The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (39 page)

I had enough sense to ask for numbers and he had enough fondness for me to provide them. “Not for last year, those numbers aren’t in yet, but for two years ago, 1953, typical Brooklyn numbers.” This was the Dodger balance sheet Walter O’Malley gave me.

RECEIPTS

EXPENSES

The single-season profit O’Malley admitted was $1,407,000. He would not admit $750,000 from radio and television, but that ran his annual profit to more than $2,000,000. Gaining control of the Dodgers cost O’Malley $1,250,000. Now the team was making more than that each season. O’Malley was earning about two hundred percent on his investment. His team had won the World Series.

He was not satisfied.

In November, O’Malley told Irving Rudd, of his publicity office, that he was booking the Dodgers into an old minor league park, Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, for seven games in 1956. On December 12, he told Rudd to move into a one-room office at the Hotel Plaza on Journal Square (in Jersey City). “Thus, I became the only general manager of a major league baseball team in New Jersey history,” Rudd recalled in a memoir called
The Sporting Life
. “Of course, if you take into account that the Dodgers were playing only seven of their regularly scheduled 77 home games in Jersey City, this made me the one-eleventh general manager of the Dodgers.

“More seriously,” Rudd says, “it was clear what O’Malley was threatening.

“Today Jersey City.

“Tomorrow California.”

Firing Durocher did not revive the Giants. The team had finished third in 1955. Under Rigney, the Giants did no better than sixth in 1956 and 1957. They traded Bobby Thomson to Milwaukee in February of 1954, a move defiant of decent sentiment, but one that brought them the good left-handed pitcher Johnny Antonelli. In the middle of the 1955 season, they sold Sal Maglie to the Cleveland Indians. The following year the Dodgers bought Maglie’s contract from Cleveland.

The Brooklyn clubhouse was electric as Maglie entered it on the afternoon of May 16, 1956. He had knocked down Dodger hitters for six years. Carl Furillo continued to swear vengeance.

As Maglie entered, Erskine and Reese and Campanella looked curiously toward Furillo.

“Hello, Dago,” Furillo said.

“ Lo, Skoonj,” said Maglie.

Maglie won thirteen games for Brooklyn. The Dodgers won the pennant from Milwaukee by a single game; quite simply, Sal Maglie, Mephistopheles on the Mound, had won it for Brooklyn.

“That may be,” Carl Erskine says, “but when I saw Maglie standing in
our
clubhouse, wearing
our
uniform, I knew nothing in this world would ever surprise me again.”

Mickey Mantle came into his own in 1956, which he now calls “my favorite year.” He batted .353, hit 52 home runs, and drove in 130 runs. Unlike Mays, Mantle had not been anointed rookie of the year. (Gil McDougald beat him out.) But in ‘56, Mantle was indisputably the American League’s most valuable player.

The Dodgers jumped to a lead in the World Series. Maglie won the opening game, 6 to 3. Next day the Yankees knocked out Don Newcombe and handed Don Larsen a 6 to 0 lead in the second inning. But the Dodgers knocked out Larsen and won going away, 13 to 8.

Larsen broke in with the St. Louis Browns in 1953, the year the Browns went bankrupt. The team underwent a kind of breech rebirth as the Baltimore Orioles, and the Yankees acquired Larsen in an eighteen-player trade with Baltimore in the winter of 1954. Larsen quickly established himself as a pretty good pitcher and a free spirit.

He demolished a car at four
A.M.
one predawn during spring training at St. Petersburg, driving into a pole.

“The pole was speeding,” Larsen told reporters. “I hope Stengel don’t fine me.”

“Fine him?” Stengel said. “He oughta get an award, finding something to do in this town after midnight.”

The Yankees won the next two games at the Stadium. On October 8, with the Series tied at two games each, Larsen went out to pitch against the remarkable Mr. Maglie. Larsen felt stressed. He had failed in this World Series. He had failed in the Series of 1955. He was having trouble making ends meet. His estranged wife, Vivian, twenty-nine, had obtained a court order requiring the Yankees, Larsen, and Commissioner Ford Frick to show cause why his World Series share should not be seized by the Bronx Supreme Court.

