The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (26 page)

Ellis Kinder was a country boy, a drinking man. He had been up much of the night, but he was rugged. He felt okay. Hell, Kinder wondered, what was going on with Williams? He
knew
what was going on with Williams. Pressure was going on. Then Old Joe McCarthy played the Boston infield back. McCarthy was conceding a run for an out. That’s what baseball textbooks said to do, go for the out early; you’ll get the run back.

Except . . .

except . . .

The Sox were swinging against Vic Raschi in a big game. The textbooks, such as they were, told you also that in big games, runs against Raschi came very, very hard.

McCarthy, managing the biggest game of his career, was playing it safe. Henrich grounded out to second and Rizzuto scored.

Joe DiMaggio lifted a fly down the right field line. Al Zarilla ran hard but fell down. DiMaggio slid safely, painfully, into third base. Another triple. One inning. Two bad Boston outfield plays. A questionable call by the Boston manager. Still, DiMaggio was stranded at third.

Raschi gave nothing away, no runs at all. Bulky, big-shouldered, glowering, black-browed, superb. The Yankees led, 1 to 0, in the eighth inning and Kinder was scheduled to hit first. McCarthy called him back and sent up a left-hand-hitting rookie outfielder, Thomas Everette Wright, who had behind him a total of six major league turns at bat.

Kinder began to curse. He could hit better than that kid. The way he was pitching, Kinder thought, how the hell could you take him out?

Wright walked. Dom DiMaggio grounded into a double play. The Yankees retained their one-run lead, and Kinder was out of the game. The Yankees broke through with four more runs against the Boston bullpen.

Boston came back in the ninth inning. With one out, Williams walked. Vern Stephens singled. Bobby Doerr hit a long fly to center. DiMaggio broke slowly and the ball sailed over his head, good for three bases and Boston’s first two runs.

With Birdie Tebbetts batting, DiMaggio suddenly shouted, “Time. Time out!” to Charlie Berry, the second base umpire. DiMaggio shook his head. He felt dizzy, he said. He began a slow jog from center field toward the Yankee dugout. He was taking himself out of the game. With that, he drew an ovation, sucking up, as Stengel said, more glory.

Raschi threw a high fastball and Birdie Tebbetts hit a pop foul that Tommy Henrich caught. The game was over. The Yankees had won, 5 to 3. The Yankees had won the pennant. Coach Bill Dickey leaped with jubilation. His head hit the dugout ceiling and Dickey went bubble-eyed.

“That is the seventy-second injury our courageous ballclub has suffered this season,” Arthur Patterson announced in the press box.

Afterwards, Casey Stengel sought out McCarthy. “Well, you won a lot of pennants for this here New York nine. You been splendid,” Stengel said. “I guess this year it was just my turn.”

After Stengel and the photographers and the reporters left, Ellis Kinder sought out McCarthy with harsher words. “You gutless old clown,” Kinder said. “You choking old bastard. You couldn’t manage my dick.”

McCarthy had managed a pantheon of stars: Rogers Hornsby, Gabby Hartnett, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio. Twenty-three years managing in Chicago, New York, Boston, the greatest players in the greatest towns. No ballplayer had cursed him out before.

Overall, McCarthy teams won nine pennants. His World Series winning percentage, .698, was and is the loftiest in history. He hadn’t managed badly against the Yankees, just routinely, which was not good enough when opposing Stengel.

After the Kinder confrontation, McCarthy lost both authority and respect. The Red Sox fired him the next season. He retired to Buffalo, New York, where he pursued obscurity and declined to grant interviews, much less compose his memoirs. He was approaching his ninety-first birthday when he died in 1978 on a cold January day. The local ballfields were buried under two feet of snow.

O
N WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER
5, Sherman Minton of Indiana, a new appointee to the Supreme Court, paid an afternoon call on the White House and found Harry Truman staring at a television set.

“Sit down, sit down,” Truman said. “We’ll talk business later. This big colored guy for Brooklyn is throwing hard. I wonder if DiMaggio will get to him.”

“He better watch Henrich,” Sherman Minton said. “Henrich is the Yankees’ best clutch hitter now.”

“Down home in Missouri,” Truman said, still watching intently, “we called a good clutch hitter Mr. Pork Chops. He was the guy who’d bring the pork chops home.”

“Henrich has a German background, Mr. President,” Minton said, “but believe me, he sure is Mr. Sauerbraten.”

