternoon in 1952 was subdued, hoarse, sober, and so determined to avoid controversy that the Once Roarin’ Redhead struck some as being dull.

Not I. As a child in Brooklyn I had seen from a distance how MacPhail created the modern Dodgers and I brought to our meeting profound respect. MacPhail responded warmly. He spoke softly and kindly of his Brooklyn days. “The franchise was dying,” he said. “Remember when I put lights into Ebbets Field?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The lights were a pulmotor. They kept the Brooklyn franchise alive.”

“Is it true you actually tried to kidnap the Kaiser, Mr. MacPhail?”

“Sure is. We wanted the bastard brought to justice as a war criminal. Right after the Armistice in ‘18, a few of us drove into Holland, which was neutral territory, in our army uniforms, and we got right up to Kaiser Wilhelm’s citadel in a town called Doom. But before we got the bastard, a neutral Dutch infantry company opened up with machine guns. Some neutrals! We had to back off.”

MacPhail mentioned in an uncomplaining way the battle he was waging against throat cancer. He even forgave me for being, as I was at the time, a member of the New York press. But when I tried to lead him into a discussion of a controversy rocking baseball — a controversy that really was wild, rowdy, and sensational — he withdrew. “No comment.” Then, “Can I trust you, if I go off the record?”

I was twenty-three years old. “You can trust me, Mr. MacPhail.”

“Well, son, let me tell you this. Ty Cobb may have been the best player in the history of the game. That’s a possibility.

“But here’s a certainty. Ty Cobb is the craziest son of a bitch on earth.”

“I can’t write that?”

“You can’t write that,” MacPhail said.

“I’d like to write that, Mr. MacPhail.”

“I’m sure you would, son. But you gave your word.”

Across twenty-four major league seasons, almost a quarter century, Ty Cobb batted .367. That is a lifetime average beyond approach and just about beyond belief. Indeed, Cobb’s lifetime average is
the
major league record that will endure from here to eternity.

Cobb was also the best base runner of his time, some say of any time. He stole 892 bases, and ploughing the basepaths he intimidated infielders as no one before or since. Often, during pregame warm-up, Cobb sat in the dugout, ostentatiously sharpening his spikes. Although no such record is kept, Ty Cobb must have spiked more infielders than anyone in the annals. To tag out Cobb was also to yelp in pain.

His salary never exceeded $30,000, but beyond the ballfield Cobb invested his way to a fortune. For years, he played down his financial skills, but in 1947, when Cobb’s wife, the former Charlie Marion Lombard of Augusta, Georgia, sued for divorce, court papers established Cobb’s wealth as “in excess of $7,000,000.” His two prime winners, selected generations ago, were a soda pop company down in his home country, known as Coca-Cola, and a vehicular growth stock in the town where he played ball, called General Motors. “In many ways,” the late Vincent X. Flaherty wrote, “Ty Cobb, the greatest of the Tigers, became symbolic of Detroit itself. He came along at a time when a lot of struggling mechanics were founding an industrial empire — mechanics who in after years became fabulous millionaires and grand dukes of industry.”

In the spring of 1952, Ty Cobb, perhaps the greatest player of all time, surely the richest ex-player anywhere, lent his name to two unusual articles published in
Life
magazine. “They don’t play baseball anymore,” Cobb said. “They’ve ruined the game.”
Life
promoted the stories with strident full-page newspaper advertisements. The magazine published photographs of Bob Feller, Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio, Ralph Kiner, Phil Rizzuto, and Eddie Stanky. Then the advertising copy asked:

“According to Ty Cobb, which two are the only
great
ball players?”

It was a rousing two-part piece, written or rather typed by Marshall Smith, the sports editor of
Life
, but fueled, generated, and thought out by Mr. Cobb. Hype aside, much of what Cobb had to say was applicable then and may be even more applicable today.

Cobb came charging off the pages like a famished lion charging a well-fed lamb. Today’s ballplayers (today being 1952)? Growl. Sniff. Roar. Why, the blokes don’t bother to learn fundamentals.

What’s that, Ty? Big league ballplayers don’t know fundamentals? Roar. Growl. They don’t even practice, or anyway not enough, or anyway not in the right manner. Most of them don’t even train seriously.

