The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (22 page)

Ever flexible, Stengel moved away from platooning catchers. Berra would be the Yankees’ regular catcher for the next eight years, paralleling the career of Roy Campanella in Brooklyn. “My other catchers were fine men,” Stengel said, “but they could not hit the ball for distance like Mr. Berra.”
No platoon
.

Curiously, the smallest, lightest Yankee was the bulwark. Shortstop Philip Francis Rizzuto would start 153 of the Yankees’ 155 games. Rizzuto stood about five foot five. Fourteen years earlier Rizzuto had presented himself at Ebbets Field for a tryout before Dodger manager Casey Stengel. After the workout Stengel said irritably, “Yer too small. Ga wan. Go home. Get a shoebox.”

Unlike DiMaggio, Rizzuto is not inclined to brood. “I liked him right away when he came to the Yankees,” Rizzuto says. “I was established. I’d been the shortstop since 1941. He came on low-keyed. What did I care in 1949 with the Yankees what had happened in 1935 over in Brooklyn? Casey wasn’t the only guy who didn’t think I could make it. That was just so much water over the dam. By ‘49, I didn’t need a shoebox, anyway. The clubhouse boy at the Stadium shined my Yankee spikes every day.”

Stengel would not discuss his early wrong call on Rizzuto. He was hypersensitive to any criticism of his baseball judgments and, when pressed, exploded into profanity. Harold Rosenthal of the
Herald Tribune
questioned him on a minor judgment once, more intensely than Stengel wanted to be questioned. In front of a mixed assemblage of sportswriters and ballplayers in the Yankee dugout, Stengel shouted at Rosenthal, “Yer fulla shit and I’ll tell ya why.”*

Stengel said Rizzuto “had somewhat hurt his arm previously [to 1949]. I was asking around and some players told me it was hard for him to throw out a man, once he went deep for a ball toward third base.

“I said in the spring, why don’t he loft the ball to first base, which he commenced doing, getting rid of the ball with an amazing quick throw. It would fly in the air but he’d get the throw off so fast he would beat the runner, which is better than a bullet throw, which takes the shortstop so long to get rid of that the runner to first base beats the bullet to the bag.”

Stengel’s views of Yankee pitching were complex. Reynolds, as he said, could start and relieve better than Cy Young. Glowering Vic Raschi was “the greatest I ever had to be sure to win one game.” Ed Lopat was “a first-class starting pitcher, and Joe Page, they called the fireman because he put out fires, could do an amazing job in relief. I believed in platooning with relief pitching. It was different when the ball was dead. Now I didn’t want to put extra strain on my starting pitchers who you need over a long pennant race.”

During Stengel’s great years, no Yankee pitcher was permitted to work 300 innings in a season, not even the bellwethers, Reynolds and Raschi, both broad-shouldered and imposing specimens.* “In the dead-ball days [Christy] Mathewson and Cy Young, they could just throw it in there on some hitters when they were ahead because there wasn’t gonna be a home run. But I ain’t managing this club in the dead-ball days, which my pitching coach, Mr. Turner, and I remember every day.”

Stengel had an extraordinary, mystical (to me) sense of when to lift a pitcher. When I asked him to explain how he perceived pitchers at work, the answer was no more than partly satisfactory. “If I see a man getting hit hard, which is even if the balls are caught, very long flies, line drives hit at somebody, and so forth, I take him out after an inning where he has given no runs, no hits, and some say how could you take him out so soon?

“But he is throwing as hard as he can and they are hitting the ball hard and he’ll just get worse from here on in. So I bring in another pitcher and when I do that I have a third one warming up, in case my second pitcher is not right on that particular day, which gives me another shot at stopping them, and does that answer your question for you, sir?”

When Stengel took over the Yankees, American League managers warmed up relief pitchers one at a time. Sometimes you’d see a starter hit hard. Then the relief pitcher was hit hard. By the time a backup reliever warmed up, the game was lost. Stengel’s thinking was a full generation ahead of that of his colleagues. I think it is fair to say that the modern pitching staff, with short relievers and long relievers, with carefully chosen left-handed and right-handed spot pitchers, this whirling, complex, twenty-armed beast, the pitching staff of today, was invented by Casey Stengel of Kansas City, Missouri, St. Petersburg, Florida, Glendale, California, and the Bronx.

