The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (33 page)

Jackie Robinson said he did not remember Branca’s first pitch to Thomson as being hip-high on the inside. “I thought it was right down the middle. I remember, Pee Wee and I exchanged looks. Like, if Branca throws another like that, we’re cooked.”

Branca’s grandiosity about a role for God in a baseball game persists, and he accepts criticism poorly. But some years ago Sal Maglie demanded of him: “How were you pitching to Thomson?”

“I wanted to get ahead of him,” Branca said, “throw a strike.”

“You did get ahead of him,” Maglie said. “Then what?”

“I wanted to get him with a curve. I threw the second fastball to set up a curve.”

“If you wanted to get him with a curve in a spot like that,” Maglie said, “you should have thrown the curve. What were you waiting for?”

Branca did not argue. Perhaps poor pitch selection, not the Divinity, was his undoing. God may not have been a Giant fan after all.

This ballgame had been televised from coast to coast on the brand-new coaxial cable. Thomson’s home run instantly became a moment in the consciousness of a nation, without equal in American sport.

There has never been a better rendering of that instant than the one in the
Herald Tribune
. Against a deadline in the Polo Grounds, Red Smith wrote:

Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.

A talented feller with whom to share a press box.

*“Don’t be
too
harsh on old Jake,” urges Leo Laboissiere, a crack scout with the Baltimore Orioles. “Most of us are wrong more often than we’re right.”

*During game one of the 1952 World Series, at Ebbets Field, Mantle slid hard into second base, breaking up a double play. He crashed into shortstop Reese, who came tumbling down on top of him. “All I could think,” Mantle says, “was, Oh, my God, I’ve killed my idol.’ “

*We would then have seen a pretty fair St. Louis Cardinal outfield, come 1951 or 1952: Stan Musial in left field, Enos Slaughter in right field, and Mickey Mantle in center. I suspect that outfield would have wrenched pennants away from the Dodgers and the Giants. The Era would have been a very different time, indeed.

*Bill Veeck brought Satchel Paige to Cleveland in 1948, when Paige was forty-two, or possibly forty-eight, and past his prime. Across six major league seasons, Paige won twenty-eight games but lost thirty-one. As Langston Hughes might have remarked, that is what happens to a dream deferred.

*When caught in a misstatement, O’Malley never missed a swaggering step. “Surely, you realize,” he told me once when I nailed him, “that only half the lies the Irish tell are true.”

One favorite O’Malley whopper: That Joseph Kennedy tried to buy the Dodgers in 1946 so his wounded son Jack could become club president. “If I’d let that deal go through,” O’Malley boasted some years after Oswald, “John Kennedy would be alive today.”

Another: “As president of the Dodgers I’m like everybody else at Ebbets Field. I’m just a fan.”

*The previous Dodger lawyer was Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential candidate in 1940. A remarkable and independent character, Willkie was too involved in such questions as U.S.-Soviet relations to give the Dodgers the time that Brooklyn chaos required.

*For all his bluster of early affluence, O’Malley entered baseball on borrowed money. After the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, Bill Shea told me, “George McLaughlin never again spoke to O’Malley. George loved the Brooklyn Dodgers. He hadn’t lent O’Malley money to kill his favorite team.”

“She’s a plain kid . . . She’d give up show business if I asked her.”

— Joe DiMaggio, describing his second wife

T
HE BEST, THE MOST
gloriously competitive, the most wonderfully hostile, fastball-in-your-ear, spikes-in-your-shin baseball ever played illuminated New York during that decade half forgotten but also half remembered as the drifty, shifty, not entirely nifty fifties. As Joe DiMaggio remarked when a
New York Times
reporter asked him to summarize the experience of taking a shower with Marilyn Monroe, “Louie, you shoulda been there.”

We moved into the time warbling “How High the Moon” along with Les Paul and Mary Ford; proceeded mistily to “Secret Love” with that dewy, sexy sunflower Doris Day; and stumbled out as music became a wind of change, hammering, loud, rock-rock-around-the-clock:

Scramble my brains,

And fry me, honey.

I’m more than just a good little egg.

(Shaboom.

Doo-wop.

Yeah,

Yeah,

YEAH
.

)

!

Some argue that baseball today, circa 1993, is better than ever. George Will, in the popular 1990 book
Men at Work
, declares that “things are better than ever . . . in baseball” and that talk about a “Golden Age” is “piffle.” Even if one resists the temptation to dismiss Will as an arriviste, it is difficult to agree with his conclusion.

It is true, to be sure, that many things today
are
better than ever: color television sets, ball gloves, thermonuclear bombs, Olympic long jumpers, high blood pressure pills, tennis rackets, jet fighter planes, and sneakers. But many things are not better than ever: epic poems, violins, presidents, concert halls, blondes, plays about royalty, and — to put a point on this — managers and ballplayers.

Indeed, many things are demonstrably worse. AstroTurf is a poorer playing surface than grass. AstroTurf has given baseball the trampoline bounce and the ground ball triple. Multisport stadia, those vast concrete coffee cups in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere, are worse than the old ballparks; they are not even designed specifically for baseball.

Generally the rich players of today are less driven to win than the forever hungry players who grew out of the Depression. Although one finds exceptions, today’s ballplayer is more the pampered house cat and less the tiger focused on the hunt.

Aren’t today’s athletes faster, bigger, and stronger than their counterparts of the 1950s? Certainly that applies to football players, runners, and Olympic basketball stars. But baseball is not a faster-bigger-stronger game.* Given a certain minimum standard, major league baseball is timing, coordination, and hand-to-eye response. Jim Thorpe, the strongest, fastest athlete of his time, was a bust as a big leaguer. For all his strength and speed, Big Jim could not hit major league curve balls.

The best recent big league shortstop has been Osborne Earl Smith, called Ozzie, who stands five foot ten and weighs 150 pounds. That is 10 pounds less than the playing weight of Harold Henry Reese, called Pee Wee, the Hall of Fame shortstop from the Era. (Are great fielding shortstops actually getting smaller?)

The strongest contemporary power hitter probably is Jose Canseco, who stands a formidable six foot four. But neither Canseco nor other large present sluggers, such as Mark McGwire (six foot five) and Cecil Fielder (250 pounds), hit for distance to match Mickey Mantle, who stands five foot eleven and played at 190 pounds. (Are great sluggers growing bigger . . . and weaker?)

An electronic timing device clocked balls fired by the Dodgers’ Joe Black at 96 miles an hour one night in 1952. “Allie Reynolds,” Black says, “was faster than me. When he was pushing it, he got up over one hundred.” Reynolds was big, but no giant, at six feet, 195 pounds. Many pitchers today are bigger. None throws faster.

The skills of managers are harder to quantify. Durocher was matchless across pennant races, keeping his players furious, focused, and sullen yet not mutinous.

As Yankee manager, Stengel practiced necromancy. I don’t believe you can say that about any baseball manager today.

During the Era, baseball had first and undisputed claim on the best athletes in America. Pro basketball was a minor sport, just bouncing out of armories and dance halls; pro football still struggled to convince fans and sports editors that not
all
of its heroes were potbellied, bald beer barrels. Baseball was totally dominant and baseball salaries were by far the highest offered in any team sport. An outstanding lineman during the Era, Don Colo of the Cleveland Browns, earned $6,000 a year. Before Allie Reynolds retired in 1954, the Yankees were paying him $65,000. With that sort of income differential, baseball was every athlete’s first choice.

Then as now, great athletes were gifted in many sports. Stan Musial and Jackie Robinson were fine basketball players. As a youngster Joe DiMaggio loved tennis. Duke Snider was a wonderful football quarterback. Willie Mays could have become the greatest pass catcher in the annals. All these athletes chose baseball; under today’s conditions they might make a different choice.

John Elway, quarterback at Denver, was a promising shortstop. Baseball lost him to the National Football League. Jim Courier abandoned baseball for tennis. Bo Jackson, a developing power hitter, has had his baseball career hampered by a football injury. Baseball stars during the Era were forbidden by fiat or contract to play another team sport.

“Football?” the Dodgers farm director Fresco Thompson roared in the face of a young prospect who wanted to supplement his baseball income on the gridiron. “Football? What is it you’re looking for, young man? A major league contract or a limp?”

Today baseball has a harder time first in attracting the best athletes. Then, the best talent it does sign is diluted by endless mushrooming of new franchises. During the Era there were sixteen major league teams. With the newest expansion, we have twenty-eight. Once there were four hundred major league jobs for ballplayers. Today there are seven hundred. Some of the best baseball players in America are not playing ball; they’re working in other sports. Many of today’s major leaguers could not have made
any
big league team in the 1950s.

* * *

Approaching the years of the Era ruled by Walter O’Malley, we run into another persistent misconception. This one suggests that people, particularly New Yorkers and Brooklynites, lost interest in baseball. In his one-volume history
Our Game
, Charles C. Alexander, Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio University, describes the Era as a time of “shrinking crowds and shifting franchises.” From 1947 to 1957, attendance at the three New York ballparks dropped from 5.6 million to 3.2 million. But these attendance figures mean less than they appear to mean. During the Era, televised baseball took hold.

The television set was exotic in 1947; televised baseball had novelty appeal. Earlier, during most of the 1930s, the three New York teams collectively (and probably illegally) blocked radio broadcasts of their games. They believed that fans offered baseball on the radio would not come out and buy tickets. When Larry MacPhail brought Red Barber to Brooklyn in 1937, it was established very quickly that broadcasts did not keep people away. Broadcasts
sold
tickets. Barber and later Mel Allen were the greatest ticket salesmen in town.

Considering television, the three teams determined not to repeat the radio blackout mistake. From 1947 on, the Dodgers, the Giants, and the Yankees televised every one of their home games and most road games as well. By 1955, the Dodgers earned $787,155 for local television and radio rights, roughly $250,000 more than the combined salaries of all their players. “We were in the black before Opening Day,” Buzzie Bavasi remembers, “but we never told that to anybody. I mean, you don’t exactly advertise a gold strike, do you?”

Unlike radio, television carried troubling side effects. More and more people bought sets from DuMont and Admiral and Philco, and old habits began changing. People grew accustomed to baseball on a 13-inch black-and-white screen, where a blizzard broke out every time an airplane flew over the antenna. When a sellout crowd jammed Yankee Stadium one summer afternoon in 1953, Rud Rennie wrote: “Many were surprised to learn that the grass was green and that there were nine men on the field at all times.”

As people embraced televised baseball, fans grew querulous. The parking was crowded at the ballpark. The seats were harder than a sofa. Besides, it was just a little cloudy. A summer shower? You never could tell.

Let’s sit at home tonight, people said, and watch the ballgame on the one-eyed box. It’s cheaper that way and more comfortable and if the game gets lopsided we can switch to Milton Berle.
Fanus televiendis americanus
. The group proliferates.

Professor Alexander’s observation on “shrinking crowds” is true in a narrow sense. The crowds at the ballparks shrank. The crowds watching televised baseball multiplied and grew.

Interest, as opposed to attendance, never flagged. The ballplayers were godlike. The managers were giants in the earth.

The Era was the greatest age in baseball history.

The captains and the kings depart (even as new legionnaires arrive) and in 1951, when Mays and Mantle reached New York, it had come time for Joe DiMaggio to go.

There was small glory in DiMaggio’s final year. He batted .263 — 66 points below his lifetime standard — and threw out fewer base runners than any other center fielder in the league. He told Gus Mauch, the Yankee trainer, “I got arthritis in every joint. The pain is terrible.” A wretched combination — slowed reflexes, physical pain, and resulting poor performance — produced a condition that seems akin to clinical depression.

Milton Gross of the
New York Post
reported in late summer: “DiMaggio no longer wants anything to do with his teammates. He won’t ride the team bus from hotels to ball parks. He takes a taxi by himself. He has pulled himself totally into a shell as though he no longer even sees the many men with whom he has performed and traveled for so many years. He will no longer even speak to his manager, Casey Stengel.”

DiMaggio’s wonderful last bow, the World Series of 1951, is generally treated as an anticlimax. Even before that Series began, the Liggett and Myers Tobacco Company purchased a full-page advertisement in the
Herald Tribune
for a victory ode:

Our hats are off to the Giant crew
When the chips are down they sure come through.
Though things looked black at the start of the race,
They didn’t quit ‘til they had first place —

Sound Off!

To the leader of this fightin’ team,
To the guy who kept them on the beam,
To Leo give a solid cheer
Our choice for manager of the year —

Sound Off!

Thomson with a mighty blast
Nailed the pennant to the mast
And Sal and Larry, Stanky and Dark
In triumph carried him from the park.

Sound Off!

Like the Giants, Chesterfield’s number one
Around New York with most every one
The reason Chesterfield sets such a pace
Is mildness plus no unpleasant after-taste

Sound Off for Chesterfield!!!

“They still gotta play us for the championship of the world,” Casey Stengel insisted, “which my men and I are much looking forward to, competing against them all, Mr. Durocher and his very excellent players, who will give us a fine contest, I am sure, when we play the Series games, which no matter what Mister Thomson has done remains as yet, if you catch the drift. My men are ready.”

The 1951 World Series, sponsored by Gillette, was televised coast to coast — a first — with Mel Allen and Jim Britt calling play-by-play, and broadcast nationally with microphones manned by Russ Hodges, the Giant broadcaster, and a former sidekick of Red Barber’s known as “Brother Al” Heifer.

“Al was not much of a broadcaster,” remembers Frank Graham, Jr., publicity director of the Dodgers for five seasons, “but if you were having a huge party and you needed a greeter, Brother Al would be your absolute first choice.”

As a World Series special, General Electric reduced the price on its 17-inch Black-Daylite television from $379.95 to $299.95. “Not a clearance!” GE announced. “Not a small screen model! Not plastic or metal! Television in genuine mahogany-veneered cabinet. Up to 78
WEEKS
to pay. Weekly terms as low as $2.72!”

Out in Las Vegas, Clark Gable filed suit for divorce from the former Lady Ashley, and the Associated Press reported that Mrs. Gable was willing to leave the star for $200,000 down and $100,000 a year for life. Closer to civilization, Uta Hagen, the beautiful German-American actress who had been Paul Robeson’s lover, was appearing in the Cort Theater as St. Joan. At the St. James, Gertrude Lawrence starred in
The King and I
. Betty Grable’s latest movie was
Meet Me After the Show
.

All this supplied backdrop. On October 4, the stumpy left-hander George Bernard Koslowski, who pitched as Dave Koslo, subdued the Yankees with breaking balls and control. Mantle, DiMaggio, Berra, and Hank Bauer collectively went one for fifteen.

Monte Irvin, so long barred from the major leagues by bigotry, at last could show the entire country — “coast to coast” — what a great ballplayer he was. Irvin pounded out four hits and in the first inning, as Allie Reynolds went into a full windup, Irvin stole home. “Never before,” Red Smith wrote, “in the history of postseason amusements, had a Giant been so impudent; never had such humiliation been worked on a team of Yankee champions.” The Giants won in commanding fashion, 5 to 1.

But champions the Yankees were, and a day later Ed Lopat outlasted Larry Jansen at the Stadium and the Yankees won, 3 to 1. Irvin hit three more singles, but the Giants made only two other hits. It was a hard-bought Yankee victory; Mickey Mantle tore ligaments in his right knee.