But, Ty, the big leaguers want to make money, don’t they, and training pays off. Maybe they did, Cobb admitted, but all they
really
cared about was cashing in on home runs. Cobb himself led the major leagues in homers across the season of 1909. He hit nine. Now, in 1952, Cobb argued, the home run had become so commonplace it had “lost its thrill.”

What about the pantheon stars Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio? They “limp along on one cylinder,” Cobb wrote. He amplified in interesting but debatable ways.

When Williams came to bat, most ballclubs shifted hard to the right, the better to collar the hard drives that Williams pulled. Usually only one man, the third baseman, covered the entire left side of the infield. Against a shift of this sort, Cobb claimed, Babe Ruth would have hit the ball to left or bunted, defeating both his opponents and the shift. Williams neither bunted nor hit to left. He was not a great hitter, according to Cobb, because he had not mastered the fundamental of slapping singles to the opposite field.

DiMaggio? A lazy layabout. Cobb wrote that DiMaggio was perhaps the greatest natural player who ever lived, possessed of speed and grace, agility, a good eye, and long, strong muscles. But, Cobb commented, DiMaggio “hated exertion” and never took “a lick of exercise” all winter. As a result, DiMaggio went to spring training with muscles “weakened and soft,” which, Cobb said, led to his frequent injuries.

When Cobb was a ballplayer, he played with his mind as well as his body and he stayed in condition all year. In the winter he claimed to have walked twenty to thirty miles a day, every day, tramping the snows of Canada in heavy boots or marching over the red-clay fields of Georgia in shoes weighted down by lead.

The champion Yankees seemed particularly to enrage Cobb. After one World Series, he wrote, Yogi Berra took a job as a greeter in a restaurant; Phil Rizzuto sold men’s clothing, and DiMaggio just sat around. “Ribbon clerk” jobs, Cobb stormed. The men should “go deliver ice.”

In fairness, some refutation of Cobb’s charges is in order. Williams could have hit to left field; he knew how to do that. His argument was — and is — that pulling the ball to right, even against the shift, was what he did best. As stubborn as Cobb, Williams was damned if he was going to change or let others dictate how he should swing.

DiMaggio was never Spartan, but his worst physical problems probably proceeded not from indolence but from arthritis. If exercise cured arthritis, the world would be full of bankrupt aspirin companies.

It is the theory of Jon Miller, as astute broadcaster who reports on the Baltimore Orioles, that each generation produces at least one harsh attack on contemporary baseball players and a concomitant glorifying of those who went before. As Cobb in the 1950s lionized players of the 1920s, so today we lionize the very 1950s players Cobb derided. In twenty-five years, according to Miller, people will exalt the players of today, who are currently regarded as overpaid and undercommitted. “ It’s the nature of things,” Miller says.

While I’m inclined to agree, the Cobb articles in
Life
remain unique, not for his exalted reasoning but for the sulfurous heat that was Ty Cobb.

Despite Rizzuto’s soft job as a suit salesman, Cobb named him as one of the two genuinely great ballplayers of the Era. Rizzuto and Musial were the men Cobb had in mind when he said “only two players” could stand comparison with those from earlier times.

Not Pee Wee Reese, not Enos Slaughter, not George Kell, not Jackie Robinson —
pointedly
not Jackie Robinson — just to mention a few players Cobb spurned who have since been chosen for the Hall of Fame.

What did Cobb have to say about these worthies?

Here is his copyrighted opinion;

“Throw them a bag of peanuts.”

For several days, everyone talked Cobb. Columnists wrote Cobb. Editorial writers deplored Cobb. And, of course,
Life
magazine sold out throughout the country.

Eisenhower won the New Hampshire Republican primary, defeating Robert Taft by 12,000 votes. On the Democratic side, Senator Estes Kefauver defeated Harry Truman by 3,000. Backed by machine gunners and tanks, Fulgencio Batista took over Cuba in a bloody coup that lasted seventy-seven minutes.

Fine, fine. Eisenhower was probably better than Taft or Dewey.

Kefauver was preachy, but we were tired of Harry Truman and his self-righteous Korean war.

Batista? Dictators came and went in Havana, but the whorehouses never closed.