The great pennant races had focused almost everybody’s attention on baseball. Still, John Foster Dulles, a dour and doctrinaire Republican functionary, maintained weaponry trained on the Red Menace. Running for the Senate in New York, Dulles charged that Herbert H. Lehman, the Democrat, was the darling of the radical left. Lehman, a devout capitalist, had inherited a Wall Street banking fortune and resided in opulence at 820 Park Avenue. Meant nothing, said Dulles. Lehman was soft on communism; he was just one more Park Avenue pinko. How nice, many thought, to flee such lewdness for the ballpark, where with minimum peril you could admire real left wingers, Joe Page and Preacher Roe.

This would be Casey Stengel’s first World Series since 1923, the season of his ninth-inning home run, and he made a grand return to the sold-out ballparks with three-colored bunting, the raucous folk festival with hustlers, which is what every World Series used to be. Casey would employ only five pitchers in five games. Burt Shotton by contrast used nine. One, Rex Barney, posted an earned run average of 16.88; two others, Carl Erskine and Joe Hatten, recorded ERAs of 16.20. Embarrassing.

Pee Wee Reese is the only man who played in every game in every one of the great Brooklyn-Yankee World Series, from 1941 through 1956, seven confrontations, forty-four games. Not Rizzuto, not DiMaggio, not Berra, but Reese, a thin, wellmuscled, graceful athlete.

Reese had a gentle, compassionate nature, formed about a core of pure competitive flame. His seamless youthful face led writers to describe him as “puckish.” He stood five feet, ten inches and played at 160 pounds, hardly a pee wee. Indeed, the nickname came not from his size but from the game of marbles. Reese won the national boys’ marble championship when he was fifteen years old. The large marble was called a shooter. The small marble, the one you aimed for with the shooter, was a pee wee. “What I got in this young feller,” Durocher remarked, when Reese reached Brooklyn in 1940, “is the Babe Ruth of marbles. On our ballclub, he’s a rookie. In the world of marbles, he’s an old man.”

Durocher was phasing himself out of the Dodger infield; he wanted to concentrate on managing. He loved to strut in silk shirts, gold cufflinks, wingtip shoes; he intended to put his playing days behind him and Reese was a perfect instrument toward that end.

“Kid,” Durocher said, “anything you want to know about playing shortstop in the majors, come to me,”

Reese nodded. He was a quiet rookie. Durocher talked about shading hitters, cheating toward second, moving with the pitch, going into the hole, turning the double play. He talked and talked, begging Reese to ask questions. But no questions came.

Finally, in late June Reese said, “There is something I do want to ask you, Skipper.”

Durocher beamed. Several thousand ganglia snapped to attention.

“Anything, kid. Anything.”

“Leo,” Reese said, “where do you buy your clothes?”

Reese became a dominant Dodger through quiet leadership rather than flash. You had to see him every day to realize what a wonderful ballplayer he was. He became captain of the Dodger team in 1947 and he championed Jackie Robinson’s cause, without ever deifying his double play partner. Robinson was often loud, often cutting. Sometimes Robinson’s needling became downright nasty.

“You know, Jack,” Reese remarked one day, “some of those pitchers knocking you down are throwing at you because you’re colored. But for some others color has nothing to do with it. They just plain don’t like you.”

Robinson winced and nodded. No other ballplayer, white or black, spoke to Robinson as Reese did. There was touching love between them and touching candor.

With all this, it was possible to forget how splendidly Reese played under pressure, how tough he was when a game was on the line. “You throw him a good curve,” Stengel said, in admiration and annoyance, “and he goes down with that bat of his and gets it like a fisherman getting his hook down for a fish. The little son of a bitch hits my good pitchers’ very good pitches, which shows that hitting is more than batting average, as my very good pitchers will confirm if they feel like talking to you.”

Reese had a good Series in 1949, batting .316, with a home run. But Duke Snider and Jackie Robinson, both Hall of Famers, batted under .200 and Carl Furillo, plagued by a torn muscle, could start only two games. “Where did you tear it, Skoonj?” Harold Rosenthal asked. “Where does it hurt?”

“It’s in my groining,” Skoonj Furillo said.

Furillo’s unusual nickname came from his fondness for scungilli, chopped conch served in a spicy Neapolitan sauce. Sturdy Carl had come into his own at the age of twenty-seven. Earlier, he’d had a nasty time playing for Durocher. “That bastard said I couldn’t hit right-handed pitchers,” Furillo told me in anger and disgust. He was a guileless man never schooled beyond the eighth grade. “Durocher was making it seem like I was afraid of curve balls. That I was backing off. That I was gutless. Hey, Meat, the year I like to squeeze his fucking head off, Durocher found out how gutless I was, right?”*

Healthy, Furillo was a good Series hitter. Now he was hurt. Reese and Gene Hermanski, an irregular outfielder, were the only Dodgers who batted over .300 in the Series. Dodger fans said, as the Series seemed to slip away, “It’s a damn shame our good hitters slumped. Otherwise we woulda kilt them Yankee crumbs.”

