The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (30 page)

“After this tense and exciting contest,” Rud Rennie wrote, “manager Eddie Sawyer left the field in a daze. Following three one-run losses, he felt like a man on an operating table, trying to fight the anesthetic.”

“Yes, sir,” manager Stengel said, “the Philadelphias are very difficult to beat, as I have told you. Why today, as you gentlemen saw, my fine team was unable to beat them again until the very last inning we were permitted to play.”

Factors at work this October included toughness, pressure, and the remarkable tenacity of Stengel and his field hands. Those who despised the Yankees — there was no shortage of Yankee haters in the country — railed once more against Yankee luck. But winning close World Series games is not primarily a matter of fortune.

With their third victory, Stengel’s Yankees now had a World Series winning streak of six, three against the Dodgers in ‘49 and three more against the Phillies in ‘50. Across those six games, the Yankees had made only one error. They didn’t give anything away. By contrast, the Phillies actually invited the Yankees back into game three, after taking a 2 to 1 lead.

In the eighth inning, Ken Heintzelman, a thirty-four-year-old left-hander, got two quick outs and walked three Yankees in a row, loading the bases. Sawyer brought in Konstanty to pitch to Bobby Brown, a devastating World Series hitter. Konstanty bothered Brown with the sinking palm ball; Brown stroked a routine grounder to shortstop. Then Granny Hamner having a great Series — he would bat .429 and steal a base — dropped the ball. It was his only error of the Series; the tying run scored.

Is it luck when you score the tying run on three walks and an error? Possibly, although one is reminded of Branch Rickey’s metaphysical pronouncement: “Luck is the residue of design.” The Phillies handed the Yankees a run, but that happens all the time in baseball.
The Yankees handed Philadelphia nothing back!

Consider the principal players:

Heintzelman pitching the only World Series game of his life, trying to remain composed at vast, intimidating Yankee Stadium, where he had never pitched before, while a crowd of 64,505 looked on. Heintzelman had never pitched in front of that many people either. He kept his poise for seven and two-thirds innings. Then he cracked.

Young Hamner, a shortstop with great fielding range, had never played in the Stadium either. With bases loaded and two out in a one-run game, he suddenly became unable to pick up a ground ball. Errors under pressure happen often, but the Yankee shortstop, Phil Rizzuto, did not make an error all World Series. Like Reynolds and Raschi and DiMaggio and the rest, Rizzuto had played under World Series pressure before. “It never gets easy,” Rizzuto says. “But you learn how to live with it, block out the crowd and the noise, and you make yourself play not the situation but the grounder.”

Little Phil, white-haired and trim at the age of seventy-six, offers a twinkly smile. “Now you know, huckleberry, what I just told you is easier to talk about than to do.”

Bobby Brown: “As a cardiologist, I’ve had to apply heart massage in an emergency room. Could I keep my patient alive or would I lose him? The stakes are completely different in the World Series, of course, but just in terms of personal pressure, will I succeed or will I fail? . . . On that level the pressure of a life and death emergency, for a conscientious doctor, which I was, and a tight spot in a World Series, for a dedicated ballplayer, which I also was, can be said to be comparable.”

For game four, Stengel could have come back with Raschi, “my finest pitcher to win one game,” but with a lead of three games to none, he could take a bit of a chance. He chose the Astoria rookie. Before Whitey Ford was finished in baseball, he started twenty-two World Series games, more than any other pitcher. (Christy Mathewson and Waite Hoyt, in second place, each started eleven.) Ford leads in Series victories, strikeouts, and also losses, with eight. (Mathewson lost five.)

“I remember when Casey told me I was going to start,” Ford says. “We were way ahead in the Series so I wasn’t
too
nervous, but I had to run around buying a bunch of tickets for all my relatives and a lot of friends.”

The Yankees scored twice in the first inning and three more times in the sixth. Ford carried a 5 to 0 lead into the ninth inning. The Phillies scuffed him a bit, getting runners on first and third with two out. Then Andy Seminick, the Phillies’ starting catcher, hit a high fly to left field. “It was just a fly ball with two out in the ninth,” Rud Rennie wrote. “It was the end. But it wasn’t the end.”

Gene Woodling had trouble picking up the fly through haze and cigarette smoke and slanting late afternoon sunlight. He finally spotted the baseball, lunged, and dropped it. The Phillies scored two runs. Then Mike Goliat singled, bringing the tying run to the plate.

