The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (29 page)

“I always loved to play ball,” Ford remembers. “I just
loved
it. When I was five years old, I used to play with a broom handle and a red rubber Spalding ball. I played in high school, Manhattan School of Aviation Trades, mostly first base. Then I went to a tryout at Yankee Stadium. I’m five foot, eight inches tall and they figure I’m too small for a first baseman. But Paul Krichell, the scout, sees me throwing in infield practice and says I ought to think of switching and becoming a pitcher. I had a good arm. Krichell gave me tips on throwing the curve. The good curve ball just came to me real easy.”

Ford became a New York City sandlot pitching star. The Red Sox and the Giants grew interested but hesitated. The kid still looked awfully small. The Yankees signed Ford in September 1947 for a $7,000 bonus, which they split into two equal payments. Ford cashed the first check, taking seventy $50 bills, and walked to Times Square. There he bought his parents a radio-phonograph combination priced at $175.

“I was wearing dungarees and a T-shirt and when I whipped out my roll, thirty-five hundred dollars in fifties, the salesclerk called the police.

“A cop grabs me and says, ‘Where did you steal this money, kid?’ After a while, I got them to call my mother, and she explained that the cash was really mine. I didn’t get arrested buying a present for my parents, but the cops sure spoiled my plans. I meant the radio-phonograph to be a surprise.”

Three seasons later, in 1950, Ford became a Yankee star. The team pumped his dimensions on its roster sheet, claiming he stood five feet ten and weighed 180, exaggerating by two inches and fifteen pounds. Hype, to be sure, but there was no luck in the Yankees’ landing Ford, no luck at all. The Yankees had him switch from first base to the mound, taught him the curve ball, tracked his progress with great care, and then outbid two other wealthy teams to sign him. (Scout Krichell gets an A.)

The 1950 Yankees finished three games ahead of the Detroit Tigers, who were bunched with Boston and an improving Cleveland team. Since Ford saved one game, in addition to the nine victories, he had a major hand in ten games the Yankees won. Older chaps named DiMaggio and Mize helped with good home run years, but without ten big victories from twenty-four-year-old Edward Charles Ford, Field Marshal von Stengel could not have won his second straight pennant.

In 1950 the Giants, with two blacks in the line-up, had their best season in eight years, finishing third. Most regarded the Dodgers — Robinson, Reese, Campanella, Snider, just to mention future Hall of Fame players in the Brooklyn lineup — as the strongest team in the National League. But Burt Shotton could not fire up the club, which dawdled about in third place as late as September 19, nine games behind a fast, young Philadelphia squad, nicknamed the Whiz Kids and managed by a gentle, fatherly character called Eddie Sawyer. The Phillies were still all white, but their days of spewing apartheid garbage were done.

Through late September, the Dodgers closed like thunder, winning thirteen out of sixteen games. The Whiz Kids lost Curt Simmons, a wonderfully fast left-handed pitcher, to the military. Injuries and pressure took tolls. While the Dodgers were, in Red Barber’s recurrent phrase, “tearin’ up the ol’ pea patch,” the Phillies were losing nine out of twelve. In another recurrent phrase, sportswriters took to saying “The Whiz Kids are looking like the Fizz Kids.”

On Sunday, October 1, 1950, the last day of the regular season, the Phillies led the Dodgers by a single game. The drama of things working with a vivid flair, the Phils would have to play their final regular season game at Ebbets Field, and on a curiously superheated autumn afternoon. The temperature climbed to 88 degrees and Red Smith announced that pulses ran rapidly “in the old Flatbush ballyard. A Dodger victory would force a play-off between a spurting Brooklyn ballclub and the Phading Phils. Few doubted who would then speed away with the pennant.”

A magnificent game developed with intensity, comic relief, and unrelenting excitement. Indeed, this would be yet another of what magazine editors like to call the Greatest Ballgame Ever Played. Some in Philadelphia still believe it really was.

Shotton started Mighty Don Newcombe, out of Madison, New Jersey, six foot four and 220 pounds, the first successful black pitcher in the major leagues.* Big Newk, the players said, could throw through a damn brick wall. Sawyer countered with sturdy six-foot Robin Roberts, just two years out of college but already in full stride toward a career that won him election to the Hall of Fame. Not only could these right-handers throw very hard; each had control. Fast balls high and tight, hopping and buzzing up toward the letters. Sharp, low curve balls cutting the black outer marker of home plate. In Brooklyn, this day was particularly warm for hitters.

