The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (25 page)

Next afternoon, the Red Sox went with a tall, bourbon-gulping right-hander named Ellis Kinder and seemed to be making off with the game. Kinder was cruising in the fifth, two out, nobody on, and the Red Sox leading, 7 to 1. But he walked Rizzuto and Henrich, and DiMaggio hit another home run high over the left field wall, scoring three runs.

By the eighth inning the Yankees had tied the score. Earl Johnson, a tall left-handed pitcher who had been having arm trouble, was the Boston reliever. Johnson threw a breaking ball low and inside and DiMaggio hit his second home run of the game. As he loped across home plate, Stengel scrambled out of the dugout and began a series of ostentatious salaams. DiMaggio looked embarrassed. The Yankees won the ballgame, 9 to 7.

From Rud Rennie’s story in the New York
Herald Tribune
two days later:

Boston, June 30 — The DiMaggio did it again. For the third day in succession since returning to active duty, Jolting Joe walloped a home run over the wall. This one in the seventh inning was good for three runs, the margin as the Yankees defeated the Red Sox, 6 to 3, sweeping the series.

Joe is stealing the show and headlines from coast to coast with a devastating performance in which he has hit four home runs in three games for a total of nine runs driven in. He has the writers searching their brains for superb super superlatives and his teammates beaming in the reflected splendor of his stardom.

The Red Sox did not fold. They regrouped and played tough baseball and going into the final weekend of the season led the Yankees by one game. Williams was having a wonderful summer; he would bat in 159 runs. DiMaggio gave the Yankees a wonderful half summer, but late in September he retreated into his hotel suite again. This time it was flu or mild pneumonia or a ferocious cold or — none dared say this in the sporting world — just overwhelming pressure. DiMaggio looked pale. He felt weak. The pennant was unsettled. The last two games pitted the Yankees against the Red Sox at the Stadium.

DiMaggio’s status was uncertain, but the Yankees placed advertisements in each of New York’s nine daily papers:

Saturday Is Joe D. Day at the Stadium

A Great Day for a Great Player 1:15
P.M.

“But will you play him?” Leonard Koppett of the
Herald Tribune
asked Stengel.

“If he feels better,” Stengel said tightly.

“Joe told me there was no sense in his playing,” Koppett said, “if he was going to be a detriment to the team.”

Stengel’s answer sailed over Koppett’s head. “It would be hard for him to be a detriment in any condition, wouldn’t it?” Stengel said. A very young reporter and a passionate Yankee fan, Koppett was too wide-eyed to recognize the bitterness between the tough old manager and the temperamental star. “Play or not,” Koppett wrote blithely, “Joe will be on hand today as the central figure in the greatest one-day baseball show ever put on in New York.”

“I got this fella,” Stengel remarked to his wife, Edna, “who sucks up all the glory and plays only when he feels like playing. I never had one like that before. What am I gonna do?”

Edna Lawton Stengel was a practical person. “Let him play whenever he wants to play, dear.”

The American League pennant race closed with a positively Aristotelian unity of place. The Yankees and the Red Sox, DiMaggio and Williams, Old Casey Stengel and Older Joe McCarthy eyeball to eyeball, nostril to flaring nostril at Yankee Stadium. By contrast, the National League race, though equally close, was diffuse. The Dodgers and the Cardinals would settle their great rivalry playing third parties. Here is the way the races stood on the morning of Saturday, October 1.

NATIONAL LEAGUE

AMERICAN LEAGUE

Often during the Era, Dodger managers assigned important ballgames to Ralph Branca, the large, hawk-nosed, right-handed pitcher out of Mount Vernon, New York, by way of New York University, where he starred on both the baseball and the basketball teams. Ralph was sensitive, open, and likable, with a fine fastball and a big snapping curve. He was just the kind of major leaguer you’d want to take the kids to meet. As a biggame pitcher, he evolved into a disaster.

