The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (28 page)

“It wouldn’t be that Ebbets Field is a small ballpark and you don’t want to face those Yankee hitters here?”

Roe simply stared.

“It wouldn’t be that you’re afraid? I don’t want to think it is that,” Rickey said.

“Ah cain’t pitch with this finger, Mr. Rickey, in Brooklyn or anywhere else.”

Rickey glared at Roe in fury. He said a single word. “Coward.”

The Dodgers started Rex Barney in the fifth game. Barney was wild, fast, erratic. Concluding that Barney’s wildness was a problem of attitude more than coordination, Rickey had ordered him to visit a psychiatrist in Brooklyn.

A highly nervous but possibly well adjusted Barney lasted two innings. Stengel started Raschi and relieved with Page. The Yankees won the game, 10 to 6, and the World Series four games to one. Johnny Mize had a sore right shoulder. DiMaggio was still recovering from his respiratory infection. Yogi Berra had a badly swollen thumb. Tommy Henrich’s back was raging.

In defeat Dodger fans cited Roe’s finger and Carl Furillo’s groin. “Not everybody on either side was healthy,” Rud Rennie wrote, “but the fair conclusion is that the Yankees outplayed the Dodgers and
outgamed
them, as well.”

Rickey said, “We didn’t go into the Series at our peak. I’m concerned now with building a pitching staff to beat the Yankees.” He never would. For the rest of his time in Brooklyn, Rickey pitted himself against Walter Francis O’Malley in a battle beyond the ballfields for control of the Dodger franchise.

Stengel had given the world a lesson in modern managing. He’d won the Series with three pitchers, Reynolds, Raschi, and Page, plus a pinch hitter who was supposed to be washed up and platoon players who starred — Gene Woodling and Bobby Brown. In Stengel’s first triumphant Yankee series, Joe Dimaggio batted .111.

Not everyone immediately recognized the range of Stengel’s gifts, but baseball writers polled by the Associated Press did vote him manager of the year, with 101 votes out of a possible 116.

“I am, uh, pleased to accept this award from you gentlemen,” Stengel told the press, “and am fortunate to have it as I have been fortunate to be able to make a career in baseball, which is important, because as you know, not many people would actually have put their trust in a left-handed dentist.”

He was still funny, but after 1949 no one again called Stengel a clown.

*Years afterwards he traveled to Vietnam with Pete Rose on a trip to cheer up servicemen. The publicity man for the trip, Robert O. Fishel, said, “I had to pack and unpack for DiMaggio every day. He said he didn’t know how to pack a suitcase. All his life he’d gotten somebody to pack and unpack for him.”

*DiMaggio told these things to Marshall Smith, the sports editor of
Life
magazine, later in the 1949 season. Still worried about money, he sold his byline to
Life
for $5,000.

*Rosenthal says that Shotton, like numbers of old baseball men, disliked Jews. “When I finally stood up to him and told him to stop mocking my name, he shouted at me, ‘Okay,
Rosenberg
.’ After that, I never again mentioned Shotton’s name in the
Herald Tribune
. I’d write ‘the Dodger manager’ but not his name. A disservice to readers, perhaps, but that was how I felt.”

*At twenty-two, I weighed 138 pounds. With great geniality, Furillo nicknamed me “Meat.” I thought the nickname Skoonj had a distressing racial tinge, rather like addressing a Jew as “Matzo-ball.” Furillo called me Meat. I called him Carl. The astounding head-squeezing episode with Leo Durocher occurred, as we shall see, in 1953.

*After retiring following the 1954 season, Roe sold an article to
Sports Illustrated
which editors titled “The Outlawed Spitball Was My Money Pitch.” Roe reported that Beech-Nut chewing gum provided ideal saliva and demonstrated in a series of posed photographs how he “loaded” the ball. He later regretted collaborating on the article and made certain sounds of recantation. His real regret may be that he gave the magazine a sensational (and factual) article for a fee of only $2,000.

*Alistair Cooke covered game one of this Series for the Manchester
Guardian
. “Baseball,” Cooke wrote, “is an industrial development of rounders [an English game enjoying great popularity with schoolgirls]. The object is to hit the ball and run all around the bases and back to the wicket. Altogether, 54 batsmen came to the wicket yesterday [in Allie Reynolds’s a to o game]. Fifty three of them made a duck [failed to score].”

