The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (20 page)

Skilled traveling secretaries — Eddie Brannick of the Giants was the best — bought meals and drinks for sportswriters, the basic device employed in keeping a benign press nonmalignant. “Ya got everything you need? We’ll have dinner next week. Bring yer wife. What? Ya short a couple bucks. Say, here’s a fifty, and don’t worry about it. If ya can’t give it back, the New York Giants won’t come looking for ya.” Such was the state of the art.

After World War II, the Yankees hired Patterson as publicity director. “I invented the damn job,” Patterson said when we talked in 1991. “I was the first full-time press agent in baseball history.” Coincidental with Patterson’s emergence, reporters, editors, and publishers were struggling toward the beginnings of self-discipline. It was then that the
Herald Tribune
, the
Times
, and later the
Daily News
started paying travel expenses for their writers. Subsequently, several reporters wrote hardnosed stories about Larry MacPhail’s drunken breakdown.*

“What I did,” Patterson said, as we lunched at a restaurant near his home in Anaheim, California, “is what today people call managing news. I’m not apologizing. I was damn good at managing news.

“Look, I saw that the Yankees were not just competing against the Giants and the Dodgers. They were competing against every leisure-time activity that you have in summer. If you decided to go to Jones Beach, you didn’t go to Yankee Stadium. You didn’t buy our tickets, pay our parking charge, eat our hot dogs, or drink our beer. I was trying to make the Yankees more interesting than the Giants
and
Jones Beach as well.

“In ‘49, we had a lot of injuries. Some — DiMaggio’s heel — were serious. Some weren’t. But I got the idea of keeping count on any injury more serious than a shaving nick. Mel Parnell and Bob Lemon [premiere pitchers] can’t stop Casey’s Yankees. Neither can Ol’ Man Injury Jinx. Come to think of it, I may have
counted
shaving nicks. The total came to seventy-one, about one injury every other day. The writers ate it up. Come to Yankee Stadium and see the walking wounded hit home runs. You couldn’t see that at the Polo Grounds or at Jones Beach State Park, either.

“When Mantle came up, we knew he could hit very long homers. I made a point of leaving the ballparks [after homers went out] and measuring them, down to the last inch. Or so I told the writers. Did that get ink! Duke Snider hit very long home runs for the Dodgers, but nobody in the Brooklyn organization realized the extra press mileage they could get with a two-dollar tape measure . . .”

The 1948 Yankees finished third behind Cleveland and the Boston Red Sox, and attendance reached a club record, 2,373,901.* But dour George Weiss thought that numbers of players — reliever Joe Page, left fielder Johnny Lindell — were drinking too much. He wasn’t happy with Joe DiMaggio running after showgirls. “Bucky Harris,” pronounced George Weiss, “is too damn easygoing. He’s lost control of the team.”

Harris had to go, Weiss decided, and his employers, Dan Topping and Del Webb, agreed. Casey Stengel and George Weiss had known each other for more than twenty years, at least since Stengel managed Worcester in the Eastern League (he finished fourth) and Weiss operated the New Haven franchise. Across decades they had stayed in touch, Comical Casey and Glum George, an early odd couple. Stengel’s Oakland Acorns won 114 games in the Pacific Coast League in 1948, the year in which Stengel celebrated his fifty-eighth birthday. Wealthy now, successful in California, Stengel was finally considering retirement when Weiss offered him baseball’s golden apple, the Yankee job. “I at once commenced not thinking of retirement,” Stengel said.

This would make Stengel the fifth Yankee manager in four seasons, troubling to many connected with a team once as stable as Gibraltar. In a series of private meetings, Webb, Topping, and Weiss on one side and Stengel on the other agreed on a two-year contract calling for about $35,000 a season. A two-year contract, Red Patterson argued, would show that stability was returning to the Bronx.

In truth, the situation remained uncertain and Stengel’s previous record as a major league manager was not comforting. “What we did about them particular matters,” Stengel told me years later, “is a kind of verbal agreement, the owners, Mr. Weiss, and me. If in one year, they didn’t like my work, or if I didn’t like their baseball methods, I could leave or be removed and so forth, without hard feelings, which you did not know before, because it is a bad custom to talk about private agreements, which you yourself know very well and cannot argue with.”

