The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (34 page)

The injury came in the fifth inning when Mantle and DiMaggio broke for a short fly hit into right center field. On hearing DiMaggio’s commanding voice — “I got it” — Mantle stopped short. He lost his footing, crumpled, and lay motionless. He felt no pain, but suddenly his knee and most of his right leg went numb.

“You okay, kid?” DiMaggio said.

Mantle was unable to speak. He was crying in terror.

Sid Gaynor, the Yankee orthopedist, said Mantle’s knee had taken “a terrific jolt. Why, with an older man, the cartilage would have torn right out of there. He’s out for the Series, of course. It’s a bad sprain. I’ll x-ray it tomorrow morning and he’ll be all right.”

Dr. Gaynor was a good orthopedist, but Mantle’s knee would not be all right ever again. For the rest of his career he had to wear a cumbersome metal brace. Some of his magic speed fled forever.

This memorable short fly ball, rising above DiMaggio and Mantle, produced a remarkable confluence of center fielders. The man who hit the fly was Willie Mays.

Years later, in a Dallas drinking club, Mantle remembered the play with anger. “DiMaggio always wanted to look good out there. That was very important to him. So he waited to call Willie’s fly until he was damn sure he could reach it in stride. That’s why I had to stop so short. If DiMaggio called for it earlier — or if DiMaggio had backed off and let me take it — I don’t believe I woulda hurt my knee.”

Mantle looked into a glass of Jack Daniel’s and said, “Damn.”

The Giants took a 1 to 0 lead in the third game, as the Series moved a few thousand yards west from Yankee Stadium, at 161st Street, to the Polo Grounds, across the Harlem River on 155th.* On several occasions the Series has been played in a single ballpark, but 1951 presented the last World Series played at ballparks within walking distance of each other.

The Yankee Stadium crowds had been subdued and civil. “Corporate crowds,” some called them, as opposed to the “lunch pail guys,” who screamed themselves hoarse during the regular season as the Dodgers and Giants went at one another.

Then in the third game came a remarkable play. Writing in the
Herald Tribune
Al Laney observed:

“The somnolence and lassitude which had enveloped crowds at the first two World Series games passed suddenly and with something of a shock in the fifth inning yesterday. Up to that time everything had been about as it was at the Stadium. . . . People got up and wandered, seeking the refreshment stands rather than waiting to have things brought to them. Some sought out friends for visits. They seemed to feel they’d have plenty of time. . . . The weather helped the mood, midsummer in autumn. Laziness was easy to achieve. And then Eddie Stanky kicked the ball out of Phil Rizzuto’s glove. . . . The first truly spontaneous shout of the Series went up. People behind the stands, who had been eating and drinking calmly, came scurrying back to their seats, getting in each other’s way and obstructing the view. The voice of the crowd had a new note. . . . This was the real thing at last.”

With one out in the fifth, Eddie Stanky, the combative five-foot, eight-inch second baseman, drew a full-count walk from Vic Raschi. Al Dark batted next and Durocher called for a hit and run. The Yankees picked off the sign and Berra signaled for a pitchout. His throw to Rizzuto had Stanky by ten feet. Rizzuto waited, ball in glove, directly in front of second base. Stanky slid hard and with his right foot kicked the ball into center field. Then he got up and ran to third.

That is a legitimate play, just as it is legitimate for a fielder to tag a base runner on the nose. Rizzuto was charged with an error and the Yankees went into shock. Dark singled. Hank Thompson singled and, after another error, Whitey Lockman knocked out Raschi with a three-run home run. The Giants won, 6 to 2. Their best pitcher, Sal Maglie, was ready for game four.

“Tell me how you kicked that ball,” Rud Rennie asked Stanky, who was sitting naked on a trainer’s table.

“I consider that an incident of minor importance,” Stanky said, managing to be nude and formal simultaneously. “Let us discuss Lockman’s home run.”

“Listen, gentlemen,” Leo Durocher shouted. “You cannot tag Mr. Stanky with the ball held nice and easy in your glove. You got to hold it in your bare hand and go for him like that and maybe you get spiked but maybe you get him out. It ain’t a fucking tea party out there. Not against my guys.”

“It was a bad game by both teams, I would say,” Stengel began, “but it was particularly bad for us, because we lost. You all saw what happened at second base.” Stengel kicked, to remind the swarming press. “They come up with a field goal good for five points. That beat us. I may have my men work overnight on blocking field goals.”