“While this baseball hero is enjoying the luxuries of life and the plaudits of the public,” argued lawyer Harry Lipsig, “he is subjecting his fourteen-month-old baby girl and his wife to the pleasures of starvation existence.”

The night before the game, Larsen went out for drinks with a group that included the Yankee backup outfielder Bob Cerv. “I am not going to say much,” Cerv told me, “I left him at four A.M.”

“I got no comment at all on that night,” Larsen says.

“I called his hotel in the morning,” Cerv says, “to make sure he got out of bed. He said, ‘Noooooo.’ At the ballpark, he took a whirlpool bath, a cold shower, and had a rub. You know what happened next.”

Maglie was marvelous, limiting the Yankees to five hits. Larsen was better. He pitched the only perfect game in the history of the World Series. Fastballs and sliders. A few slow curves. Superb control. A novel no-windup delivery.

With two out in the ninth inning and twenty-six men retired, Dale Mitchell pinch hit for Maglie. He took a ball, high and outside. A slow curve broke over for a strike. Mitchell missed a curve. Strike two. He fouled a fastball. He took a quarter swing at a fastball that seemed to be eye-high. Babe Pinelli, the umpire, called Mitchell out.

“Damn,” Dick Young said in the press box. “The imperfect man just pitched a perfect game.”

“Casey,” Louis Effrat of the
Times
shouted in the winning clubhouse, “was that the best game you ever saw Larsen pitch?”

“So far,” Stengel said.

Shirley Povich of the
Washington Post
wrote a lead people remember:

The million-to-one shot came in. Hell froze over. A month of Sundays hit the calendar. Don Larsen today pitched a no-hit, no-run, no-man-reach-first game in a World Series.

By nightfall, Larsen dispatched four hundred twenty dollars to the lawyer for his wife and daughter.

“This man is still no hero,” Harry Lipsig, the lawyer, said. “In these proceedings, he has brazenly suggested when his daughter was born she immediately was to be given out for adoption.”

In California Larsen’s mother, Charlotte, a housekeeper at a retirement home in La Jolla, said she had been weeping tears of joy.

* * *

Labine shut down the Yankees, and the Dodgers won the sixth game, 1 to 0, in ten innings. The next day the Yankees won, 9 to 0, putting Don Newcombe to rout in three innings. It was the seventeenth time the Yankees had won the Series.

“They beat the hell out of us,” Walter Alston said.

In December of 1956, O’Malley sold Jackie Robinson’s contract to the New York Giants for $35,000 and the rights to a journeyman left-hander named Dick Littlefield. O’Malley wrote the Robinsons a letter of farewell.

Dear Jackie and Rachel:
I do know how you and your youngsters must have felt. It was a sad day for us as well.

The roads of life have a habit of recrossing. There could well be a future intersection. Until then, my best to you both.

With a decade of memories.

Au revoir,
Walter O’Malley

“If it makes him so sad,” Jackie said to Rachel, “why did he go and trade me to the Giants?”

Robinson quit and sold the announcement of his retirement to
Look
magazine for $50,000. Then he went to work for Chock Full o’ Nuts, the coffee company, as director of personnel. In the summer of 1957, I traveled to Greenwood Lake, New York, to watch Sugar Ray Robinson train for a fight with Carmen Basilio. After a while, Jackie Robinson appeared carrying a carton and looking embarrassed. The carton contained cans of coffee. William Black, the president of Chock Full o’ Nuts, had ordered Robinson to pass out coffee cans free “to get some publicity from the boxing writers.”

Sugar Ray greeted Jackie with a hug; but a hero had been reduced to a handout man.

“By 1957 we had a terrible situation at the Polo Grounds,” Chub Feeney remembers. “The park was deteriorating. People were afraid of the neighborhood. At the very least, we needed three million dollars as a minimum to break even and we weren’t getting it. We offered Jackie fifty thousand dollars to play for us, although we knew he wasn’t in great shape. We were hoping desperately to boost attendance with Robinson. We were drawing only six hundred fifty thousand a year in a metropolitan area of twelve million.