Such was the stuff of chatter. Getting serious, people said, “Wait a minute here, let’s talk something important. Can you really
believe
Ty Cobb?”

That week Bob Cooke, the sports editor of the
Herald Tribune
, assigned me to interview Larry MacPhail, who had emerged from a sort of self-imposed obscurity as the new president of Bowie Racetrack. I’d covered horse racing a bit and enjoyed some horsemen, but to me in those years racing was a sport, or maybe a business. Baseball was something else. In Prospero’s term, baseball was “rough magic.”*

“Could be a nice little story,” Cookie said, “MacPhail moving into another world. Don’t try to get him mad. Don’t try to drink with him. Don’t press. Just write what you see.”

I nodded and the boss and I talked about softball prospects for the
Herald Tribune
team. Cookie played shortstop. I played third. Cooke was a patrician gentleman. He couldn’t hit.

As I mounted my honeydew Chevrolet convertible — the pale green car was $200 cheaper than the red one — I began working out numbers of questions to trap MacPhail away from racetrack talk.

Was the great DiMaggio really a lazy layabout? (Here comes the Jersey Turnpike.)

Was the great Williams just a free-swinging bum? (Look at these trucks. Every truck in New Jersey wants to crush my little green car and me.)

There’s no arguing about Musial, but is Rizzuto really that good? What about Reese? It was MacPhail who brought Reese to Brooklyn in 1940. (Watch that damn trailer. Where the hell is Maryland? Why didn’t I take the Pennsylvania Railroad?)

With all the Cobb furor, MacPhail anticipated what I planned to do. He blocked my moves by putting our interview on a personal basis and, manipulating with great skill, played the off-the-record game to a fare-thee-well. It is almost always a bad idea to let an interview subject take you off record; at twenty-three I was learning my trade.

On the record MacPhail said that he was a novice at running racetracks. Yes, he had brought night ball to the major leagues, but he didn’t like the idea of night horse racing. He went on in a mildly interesting way and then helped out in the dedication of a statue to a horse called Billy Barton, a steeplechase jumper who lived thirty-five years. My story began:

Larry MacPhail made his debut as a racing executive this afternoon at a party where he shared top billing with a horse.

I dealt with his subdued manner indirectly:

He guarantees no more racing improvements than increased park space. He refuses to rap anybody famous. As a new member of Maryland’s gentry, Larry seems to feel that loud talk and bickering are not seemly.

The quiet of countrylife may have had its effects.

“Nice piece,” Cooke told me.

“I blew Cobb,” I said. “I couldn’t get MacPhail to talk Cobb on the record.”

“I’m tired of Cobb,” Cooke said. “You wrote a nice piece and you didn’t press.”

“I let him take me off record and then I felt I had to honor that.”

“You did right,” Cooke said. “No one story, none,
ever
, is worth losing a source like Larry MacPhail.”

Cooke liked my work considerably more than I did. Exactly three days after the MacPhail piece appeared, he pulled me out of a drab Manhattan March and sent me to Florida — or was it Eden? — to cover the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The MacPhail we are about to meet, back in October 1947, is not someone I knew personally. He does not seem well. Some of his conduct traces to whiskey but some clearly goes beyond that. I don’t think it is reaching to assert this: After the 1947 World Series, when the Yankees of Larry MacPhail won the World Series from a Dodger team significantly shaped by Larry MacPhail, the creator, MacPhail himself, underwent a nervous breakdown.

By tradition, World Series winning teams threw victory parties. The players and the manager and coaches were invited, of course, along with wives and selected, which is to say non-confrontational, writers and sports announcers and hangerson. By tradition the parties were off record. The mood was manic — the host team had just won the Series — and the abundance of good whiskey and attractive women on top of a manic mood, encouraged excessive behavior. “When I go to one of those things,” said Rud Rennie of the
Tribune
, whom MacPhail twice tried to have fired, “my understanding is that I’m a guest, not a reporter. A guest who doesn’t tattle, if he is a gentleman.” Which Rud Rennie was.

A full complement of reporters attended the Yankee victory party in 1947, held in the Grand Ballroom of the Biltmore Hotel on the night of October 6. Neither MacPhail nor the old gentlemanly press code really survived the evening.