Stengel tramped to the mound and lifted Ford for Allie Reynolds. “Casey got a lot of booing for taking me out,” Ford says. “‘Let the kid finish. Give him a chance.’ Stuff like that. Hell, half the people booing were my relatives. But I admire Casey for what he did, making the move he thought he should, and the hell with the booing.

“The way Allie Reynolds looked when he come in, with those high Indian cheekbones of his. . . . He was the meanest-looking pitcher I ever saw. Walking off the mound, I was happy about one thing. I wasn’t going to have to hit against Allie Reynolds.”

Reynolds threw three fastballs past Stan Lopata and the 1950 World Series was done. The Yankees and Stengel were establishing baseball dominance without precedent.

“I’m sorry I had to take the young man out,” Stengel said later, “but as I have been telling you, the Philadelphias is hard to defeat, and I am paid by my employers to defeat them, which is why I went for the feller with the big fastball. Have a nice winter.”

T
HE BROOKLYN FAMILY O
’
MALLEY
, destined to change the face of baseball, crossed paths with my own family long, long ago, in 1937. Viewed from the declining years of this century, the setting was unlikely: an Episcopally oriented grade school, called Froebel Academy, located at the corner of Brooklyn Avenue and Prospect Place, such a conservative institution that in 1936 a straw poll of upper school students showed Alfred M. Landon defeating Franklin Delano Roosevelt by a margin of 10 to 1. (In the November election, Roosevelt won forty-six of the forty-eight states.)

Froebel education was rooted in Anglican traditions: chapel every morning with psalms and hymns and sermonlike talks by the headmaster. Very early, Froebel students were required to memorize the Gettysburg Address and “An Old Athenian Oath” and to sing the Doxology. Most of the student body was staunchly Protestant, but the entry of two Roman Catholic children named O’Malley was accepted easily enough. Shanty Irish would have been unwelcome, but Terry O’Malley and her younger brother Peter were well dressed and generally well behaved. Terry was a spirited tomboy; Peter, tall for his age, bespectacled, serious and skinny, wasn’t much good at sports. In the gossip that buzzed through recess or preceded football practice, I learned that the father was a lawyer, not particularly wealthy, but one who could pay his bills.

At the request of Carlton M. Saunders, M.A., the headmaster, my father took over the Froebel athletic program in 1937, actually coaching football and baseball across many afternoons on the gravelly field that stretched behind the schoolhouse. At the same time, Walter O’Malley moved on to the board of trustees of Froebel, eventually becoming chairman. Neither my father nor O’Malley accepted a fee. My father loved sports and seemed to enjoy coaching us, which, helped by several paid assistants, he did with verve and towering authority. When he said jump, we jumped without comment, except perhaps to say, “How high, sir?” (The noun
Coach
had not yet become a title, like Professor or Doctor.)

O’Malley enjoyed making policy and manipulating, and it was under his aegis that Froebel, in a startling break with tradition, replaced Mr. Saunders with someone named Florence McCormack. She would work more cheaply than Mr. Saunders, which pleased O’Malley mightily, and she, like Walter, was Roman Catholic. O’Malley was burningly aware of ethnicity and in time created in Dodger management an entirely Roman Catholic hierarchy.

I have known the O’Malley background intimately since my own childhood. No version I have read is close to accurate, hardly the fault of the writers. Walter O’Malley, the Great Manipulator, was something of a novelist. He enjoyed making up stories, inventing familial wealth and creating for himself a distinguished career, say as an admiralty lawyer, which had not in fact existed. There was a touch of megalomania to O’Malley, but aside from that he loved games, golf, poker, even baseball. Getting
The New York Times
to print his fabrications as truth amused him. He sure had put one over on that old Scotch-Irish Protestant sportswriter Roscoe McGowen and on that silk-stockinged Park Avenue publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who by the way just happened to be Jewish. *

O’Malley’s father, Edwin, was a Democratic party ward heeler, who became commissioner of markets for New York City and was dismissed after a contentious — but now obscure — scandal in 1922. O’Malley’s mother’s family was southern German and as staunchly Catholic as the Irish-American father. Even after his dismissal, Edwin O’Malley retained some money. He sent his son to the University of Pennsylvania to study engineering, and later to Fordham, where Walter got his law degree.