“We could have sold the club, but my Uncle Horace didn’t
want
to sell the club.

“You knew him.

“He lived for baseball . . .”

Hulan Jack, borough president of Manhattan, proposed a new stadium for the Giants. It would be built on enormous stilts, Jack said, over railroad tracks on the West Side of Manhattan. This is where, thirty years later, Donald Trump proposed a development so enormous that its highest skyscraper would cast a shadow on Central Park. Hulan Jack was an eccentric; he talked of a 110,000-seat ballpark. He had no plan to raise construction money.

“We owned the Minneapolis Millers in the American Association,” Feeney says. “By June of 1957, Horace and I were finishing arrangements to move the team there. Then Horace’s phone rang. Walter O’Malley said, ‘Why not move to California with me?’

No one paid appropriate attention in 1955 when O’Malley sold Ebbets Field for three million dollars to a real estate developer named Marvin Kratter. He also sold ballparks the Dodgers owned in Fort Worth and Montreal for one million dollars each. “That five million dollars,” he said, “is the money that will, one way or another, go into our new Brooklyn ballpark.” But he also invested some of the money by acquiring the Los Angeles franchise in the Pacific Coast League from the Chicago Cubs. He now owned territorial rights to Los Angeles. He was ready to play his special game: stroke and tomahawk.

“My roots are New York,” O’Malley told Mayor Robert Wagner at City Hall on June 2, 1957. “People in Los Angeles want the Dodgers to move. They’ve made flattering offers. I am in no way committed.

“What do you want?” Wagner asked.

“Air rights over the Long Island Railroad station at Atlantic Avenue and Flatbush Avenue in downtown Brooklyn. The Dodgers don’t want anything else. We’ll pay for a new ballpark by ourselves.”

Wagner was a pleasant person, part Tammany hack, part liberal reformer, and totally overmatched in negotiating with O’Malley. Robert Moses, New York’s commissioner of parks, was the principal city player. Through a series of appointments, Moses controlled not only parks, but highways and urban projects as well. Urbanologists regard Moses as “the single most powerful figure in twentieth-century New York City government.” Moses put hard questions to O’Malley.

“You aren’t suggesting, sir, that four or five million dollars is enough to build the domed stadium you propose?”

O’Malley conceded that the cost would be higher. “The Brooklyn Dodgers are prepared to sell a bond issue to citizens of Brooklyn, backed by the full faith and credit of our franchise. I have no doubt, Mr. Moses, none whatsoever, about our ability to finance ourselves.”

Further, O’Malley said, he was negotiating with Mathew Fox of Skiatron, Inc., “to put our games on subscription TV.” The technology involved a coin box on television sets. Fans would have to put two quarters into the box to unscramble pictures of Dodger games. “These receipts will help pay for the new ballpark.”

Moses looked incredulous. “Engineers and electronic experts,” O’Malley said, “tell me coin box television is no problem at all.”

“As a matter of fact,” Moses said, “I just don’t want to see a baseball field in downtown Brooklyn at all. The streets will never handle all the cars.”

O’Malley said that his plans for the domed stadium, over the Long Island Railroad station, included such good access that most people would come to the park by train.

“You are in error, Mr. O’Malley. If I let you build your domed stadium, your ballgames will create a China Wall of traffic in Brooklyn. No one will be able to pass.”

“Where would you prefer that we relocate?” O’Malley said.

“I have a lovely parcel of land in Flushing Meadow, at the old World’s Fair site in Queens.”

O’Malley looked steadily at Robert Moses. “If my team is forced to play in the borough of Queens, they will no longer be the Brooklyn Dodgers.”

Next day the front page of the
Herald Tribune
announced that a new aquarium was being dedicated in Coney Island and that Margaret Truman, wife of Clifton Daniel, Jr., assistant managing editor of the
New York Times
, had given birth to a son. A headline in columns four and five, more prescient than the copyeditor knew, described the meeting among O’Malley, Wagner, and Moses as “a scoreless tie.”