The Dodgers didn’t become annual lovable losers in September and October via predestination. The famous reputation formed gradually, each year’s late flop adding to the lore and legend of the previous one. To understand what Wait’ll Next Year really means is to understand the individual Last Years that comprise this sad saga.
These were also my formative years. As I came to consciousness, I didn’t then, and don’t today, mark time by each of the Dodgers seasons, but the connection between them was obvious as I became a fully conscious fan during the worst of all their disasters—the historic pennant race of 1951. For my parents—at first pulsating with postwar optimism and pride in their war service, only to face the agony of my father’s disability—the unique life of a Brooklyn Dodger fan was not overpoweringly obvious at first.
For the Dodgers, the postwar era also began in an atmosphere of optimism. A strong team was back from the fighting with legitimately high hopes and the added glow from Branch Rickey’s signing of Jackie Robinson at the end of 1945. Their history had not been very successful, but the record of no championships was not the same as a curse.
The saga did not start with the first two World Series in 1916 and 1920. Those were simply disappointing ends to successful seasons, the first pennants in the team’s modern history.
It hadn’t started with 1941, either. That was also a disappointing end to a successful season, the first Brooklyn National League pennant in twenty-one years, proof that the Larry MacPhail–Leo Durocher era was synonymous with winning as well as prosperity. The Dodgers had performed before more than 1.2 million fans at Ebbets Field and drawn another million for their road games. Except for two weird plays—the line drive by Marius Russo off Freddie Fitzsimmons’s leg and the ball that got past Mickey Owen—the Dodgers, not the Yankees, might have been in position to win the World Series.
It was the following year when the team’s performance began to get frustrating, setting the stage for a repeat nonperformance four years later—each against the St. Louis Cardinals. Recalling the 1942 season, my mother once told me that there were two occasions that year when she simply felt sick, just the way she would so many times through so many later seasons. It wasn’t the same as disappointment, she said; it was like getting kicked in the stomach.
My mother was one tough woman, famously spare with her emotions and anything but a baseball hero-worshipping premodern groupie. Until 1942, she had only two idols—Franklin Delano Roosevelt and my father. That year, however, she flipped for Pete Reiser, much to her astonishment. She said she was mesmerized by his baseball playing, at the graceful ease with which he fielded, ran, and hit. At Ebbets Field, she said, Reiser was the first ballplayer who drew her out of her shell and got her to yell during the games. In addition, like a lot of knowledgeable Dodger fans, she had developed a deep respect for all the moves Larry MacPhail had made to transform the team into a contender.
My father was already in basic training when the 1942 season opened, but my mother was in the stands at the Polo Grounds for the game against the Giants, courtesy of her boss. Baseball would be her hobby for the next forty months. She had a hard core of girlfriends at her law firm and then the U.S. Attorney’s Office, all with husbands away in the war, who would go to ballgames together for the next fifteen years. During the war, she found it the perfect distraction from long days, and it reminded her of the good times with my father before Pearl Harbor. She described herself as lucky to have a job and even luckier to have one that usually demanded work on weekends and at night. She hated being alone with the unavoidable thoughts and worries about my father—where he was in the Pacific, whether he was safe. She never got used to it and she never got over it.
If anything, the Dodgers were a stronger team in 1942 (the flood of ballplayers who eventually left for the war was but a trickle that season) than they were the previous year when they squeezed in front of the Cardinals by two games in the standing. In fact, the Dodgers ended up winning four more games. The Cardinals, however, won the pennant, finishing the season white-hot and overcoming a Dodger lead that had stretched to eight games with barely a month to go.
Two events put an exclamation point on the collapse. In July, in just his second full season as a Dodger, Pete Reiser chased a long fly ball hit over his head in center field by Enos “Country” Slaughter of the Cardinals. Fast and fearless, Reiser caught up to the ball just before he crashed, headfirst, into the wall near the exit gate. The ball fell out of Reiser’s glove as he crumpled in a heap on the grass, unconscious, and Slaughter sped around the bases for a home run that figured prominently in the Cardinal victory that day. At St. John’s Hospital, the diagnosis was severe concussion, and the recommendation of every doctor who looked at him was that he not play for the rest of the season. Larry MacPhail and Leo Durocher paid no heed, however, and Reiser was back playing before he had stopped having vision and equilibrium problems. He had been hitting close to .400 before he was hurt but finished the season barely hitting .300. His enormous promise remained, but he had been seriously damaged by Dodger decision making as well as by Ebbets Field’s outfield wall.