At one point, Weiss showed Stengel dossiers that two private detectives had compiled for him on a number of players — “night crawlers” in the argot of the time. “I don’t like what I read here,” Weiss said. Although he himself had been a ranking night crawler. Stengel said he would address the problem. He didn’t personally favor private detectives, although Weiss would continue to employ them. Stengel’s device for getting players into their hotel rooms before dawn was more direct. He sat in a prominent place in hotel lobbies into the wee hours. Like everyone else, the players knew he was there. Anyone coming in late had to walk past the manager and endure withering Stengel sarcasm.

“When the hiring was settled, we decided to have a press conference,” Red Patterson remembered. “We knew that Casey could be funny. Weiss said he was a great baseball man. Still, we were nervous. The writers might kill us for firing Harris, a sweet guy. We spread the word Harris wasn’t coming back during the World Series, when the writers were preoccupied with Lou Boudreau and Warren Spahn.

“Then we scheduled Stengel’s conference for lunchtime. More free food and free drink for the writers. We hired the 21 Club. We were the Yankees. We went first class. The day we picked, October 12, was one day after the World Series ended. The writers would maybe be so preoccupied wrapping up the Series that they wouldn’t get around to knocking us.

“I know that sounds crazy, but there it is.”

The
Herald Tribune
put the story on page one:

YANKEES NAME
STENGEL PILOT
FOR TWO YEARS

Former Manager of Braves and Dodgers Is Chosen as Harris’s Successor

The piece began halfway down the front page. The
Tribune
of October 13 was more interested in Soviet and American arms negotiators ranting at one another and in Thomas E. Dewey’s drab campaign to bounce Harry Truman from the White House. Stengel wasn’t even the biggest story in New York City. On the day the Yankees unleashed Stengel, Columbia University installed its thirteenth president, General of the Army Dwight David Eisenhower. With an audience of 20,000 gathered below the steps of Low Library, the general disappointed conservatives by saying in his inaugural address; “Academic freedom includes the right to teach straightforward courses on communism.”

The same day, at “21,” Stengel disappointed just about everyone. Dan Topping, the Yankee president, arrived to introduce him. Topping had a brother named Bob; both Toppings had been married to a sensual brunette movie actress named Arlene Judge. But where Dan became a working baseball man, Bob Topping’s ambitions led him toward nothing but a lush life. The brothers were not close.

Dan Topping introduced Stengel as the man who’s going “to lead our great Yankee ballclub to a pennant.”

Lips pressed together in tension, Stengel moved to the microphone. He looked at his employer Dan Topping and said, “Thank you, Bob.”

Nervous laughter.

“Uh, Dan. I am happy to be back in New York, which is where I played before. I had some other offers regarding managing, but I didn’t want to leave Oakland, where the owner has been very good.” After a while, he threw the room open for questions.

“What are your plans for the Yankees?”

“I, uh, last seen the Yankees play a couple years back. Now I must study the Yankee situation and then, uh, I will commence to draw conclusions.”

To indicate old guard support for the new man, Topping asked DiMaggio to linger in Manhattan and attend the Stengel press conference. DiMaggio sat quietly on the dais.

“What do you think about managing a great player like Joe DiMaggio?” a reporter asked Stengel.

“I can’t tell you much about that, being as since I have not been in the American League so I ain’t seen the gentleman play, except once in a very great while.”

DiMaggio, with an ego as mighty as his bat, grimaced. In their few years together, he and Stengel never got along.

Then it was done. In half an hour Stengel had gotten the boss’s name wrong and offended the biggest star in town.

This is the way old Casey Stengel stumbled at “21” on the first day of the biggest job of his life.

This is the way —
His mouth wide open
His warped old tongue
Saying
the
wrong
bloody
thing.

“Most observers,” commented John Drebinger, senior baseball writer at
The New York Times
, “were kindly disposed toward Stengel. But after that press conference they were viewing his forthcoming performance with misgivings.”

“I knew what I was getting,” George Weiss insisted twenty years later. “I was not hiring a comedian. In the minors Casey was wonderful working with veterans and great with difficult youngsters like Billy Martin, too. Nobody pushed Casey around.

“He had an uncanny knack for getting the right hitter up at the right moment, handling pitching, running a game. He had been studying for years. He had learned a lot from John McGraw. Everybody agreed that Casey did a wonderful managing job his first Yankee season. But what did they think, that he learned how to manage, all at once, in 1949?”