How did the Yankee ballplayers respond to their first exposure to managerial genius? DiMaggio was profoundly negative. He didn’t care for Stengel’s long-winded style and thought platoon baseball was chaotic. DiMaggio was a laconic and introverted man. Before retiring at night, he habitually stacked his coins on the bedroom dresser, one pile for pennies, others for nickels, dimes, and quarters. Stengel’s platooning offended DiMaggio’s sense of order.

“I don’t get this guy,” he complained to Phil Rizzuto. “Nobody knows when he’s playing or where. With this guy managing, we can’t possibly win.” Unhappy, DiMaggio came down with heel spurs and missed the first sixty-five games of the season.

Others were more tolerant. “You see, whatever he was doing with the club, Casey came on in a very low-keyed way to us veterans,” Rizzuto says. “He didn’t tell us all his ideas all at once. He was really pretty humble. To me and the other veterans, he said, in one way or another: ‘I know you’re big leaguers. You know what you’re doing. Just whatever little input I can give you I will.’

“If he had come in with a big speech, telling us a whole lot of stuff up front, there would have been trouble. Casey did a lot of smart things with the Yankees but the smartest thing he ever did was come on slow.”

Charlie Silvera, a backup catcher for nine years, is renowned among teammates for his vivid memory.* “Remember,” Silvera says, “I was a rookie Yankee catcher the same year Stengel was rookie Yankee manager. I was only twenty-four, but I knew the tradition, that Joe McCarthy had been a stern taskmaster and that Bucky Harris was looser.

“I caught for Portland in the Coast League, playing against Casey’s teams for two years. He could get noisy. He put on a pretty good show just in the dugout.”

“But there was none of that in St. Petersburg, none of that the whole first year. Starting out, I think the first thing was to put that clown background behind him. He wanted to get the players on his side and the writers on his side, as a sound baseball man.”

I mentioned Stengel’s gruffness and sarcasm.

“Face it, he was one gruff old man,” Silvera said. “With the platooning, some players said he wasn’t fair and then he’d say, quietly, ‘Well, you don’t like me very much now, but when you get your check for playing in the World Series, you’ll like me a little better.’

“And, of course, he kept on platooning, which caused the guys being platooned to play even harder when they got into the lineup. They’d say, ‘I’ll show that crooked-legged old bastard.’

“That was fine with Casey. He wanted to win. And win today. None of that wait-till-next-year stuff. That was Brooklyn. None of that we’ll-get-’em-tomorrow.

“You were a Yankee. You got ‘em today.

“Anybody who didn’t understand that did not play for Casey very long.”

Jerry Coleman, he of the rolled-up knickers, was a bright, sensitive California kid, tough enough to fly fighter planes during the Korean War.

“First of all, about the pants,” Coleman says. “I didn’t wear ‘em the way I did to shrink the strike zone, whatever Casey said. The truth is when I wore ‘em longer I could feel fabric against my knee and that was inhibiting. Rolled up they felt comfortable and I believed I could run better. But if Casey thought I was being shrewd, I won’t argue.

“When he came to the Yankees, he was up against an old-school-tie type of thing. Rizzuto, Henrich, DiMaggio, Keller all became stars under Joe McCarthy. They loved McCarthy, and why not? They looked at Stengel as an outsider.

“Everybody was wary that first spring. Stengel treated Joe DiMaggio the way everybody else treated Joe DiMaggio. Like an icon. Whatever may have been
muttered
, there never was a
confrontation
between them. Even when Casey thought DiMaggio was past his peak in center, he never said anything like that directly.

“But Casey was not exactly a wimp. That first spring, the squad split one day in Texas. One squad went to Austin. One went to San Antonio. We lost both games to Texas League clubs.

“Casey went crazy. Nuts. You’re professionals. You’re Yankees. Minor leagues beat you!
Damn you! GO OUT AND WIN!!

“Nobody knew about DiMaggio’s bad heel, but one day Joe just disappeared. We read about it in the papers. Joe was just gone. You look around. There’s rookie Gene Woodling, rookie Hank Bauer, almost rookie Bobby Brown, Yogi Berra who never caught regularly before, three pitchers nobody knew that much about, and rookie Jerry Coleman. They were picking us anywhere from third to sixth.