The seating capacity of Ebbets Field varied over its forty-seven-year life. In 1950 the park seated 32,111. Somehow on this October day a crowd of 35,073, almost 3,000 above capacity, paid its way into the old arched ballpark. People stood behind seats and sat in the aisles and climbed girders and settled into uncomfortable iron nests. Crowds milled outside on Sullivan Place and Bedford Avenue. A swarm stormed the roof of a six-story apartment building at 250 Montgomery Avenue. From that roof, you could see the infield and the mound, much of right and center field, none of left. Wasn’t this ballgame televised? Indeed it was, on channel 9. But in 1950, people preferred to see baseball live, live and visceral and bloody and real, no matter how distant or perilous the perch.

“General admission fans,” Harold Rosenthal reported in the
Herald Tribune
, “began collecting outside the Ebbets Field gates at midnight. “Police and fire officials estimate that by game time, as many people had been turned away as gained admission.”

“I remember very clearly,” Rosenthal said forty-two years later, “that I took the BMT subway to the ballpark and I got out at the Prospect Park station. There was a terrific crowd in the streets and I had to push a little. But it was a genial crowd, all upbeat. ‘We can do it,’ people were saying. ‘We’ve come from way back and we can do it.’ Remember, an upbeat 1950 Brooklyn crowd was nothing alarming, nothing like an angry urban crowd today.”

The two right-handers dominated through five innings, with Roberts a shade more imposing. Nobody scored. Eddie Waitkus, now in a remission from tragedy, led off the sixth for Philadelphia with a sharp grounder to the right of first baseman Gil Hodges, who made a lunging snare. Then Hodges tossed to Newcombe covering first base for the out. Richie Ashburn, a fine center fielder who lived to become a New York Met a generation later, hit a replica of Waitkus’s smash. Another out, Hodges to Newcombe. Dick Sisler, on the biggest day of his life, smoked a single to right. Del Ennis, a strong right-handed slugger, followed with a short fly ball into right center. Duke Snider, playing Ennis to pull the ball into left center, couldn’t race in fast enough. Nor could Carl Furillo, playing a deep right. Jackie Robinson at second base had a chance to make the play but broke slowly. The short fly dropped beyond Robinson for a base hit. Then Willie “Puddin’ Head” Jones, a strong country boy from South Carolina, lined a Newcombe fastball cleanly into left field and Sisler ran home with a Philadelphia run.

Pee Wee Reese, the Dodger captain, batted .260 in 1950, but Reese was the best .260 clutch hitter on the planet. With two out in the sixth inning, Reese cracked an outside fastball high and deep to right.

The right field wall in Brooklyn angled back for about eight feet, then rose vertically to a point fifteen feet high, where it was topped by a stiff screen that went forty feet into the air. Right field in Brooklyn wasn’t deep — 297 feet down the line and 344 to right center — but it was high. Reese’s drive struck just at a point where the screen rose from the fence. And there, for the only time in Ebbets Field history, the baseball stuck. It neither bounced off the screen nor dribbled down the fence. The baseball stuck, wedged between fence and screen.

Reese sped around the bases.

“Slow down,” Frank Dascoli, the second base umpire, shouted. “Slow down, Pee Wee. The ball is stuck.”

Reese did not slow down. (“I knew the ground rules,” he says. “If that ball started rolling down the right field wall, it was in play.”) He rimmed the bases at top speed, turning his head two or three times to see the baseball but never slowing, sprinting all out until he crossed home plate with the tying run.

No one had ever seen a ball stuck on the wall before. No one would ever see a ball stuck there again. “The Dodgers,” growled Red Smith, who always rooted against them, “have adopted germ warfare.”

A boy of twelve or fourteen crawled out along the top of the right field wall between innings and retrieved the baseball. Scrambling back, he tossed it to a cohort in the crowd. Before ballpark police could react, boy, ball, and cohort escaped into a keyhole of history.

The game itself remained tied into the last of the ninth inning. The Dodgers had gotten only four hits; Reese had two of them. Cal Abrams — Calvin Ross Abrams, born in Philadelphia and raised in Brooklyn — was a left-handed, opposite-field hitter. He led off the Dodger ninth by drawing a walk on a three and two pitch. Reese tried to sacrifice Abrams to second but fouled off two bunt attempts. Then he lined a single to left center, his third hit. The Dodgers had men on first and second with nobody out.

The hitter was Duke Snider, a poor bunter. But Richie Ashburn in center field suspected the bunt anyway, at least on the first pitch. He moved in, playing more shallow than he normally played Snider, to back up the infield in the event of a bunt and a subsequent throw to second base.