The next day, a Sunday, brought rain, a steady October rain soaking the Polo Grounds and washing away the ballgame everyone was awaiting. “That rain killed us,” Monte Irvin says. “It took away our momentum. It gave them a chance to regroup. The Yankees always had the luck. I’m not denying that they were a fine team, but they always got a break when they needed a break most. And that gave them confidence. Those Yankee teams beat you with confidence and with Casey; the talent just flowed easily under those conditions.”

Salvatore Anthony Maglie won twenty-three games in 1951. Scowling, heavy-featured, with hooded eyes and a jet-black beard that always showed a shadow, Maglie was Mephistopheles on the Mound. He was nicknamed Sal the Barber, to a small extent because so many Italian Americans cut hair and to a larger, much larger, extent because he threw fastballs at batters’ chins. Sal the Barber offered terrifying shaves.

He was genial enough off the mound, and frank in discussing tactics. “You have to make the hitter afraid of the ball,” he said. “A lot of pitchers think they do that by throwing at a hitter when the count is two strikes and no balls. The trouble there is with that count, a knockdown is routine. It’s expected. You don’t scare a guy by knocking him down when he knows he’s gonna be knocked down.”

“Then when, Sal?” I asked.

“A good time is when the count is two and two. You knock him down two and two, he gets up shaking. Then curve him and you have your out. Of course, you have to be able to get your curve over the plate on a three and two count. Not every pitcher can do that.” Maglie could break two or three different curves over the plate with the count full. He worked his intimidating style so well under pressure that he beat Brooklyn, the National League’s best hitting team, twenty-three times over the years, against only eleven defeats.

Maglie was thirty-four in the autumn of ‘51, and he had pitched 298 innings. He was tired. His back hurt. Durocher, compassionate and loving to Mays, respectful of Monte Irvin, believed in motivating Maglie with a lash. As it happened, on Monday, October 8, Sal Maglie felt considerable pain in the lower right area of his back. It was not his nature to complain; the steady needling to which Durocher subjected him had the effect of making it just about impossible for Maglie to complain, even when he should have.

On the Yankee side, Stengel called a meeting. “Now, uh, men,” he began, “we have not done well, and I am including everybody when I say we, including you very excellent ballplayers and including the manager. You have not done well and the manager has not done well but we are going to be all right if you just go out and play the way you can and I commence managing as I should be managing. We have all been lousy together. Now, let’s all be goddamn good.”

The Yankees awoke. In the first inning, DiMaggio, who had not hit a ball well for three games, scorched a curve ball against the facade of the left field roof, just foul. Another pitch, another foul, this one a fierce low liner that crashed against a fence. Then Maglie fooled him with a fastball and DiMaggio was called out. He had come to bat twelve times without a hit. “Even though I struck out,” he said later, “I felt good. I dropped my bat weight down from thirty-five ounces to thirty-four ounces. I was swinging better.”

The Giants scratched a run off Allie Reynolds in the bottom of the first and the Yankees tied the score in the second. As Maglie came into the dugout, after having given up one run, Durocher said, “C’mon, you son of a bitch. Pitch like you can.”

DiMaggio lined a single in the third inning. His first hit was a signal. The Clipper was back. In the fifth, with Berra on base, DiMaggio cracked the eighth and final World Series home run of his career, a line drive that rose into the left field stands.

Durocher called Maglie several names. The Yankees won, 6 to 2, and the Series was tied at two games.

Actually, the Series was over. Next day at the Polo Grounds, Gil McDougald, the young Yankee infielder, walloped the third grand slam homer in Series history, scoring Berra, DiMaggio, and Johnny Mize ahead of him. McDougald was an odd-looking hitter. As Smith described him, “he plants his right foot barely within the rear inside corner of the batter’s box and spreads his legs like an adagio dancer . . . his left foot points toward third base, his right toward the box seats behind first. His body is twisted awkwardly as he peers slantwise at the pitcher. He holds the bat slackly as though it is too heavy . . . it droops behind him like a bent banana.”

Still, the man hit a grand slam home run. “Red,” Stengel said, “the kid won the most valuable player prize in the Texas League last year and how do you think he did that? By goin’ around buyin’ votes? However you think he looks, the kid can hit.” The Yankees won the game, 13 to 1.