“There are four basic parts of managing,” Coleman said. “Keep the fans interested and happy. Get along with your front office. Handle the team. Contend with the media.

“Great as Stengel was with our team, he was just as great with the media.

“Somebody says, ‘Hey, Case, who’s a greater player, DiMaggio or Ruth?’ and he doesn’t want to answer that question. For obvious reasons.

“So he says, ‘Well, Mr. DiMaggio can do this, and Mr. Ruth could do that, and don’t forget Mr. Cobb,’ and now he’s back to 1912 with John McGraw and then he’s telling the reporter what was going on in Kansas City when he was a child.

“By this time the reporter has forgotten the question.

“I’ve never seen a manager to match him.

“Casey Stengel was a brilliant man, but you knew that, didn’t you?”

Well, I suspected.

*Lardner was particularly annoyed by Arthur Daley, the genial and inept sports columnist for the
New York Times
, who wrote enraptured accounts of a saintly Casey. Groping toward realism, Daley spelled one verb coming out of Stengel’s mouth “w-u-z.” “Now how else would you spell that word?” John Lardner asked me. “W-a-s?” That was Lardner’s only comment on Daley’s efforts to reproduce Stengelese.

*Writing about drunkenness had been absolutely beyond the bounds of sports pages. The famous Yankee manager Joe McCarthy went on a bender during spring training in 1938 and failed to show up at the ballpark for five days. The few reporters who mentioned that manager McCarthy was missing from the Yankee bench attributed his absence to “Florida flu.”

*The record was not broken until 1979 when a well-remembered Yankee ballclub, starring Reggie Jackson and Lou Piniella and managed by Bob Lemon and Billy Martin, drew 2,537,765. Curiously that Yankee team finished no better than fourth.

*I never reported this episode in the
Herald Tribune
, and readers may well ask why I did not. I felt that if a quote was pretty much nonsense, then I wasn’t going to report it, even though a nonsensical quote might make headlines. And the Woodling quote was nonsense, as Woodling himself agreed, once his rage passed. I was employed by the
Tribune
, not the Yankees, but we were never encouraged at the paper to lob grenades just to see how loud a bang they would make.

*Rosenthal was outraged. He telephoned me at home and announced, “I’m not speaking to Stengel. I thought you’d want to know.” Since Rosenthal was the reporter, the note taker, the important question seemed to me whether Stengel was still speaking to Rosenthal, which, of course, he was. Rosenthal’s indignation softened quickly but recurred for decades afterwards, whenever someone suggested that “Casey must have been a sweet old guy.”

*As Reynolds and Raschi anchored Stengel’s Yankees, the Dodgers of the 1960s were anchored by Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax. Drysdale pitched more than 300 innings for four consecutive seasons. Koufax pitched more than 300 innings three years out of four, reaching a peak of 336 innings in 1965. A year later arthritis in his pitching elbow forced Koufax to retire when he was thirty years old. In essence Koufax at his peak was pitching seven or eight more complete games a season than Stengel permitted Reynolds or Raschi or Whitey Ford to work.

*During our talk, Silvera described himself as “a spear carrier among a bunch of emperors and lords. You gotta have spear carriers and I was a damned good one.”

T
HE THREE NEW YORK CITY
ballclubs drew more than five million fans in 1949, despite a disappointing finish by Leo Durocher’s evolving Giants. Durocher had uttered one classic comment on his well-liked predecessor at the Polo Grounds, stumpy, congenial, uncomplicated Mel Ott. “Nice guys finish last,” Durocher said.

“Right,” pronounced the
Daily News
’s tart-tongued Dick Young when the 1949 baseball season ended. “And not-so-nice guys finish fifth.”

Both the Yankees and the Dodgers battled through pennant races that turned and twisted and blossomed until Sunday, October 2, the very last day of the season. The Giants, who finished twenty-four games behind the Dodgers, made news somewhat more subtly. On the eighth of July, the team was integrated.