Snider cracked Roberts’s first pitch on a hard low line into center. The ball bounced. The Brooklyn crowd made a great triumphant sound. Surely Abrams would score the winning run. But quick Richie Ashburn raced in from his shallow post, scooped the ball, and fired it toward catcher Stan Lopata. Milton Stock, the Dodger third base coach, waved Abrams home. The throw was perfect and beat Abrams by fifteen feet. Lopata, a six-foot, two-inch 210-pounder, set his body and blocked the plate. Abrams ran into the tag gently, like a pacifist.

The Dodgers were a good base-running team. Reese reached third and Snider took second on the play at home. Two men on for Brooklyn, only one out, and Jackie Robinson, the best batter in the league that year (after Stan Musial) stepping in to hit. Roberts walked Robinson deliberately, a move that both took the bat out of Robinson’s powerful hands and set up a potential double play.

Bases loaded now. Still one out. Tie game. Roberts jammed Carl Furillo with a fastball and Furillo swung weakly and lifted a low pop foul to Eddie Waitkus. Two out. Then Gil Hodges hit a long fly ball to right center that Ennis caught. The Brooklyn flurry was over. The game went into the tenth inning.

Roberts bounced a ground single up the middle. Waitkus lifted a pop fly single to center. Ashburn bunted, but Newcombe threw to Billy Cox at third base, forcing Roberts. Newcombe got two strikes on Dick Sisler, wasted a pitch high, and then tried to throw an outside fastball past the hitter. Sisler batted left. He slapped the fastball into left field where it carried 350 feet, into the first row of box seats in the lower deck.

Home run. 4 to 1, Phillies.

The Dodgers went out in order in the bottom of the tenth. The Phillies had won their first pennant since 1915. Roberts’s victory was his twentieth, the first Philadelphia pitcher to win twenty since Grover Cleveland Alexander had a great year in 1917.

October 2, 1950, was an unsettling day in Brooklyn and beyond. The Korean War, which had quieted, flared into fresh violence on that day when South Korean troops rolled north across the 38th parallel and General Douglas MacArthur called upon the North Korean army to surrender “and avoid useless shedding of blood and destruction of property.” MacArthur’s arrogance would wane in November when the Chinese Communists intervened with a million foot soldiers and put his armies to rout. President Truman removed MacArthur from command the following April and the general made his famous farewell speech to Congress. (“Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.”)

MacArthur settled in Manhattan after that and became a frequent visitor to Ebbets Field. The American Caesar, as William Manchester called him, turned out to be an enthusiastic Dodger fan.

Walter O’Malley was flattered to have the general as a guest, but in time MacArthur annoyed the sportswriters. The general insisted on riding the press elevator to O’Malley’s private box but would not enter an elevator occupied by reporters. An aide-de-camp imperiously cleared out all journalists before the general would step aboard.

“What are we, cholera?” Dick Young wanted to know.

Having exhausted their ace in the great Sunday victory, the Phillies did not start Robin Roberts against the Yankees on Wednesday, October 4, when the World Series began in Philadelphia. Instead, Eddie Sawyer worked a rugged right-hander from upstate New York, Casimir James Konstanty, who answered to Jim. Konstanty threw with reasonable speed; his “out” pitch was a palm ball, which dipped sharply as it approached home plate, much like the popular split-fingered delivery of recent years. He had appeared in seventy-four games that year, winning sixteen and saving twenty-two, but he had not started any at all. Konstanty was a relief pitcher. Before the 1950 Series, he had not started a ballgame since 1946.

He pitched with surprising endurance, giving up only a single run. But Vic Raschi pitched a two-hitter and the Yankees won, 1 to 0, the second straight October in which they opened the Series with a 1 to 0 victory.

Roberts returned to work on Thursday and pitched another fine game. Allie Reynolds was just a little finer. Joe DiMaggio hit a homer in the tenth inning and the Yankees won this one, 2 to 1. “Yes, sir,” Stengel told the swarming reporters at Shibe Park, “them Philadelphias is a very fine team, make no mistake. It is difficult to beat them, which is why it took us an extra inning today.”

Back at the Stadium next afternoon the Yankees won the third game 3 to 2, scoring the winning run with two out in the ninth on successive singles by Gene Woodling, Phil Rizzuto, and Jerry Coleman. Never had there been three such close games at the start of a World Series. “The Phils,” Jimmy Cannon said, “are playing just well enough to lose.”