T
HE OLD BASEBALL SCOUT
comes down to us as a wise codger. His manner is gruff, his face is grizzled, and his car, in the old baseball movies, is a 1924 Model A, the one Henry Ford said you could get in any color you wanted, so long as the color you wanted was black.

The old scout doesn’t have much money. Never has. Although he’ll take a drink, he’s blind to women. The old scout’s life is a celibate journey, never brightened or distracted by a pretty smile, in search of the Rookie from Olympus.

In legend, the climax always is the same. Above the steaming radiator of his faltering car, the old scout suddenly perceives a ball in flight. It seems to be leaving village, county, state. Then he sees the kid who hit it.

Music pipes in here, a horn call commanding our attention.

The old scout has found his Rookie from Olympus. And, because he is an old scout, and wondrous wise, he knows at once what he has discovered.

The horn music fades. The rookie trots into the picture.

“Say, son,” the old scout says, in his gruff and kindly way, “have you ever heard of the. . .

major. . .

leagues?”

Three Olympian prospects who strode to glorious maturity during the Era were Willie, Mickey, and the Duke. Mays, Mantle, Snider; Giant, Yankee, Dodger; speed, power, grace, and youth, as well.

The Dodgers signed Snider out of Compton High School, in Greater Los Angeles, and brought him east to Bear Mountain, New York, where the team gathered for spring training in 1944. Ballclubs had to abandon spring training in the South during World War II, when the military commandeered the country’s rolling stock.) “Was I green?” Snider says. “It was late February and I didn’t bring a topcoat. Being a California kid, I didn’t own a topcoat.”

“Did you buy one in New York?”

“The Dodgers only gave me a bonus of $750,” Snider said, “and my family needed the money. No, I didn’t buy a topcoat. I was just cold a lot.”

After watching Snider exercise within the army fieldhouse at West Point, the Dodgers sent him to Newport News, in the Piedmont League, the bottom of the minors. There, at the age of seventeen, Snider batted .294.

The old scout in charge was one Jake Pitler, out of Olean, New York, later coach and caddy to the gabby Brooklyn manager Charlie Dressen. Old Scout Pitler filed his Snider report on September 2, 1944. His enthusiam was restrained.

“Well-built and moves good,” Pitler wrote. “Has lots of ability, but must improve on hitting curve ball.”

Pitler rated Snider’s outfield throwing as “very good,” an A minus. But in other categories — hitting, power, running, speed, and fielding — Pitler rated Snider only as “good,” no more than a straight B. Snider had a magnificent throwing arm. He was certainly among the ten best center fielders of modern times. He had astounding power. Pitler saw none of these things. Indeed, he reported that Snider “throws right, bats
right
.” Snider hit 418 major league home runs batting left-handed. He had batted left-handed from boyhood days.

Wise Old Scout Jake Pitler did not seem to have known what he had come upon in Snider. Later, after a hitch in service, Snider moved up quickly. By 1950, he led the National League in hits.

“He’s a great kid,” Old Scout Pitler said, reemerging as a Dodger coach the following spring.

By then
everybody
knew Duke was a great kid. Pitler’s onscene 1944 scouting report draws an F.*

Tom Greenwade, an old Yankee scout, is credited with having discovered Mickey Mantle, one early summer night in 1948, when he stopped off to watch a team of teenagers play a ballgame at Baxter Springs, Kansas. Greenwade dined out for years on Mantle stories. But there was little shock of recognition when Greenwade first saw Mantle, and precious little hurry to sign the young man.

Mickey’s father, Elvin “Mutt” Mantle, worked in lead and zinc mines in the northeastern corner of Oklahoma, literally scratching a living out of unyielding earth. He taught his son switch hitting, drilled the boy at shortstop, and once, about the time Snider was moving up through the minor leagues, drove all the way to St. Louis to ask the Browns to give Mickey a tryout. Sturdy Mutt Mantle had press clippings in his hand and his son in tow. The Browns, baseball’s weakest franchise, were not interested.

Later a St. Louis Cardinal scout named Runt Marr called on the Mantle home in the town of Commerce, Oklahoma. “I got to do a little more work, folks,” Runt Marr said, “but promise me this: Mickey won’t sign with another club until you give me a chance to make an offer.” That was in 1948. “I’m still waiting to hear from Runt,” Mantle said in 1992.

The Browns refused to discover Mickey Mantle. The Cardinals discovered him, then never made an offer. Tom Greenwade, who finally did sign Mantle, moved, as the southern saying is, slow as molasses in winter.