And then, just days before the season ended, Larry MacPhail was canned by the team’s board of directors. He had repaired the team and repaired Ebbets Field, he had greatly reduced debt, and he had stitched together the beginnings of a lucrative broadcasting network. The profits, however, were puny in the board’s stern view; the directors wanted fat, annual distributions, and MacPhail was viewed as not only mercurial but spendthrift. Once again, the directors consulted Ford Frick in the league office, and once again he consulted his friend Branch Rickey, the Cardinals’ famous architect. This time, Rickey recommended himself. He and MacPhail were both baseball geniuses—pioneers in the development of farm team systems for young prospects and in making deals for more established players—but Rickey was both famously straitlaced and deeply religious as well as a legendary tightwad with salaries.
MacPhail was ushered out. The cover story for his departure was a supply service job, at a lieutenant colonel’s rank, in the army he had served in World War I. Meanwhile, a new ownership group had been assembled that would rule the team for the next eight years. The change was managed by an important figure in Brooklyn’s modern business and political history—George V. McLaughlin of the Brooklyn Trust Company, which was both the mortgage holder on Ebbets Field and the team’s operating lender.
McLaughlin’s bank was represented on the Dodgers by a Brooklyn lawyer—a graduate of Fordham Law, with engineering credits as well from the University of Pennsylvania—who had thrived during the depression representing failing companies in bankruptcy proceedings. In addition to handling mortgage foreclosures for the bank, he gradually assumed responsibility for the Dodgers’ legal needs. His name was Walter O’Malley.
In the lore of John Sexton’s family, this was no automatic elevation. His father had been both an attorney and a powerful figure in Broklyn’s Democratic Party organization. He also had been close to Branch Rickey and the family legend is that Rickey had offered him the position of general counsel in the Dodger management. Sexton declined, and it is far from clear Rickey could have prevailed over the bank’s power and O’Malley’s ambition. However, there are never enough what-ifs in Dodger history, and this is another.
Rickey owned twenty-five percent of the team, as O’Malley eventually did. A third quarter share was held by another stalwart of the business establishment—John Smith of the Pfizer Company, the drug giant that eventually sold penicillin and had been based in Brooklyn for nearly one hundred years. The final share was owned by the last link to the Charlie Ebbets era, the heirs of one of his partners, Steve McKeever.
During the war, Rickey continued to build the nucleus of a Dodger future around young prospects whom he stockpiled in an elaborate farm team system that came to include more then five hundred players, financed in part by the strategic selling of the contracts of older Dodgers judged to be past their prime; Rickey became deservedly famous for his sales and his purchases, motivated strongly by the fact that his contract guaranteed him 20 percent of the profits on these transactions.
Rickey also launched his secret project to desegregate the sport; his cover story was that he was looking for black players with which to stock a new Negro League venture. The atmosphere around the Dodgers was very positive during the war years and as the global conflict drew to a close. There were reasons galore to expect that the Dodgers were about to become one of the sport’s premier teams and no hints at all of the nine nightmarish seasons ahead.
In 1946, the first full season after the war, the Dodgers and Cardinals were back at it again, battling all year long and down to the final games of the season. Pee Wee Reese was back, along with a MacPhail-era rookie, Carl Furillo, in center field; a scrappy second baseman in the Leo Durocher mold, Eddie Stanky, had replaced the thirty-seven-year-old Billy Herman at second; Reiser was still contributing solidly in the outfield, as was the Dodgers’ most popular player, right fielder Fred “Dixie” Walker (known famously in Brooklynese as the People’s Cherce).
The 1946 season was also my debut in Brooklyn. My father was getting regular magazine assignments through his agent and war buddies—Harper’s, Reader’s Digest, and trade publications. He was making good, not great, money, but it was enough so that for the first time in her life, my mother didn’t have to work. She kept house and spent every day when the weather was nice wheeling me around the parks in Tudor City, getting to know the other Baby Boom mothers. Just months old, I witnessed several games from the outfield bleachers at Ebbets Field, passed between my father and mother, and for one glorious inning was held by none other than Hilda Chester My parents had gotten to know possibly the most famous baseball fan ever during her heyday in the 1930s, A formidable woman with a foghorn for a voice and a delightfully coarse, occasionally vulgar wit, she had haunted Ebbets Field since the 1920s. Her life is truly the stuff of legend, much of it unverifiable. There is general consensus that she had worked bagging peanuts for sale at ballparks and that after a heart attack her doctor had told her to stop her trademark yells and harangues from her customary bleacher seat. She responded by developing two new trademarks—a cast-iron frying pan that she banged with a ladle, and then a cowbell (the gift of some Dodger players) she rang while leading processions of her groupies through the stands. My father, a master at conversing with odd people as though they were senators, who engaged her before and after the war, told me that behind her raucous behavior was a tough, often sad, life, but that she was warm and decent under a very gruff exterior. Her favorite Dodger by a mile was manager Leo Durocher. She did not show up in Brooklyn much after he left for the Giants, but I remember seeing her famous sign in front of her seat (Hilda Is Here) on occasion as a boy, and her presence during the 1955 World Series is a matter of record.