Earlier the Giants had signed two distinctly different black athletes and assigned them to the Jersey City farm team in the International League. During a barroom brawl somewhere in Texas, Henry Curtis “Hank” Thompson, an infielder who stood a broad-beamed five feet, nine inches, had beaten a man to death. “The way things worked in the South then,” reported Garry Schumacher of the Giant front office, “when one colored guy killed another colored guy, it didn’t count. The white cops wouldn’t even make arrests.” Thompson proved pleasant enough, except when an occasional rage gripped him, and not notably bright. Baseball integration was proceeding at a most lethargic pace. But history often moves unevenly. Just two years after Robinson’s first Brooklyn season, the stern character barrier to blacks — no drinkers, no rowdies — was coming down. Henry Curtis Thompson was a bibulous man.

Along with Thompson, the Giants signed a black of faultless character and keen intelligence, Monford Merrill Irvin, an outfielder who had graduated from Lincoln University, a small Negro college in Pennsylvania, affiliated with the Presbyterian Church. Irvin was thirty years old. Racism kept big Monte Irvin out of the major leagues during most of his prime playing seasons. Irvin was courteous, thoughtful, soft-voiced. To Robert Creamer of
Sports Illustrated
, perhaps unconsciously mouthing some prejudice of the time, “Monte Irvin sounds like a Latin professor.”

Into July, Thompson hit .303 for Jersey City. Irvin hit .373, with fourteen steals and fifty-two runs batted in across sixty-three games. They were then promoted to the Polo Grounds. “Of course we knew segregation was wrong,” says Charles “Chub” Feeney, vice president of the Giants at the time. “My uncle [Giant president Horace Stoneham] knew it and I knew it, but pure idealists we were not. Competing in New York, against the Yankees and the Dodgers, the resource we needed most was talent. Whatever Durocher told you, Leo’s brain alone was not enough. In 1949, the Negro leagues were the most logical place in the world to look for ballplayers.”

Still, the best young player in Negro baseball, indeed the best young player in the world, was not allowed into white baseball for another season. Quite simply, Willie Howard Mays, the eighteen-year-old center fielder for the Birmingham Black Barons, was a wonder. But opportunities for blacks, even wonder-blacks, remained restricted.

With the addition of catcher Roy Campanella and the very large, very fast right-hander Don Newcombe, the Dodgers of 1949 were solidly integrated. Some days a third of the starting Brooklyn lineup was black. For the time being, that was enough, Branch Rickey decided. The Giants wanted to see how things went with Thompson and Irvin before they undertook further black hiring.

Three major league teams were integrated — Cleveland, the Dodgers, and the Giants. Three teams were integrated and two of them were based in enlightened New York. The Yankees felt a certain pressure.

Between them, Dan Topping and Del Webb had no discernible social conscience. Topping was comfortable in an all-white, all-wealthy Southampton social world. Webb’s construction company had built one of the concentration camps used to imprison Japanese Americans during World War II. With some drinks in him, Webb boasted that he had completed the concentration camp “ahead of schedule.” Citing his responsibility toward his employers’ investment, George Weiss was determined to keep the Yankees white. Besides, personally Weiss didn’t care for blacks and didn’t trust them. (In later years Weiss unloaded an outstanding black Puerto Rican prospect, Victor Pellot Power, informing people at the
Times
and the
Herald Tribune
, “Maybe he can play, but not for us. He’s impudent and he goes for white women.”)

But social pressure remained and, besides, it was illegal for an employer in New York State to discriminate. Seeming to bow to the law, but actually sidestepping, Weiss sent Bill “Wheels” McCorry, sometime scout and full-time road secretary, to look at Mays in a few Negro League games in Alabama. Although McCorry was born in upstate New York, he had the attitudes of a southern Klansman, which he made little effort to conceal. He reported back to Weiss that Willie Mays could run some and could throw a little but wasn’t worth signing because “the boy can’t hit a good curve ball.”

“That’s just about the worstest scouting report I ever heard of,” Roy Campanella says. “Willie couldn’t hit the curve! He was eighteen years old. No way an eighteen-year-old kid is
ever
gonna be a good curve ball hitter. That takes time. Mickey and Duke, great as they were, they didn’t hit good curve balls when they were eighteen.

“The onliest thing McCorry had negative on Willie was something else: the color of Willie’s skin.”