This is the Flatbush version of the Grand Illusion. The Dodgers never had a true fence buster of a Series against the Yankees. Twice Duke Snider hit four home runs in one Series, but overall the Yankees consistently outhit and outslugged the Dodgers. In their thirty-nine Series games from 1947 through 1956, the Yankees hit forty-five homers. The Dodgers hit fourteen fewer, a significant difference, some thirty-one percent. Lifetime, Jackie Robinson was not much of a World Series hitter, batting only .234. By contrast, Billy Martin hit five Series home runs against the Dodgers and batted .333. Gil Hodges, Brooklyn’s strongest right-handed slugger, got no hits at all in the seven-game Series of 1952. He went 0 for 21 and 0 for October.

This was not coincidence, or what was damned in Brooklyn as Yankee luck. It is a tested axiom that good pitching stops good hitting and this is what worked mightily against Robinson, Hodges, and the others. The Yankees had very good pitching and a manager who knew how to use good pitching better than anyone else on earth. Didn’t the Dodgers have splendid pitchers as well? Indeed they did. “A lot of their fellers really threw hard,” as Bobby Brown points out. “Newcombe, Branca, Barney were very fast. But it happened we were a great fastball-hitting team.” Brown speaks without smugness, although when he retired to work in medicine full-time, his World Series batting average, pounded mostly against Brooklyn fastballs, stood at .439.

Allie Reynolds started the first game against Don Newcombe, power pitcher against power pitcher. The Dodgers brought back stars from a 1916 Brooklyn team that won a pennant, and Stengel chattered cheerfully with old teammates Zach Wheat, “Chief” Meyers, “Rube” Marquard. “Damn,” Stengel said, clearly and sadly, “where did all those years go?”

“For eight and a half innings,” Red Smith wrote, “nothing happened yesterday at Yankee Stadium. Reynolds and Newcombe wouldn’t allow anything to happen. There were no fielding plays of great distinction, no hits of special note. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall sat looking on, as silent as the 66,224 other witnesses. They’ve put on more spectacular battles themselves in El Morocco.”

Across nine innings, Reynolds struck out nine Dodgers, including Snider three times. Across eight and a half innings, Newcombe struck out eleven, every Yankee but Rizzuto and Henrich. He walked nobody.

Henrich led off the ninth inning. Newcombe missed with an inside fastball. He missed with another. His curve was a fast, sharp-breaking pitch. He threw the curve to Henrich, low, where he wanted it. Henrich cracked a long drive to right. Newcombe gave the ball a quick look and started off the mound. Henrich’s homer won the ballgame, 1 to 0. At the White House, Harry Truman clapped Sherman Minton on the back.

“Taking nothing away from the Brooklyn team,” Stengel told the sportswriters, “you would have to agree after what you just saw, that they are pretty nice, the ballplayers I got.”

“The plate umpire [Cal Hubbard] is an American League guy,” Jackie Robinson said, “and he called an American League game. I’ve never seen so many bad strikes called against us. Reynolds was missing the corners all day.”

When A. B. “Happy” Chandler, the commissioner, read Robinson’s remarks, he ordered Robinson to wire an apology to Hubbard or face suspension. Then Chandler issued a press release stating that he personally had ordered Robinson to “stop popping off.”

“Is this because of my color?” Robinson said, echoing a question someone asked. “Ask yourself this. There are fifty ballplayers on the field and most of them yap at the umpire. One ballplayer is singled out by the baseball commissioner. The one ballplayer is colored. Aside from that, I have no comment.”

Brooklyn’s best pitcher — as distinct from hardest thrower — was a left-handed stringbean, all bones and angles and Adam’s apple, out of northeast Arkansas hill country. Elwin Charles Roe had been nicknamed “Preacher” during a gabby childhood, and Preacher Roe was a droll and remarkable character. His father, a failed pitcher, practiced medicine out of a tin-roofed house in Viola, the only doctor in a wide area, patching and treating farm families, collecting his fees in grain and dairy products, and dreaming about the major leagues. “Arkansas,” Preacher recalled, “was Cardinal country, and when I finished college down at Searcy, muh Dad came up to St. Louis with me to meet Mr. Rickey and read the contract afore I signed.” Roe pitched a single three-inning stint for the 1938 Cardinals and gave up four runs. He was then dispatched into the farm system — baseball people called it Rickey’s Chain Gang — and languished there, a fast, wild hillbilly of uncertain promise.