In the final week of the season, however, there was a harbinger of the disaster to come—another injury to poor Pete Reiser. Playing despite a bad leg and leading off first base, he tried to slide back to beat a pickoff attempt, caught his spikes in the dirt, and broke his ankle.
On the last day of the season, the Dodgers were shut out at home by journeyman Mort Cooper of the fourth-place Boston Braves, leaving the players in their dressing room and thousands of fans in the ballpark to wait for the result of the game between the Cardinals and Chicago Cubs that would determine whether the Dodgers were finished for the season or would be in a playoff. There is a picture of the throng, largely clustered on the outfield grass in front of the famous scoreboard in front of the right-field fence, between the signs then advertising Botany neckties and Gem shaving blades. Somewhere in the crowd is me, at the ripe age of nine months, with my parents.
As it turned out, the Cubs crunched the Cardinals at home, creating the first tie in league history and requiring a best-of-three-game play-off to determine the pennant winner. For reasons that old-timers still argue about, the Dodgers won a coin toss to determine where the first game would be played and elected to start on the road in St. Louis, requiring an immediate, long train trip. The game featured the Dodger future (twenty-year-old Ralph Branca) against the Cardinal present (twenty-game winner Howie Pollet).
Branca was not effective, yielding three runs in less than three innings. Howie Pollet pitched a complete game for the win.
The second play-off game in league history was played in Ebbets Field, matching two pitchers coming off strong seasons—Dodger left-hander Joe Hatten and Murry Dickson of the Cardinals. Hatten was even less effective than Branca had been, giving up five runs in less than three innings, including a run-scoring triple by Dickson.
A powerful team being slowly assembled under Branch Rickey had been beaten by a St. Louis Cardinals team that Rickey had already helped build. Around Brooklyn, the talk was mostly about the decision to open the play-off on the road; it was assumed the Dodgers would be contenders the following year—which they were.
The year 1947 belonged to Jackie Robinson, a season of struggle but of triumph as well. Hitting, fielding, running, he was the spark of a team that began to slowly pull away from the Cardinals. Toward the end of the season the team had a night for him at Ebbets Field, a fitting tribute to a man who was the runaway choice as Rookie of the Year while he was making much larger history as well. In the end the Dodgers won the pennant going away, finishing five games ahead of St. Louis. At this point in their development, Robinson was the one addition to Reese and Furillo among the Dodgers who would be on the field eight years later, playing first base at the time.
Until 1947, the famous term Subway Series primarily meant the Yankees and the Giants, who had played memorable World Series against each other in the 1920s and ’30s. The only exception had been in 1941. This was the year the great rivalry was joined in earnest between the Yankees and the Dodgers—between the team of the borough where working families lived and a team based in the blue-collar Bronx but suffused with the glow of Manhattan and more than a generation of unparalleled success.
Even before the season, bad blood had begun to flow. By this time, Larry MacPhail had resurfaced as one of three Yankee partners, forging an alliance with two men Dodger fans loved to hate: The first was Dan Topping, a trust fund child with movie star looks and gobs of money from the Anaconda copper fortune. Among his lesser distinctions, he was one of silent movie star Arline Judge’s eight husbands. Topping had dabbled in professional football as well, including a team in Brooklyn. The second man was Del Webb, the boss of a real estate development empire that filled up the postwar West with tract houses sold with restrictive racial covenants forbidding sales to people of color. Webb also had been involved in the construction both of the internment camps where Japanese-Americans were confined during the war and of the Frontier casino in a spot of Nevada desert called Las Vegas, the postwar brainchild of mobster Bugsy Siegel.
After the deal acquiring the Yankees from the estate of beer baron Jacob Ruppert (the modern team’s as well as Yankee Stadium’s builder), MacPhail resumed his madcap life that combined baseball wheeling and dealing with large-scale misbehavior and binge drinking. Like more than a few sports figures of the time, he also hung with people who were called colorful or gamblers in the popular press, euphemisms for gangsters. In 1947, however, it was not MacPhail who got in trouble for his escapades; it was Leo Durocher of the Dodgers.
