The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (36 page)

That was Tuesday night. On Wednesday afternoon, Joe Black outpitched Allie Reynolds, and the Dodgers won the first Series game at Ebbets Field, 4 to 2. Raschi won a game for New York. Roe won a game for Brooklyn. Reynolds started again in game four and, defeating Black, 2 to 0, struck out Jackie Robinson three times.

Stengel was grim in victory. He pointedly reminded the writers of Allie Reynolds’s Creek tribal background and Jackie Robinson’s remarks to Faye Emerson.

“Before he tells us we gotta hire a jig,” Stengel said, “he oughta learn how to hit an Indian.”

Sunday, October 5, was memorable; a crowd of 70,536 at Yankee Stadium was treated to a magnificent game. “Eleven tremendous innings,” Red Smith pronounced. The passionately Republican
Herald Tribune
was reporting that Dwight Eisenhower’s campaign to recapture the White House from the Democrats was more than a campaign; it was a crusade! Working to inform his readers rather than to delight his employers, Smith reported in the
Herald Tribune:
“Crowds at the Stadium yesterday expressed their emotions by wild animal cries, by boos and cheers for a California politician named Richard Nixon — first Republican to be jeered by a World Series crowd since Herbert Hoover got it in 1931.”

Helen Rogers Reid, the Iron Maiden who owned the
Tribune
, was not amused, but neither did she want the column killed. The
Tribune
of the Era was a collegial place. Helen Rogers Reid and her son Whitelaw considered criticism of Nixon unfortunate. Censorship was unconscionable.

Carl Erskine pitched for Brooklyn and took a one-hit shutout and a 4 to 0 lead into the fifth inning. Erskine remembers: “I had first-class stuff. My curve was sharp. It was October 5. That was my fifth wedding anniversary.

“In the fifth inning my control slips. A walk. Some hits. Mize rips one. I’m behind five to four. And here comes Dressen.

“I’m thinking, ‘Oh, no. I got good stuff.’ I look at Dressen coming closer and I think, the numbers are against me. October
fifth
. My
fifth
wedding anniversay. The
fifth
inning. I’ve given the Yankees
five
runs. Five must be my unlucky number. . . . The fives have done me in. Suddenly Dressen says, ‘Isn’t this your anniversary? Are you gonna take Betty out and celebrate tonight?’

“I can’t believe it. There’s seventy thousand people watching, more than lived in my hometown, Anderson, Indiana, and he’s asking what I’m doing that night. I tell him yes, I was planning to take Betty someplace quiet.

“‘Well,’ Dressen says, ‘then see if you can get this game over before it gets dark.’ I get the next nineteen in a row. We win in eleven. I took Betty out to dinner and we celebrated the first World Series game I ever won.”

Without anointing anything as the greatest ballgame ever played, I can say that this was the most
enjoyable
ballgame I’ve seen. Jackie Robinson showed up the Yankees with brilliant base running, a delayed steal in the second inning. Snider homered and made a magnificent leaping catch in deep right center. (“Not quite as magnificent as you think,” Snider said recently. “I could have gone closer to the wall, but I sorta shied. Hard catch, but if I’d played it better, I wouldn’t have had to jump that high.”) Andy Pafko and Carl Furillo each made leaping catches and they
did
have to leap as high as they did. They jumped well above box seat railings and snagged what appeared to be home runs. Billy Cox, the great third baseman, made a backhanded stab on Phil Rizzuto in the tenth inning that moved Stengel to a fuming rave: “He ain’t a third baseman. He’s a fucking acrobat.” Finally, John Sain, a good-hitting pitcher who worked six strong relief innings, was called out on a ground ball in the tenth inning when he beat the throw. Red Patterson displayed a photograph in a press room at the Biltmore which showed Sain’s foot creasing the bag while the baseball was still several feet from the glove of Gil Hodges. Art Passarella, an American League umpire, is calling Sain “Out!”

“That’s how it goes in baseball,” Fresco Thompson told Patterson. “You don’t make decisions hours later, Red. Leave the photos to Belmont and Hialeah.”

Erskine and Robinson; Rizzuto and Mize; Snider and Cox; Nixon and Stengel. And luck — the bad call — actually going against the Yankees. One’s cup ran over, provided of course the cup itself had been forged in Brooklyn.

For the first time ever, the Reliable Jersey House installed the Dodgers as favorites to win a Series from the Yankees. To bet Brooklyn, you had to put up eight dollars to win five. For what seemed to have been eons, Brooklyn fans bleated in October, “Wait till next year.” Now in 1952 it seemed that Next Year had arrived.