He would go on to marry a wealthy woman and enjoy great business success in later years, but to this day anger and sadness play on Branca’s face when he discusses his pitching career. A twenty-one-game winner at the age of twenty-one, he was out of baseball, selling insurance, by the time he was thirty. He blames injuries. Others are not so sure.

“The tree that grows in Brooklyn is an apple tree,” Dick Young wrote in the
Daily News
, “and the apples are in the throats of the Dodgers.” Young meant that the Dodgers could not swallow, that they were choking. “Not all the Dodgers, of course,” Young told me. “No one in his right mind would call Reese or Robinson a choker. I meant the pitchers. Specifically I meant Ralph Branca. The other players agreed with what I wrote. Quietly they agreed with me. Sometimes it looked like everybody on the Brooklyn club knew who the chokers were, everybody except the ballclub manager.”

Branca started strong in Philadelphia on Saturday, but abruptly lost command in the sixth inning when Dick Sisler tripled and Del Ennis, a free-swinging right-handed slugger, cracked a home run into the upper deck in left field at Shibe Park. Branca went no further. The Phillies won, 6 to 4. But the Cardinals lost in Chicago. The Dodgers stayed one game out front.

On Sunday the Cards played a powerful ballgame at Wrigley Field. Musial hit two home runs and St. Louis won, 13 to 5. The Dodgers pulled ahead in Philadelphia but the Phillies overcame a five-run deficit and tied the score. Two in the tenth inning at last won the ballgame, 9 to 7, and the fiercely contested pennant for Brooklyn.

“C’mere,” Burt Shotton bellowed at Harold Rosenthal in the Dodger clubhouse. Shotton hugged the reporter and bellowed, “How about that win, Rosenbloom?”*

St. Louis had now finished second three straight times. Despite Musial, the Cardinals, the closest thing extant to a Confederacy team, were in decline. By the time the Cardinals won another pennant, long afterwards in 1964, their best pitcher and most of their best hitters were black men.

Joe DiMaggio’s haul, on October 1, was without precedent, either in baseball history or in the annals of excess in the Bronx. Gifts from “fans and organizations” included two automobiles, one motorboat, three watches, two television sets, one foam mattress with box spring, three sets of luggage, a deer rifle, a case of oranges, a pack of walnuts, a cocker spaniel, three sets of cufflinks, three hundred quarts of ice cream, a golf bag, a case of shoestring potatoes, a set of fishing tackle, an electric blanket, three money clips, and a set of rosary beads.

“How do you feel?” Red Smith asked DiMaggio.

“You know something, Red?” DiMaggio said. “I’m kind of worried.”

“You’ve been through tough ballgames before,” Smith said.

“I’m not talking about the ballgame. I’ve got to say thank you. It’s my speech that has me worried.”

DiMaggio withdrew into silence, mentally rehearsing what he would tell the crowd — 69,551 people assembled in triple-tiered, autumn-shadowed Yankee Stadium. After a while Mel Allen walked up to a microphone set up close to home plate and said, “It’s always best to be brief when introducing a great guy. Ladies and gentlemen, Joe DiMaggio.”

“The cheers that followed,” Smith wrote, “ricocheted off the eardrum, made conversation impossible and gave Joe an opportunity to rehearse his speech once more.” People screamed in adulation. DiMaggio stood silent and solemn.

Facing the seats behind home plate, DiMaggio began very gracefully: “First of all, I’d like to apologize to the people in the bleachers for having my back to them.” That started the ovation again.

“This is one of the few times in my career,” DiMaggio said, “that I’ve choked up. Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, right now there’s a big lump in my throat.

“Many years ago a friend of mine named Lefty O’Doul told me, when I was coming to New York, not to let the big town scare me. This day proves that New York City is the friendliest town in the world.

“I thank the good Lord for making me a Yankee.”