On the night in 1948 that Greenwade saw the Baxter Springs Whiz Kids, Mantle hit two home runs right-handed and another home run left-handed.

The exact date is lost. The precise postgame conversation is not. “Son,” Old Scout Greenwade said, “do you think you’d like to play for the Yankees?”

Mantle was not much at eloquence. His clear blue eyes looked right at Greenwade. “Shit, yeah,” he said.

Mantle was still a junior at Commerce High. The rules of organized baseball decreed that scouts could not sign boys until they had graduated or, since some players fell before algebra and history, the class with which they had entered high school graduated. Greenwade moved on, without further romancing Mantle. It was ten months before Mantle saw Greenwade again.

“That was my high school graduation day,” Mantle says. “Tom Greenwade talked to the principal. He wanted to see me play some more. He said could I skip the graduation ceremonies that night so I could play another game for the Baxter Whiz Kids. When Greenwade told the principal he was a Yankee scout, the principal said sure, whatever he wanted. The principal got real excited meeting a big league scout. I don’t remember being that excited myself. We didn’t have a television but we had a radio and I used to listen to the broadcasts from St. Louis. The best games were National League, the Dodgers and the Cardinals. My two idols were Stan Musial and Pee Wee Reese.* I wasn’t that much turned on by the Yankees. But they were the only big league team that wanted me.”

Greenwade’s first offer was a $500 bonus.

“My boy can do better than that staying here playing semipro,” Mutt Mantle said.

After considerable haggling, Greenwade agreed to make the bonus $1,500. Since that was the only offer, Mantle took it.

How, then, to rate Old Scout Tom Greenwade’s pursuit and evaluation of Mantle? Probably a B minus. In semipro ball, Mantle was playing shortstop, the wrong position, but speed and strength and power, the matchless switch-hitting power, must have been visible. Greenwade was less excited than he should have been. Indeed, if the forgotten Cardinal scout, Runt Marr, had been more alert, Greenwade would not have gotten to sign Mantle at all.*

Mantle went to play in Independence, Kansas, where he batted .313. The next year, 1950, he batted .383 at Joplin, Missouri. The following spring, Stengel saw him.

Casey, a better old scout than Hollywood scriptwriters could imagine, knew just what he was looking at right away. “You gonna send that flashy kid to Kansas City, Case?” a reporter asked in 1951, when Mantle was nineteen.

“I think,” Stengel answered, “it might be safer for the boy if he spent the summer up in New York City with me.”

The first pro baseball man to observe Willie Mays was Willie’s father, who played with Negro teams around Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1920s and ‘30s. The father, named William Howard after Taft, who was president when he was born, was fast and lithe. His baseball nickname was “Kitty-Kat” Mays.

I met Kitty-Kat late in the 1960s, after he had left the South and gone to work in Harlem as a supermarket checkout clerk. He was chubby by then, with a significant belly. “Sure,” Kitty-Kat Mays told me in a dugout at Shea Stadium, “I’ll be glad to tell you bout my boy, Willie. Ask anything you want.”

“When, sir, did you first begin to think your son was going to become a great ballplayer?”

Kitty-Kat offered a quick smile. “The neighborhood where we all lived” — Willie’s parents had been divorced — “had this ballfield, and when Willie was eight years old, he was so good he had to play with older kids.”

“I mean even before that, if possible.”

“Well, I’ll tell you a truth I ain’t never told no one,” Kitty-Kat said, slowly and seriously. “I knew he was gawna be special soon as he started walking, right around the time he got to be one year old. He’s one year old and I bought him a big round ball. Willie would hold that big round ball and bounce and chase it. If it ever got away from him, he’d start to cry.

“You couldn’t believe how good Willie was, one year old, chasing down that big round ball. Little bit of a thing, but even then his hands were sure and strong.

“I’m telling you the truth. Right then, when he was one year one, I knew he’d be a great one.”

It was sixteen or seventeen years before Mr. Mays’s magnificently prescient scouting report drew outside confirmation. Young Willie had started playing for the Birmingham Black Barons, which is where the Yankees spurned him out of bigotry. The Boston Red Sox also knew about Mays and, like the Yankees, went through the motions of scouting him. They declined to make an offer. (No black played for the Red Sox until 1959.) Finally, the Dodgers knew about Mays as well. There is no written evidence (this is not the sort of thing people put on memo pads), but by 1949 the Dodgers were backing away from further good black prospects. With Robinson, Campanella, and Newcombe already signed, Rickey elected to slow down integration, even if it meant losing good ballplayers. He thought three blacks in a starting lineup of nine was a good balance. “It would not have been prudent,” he remarked privately years later, “to have had too many Negroes on any one club.”