The Yankees could have signed Willie Mays in 1949 for a bonus of $5,000. They made no offer. If they had signed Mays, the Yankee outfield through the 1951 pennant race would have been remembered through the corridors of time: DiMaggio, Mantle, and Mays.

One has to conclude that bigotry is not simply wicked. It is also pretty damn dumb.

Two absolutely extraordinary episodes in 1949 removed the baseball focus from the field. One was a deed of psychopathic violence that wrecked at least two lives. The other, less obviously violent, haunted and troubled Jackie Robinson until his death.

Both the Dodgers and Yankees broke training camp in fine style. Robinson was back to a good playing weight of 190 pounds. With the arrival of Campanella, he was no longer the only black regular in the National League. His teammates increasingly felt more comfortable with him and he felt increasingly comfortable with himself.* Robinson flowered throughout the summer of 1949. With a batting average of .342, he led the league, outhitting Musial by four points. Robinson batted in 124 runs and hit 38 doubles and 12 triples. In a period of cautious base running, he stole 37 bases. That is almost routine for a good base runner today, but it was 11 more than anyone else in the majors stole in 1949. And he stole in punishing ways.

Somebody wrote a song:

Did you see Jackie Robinson hit that ball?
Did he hit it, man, and that ain’t all.
He stole home!

There was no musical background for Stengel’s platoons in the Bronx, but without Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio — who had been sanctified in song (“Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio”) eight years before — they performed wonderfully well. Vic Raschi won nine of his first ten decisions. Tommy Henrich hit sixteen home runs across three months. In June the Yankees had a four-game lead.

The integrated Dodgers against the dominantly southern Cardinals. The Yankees and Casey Stengel against the world. A gripping time for baseball, with excitement aplenty, when suddenly, on June 15, gunfire exploded into the major leagues.

A tall, rather drab, black-haired Chicago woman named Ruth Ann Steinhagen, daughter of a hard-working die maker, had become infatuated with a graceful but quite ordinary-looking first baseman named Eddie Waitkus, a native of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Waitkus had fought in the South Pacific during World War II and been awarded the Bronze Star for courage under fire. He was quiet, in no way a hell raiser, and he sometimes mentioned that he had turned down a Harvard scholarship to play pro ball. He was a bachelor, a fact not lost on Ruth Ann Steinhagen.

Ruth Ann noticed Waitkus when he was playing for the Cubs at Wrigley Field in 1946. He was a smooth fielder who hit for a .304 average, without much power, but he moved well around first base, a slick fielder; in the argot, a fancy Dan. Ruth Ann Steinhagen began spending whatever spare money she could find to buy tickets to Wrigley Field. She always sat as close as possible to first base. She was sixteen and gawky; after a time she felt she was in love. She saved newspaper photos of Eddie Waitkus and Cubs ticket stubs. She wrote to the ballclub and obtained more photographs of Waitkus. She graduated from high school and found work as a typist. There is no record of a serious boyfriend in her life.

Ruth Ann was a gay and happy child who changed markedly on reaching adolescence. She became quite prim, fastidious about her hair and fingernails. She worshiped regularly in a Lutheran church. But suddenly, her parents said, as an adolescent, she announced that she did not want people to look at her.

She grew interested in music, in a pop singer named Andy Russell, who sang love songs in English and Spanish. Then she turned to Franz Liszt, the great romantic pianist and composer; she confessed to a girlfriend that she had a “crush on Liszt.” Franz Liszt died in 1886.

Her lonely passion for Waitkus took hold across the seasons of 1947 and 48. Waitkus wore number 36. Ruth Ann bought every phonograph record she could find that was produced in 1936. Since Waitkus was born near Boston, Ruth Ann began eating baked beans. Her parents said she “wanted Boston baked beans all the time.”

At length her parents convinced her to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Abraham A. Low, who reported later that Ruth Ann appeared “very disturbed and confused.” Her mother disputed that version saying, “The doctor told us there was nothing wrong with Ruth, except she should forget about Eddie Waitkus.”