After the press conference, Stengel retreated. This tough, competitive roustabout was hired not to charm the press or, as some have suggested, ex post facto, to humanize “the lordly Yankees.” Weiss hired Stengel to win the pennant. That was the sine qua non. If Stengel finished second — far higher than he ever had finished before in the major leagues — he would be fired.

“Late in that season,” Stengel later said, “everyone was talking about platooning the players, which I very much did, but we come to a point against Boston where it come down to this: I had to win two games to win the pennant. I was gonna platoon myself out of a job, or platoon myself in, which is what happened as I am certain you recall.”

As a rookie manager, Stengel was given limited authority. Weiss would listen to Stengel on trades and even a bit on whom the Yankees might hire as coaches. But the decisions were made by Weiss.

“I know the league better than you,” Weiss said.

“Yes, sir, you do,” Stengel said. “But there is one pitching coach, who has been working in Portland, Oregon, which is very good.”

Stengel recommended Jim Turner, gruff, gray-haired Milkman Jim, who had had one fine year with the Boston Bees and had closed out his career as a wartime reliever for the Yankees. Turner came from outside the Yankee establishment but Weiss respected his work and hired him. Weiss then told Stengel that Bill Dickey, the greatest catcher in Yankee history, would be another coach, along with bald, quiet Frank Crosetti, who had played shortstop across seventeen seasons. Between them, Dickey and “Crow” had spent thirty-four years as major league ballplayers. Neither had played an inning for any team except the New York Yankees. Weiss was blending his roustabout manager with pillars of Yankee tradition. But the world was less than awed.

“Well, sirs and ladies,” wrote Dave Egan in the Boston
Record
, “the Yankees have now been mathematically eliminated from the 1949 pennant race. They eliminated themselves when they engaged Perfesser Casey Stengel to mismanage them for the next two years and you may be sure the perfesser will oblige to the best of his unique ability.” As Frank Graham, Jr., commented in
Casey Stengel
, the most winning and insightful of the Stengel biographies, “Uneasy lay the crown upon this old gray head.”

Stengel spent the winter quietly getting ready to become a manager in New York, meeting from time to time with baseball men, gathering information on Yankee ballplayers, players he had seldom seen at work. He joined the Yankee delegation at the baseball winter meetings in Chicago, where Weiss made a questionable trade. He gave the St. Louis Browns Sherman Lollar, a promising catcher, two other players, and $100,000 for a pitcher named Fred Sanford. The season before, Sanford attracted attention by starting thirty-three games for the Browns and losing twenty-one. In 1948, Fred Sanford led the major leagues in losses.

Red Patterson told the writers that Sanford was “a great acquisition. Last year, like somebody’s ex-wife,” Patterson said, “he shoulda sued the Browns for non-support. Whenever he pitched, all those Brownie fielders went to sleep.” But remember that two measures of pitching are essentially independent of position players. A pitcher should allow fewer than one hit an inning and should strike out more batters than he walks. Sanford allowed 250 hits in 227 innings; he struck out 79 batters but walked 91. His greatest merits, on the record, seemed to be that he was inclined to go to bed early and he didn’t drink much. If Stengel wondered about this curious acquisition, he kept his counsel. Writers who pressed him in the lobby of the Blackstone Hotel gained neither jokes nor specifics. “There is very many good ballplayers on the New York Yankees,” he said. “More than I ever managed on one team before. I think we can win.”

Few newspapermen agreed. When
The Sporting News
polled 206 baseball writers, the forecast for 1949 looked like this:

1. Boston Red Sox (119 votes)

2. Cleveland Indians (79)

3. Yankees (6)

Platooning — playing more than one man at a position — traces to John McGraw, who so mightily impressed Casey decades earlier. Generally, a right-handed batter has more trouble hitting the deliveries of a right-handed pitcher than he does hitting a left-hander’s stuff. (These assertions apply in exact reverse for left-handed batters.)

When a left-handed pitcher throws, the right-handed batter “sees the ball better.” Actually, he picks up the baseball in flight a fraction of a second sooner than he can when facing a right-hander. An unimpeded fastball goes from pitcher’s hand to catcher’s glove in two-fifths of a second. Every millisecond counts.