The road was open for the Giants. “We decided we were going to integrate in 1948 or ‘49,” Chub Feeney says, “so we were looking at the black leagues pretty carefully. We sent one of our scouts, Ed Montague, who was white by the way, down to Birmingham to look at a first baseman named Alonzo Perry. He wasn’t impressed by Perry, but he burned up the telephone lines about a kid named Willie Mays. Quick bat. Great hands. Terrific speed.

“You know, Willie’s parents split when Willie was young and the main person in Willie’s life was his Aunt Sarah. As I understand it, after the divorce he went and lived with her.

“Aunt Sarah was a pretty good agent. She said we could have Willie, all right, but we’d have to pay a bonus. Five thousand dollars. That’s what, fifty thousand dollars today? And mind you this is in an Alabama town that’s so poor they haven’t been able to pave the streets.

“Eddie Montague argued a little with Aunt Sarah, but his heart wasn’t in it. All Eddie wanted to do was sign the kid.

“So we came up with the $5,000 bonus and no, don’t ask me, I have no idea whether Aunt Sarah charged Willie a commission.”

The Giants dispatched Mays to their farm team at Trenton, class B in the old minor league classifications. These ran from Triple A down to D. Trenton was four rungs from the top, a lower level of baseball, Mays says, than he had been playing for the Birmingham Black Barons. “I had to hit against Satchel Paige for Birmingham. There wasn’t nobody, no way, near Satchel Paige playing baseball down in class B.” (Mays batted against Paige in only one game in Negro ball. He remembers it. He went one for two.)

Mays hit .353 at Trenton, but the assessment of manager Frank “Chick” Genovese remained conservative. Genovese evaluated Mays’s throwing arm at 4, the highest number in the Giant rating system. But Genovese gave Mays only a 3 in power, a 3 in hitting, a 3 in running, and a 3 in fielding. (He actually gave the greatest outfielder in history a B in fielding!)

It was not until a year later, 1951, that a stocky, weary old catcher out of Savannah, Tennessee, named John Herman “Hank” DeBerry filed a scouting report that is more than a report. Old Hank DeBerry wrote a scouting poem.

In thirty-five games that season at Triple A Minneapolis, Willie Mays would bat .477. Hank DeBerry watched Mays play minor league ball from May 6 through May 10. This is what he sent to the Giant offices, overlooking Bryant Park on 42nd Street in New York City:

“Sensational.

“The outstanding player on the club.

“He’s now on the best hitting streak imaginable.

“He hits all pitches. He hits to all fields.

“Everything he does is sensational.

“He runs and throws with the best.

“He makes the most spectacular catches.

“He slides hard. He plays hard.

“The Louisville pitchers knocked him down plenty. It had no effect on him at all.

“He’s as popular with local fans as can be — a real favorite.

“This player is the best prospect in America.

“It was a banner day for the Giants when this boy was signed.”

On September 10, 1951, the Giants were closing in on the Dodgers. After a torporific start, the team had fallen thirteen games behind. But with Mays in center field, the team awakened. By September 10, the Dodger lead was less than six games. That day in Savannah, Tennessee, a heart attack killed the old scout Hank DeBerry.

I like to think that before he died, when he gazed at Willie Mays, Hank DeBerry saw his promised land.

In 1950, when Mays was dominating in Trenton, Mantle was tiring outfielders in Joplin, and Snider was becoming a major league star, the Yankees called up a slim, sandy-haired lefthanded pitcher out of the borough of Queens, a bartender’s son who by his own account “was all bright and street smart. I knew my way around.” Rookie Whitey Ford would win nine games and lose only one that season and the Yankees needed just about every victory. Quite suddenly old 100-proof Joe Page was finished at the age of thirty-two. Page lost seven games in relief and his earned run average jumped to a sorry 5.04. The booze turned his arm to rust all at once.

Around the American League fans groused about the Yankees’ damnable good luck. “Just when that lefty Joe Page is drinking himself out of the league, they come up with this slick kid left-hander.” And, of course, luck had nothing to do with the Yankees’ getting Ford, who, sportswriters later wrote, was really a Cadillac pitcher.