Among their shared acquaintances were two legendary gambling figures who belonged in a Damon Runyon story—Memphis Engleberg and Connie Immerman, the latter the operator of a casino in Havana and an “associate” (to use another euphemism) of mobster Charles “Lucky” Luciano. According to legend, the two had been part of the group that crime figure Arnold Roth-stein used to fix the 1919 World Series. Back then, baseball and gamblers were no strangers, and separating them was high on the agenda of the commissioner hired by the team owners in 1945: A. B. “Happy” Chandler (a former governor of Kentucky and the man who sanctioned the signing of Jackie Robinson).
Durocher was a mere manager; MacPhail, however, was part of an ownership group. What is more, Durocher had lived a publicly notorious life for years, including a messy divorce involving assault charges in 1934 and an even more famous affair that turned into marriage with the actress Laraine Day. In the morality politics of the day, moreover, Durocher was a favorite whipping boy for the stern disciplinarians of the Catholic Church, who regularly inveighed against him for corrupting the young and in Brooklyn threatened to discourage parish kids from attending games.
In the end, MacPhail’s behavior was officially ignored and Durocher—by then a team and borough fixture for nearly a decade—was suspended for the entire historic season. For the first two games, the fill-in manager was Clyde Sukeforth, the scout Branch Rickey had sent to look Jackie Robinson over and bring to Brooklyn; for the rest of the season, and for the following three years, Rickey hired a contemporary and friend, Burt Shot-ton, who had managed the Phillies twenty years before. A quiet, dignified man who dressed impeccably off the field, he was the anti-Durocher.
After the manager melodrama and the debut of Jackie Robinson, the pennant-winning season was almost anticlimactic, with one tragic exception again involving Pete Reiser. Once again, the speedy star was playing a shallow center field against the Pittsburgh Pirates on June 4, when a long-forgotten outfielder named Cully Rikard hit a shot over his head to the deepest part of the ballpark. Once again with Reiser racing back with no thought of the rapidly approaching unpadded wall and forgetting that the fences had been moved in by more than ten yards, it was a virtual repeat of the disaster five years ago, except that this time he could have died. He hit the wall with his head at full speed, collapsing with the ball still in the webbing of his glove. He was virtually paralyzed for more than a week, eventually needed surgery to remove a blood clot from his head, suffered repeated episodes of double vision and grogginess, and never played the outfield consistently again. He could still hit (his average in 1947 was .309), but the full-time career of a man many baseball people considered the best natural all-around athlete in the game’s history, with the possible exception of Shoeless Joe Jackson, was at an end.
There was nothing forbiddingly awesome about the Yankees in 1947. They won three more games than the Dodgers, but in a weaker league. They were anchored by Joe DiMaggio, but with a large collection of new players and a new manager (Bucky Harris had replaced a team legend, Joe McCarthy), there was no obvious favorite that fall.
In the first game, it was the Dodgers who broke on top for a run off the Yankees’ Frank Joseph “Spec” Shea. In Yankees-Dodgers lore, pitching is central, and one of the dominant themes of the torture Brooklyn endured was the seemingly endless emergence of journeymen who had career moments against them in the World Series. Spec Shea, whom the newspapers also called the Naugatuck (as in Connecticut) Nugget, won fourteen of his fifty-six career victories that year. He also pitched two excellent games in that Series, winning both of them.
Through four innings, however, young Ralph Branca was magnificent, retiring all twelve of the batters he faced, five on strikeouts. In the fifth inning, he fell apart. The disaster began with a ground ball that DiMaggio hit toward left field, which Pee Wee Reese chased down too deep in the shortstop hole to have a chance of throwing him out. Unnerved, Branca walked a batter, hit another, gave up a two-run double, walked another hitter, and was in the process of walking a third when Shotton yanked him. Before the inning was over, the Yankees had batted around and scored five runs.
The Dodgers’ pitching also collapsed in the second game, but after their hitters awoke to break open the third game at Ebbets Field, the stage was set for one of the weirdest games in World Series history. For eight innings plus two outs, still another journeyman pitcher—Floyd (“Bill”) Bevens, 7–13 for the season—had held the Dodgers hitless. He had given up a run on two walks, a sacrifice, and a ground ball out, but no one had ever come that close to a no-hitter in the Series and the Yankees had scored two runs. The ninth inning was for the ages.
