The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (27 page)

At length Roe made the major leagues with a good wartime Pittsburgh team in 1944 and a year later led the National League in strikeouts. Winters in Hardy, Arkansas, Roe taught high school math and coached basketball. “One night,” he said, “I didn’t care for a referee’s call and I shouted something.

“The ref shouted back at me, ‘Shut up.’

“I thought he shouted, ‘Stand up.’

“He decked me. My head hit the gym floor. I got a skull fracture and a lacerated brain. The fracture ran eight inches long.”

Recovering slowly, Roe stayed with the Pirates through two more seasons. Both went badly. He could throw an occasional hard one but would not be a consistent strikeout pitcher ever again. “I commenced thinking,” Roe said, “about pitching to spots, changing speeds, fooling them hitters instead of overpowering them, and, of course, I commenced to develop my wet one.”

On December 8, 1947, Branch Rickey dispatched three ballplayers to the Pirates: Vic Lombardi and Hal Gregg, journeyman pitchers, and Fred “Dixie” Walker, who wanted to be traded rather then play on the same club with a Negro. In exchange, the Dodgers got Billy Cox, who became the finest fielding third baseman of his time; Gene Mauch, who was to become better known as a manager; and the remarkable, evolving spitball-throwing Preacher Roe.*

Twice in Brooklyn Roe would lead the league in winning percentage. With success he went to considerable lengths disparaging his fastball. “I got three speeds,” he said. “I got my change of pace [slow ball]. I got my change off my change [slower yet]. And I got my change, off’n my change, off’n my change.” Slow, slower, slowest. Actually he could throw a good fastball now and again, but he tended to keep that pitch high and wide. He wanted batters to see it, to upset their timing. He wanted them actually to swing at slower and deceptive breaking balls.

The spitball is thrown with a straight fastball motion. At the instant of release, you squeeze, as when squirting a watermelon seed. Properly squeezed, a spitter breaks down sharply, a most difficult pitch to hit. Roe jiggled through interesting tableaus on the mound. He moistened his fingers and then carefully dried the fingers on the bill of his cap. Or he pretended to moisten his fingers. He wanted his spitter to surprise, when it broke down, but Roe was aware that a fake spitball, yet another pitch, helped keep hitters off balance.

The fingers were not his repository of moisture. What Roe wet purposefully was the meaty part of the hand below the thumb. Then, in an intricate gangling windup, he transferred the moisture to his left index finger before the delivery and squeezed. Once in a while a Dodger infielder walked a moistened ball in to Roe with a quick remark, “It’s there if you want it.”

How come Roe was never caught? He was not only droll but tricky. Once, when Roe was holding a premoistened ball, umpire Larry Goetz came charging in from second base yelling, “The ball, Preacher. I want to see the ball.”

Roe tossed the ball obediently to Goetz. By this time Roe was the best control pitcher in baseball. Somehow the soft toss went over Goetz’s head. Pee Wee Reese scooped the ball and flipped it to Jackie Robinson, who rubbed the ball and tossed it to Gil Hodges. After another rub, Hodges tossed the ball to Billy Cox who flipped it to Roe. Ten hands had now rubbed the baseball dry.

“Here, Larry,” Roe said mildly. “Here’s the fucking ball.” Red Smith called Roe “an angular, drawling splinter of gristle.” The Preacher stood six foot two and weighted 163 pounds. Stengel started broad-shouldered Vic Raschi, and Jackie Robinson led off the second inning by cracking a double to left field. Gene Hermanski hit a foul pop fly into short right and Jerry Coleman made a good running catch with his back to the infield. Robinson sprinted to third. When Gil Hodges singled to left, the Dodgers had a run.

That was all Roe needed this mild October afternoon. Roe showed his fastball but kept it out of reach. He broke curve after curve around the black borders of home plate. From time to time, Preacher broke a spitter down below the knees.

In the fourth inning, Johnny Lindell cracked a line drive that caught Roe on the fourth finger of his right hand. He made the play but soon had to have a hole drilled in the nail to relieve pressure. “The pain made me sick to my stomach,” Roe said later, “but good thing it wasn’t my pitching hand.”

His slow stuff and his remarkable control stopped the Yankees on six hits. Roe did not walk a man. The Dodgers won, 1 to 0.

“You must have had great stuff,” Harold Rosenthal told Roe after the shutout.

“My breaking stuff was better than usual,” Roe said. “My fastball wasn’t hardly no use. I was lucky I had my forkball working good.”

“Forkball?” Rosenthal said. He had covered the team for two years. “I never knew you threw a forkball.”