But on Monday at Ebbets Field, Stengel managed with triumphant desperation, and the Yankees won because Billy Loes, Brooklyn’s starting pitcher, lost a ground ball in the sun. Stengel started Raschi and relieved with Reynolds. That meant he had no suitable pitcher for a seventh game. Tomorrow’s problem. Today Stengel focused on making sure the Series actually went to seven games.

Duke Snider’s home run in the sixth inning gave Loes a 1 to 0 lead. Berra tied the game with a home run in the seventh. Woodling singled. As Loes wound up to pitch to Irv Noren, the ball dropped out of his glove. Balk. Woodling took second.

Loes struck out Noren. Billy Martin popped to Cox. Two out, Woodling on second, Raschi up. The Yankee pitcher hit a bounding ball toward Loes. Late afternoon sunlight flooded into Ebbets Field through arches behind seats on the third base side. The grounder bounced up in front of the low October sun and Loes was blinded. The ball struck Loes’s knee and skittered past Gil Hodges into right field. Running with two out, Woodling scored.

Eighth inning homers by Mantle and Snider canceled one another. The Yankees won, 3 to 2.

“There were only 30,037 persons at Ebbets Field for this game,” Rud Rennie wrote, “which would have had the effect of an A-bomb with noodles if the Dodgers had won. It was the smallest crowd of the Series, probably because many did not think they would be able to get tickets; or maybe because many people did not want to stand in line and preferred to stay at home and look at it on television.”

Stengel next started Ed Lopat, whose left-handed slow stuff would not long stop a Brooklyn lineup consisting of seven right-handed batters in Ebbets Field. Stengel knew that. Lopat pitched three scoreless innings and, as soon as the Dodgers started to cuff him, Stengel summoned Allie Reynolds. Another three innings. Then Raschi again.

The Dodgers started Joe Black and relieved with Roe and Erskine. In the seventh, with the Yankees leading, 4 to 2, the Dodgers loaded the bases with one out. The batter was Snider, who had hit four home runs so far in the Series.

Stengel brought in a journeyman left-hander, Bob Kuzava, whose name reminded Red Smith of “some kind of melon.”

“I knew Snider a little bit from the International League,” Kuzava says, “and good as he was, I never had trouble with him.” The count went full. Kuzava threw a rising inside fastball. Snider popped to second base.

“I thought,” Kuzava says, “that Casey would lift me then for Johnny Sain, bring in a right-hander to face Jackie Robinson. Sain had pitched in the National League; he knew how to work Jackie. I turned and looked for Sain, but Casey kept me in.”

Kuzava threw Robinson a snapping outside curve and Robinson hit a pop fly to the right side. “I saw the ball,” Kuzava says. “I coulda caught it. But this is the major leagues. The World Series. Pitchers don’t chase down pop flies.

“I hollered, ‘Joe! Joe!’ “

That was the call for first baseman Joe Collins. But Collins lost the pop fly, as Loes had lost the grounder, or he froze. Billy Martin, running at top speed, made a wonderful catch when the ball was barely shoelace high. That was the ballgame and the Series.

“Them Brooklyns is tough in this little park,” Stengel said, “but I knew we would win today. My men play good ball on the road. Now, you are gonna ask me why I left in the left-hand fella [Kuzava] to face the right-hand fella [Robinson], who makes speeches, with bases full. Don’t I know percentages and etcetera? The reason I left him in is the other man [Robinson] has not seen hard-throwing left-hand pitchers much and could have trouble with the break of a left-hander’s hard curve, which is what happened.”

Stengel now had managed four consecutive World Series winners. The benchmark managers, John McGraw and Connie Mack, won successive World Series on three occasions. No other manager matched Stengel and his lineal predecessor Joe McCarthy with four straight.

“Nice Series, young man,” Rud Rennie said to Mantle, who batted .345. “What are you up to now?”

“Headin’ back to Oklahoma. I got me a job working down in the mines.”

“Work in the mines?” Rennie said. “You don’t have to do that now.”

“Yes I do,” Mantle said. “You know my dad died and I got seven dependents who’re counting on me.” Mantle named three brothers, a sister, his mother, and his wife.

“That’s six,” Rennie said.

“A baby is due in March,” Mantle said.

High above Ebbets Field, I looked at my Royal portable and quested for a lead. I was twenty-three, about Mantle’s age, and seated between two elegant veterans, Red Smith and Rud Rennie. My assignment was the lead story that would run on the front page of the
Herald Tribune
.

I thought of Brooklyn’s bent dreams, but I thought, too, of how the Yankees had responded with power and endurance and great courage. I began with a short sentence:

“Every year is next year for the Yankees.”

O
N A SLOW PLANE TO FLORIDA
one bright spring morning in 1953, Allan Roth was having difficulty reviewing charts. Roth was the Dodger statistician and kept extraordinary records, breaking down the performance of players in ways widely used today but novel then. He worked with pencil and graph paper but on this flight, as he tried to review “Hodges, G. vs. right-hand pitchers’ curve balls,” he was jabbed repeatedly by a T-square.

Hodges set a record in the 1952 Series by getting no hits at all in the seven games. He had small luck with hard outside curves and sliders and Dressen wanted to teach Hodges to hit to the opposite field. Roth was compiling a record of futility that Dressen hoped would convince the big first baseman to change his batting stance.

“But I couldn’t get much done,” Roth remembered. “The T-square hit me. Then a drawing board. Then the T-square again.” In the cramped and crowded DC-3, Roth was sitting next to the eminent industrial designer Raymond Loewy. For the entire flight, six hours, Loewy scrawled and sketched. His assignment: design a new baseball park for Brooklyn.

O’Malley took me into his confidence that March. “Did you ever ask yourself,” he began in the modest Florida office where he worked, “why in an electronic age we play our games in a horse-and-buggy park?”

I had never asked myself anything like that. Ebbets Field was a Brooklyn fixture, like the Soldiers and Sailors Monument at Grand Army Plaza and the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island.

“The aisles are too narrow,” O’Malley said. “The stairs are too steep. Poles obstruct the views. We can’t park enough cars. We need twice as many seats. The bathrooms smell. The girders holding up the whole thing are rusting away.”

He puffed his cigar, looking unhappy, then brightened. “Imagine a new park. Seventy thousand seats just like the Yankees have. No poles. You can cantilever construction now. Escalators take the fans to their seats. Plenty of parking. Restaurants and train stations right in the park. Then, to end worries about rain, we put a dome over everything.”

After a while I said, “Walter, as far as I know, grass won’t grow under a dome.”

“We can get agronomy people to work on that, or maybe we can find a substitute for grass.” His face was beaming; he was serious.

“Where on earth did you get this idea for a dome?”

“History,” O’Malley said. “I wondered about the Coliseum; did the Romans call off battles between gladiators when it rained? I did some research and found out they did not. The Romans developed a retractable canvas dome. It was tied in with winches. When rain started, slaves cranked those winches and the Roman citizens did not get rained on. Or overheated, either. There was a hole in the center of the Coliseum dome that let the warm air out. The warm air rushed up so quickly no raindrops fell through. A dome worked in Rome. It will work in Brooklyn.”

O’Malley became intimate and deferential. “Just thought this might make a story for you sometime.”

I thought it did, but when I wrote a brief piece, Bob Cooke, the sports editor, would not run it. “You’re supposed to be writing baseball,” he said, “not Walter’s fantasies.”

The author’s son, Gordon J. Kahn II, an architect, recently ran down O’Malley’s Roman tale in a professional library. The “Coliseum or Flavian Amphitheater” inaugurated by Titus in
A.D.
80, was designed to take fifty thousand spectators. Those of “equestrian rank or higher” had cushioned marble seats. The seating higher up was wooden. “At the top,” reports Fletcher’s
History of Architecture
, “there are brackets and sockets to carry the masts from which a canopy, known as a velarium, was hung to give shade.”

Not a retractable top, really, but enough to give O’Malley his inspiration for the dome. (How many other baseball men have ever had any clue to the architecture of ancient stadia?)

After Loewy built a model, people made dismissive jokes about O’Malley’s Pleasure Dome. Walter was the wrong man to dismiss.

* * *

As the Dodgers worked their way North, I had a beer with Carl Furillo. “It’s gotta stop,” he said.

“What’s gotta stop.”

“Maglie throwing at my head. I know why he’s doing it. Durocher orders him to do it. Next time Maglie throws at me, I go for him.”

“Who?”

“Durocher. I’m gonna get him.”

The Dodgers reached their mountaintop in 1953. As a team, Brooklyn batted .285. No club has matched that for more than a quarter century. The ‘53 Dodgers led all baseball with 208 home runs. They scored 955 runs, about 200 more than any other club in the league, and they were the best defensive team as well. The Dodgers made eleven fewer errors than any other team in the league. The Brooklyn weakness — and this was relative — was the pitching staff. The Dodgers had a good strikeout staff, but the team earned run average was unimposing: 4.10. By contrast, the Yankee pitching staff, with Reynolds, Raschi, and Ford, posted an ERA of 3.20. The difference, a run a game, would be significant.