Hank Bauer’s three-run triple in the sixth inning of game six gave the Yankees a 4 to 1 lead, which they carried into the ninth.

Stanky singled. Dark bunted safely. Whitey Lockman singled, loading the bases. Monte Irvin hit a long fly that scored Stanky and advanced the other runners.

The hitter was Bobby Thomson. Everyone remembered. Thomson flied out. Another run. The teams now were a single run apart.

Durocher ordered Sal Yvars, his backup catcher, to pinch hit. “I hit .317 that year,” Yvars says, “and Durocher didn’t use me up to then for the whole Series. We had an incident during the season. I ended up taking a swing at him. I got a hot Italian temper, but you better know, too, that Durocher was a vulgar, filthy guy who treated me and Maglie like dirt. When I ask why he ain’t using me in the Series, Durocher says, ‘I’m teaching you a lesson. Now get the fuck away from me.’ He hated me. I got so mad I went and broke all my bats, six Louisville Sluggers. Now, finally, Durocher’s
got
to use me. He’s got nobody else. And I gotta borrow a bat.

“I was a good contact hitter under pressure. I hit a helluva line drive . . .”

The ball carried into right center where Bauer made a lunging, skidding catch. The Series was over. The Yankees had won in six games.

“For me,” Irvin says, “hitting in that Series was almost too easy. Allie Reynolds threw me serious heat; it was brutal hitting against him and Raschi. Except sometimes you’re on a roll and the pitcher, whoever he is, throws it and you see it and you hit it and it drops. In that ‘51 Series for me, it was see the ball, hit the ball, and the ball fell in.

“It wasn’t
just
the rain that beat us. I think of games that got away, especially the second and the sixth, and then I remember Don Mueller getting hurt in the playoff.

“Don was a wonderful hitter. When he went down in the playoff, it took away an absolutely key element.

“There’s no doubt in my mind, none at all, that if we had Mueller, we’d have beaten the Yankees.”

Rud Rennie called the Giants “wide-eyed.” In achieving their third consecutive World Series victory, the Yankees were “lordly.”

On the same day, October 10, the FBI announced a victory of its own. Gus Hall, national secretary of the Communist party, was slapped into the federal prison in Texarkana to serve five years. His crime: “teaching the overthrow of the government.”

Hall had done nothing violent. He was arrested because he
might
do something violent. The times were disappointing for Sal Yvars, the New York Giants, Gus Hall, and free speech.

Life
magazine struck a week later and before that fallout settled, Joe DiMaggio broke down and cried. During the last month of the pennant race, the Dodgers assigned Andy High to scout the Yankees. High reviewed the Yankees clinically; most of his judgments were sound. When the Giants won the pennant, the Dodgers delivered High’s scouting report to the Giants, in a gesture of National League solidarity.

The statistician for the Giant broadcast team was a young man called Clay Felker, quite frantic to further his career. Felker wangled an appointment with Sidney L. James, assistant managing editor of
Life
. He wanted to work for
Life
, Felker said. He could help because he had great baseball contacts.

“If your contacts are so great,” James said, “get us a copy of the Dodger scouting report on the Yankees. If you bring that in, I’ll hire you.”

Felker approached Buzzie Bavasi, whom he knew slightly, and said that his career was on the line. According to Bavasi, “Felker begged me to
lend
him a copy of the report. He promised he wouldn’t show it to anybody else. He’d just make some notes for a story. Then he could get this great job at
Life
magazine. I took a chance. I decided to help the kid.”

Life
published the entire Andy High scouting report in its issue dated October 22, 1951. “I got three different scouting reports,” Larry Jansen remembers, “two from our people and one from the Dodgers. Not one mentioned that Mickey Mantle was a helluva bunter. He led off against me in the second game and surprised all of us. He beat out a bunt. That led to a run. I end up wondering why none of the scouts noticed Mantle’s bunting.”

Life
magazine was not interested in publicizing deficiencies in Andy High’s scouting. Instead the magazine quoted Leo Durocher: “High’s report was great. Never saw one like it. It has everything, all the little details.”

Life
ran High’s comments on Berra, Mantle, Woodling, Reynolds, and the rest, but had a little trouble with DiMaggio. Here the report read: