The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (38 page)

Mays turned his back and ran toward a point to the right of the blockhouse. He sprinted toward the bleacher wall some 485 feet away, and toward the Harlem River beyond. Time slowed. The ball was frozen in the air. Willie showed his back. Number 24. Then time began again.

The ball was hit too far and too hard to be caught. Willie ran and ran. He ran past the farthest edge of the outfield grass. As his spikes touched the narrow cinder strip near the base of the bleachers, he took the ball over his left shoulder and he whirled and threw and went tumbling. His throw held Rosen on first base. “This,” Arnold Hano wrote, “was the throw of a giant.” The crowd at the Polo Grounds numbered 52,751; the roar of that crowd was thunder.

The Giants won the ballgame in the tenth inning, 5 to 2, when Dusty Rhodes pinch-hit a three-run home run. Rhodes’s homer traveled 251 feet. The ball Vic Wertz hit, the uncatchable wallop that Willie Mays caught, carried 455 feet.

“Leo,” Harold Rosenthal said in the dressing room, “was that the greatest catch Willie has made?”

Durocher was a nasty winner. “Fuck,” he said. “What kinda question is that? Willie makes great catches alla time. He’s made catches like that all year. Where you been!”

In the Cleveland clubhouse, manager Al Lopez said, “I don’t know what in the world Leo is talking about. I’ve been in the major leagues since 1928 and that was the greatest catch I ever saw. I believe that was the greatest catch ever made. I’m not even factoring in pressure.” Although the New York Giants had only three years of life left, they were triumphant in the autumn of 1954 as no Giant team before.

After the sweep, Mays liked to amble out of his apartment in Harlem. On mild days the greatest player in baseball wandered into the streets and played stickball until dark with young people from the neighborhood.

Dwight David Eisenhower, president during most of the Era, was regarded with some ambivalence by the old Roosevelt Democrats, so numerous around New York. After Eisenhower spent several years as president of Columbia University, someone remarked, “In a community of scholars, his best friend was the football coach.” Nor were austere Republicans that pleased with him. In 1952 as Eisenhower was wresting the nomination from the thin-lipped Cincinnati conservative Robert Taft, mid-western Republicans claimed that Eisenhower was as dangerously liberal as Thomas E. Dewey. “Pick Taft,” their placards demanded. “Beat Eisen-hewey!”

History informs us that Eisenhower was a centrist, somewhat wiser than he was given credit for during his presidency. He never had the nerve or spirit directly to reprimand the demagogue Joe McCarthy, even when McCarthy called General George C. Marshall a dangerous leftist. Marshall had been military godfather to Eisenhower. But Eisenhower resisted increasing demands from the French that the United States send troops to Indochina, in the war that evolved into the Vietnam War.

Eisenhower did send France $60 million in 1953 to prosecute the conflict and even agreed to train South Vietnamese soldiers. But unlike his successors John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, Eisenhower refused to commit American combat troops. “It makes no sense for the country to become involved in a land war in Asia,” he said.

By and large, despite jokes about Eisenhower’s intelligence and syntax, the country trusted the old general. When Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in Denver on Sunday, September 25, 1955, shock was intense. “Few men,” began James Reston’s passionate outburst in
The New York Times
, “in the public life of the Republic have wielded such power yet retained such affection. Accordingly, his intimates were in despair tonight and political leaders of his party were dismayed.” What Reston could not see was that the dismay was not simply a matter of fondness for Eisenhower. National distaste for Eisenhower’s vice president was palpable. The vice president, of course, was Richard Nixon. “Can you imagine if Ike died and Nixon became President?” people asked one another. Many shuddered.

To enormous relief, Eisenhower held on to life at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital and a Nixon presidency was thus delayed for almost two decades.

On September 30, James Dean, smoldering and intense, was ticketed for driving a Porsche Spyder 65 miles an hour on Grapevine Road, south of Bakersfield, California. Two hours later Dean plowed into a larger vehicle driven by Donald Turnupseed of Tulare and lost his life at the age of twenty-four.

Back East, the champion Giants had been sagging, except for Mays, who hit 51 home runs. The Dodgers and Alston began to get along. Brooklyn finished in first place, thirteen and a half games ahead of the Milwaukee Braves. The Giants slipped to third. Durocher seemed to lose interest in his job, arriving at the Polo Grounds just a few minutes before game time. “You can’t believe what I put up with,” he told Spencer Tracy. “The boss [Horace Stoneham] is a full-time drunk.”

“I used to be a drunk myself,” Tracy said. “That was in the old heimerdeimer days.”

“Not like Horace,” Durocher said. “We got to make some moves. He says, ‘We’ll be okay, pally.’ I’m sick of this.”

The Yankees outlasted the Indians, and for the third time in four seasons the World Series matched the Yankees against the Dodgers. Each ballclub was somewhat past its peak. Allie Reynolds, who owned oil wells, retired to Oklahoma. George Weiss sold Vic Raschi to the Cardinals. At long last the Yankees brought up a black, the catcher-outfielder Elston Howard. But this was a lesser team. The shortstop, Billy Hunter, batted only .227. No one on the pitching staff won twenty games. Mantle had a strong year with 37 homers, but going into the World Series his left knee hobbled him. He could not play every day.

The Dodgers, of course, were older too. Reese had reached thirty-seven. Robinson, at thirty-six, was having trouble with his legs and incipient diabetes. These teams were heavyweights, but flabbier than they had been. They were also crabby.

The Yankees won the first game, 6 to 5, on Joe Collins’s two homers; Jackie Robinson stole home in the eighth inning. “What a lousy, showboat play,” Berra announced in the Yankee clubhouse. “They’re two runs behind. Anyway, I had him out. The damn umpire blew the call.”

“Lousy?” Robinson said to a reporter. “Whitey Ford was winding up. With me on third? Anytime they give me a run that way, I take it. And Berra
didn’t
have me. He made a lazy tag. He stayed
behind
the plate. By the time he put the ball on me, my foot was across the plate.”

The Yankees won the next day, 4 to 2, knocking out Billy Loes in the fourth inning. They were up by two games. Mantle had not played an inning.

Al Laney interviewed fans at the Stadium. “The Dodgers got a better team,” someone told him. “There ain’t a doubt. But when they go up against the Yankees, they can’t win. It’s the hawks get em. The hawks. They can’t get away from the hawks.”

Johnny Podres held off the Yankees at Ebbets Field on his twenty-third birthday and the Dodgers won, 8 to 3. Mantle limped into action and hit a home run, but after that he was in too much pain to be a factor. (“If Mickey says he hurts, believe me he hurts,” the orthopedist, Sid Gaynor, said. “His pain threshold is remarkable, ten times higher than DiMaggio’s.”)

The Dodgers won two more in Brooklyn. Snider hit two home runs in the fifth game and a small Cuban outfielder named Edmundo Isasi Amoros, nicknamed Sandy, knocked in two more runs with another homer. “Wait till you see this kid hit,” Al Campanis of the Dodgers had told reporters. “His wrists are so quick, he hits the ball right out of the catcher’s glove.

“I’ll do some work for you guys. Give him a nickname Edmundo ‘Miracle Wrists’ Amoros! How’s that?”

The nickname didn’t work in 1955. “Miracle Wrists” batted .247. He was a cheerful sort, but he had a hard time learning English. Some said the only three words he knew were “shrimp cocktail” and “steak.”

The Series returned to the Bronx, and the Yankees won the sixth game, 5 to 1. The Reliable Jersey House favored the Yankees, 7 to 5.

Duke Snider sprained his left knee in center field. He could play the seventh game, but he was hobbled. Jackie Robinson bruised his left heel so severely he could not play at all. Mantle could not start. The famous ballgame of October 4, 1955, matched a pair of tired, wounded clubs.

The deposed manager, Charlie Dressen, had spent months teaching Johnny Podres a change of pace. “Think fastball,” Dressen said. “Throw a fastball. Just when you release — zip! Pull down the window shade.” The downward motion takes speed off the pitch at the same time as it increases rotation. The batter sees a rapidly spinning baseball. Fastball, he thinks. But the rapidly spinning pitch is moving slowly. Rotation is the fooler. Podres frustrated the Yankees with good fastballs and spinning changeups. The Dodgers chipped away — “beating at the Yankees with butterfly wings” — and scored single runs in the fourth and in the sixth.

Alston started infielder Jim Gilliam in left field. In the last half of the sixth, he moved Gilliam to second base and sent Amoros to left. Billy Martin walked. McDougald beat out a bunt. Yankees on first and second. Nobody out.

Podres threw Berra an outside fastball and Berra stroked a drive far down the left field line. Amoros, left-handed, wore his glove on his right hand. He ran full tilt and speared the ball in the glove and threw to Reese, who spun and loosed a perfect throw to Gil Hodges at first base. McDougald, running on what might have been a hit, was doubled. It was a fine catch and an absolutely spectacular relay throw. Pee Wee Reese at his very best.

The game ended at 4:44
P.M.
The Dodgers won, 2 to 0. Brooklyn had won its first World Series.

Francis Sugrue of the
Herald Tribune
described victory night in Brooklyn. “The Fourth of July, New Year’s Eve, St. Patrick’s Day, V-E Day, and Bastille Day, all in one. Add to that a touch of Mardi Gras. The minute Pee Wee Reese threw out Elston Howard for the last out at first base, Brooklyn police headquarters sent out an alert for all to be on the lookout for Dodger fans. As this edition went to press, there were no fatalities.”

Somehow, Reese and I ended up toasting the universe on West 57th Street. His face was shining, a child’s face when school is out, or when Christmas morning finally has come.

“Can I ask you something, Pee Wee?”

“Sure.”

“Two out in the ninth. You’ve played on five losing World Series teams. You’re one out away from winning a Series. Elston Howard’s up. What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking,” said Pee Wee Reese, the greatest, bravest shortstop of the Era, “I hope he doesn’t hit the ball to me.”

Walter O’Malley summoned the press a few days later. He had commissioned “Buckminster Fuller of Princeton” to design the new Dodger Stadium as a geodesic dome.

A sportswriter asked how to spell the word.

“Dome,” Buzzie Bavasi said. “D-o-m-e.”

“Are you gonna give Podres a raise?” someone else asked.

“We’re here to talk about the geodesic dome,” O’Malley said.
Nobody took him or Bucky Fuller seriously
.

Durocher continued telling Hollywood friends that his employer was a drunk. A group of actors and agents threw a stag for Durocher at the Friars Club, and a special feature was Danny Kaye’s imitation of a drunken Horace Stoneham. Kaye had the words right — “pally,” “by golly.” Kaye’s mimic drunken diction was brutal.

“The greatest thing,” Durocher said later, “was when Danny opened his fly and pulled out his pecker and put it on a saucer. He’s doing Horace. I mean, the sloppy talk and the stupid speeches and the rest. He’s doin’ Horace with his pecker hanging out. I never laughed so hard in my life.”

William Joseph Rigney of Burlingame, California, was hired to manage the Giants for 1956.

D
ICK YOUNG INSISTED
O’Malley told him he wanted to leave Ebbets Field “because the area is getting full of blacks and spics.” O’Malley denied having said any such thing.

“Oh, yeah,” Young parried when I pressed him. “O’Malley also said the trouble with Brooklyn was that the place had too many blacks and spics
and Jews
.”

Certainly O’Malley was most comfortable with his Roman Catholic cadre, Bavasi and Fresco Thompson. Jackie Robinson disquieted O’Malley, not just because Robinson was Rickey’s man but also because he was a challenging, defiant black. Walter liked blacks docile. He preferred Pullman porters to Jackie Robinson.

The Dodgers brought Sandy Koufax to spring training in 1955. Al Campanis, who scouted Koufax, said, “Only twice in my life has my spine actually tingled. Once was when I saw the Sistine Chapel. The other time was when I saw Sandy Koufax throw a fastball.”

Koufax was wild. Today he is remembered as a Hall of Fame player, but it was not until 1963, in Hollywood, that Koufax became a twenty-game winner. Alston and others in the Dodger organization handled him poorly. It may not, however, have taken Koufax eight years to throw a strike under pressure. He is a closemouthed man but he has remarked that Alston would have made him a starter earlier, except that he was Jewish.

O’Malley was aware of everyone’s ethnicity. It is excessive to accuse him of bigotry, but he did harbor stereotypes. Brooklyn blacks were moving southward out of Bedford-Stuyvesant toward Eastern Parkway and Crown Heights. Ebbets Field stood in the path of the black advance. This became another reason he wanted to move.

O’Malley did not relish the Dodgers’ great 1955 World Series victory as a sportsman would have relished it — triumph after half a century of failure. It was good; it was fine; but it cost him extra damn dollars for a victory party. Most of all O’Malley saw the triumph as a wedge. The mayor and the governor had better start working with him on his new Brooklyn ballpark forthwith, now that he was presiding over the greatest baseball team on earth.

Dodger attendance in 1955 ran slightly over a million, a disappointing total. The Yankees drew five hundred thousand more. The upstart Braves, who had moved from Boston to Milwaukee, drew two million.

“This is a very serious problem,” O’Malley told me. “With the Braves making more money than we are, they’ll hire the best scouts away from us and before you know it, they’ll have a better team. That would be ruinous. You know what I say. In Brooklyn, you’re first or bankrupt.”