“Sure do,” Roe said. “I struck out DiMaggio with my forkball.”

Like the spitter, a forkball drops. “He was telling me in his country-slick way that his spitball was working well,” Rosenthal said afterwards. “But he was too slick for all us city guys, including me, including Joe DiMaggio.”

After back to back 1 to 0 games, the Series was tied.

New York Telephone Company operators reported the precise time to any caller dialing Meridian 7-1212. During the Series, the company also provided the World Series score throughout the afternoon to callers dialing the time number. The volume of calls for scores, the company reported, reached 224,526 on the afternoon of October 6. The shutout Series, Reynolds and Raschi, Newcombe and Roe, held New York, and the nation, in thrall.

Ralph Branca was twenty-three. He had started twenty-seven times that season and won thirteen, including every decision at Ebbets Field. Shotton chose him to start game three, on Friday afternoon in Brooklyn.

Stengel went with Tommy Byrne, a strong left-handed pitcher who walked more batters than anyone else in the American League. The Dodgers, a solid right-hand-hitting lineup, seemed good bets to win on the dyed green grass of home. But Branca was on the way to constructing that strange and troubling career. Too nice and too softly sensitive, some say until this day, to win big games in the caldron that was the major leagues around New York during the Era.

Branca pitched two perfect innings. Then in the third he walked Cliff Mapes, a journeyman outfielder who didn’t hit much. (Mapes’s lifetime Series record: one hit in fourteen turns at bat.) You don’t want to walk the first man to come to bat in an inning; you particularly don’t want to walk him if he doesn’t hit much. Branca struck out Jerry Coleman, but Tommy Byrne bounced a single to center and Mapes went to third. Phil Rizzuto scored him with a fly to right. “Damn,” Pee Wee Reese remembers thinking. “They haven’t hit a ball solid and we’re losing.”

Reese straightened that out soon enough. He slammed a home run into the lower stands in left, tying the score. Byrne gave up a single and, with one out, walked Robinson and Hodges, loading the bases. Joe Page had pitched the ninth inning for Stengel the day before. Page chiefly worked at short relief, two or three innings at a time. But here Stengel saw — he was phenomenal at this perception — the ballgame at an absolutely critical point. What might happen in the seventh or eight inning wouldn’t matter if the Yankees lost the ballgame in the fourth.

The Dodger hitter was Luis Olmo, a right-hand-hitting backup outfielder who had batted . 305. Stengel sent for Page, bringing in a left-handed relief pitcher to face the right-handed batter. Olmo fouled out. “Stengel,” someone said, “knows things that nobody else does.” Duke Snider bounced out. The game remained tied.

Gene Woodling had doubled for the Yankees in the top of the fourth, but after that Branca retired fourteen consecutive hitters. Lefty Joe Page all but matched him. Going into the ninth the game was still tied at one run. Then Branca’s mastery fled.

Robinson’s great stab robbed Henrich of a hit, but Branca walked Yogi Berra. After DiMaggio fouled out, Bobby Brown singled and Branca walked Gene Woodling, loading the bases.

The batter was Cliff Mapes. Clyde Sukeforth, the Brooklyn pitching coach, walked to the mound. “Get ahead of him,” Sukeforth said. “You’ve got great stuff. Just throw it in there.” Branca nodded. Sukeforth returned to the dugout. Suddenly as Branca was about to pitch, Stengel called time. As Red Smith wrote, “Field Marshal Casey von Stengel called for Johnny Mize, who has devoted a long and blameless life to the abuse of National League pitchers.” Long John Mize, of Demorest, Georgia, was a powerful left-hand-hitting slugger who had led the National League in home runs four times, twice with the Cardinals and twice with the Giants, and played in the All-Star Game nine times. High cheekbones gave him a feline look; Long John was the Big Cat.

“Cat was a helluva hitter,” Leo Durocher recalled, “but was he my kinda player? Not by 1949. Not anymore. They said Mize was strong as a tank, but by ‘49 he couldn’t move. On the bases he was a tank, all right, a stalled tank. At first base, he covered a dime on a good day. So when Horace Stoneham said he could get rid of him, I said, go right ahead. We got some young guys who move better than him.”

Under baseball rules, before selling Mize to the Yankees in an interleague transaction, the Giants had to offer him to every team in the National League. No one bid for the slugger, then thirty-six years old. George Weiss brought Mize from Manhattan to the Bronx for $40,000 on August 22.

Now in October the Dodger brain trust had primed Branca to pitch to Cliff Mapes. But here came Mize, six foot two, 220 pounds, all slugger. “I knew the bases were loaded,” Mize said. “I knew the score. Even if the kid walked me, it would force in a run.”

Clyde Sukeforth did not make a second trip to the mound. Branca fell behind Mize, two balls and one strike, and then threw a fastball that Mize said “looked big and fat.

“When I hit it, I didn’t know right off whether it was going to hit the right field screen or carry over it into the street there. I didn’t care. I just knew that nobody was going to catch the ball.”

The baseball struck the screen and scored two runs. Carl Furillo played the carom perfectly, holding Mize to a single, a rocketing 330-foot line-drive single. Still, two runs scored.

Jack Banta replaced Branca. Jerry Coleman singled in another run. The Yankees led by three.

The Dodgers didn’t quit; they were a gritty team. Luis Olmo and Roy Campanella hit home runs off Joe Page in the bottom of the ninth. Stengel tramped out to talk to Page. “Don’t hurry,” he said. “You’ll get him.” With two out, Joe Page had just enough left to overpower pinch hitter Bruce Edwards with a fastball that was called strike three. The Yankees won by a single run, 4 to 3. This tense and exciting game, on a gray day in Brooklyn, effectively settled the 1949 World Series.

“Damn. It had to be a Giant [Mize] to do it,” Burt Shotton said loudly in the Dodger dressing room afterwards, where one reporter said “the silence was so heavy it seemed to make even breathing difficult.”

Long-faced Ralph Branca sat in front of his locker. “One out away. One out away,” he mumbled. He had thrown Mize a good high inside fastball, he said. “I had good stuff. I got it in there. It just got hit.”

Cheerful and naked in the visiting clubhouse, Stengel said, “They got to win three out of four to beat us now. I don’t think they can do that.” The nude manager twisted his face into an enormous wink.

“Mize,” Rud Rennie said, trying to grasp Stengel’s thinking. “What made you decide to pinch hit Mize?”

“They tell me he always hit Branca hard,” Stengel said, “which I didn’t actually see because I wasn’t in the other league, but what I do know is that he is one of the great hitters in baseball and in that spot, tie in the ninth in the World Series, I want to have one of the great hitters in baseball at the plate for my team.”

Upstairs in the press box, Red Smith observed to Grantland Rice that Branca had walked four batters and three scored.

“Jack London ought to be covering this ballgame,” Rice replied. “Title it
The Call of the Wild.”

“Steinbeck, Granny,” Smith said. “I’d go with Steinbeck.”

“Why is that, Red?”

Smith said, “
Of Mize and Men
.”

Smith’s great rival Jimmy Cannon curled over a Remington typewriter, trying to describe Casey Stengel’s craggy face. “Stengel had the look,” Cannon wrote, “of an eagle that had just flown through a sleet storm.”

To some of us, the press box during the Era was as exciting as the ballfield.*

Desperate, Shotton called on Don Newcombe to start with two days’ rest. Stengel tapped Edmund Walter Lopatynski, a stocky, genial, left-handed New Yorker who worked under the name of Ed Lopat and specialized in changing speeds. Newcombe threw three good innings. Then the Yankees knocked him out and continued pounding old Joe Hatten until they had moved ahead, 6 to 0, after five innings. The Dodgers chipped away at Lopat for single after single, seven sixth-inning singles in all, until Stengel called on Allie Reynolds to relieve. Like Newcombe, Reynolds was working on two days’ rest. Unlike Newcombe, he was not asked to go nine tough innings.

“Throw as hard as you can for as long as you can,” Stengel told him. Reynolds ended the long inning by striking out pinch hitter Spider Jorgensen. Then he blazed past the Dodgers, retiring nine in a row across the last three innings. The Yankees won the ballgame, 6 to 4.

Branch Rickey, integrator of baseball, empire builder in St. Louis and Brooklyn, elected to take over managing a team, that was losing the World Series three games to one. “I want Roe to pitch the fifth game,” he told Shotton.

“He’s a skinny guy to start with two days’ rest,” Shotton said. “Besides, he tells me his finger hurts real bad.”

“That’s on his
right
hand. Send him to my office immediately.”

Gangly Preacher Roe, in a suit and tie, walked into an anteroom at Ebbets Field and showed a swollen, misshaped finger to Branch Rickey. “Ah cain’t get my glove over that finger,” Roe announced.

“You could if you wanted to,” Rickey said. “This is the World Series. The team needs you.”

“I want to help,” Roe said, “but Ah cain’t pitch without a glove and with all this pain.”