Ruth Ann could not forget Waitkus, whose background was Lithuanian. She began giving herself lessons in the Lithuanian language. In December 1948, the Cubs traded Waitkus to the Phillies for Walter “Monk” Dubiel, a right-handed pitcher who lost as often as he won. It was a roundly bad deal for Chicago, a poorly run ballclub playing in handsome Wrigley Field, where ivy vines climbed the outfield walls. Ruth Ann took to bed and cried for several days and nights.

She moved into a rooming house, near her parents’ home, and worked as a typist. Her obsession with Waitkus sometimes elated her but sometimes depressed her so severely that she thought of suicide. Early in the 1949 baseball season, Ruth Ann Steinhagen conceived a bizarre plan.

The first week in May she went to a pawnshop and ordered a .22-caliber rifle that was on sale for twenty-one dollars.

“What do you want the gun for, miss?” the pawnbroker asked.

“Father’s Day is coming,” Ruth Ann said. “I want it as a present for my father.”

The pawnbroker showed her how to disassemble the rifle and gave her two boxes of shells. The Phillies, with Eddie Waitkus at first base, were coming to Chicago for a three-game series starting on Tuesday, June 14. The Phillies and Eddie Waitkus would stay at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, close by Lake Michigan on the North Side of Chicago.

On about June 10, Ruth Ann Steinhagen made a three-day reservation for “a nice room” at the Edgewater Beach. Then she went to her bank and withdrew eighty dollars, all she had in her savings account.

On Monday, June 13, Ruth Ann packed a suitcase with three days’ clothing, the bullets, the rifle, and a knife with a blade that was five inches long. She checked into the Edgewater Beach at four
P.M.
and was given a room on the twelfth floor. She was feeling agitated and ordered a daiquiri from room service. Then she ordered another. She wanted to be able to think clearly, but she felt very strange. At one minute, she wanted to use the rifle to kill herself. In the next minute, she wanted to use it to kill Eddie Waitkus, whom she had never met but who tomorrow night would be sleeping under the same roof as she.

The Phillies traveled to Chicago by overnight Pullman car. The team stopped at the Edgewater Beach Hotel just long enough for check-ins. Then the ballplayers rode a bus for the fifteen-minute trip to Wrigley Field.

Ruth Ann had a light breakfast in the hotel coffee shop. Then she went to Wrigley Field and bought a general admission ticket. She arrived at noon when the gates opened and moved to a seat close to first base.

The baseball calendar was full for Tuesday, June 14. Back in New York, the Yankees maintained a three-game lead in first place by defeating the Chicago White Sox, 15 to 3. That was Vic Raschi’s tenth victory.

At Cincinnati, Larry Jansen pitched a four-hitter and the Giants defeated the Reds, 2 to 0. Trying to create a team that could run, Durocher had gotten the Giants to trade massive, muscular, immobile Walker Cooper, his slugging catcher, to Cincinnati and call up young Wes Westrum. “He’s thirty pounds smaller but twice as quick,” Durocher said.

“I ain’t gonna answer Durocher with no words,” Cooper told Ed Sinclair of the
Herald Tribune
. “But tonight, he better watch it. I’m fixing to bust some fences.”

That night Westrum contributed a clutch single for New York. “Cooper wound up with no hits at all,” Sinclair wrote. “He looked the same as ever, or somewhat worse, when he grounded into a game-ending double play.”

“Yeah,” Durocher said, merrily. “I told ya he couldn’t run. My wife coulda beat the fucking relay to first base. Cooper couldn’t, and yeah, yeah, I know. Laraine’s legs are better looking, too.”

In St. Louis the Dodgers moved three games ahead of the Cardinals on the pitching of their skinny left-handed ace, Elwin “Preacher” Roe of Ashflat, Arkansas. The Dodgers won, 7 to 2, and would have won by more if the Cardinals had not executed a triple play.

The biggest baseball story of the day unfolded in Chicago. The Cubs had won the pennant in 1945 under manager Charlie Grimm, a genial, storytelling midwesterner nicknamed Jolly Cholly who liked to sing, accompanying himself on the banjo, which he played left-handed. After 1945, the Cubs began a drift (which some suggest continues to this day). Jim Gallagher, the general manager who had made the mindless Waitkus trade, now fired Grimm and replaced him with Frankie Frisch, the old Fordham Flash, who was every bit as easygoing as a drill sergeant.