O’Malley graduated from Fordham Law while the Depression raged and set about wheeling and dealing. He claimed to have made the definitive feasibility study for construction of the Triborough Bridge and after that — “with my engineering background” — rewritten the New York City building code. Perhaps. But when I was at Froebel Academy late in the 1930s my father knew O’Malley simply as “a lawyer for a bank.” O’Malley handled collections out of an office in Manhattan but also was a familiar figure in the courthouses and Democratic clubs of downtown Brooklyn. He was a glad-handing sort, offering cigars and buying drinks for what he called “the higher-ups.” Although O’Malley’s legal acuity left the famous lawyer Bill Shea unimpressed, his swarming, energetic style attracted the attention of George V. McLaughlin, president of the Brooklyn Trust Company, the bank that held the mortgage on Ebbets Field. O’Malley was an ingratiating, hustling young feller. McLaughlin came to trust him with problem collections.

The problem at Ebbets Field was clear. The Dodgers were not paying down the mortgage, said to exceed three hundred thousand Depression dollars. As Larry MacPhail began generating revenue by bringing in Pee Wee Reese, Dolph Camilli, and Billy Herman, he insisted that he needed more time before taking on the mortgage. “I need every cent I’ve got, George, to keep operating this club. We’re taking on the Cardinals and the Yankees. The mortgage comes next.”

McLaughlin accepted that, but bank examiners for New York State found the situation intolerable. They delivered an ultimatum: Either the Brooklyn Dodgers commenced making timely interest payments on the mortgaged ballpark or they would order the Brooklyn Trust Company to foreclose on Ebbets Field.

McLaughlin summoned O’Malley. “I want you to get over to Montague Street and tell me exactly what’s going on.”

“I’ll need to attend board meetings to get a good picture,” O’Malley said.

“I’ve arranged for that,” McLaughlin said. “I’m having you appointed lawyer for the Brooklyn Dodgers.* Understand, we simply
cannot
foreclose on Ebbets Field. The public reaction would be disastrous for the bank. We’d lose half our depositors. Aside from that, Walter, I’m a Dodger fan.”

O’Malley presently described the financial profligacy he found in the Dodger offices with wincing horror. Large sums of money came in at Ebbets Field, from ticket sales and hot dogs and beer. Concession receipts ran to about ten percent of the gate. A sold-out Ebbets Field meant receipts of about $75,000. That money, in dimes and quarters and dollar bills, was loaded into duffel bags and transported to the bank in downtown Brooklyn, where the duffel bags were dumped into a vault. “The bags weren’t sealed,” O’Malley recounted years afterward, “and some of our employees were supplementing their income by dipping into the unsealed duffel bags.”

“That’s called skimming,” I said.

“I know what that’s called,” O’Malley said irritably. Matters were so bad, he told McLaughlin, that he could not do much to correct the situation even as club lawyer.

“Terrible mess, George,” O’Malley insisted in his Tammany basso. “The only way I can get something meaningful done is if I myself become a director of the team.”

McLaughlin accepted O’Malley’s approach. The Brooklyn Trust Company lent O’Malley $250,000, with which he purchased twenty-five percent of the stock in the Brooklyn National League Baseball Club, Inc.* Timely interest payments on the Ebbets Field mortgage began soon after.

O’Malley sized up major league baseball with that consuming nonromantic intelligence of his and saw something both akin to and remote from grass and gloves and basepaths. He detected the road to El Dorado.

O’Malley set out immediately to invent a baseball background for himself “I played a little ball and pretty damn well,” he began one of the whoppers, “until at Penn a ground ball intersected with my nose and I thought better of participation on the field.” O’Malley has been described as looking like a cartoon of a capitalist drawn for a socialist magazine: jowls, glasses, paunch, cigar. But reporters accepted his story of athleticism partly because he had the sense to tell it with self-deprecating charm.

He’d always loved sitting in the box seats at Ebbets Field, O’Malley maintained. Even though his law office was “high up in the Lincoln Building in Manhattan,” he had taken favored clients to Dodger games “for many years.” Was this true? Probably not. But again O’Malley offered soothing self-deprecation. “I wasn’t fancy enough to get good seats at Yankee Stadium. That’s why I had to take my clients to Brooklyn. And when I got to Ebbets Field, darned if I didn’t like what I saw.” There was no stuffed shirt about O’Malley. Most people quickly liked him; his charm could have warmed an igloo in January.