A fine, tough ballgame followed. Stocky, bespectacled Dom DiMaggio opened the game for Boston with a single to right field. After Johnny Pesky forced little Dom, Ted Williams handcuffed Tommy Henrich with a bounder. Williams hit ground balls with so much overspin that infielders likened them to grenades. Allie Reynolds bounced a curve ball past Yogi Berra and both runners advanced. Vern Stephens lined out to Johnny Lindell in left field and Pesky scored.

In the third, with the Red Sox still leading by one run, Reynolds walked Pesky, Williams, and Stephens. Early though this was, Stengel sent for lefty Joe Page, his great closer. Before Page got his head into the game, he walked two more. The Red Sox now led, 4 to 0. At this point Mr. Page went fully awake. Across the final six innings, he allowed the Red Sox only one hit.

Joe DiMaggio got the Yankee offense going in the fourth inning with a line drive to right that bounced over the low railing for a ground-rule double. Before the inning was done, the Yankees scored twice. In the fifth, Rizzuto, Henrich, and Berra singled on successive pitches for another run. With two out in the eighth, Johnny Lindell crushed a fastball deep into the lower left field stands. Noise ricocheted off the eardrums once again.

The Yankees won the ballgame, 5 to 4. With one day left and one game left in the season, the teams were tied.

Sunday, October 2, was an unsettling day. The Soviet Union announced that it was severing relations with the Nationalist China, now based on Taiwan, and would recognize the People’s Republic, ruled by Mao Tse-tung. The
Times
reported that the Russians would demand that the Chinese Communists replace the Chinese Nationalists at the United Nations. The world was moving slowly toward a withering war on the redolent peninsula of Korea.

Justice William O. Douglas, the preeminent liberal on the Supreme Court, was bucked off a horse near Yakima, Washington, and broke thirteen ribs. But next day, the big news was baseball. Even the grim, gray
New York Times
published a breathless baseball story as its lead.

The Stadium was overflowing with fans — 68,055 paid — under a bright early autumn sky. The weather was gentle — high 60s. “Hey,” Casey Stengel said to Joe Cashman of the Boston
Record
, “how is your team today, Cashbox? Confident?”

“I think they are,” Cashman said.

“Well, so is my club,” Stengel said. He grinned without mirth. “But one team is gonna lose all its confidence before dark.”

Boston manager Joe McCarthy was tense and clipped. Managing the Yankees, McCarthy had won eight pennants from 1932 through 1943. A month into the 1946 season, Larry MacPhail fired him. The Red Sox hired McCarthy in 1948 on the supposition that a man who had won with the Yankees might know how to defeat the Yankees, as if, say, George III commissioned Benedict Arnold to lead an army attacking Washington’s Continentals.

McCarthy did outpace the Yankees in 1948, but still finished second to Cleveland. Now, at sixty-two, older even than Stengel, Joe McCarthy wanted to wrest the pennant from the Yankees, the team that he’d helped build and shape, the team that had fired him. McCarthy wanted to beat the Yankees as a climax to his life.

“Yeah, we’re ready,” he said tightly. “We been ready all year.” Plump Johnny Schulte, the Red Sox bullpen coach, was merrier. “I’ve got myself a couple of train reservations,” he said to Arthur Daley of the
Times
. “If we win, I’m on the six o’clock for Boston, and the World Series. But just in case, I’m also booked on the seven-thirty for St. Louis. That’s home.”

Joe DiMaggio allowed himself one light moment. “Joe,” he said archly to Page, the team’s preeminent pub crawler, “how did you sleep last night?”

“Good,” Page said. “I always sleep good. That is, I always sleep good when I get to sleep.”

Then it was time to play ball: Vic Raschi, 20 and 10, against Ellis Kinder, 23 and 5, for three months the most effective pitcher in baseball. Raschi handled the Sox easily in the first inning. Rizzuto led off for the Yankees with a line drive over third base. It was only 301 feet down the line. The drive looked good for two bases at most. Williams rushed over but did not get his glove down, and the ball skittered past him for a triple. “Ted played that,” Red Smith said, “as though the baseball were a viper.”