The Dodger catcher, Bruce Edwards, very nearly tied the game with a long fly ball that Joe DiMaggio caught in deepest center field. Carl Furillo then walked, and for speed Shotton sent in a small kid outfielder from Pennsylvania named Al Gionfriddo to run for him. After the Dodgers’ third baseman, John “Spider” Jorgensen, fouled out, Shotton sent Pete Reiser up to bat for pitcher Hugh Casey. In a display of daring that would be almost unthinkable today, Gionfriddo took off for second with the count two balls and no strikes on Reiser. He dived at the base, just beating the throw, whereupon the Yankees intentionally threw the fourth ball to Reiser. This was a highly unusual move, putting the winning run on base, but Harris’s thinking was that because Reiser had a bad ankle that month his famous speed was not in play. Harris’s thinking backfired, however, when Shotton sent in utility infielder Eddie Miksis to run for Reiser.
The stage was thus set for Harry “Cookie” Lavagetto, a product of the MacPhail era in the late 1930s who lost his best years to the war. He might not have made the Dodgers after the fighting ended, except there was a special rule that permitted teams to keep three additional players on the roster if they were war veterans.
Lavagetto swung at Bevens’s first pitch, a fastball that rode in on him, and missed it. The second fastball was over the plate; Lavagetto went with it and drove a hard line drive straight at the huge wall in right-center field.
There was never any doubt about the only hit the Dodgers got that day. When the ball bounced off the wall, hit Yankee right fielder Tommy Henrich in the chest, and rolled away from him, there was also no doubt that Gionfriddo and Miksis were going to score easily. One moment, the Dodgers were two strikes away from being no-hit and going down 3–1 in the Series; the next moment, they had won the game and tied the Series. My father always told me that the celebratory eruption that ensued was the most positive emotional moment surrounding the team that he experienced until that afternoon eight years later.
The Dodgers’ hitters remained quiescent the following day when Spec Shea pitched a marvelous complete game victory—a tense 2–1 win—to send the Series back to the Bronx. This time, the Dodgers’ bats woke up, taking an 8–5 lead into the sixth inning, when a second famous Series moment from that year occurred. For defensive purposes, Gionfriddo had been sent into the game to play left field in place of Miksis. Two men were on, there were two outs, Joe Hatten was pitching, and the most dangerous Yankee of them all was next. As Joe DiMaggio came up to bat, representing the tying run, Gionfriddo was moved even closer to the third-base line in the Dodger expectation that he would try to pull the ball. Instead, he hit it on a low, hard line toward the Yankee bullpen in left-center field.
Not unlike another Dodger left fielder eight years later, Gionfriddo took off at the crack of DiMaggio’s bat and ran, and ran and ran and ran. Miraculously, he got near it, just in front of the 415-foot sign, reached out in midstride with the glove on his right hand, snared the ball, twisted in the air so he bumped the fence with his rear end and came down on his feet. As with Sandy Amoros’s play in 1955, the run was more spectacular than the catch. In the papers, Gionfriddo compared it to an end in football running under a long forward pass. On his way back to the Dodger dugout, he noticed a scene famously captured on film—the normally controlled DiMaggio kicking the dirt around second base in disgust.
This set the stage for the first time in Dodger history that the team would play a game in which they could win the World Series. All the pitchers were tired from the grind of the previous six games, with the Yankees choosing to start Spec Shea again on two days’ rest and the Dodgers going with journeyman Hal Gregg, who had pitched seven strong innings in the Game Four miracle against Bill Bevens. In Dodger lore, there is an amazing succession of small turning points that are as maddening as they were pivotal. In their first Game Seven, it was base running.
In the first inning, both Eddie Stanky and Pee Wee Reese were thrown out by Yankee catcher Aaron Robinson while trying to steal second base. These were not foolish attempts: Robinson’s relatively weak throwing arm was well-known; this just happened to be his day. Then, in the second inning, Carl Furillo was thrown out trying to score on a ground ball to Phil Rizzuto at short. The Dodgers had five hits and a walk in those two innings but only two runs.
The Yankees, meanwhile, pecked away at the Dodgers’ pitchers, getting one run in the second inning, two in the fourth, one in the sixth, and one in the seventh. After the fourth inning, the Dodgers got exactly one hit the rest of the way—a two-out single in the ninth. The man who shut them down—as he had for four innings in Game One before taking the loss in Game Six—was one of the pioneers in the then-infant art of relief pitching, a tall specialist in the forkball (so-called because it is held between the first two fingers) named Joe Page. He had three marvelous seasons with the Yankees beginning that year and two productive World Series, both against the Dodgers. This time the disappointment was keen; the team had every opportunity to win, but losing late was becoming familiar. Three little-known ballplayers in that World Series performed feats that are still talked about today, but Bill Bevens, Cookie Lavagetto, and Al Gionfriddo would never play another inning of major-league baseball.
The 1947 World Series was not like 1941. It is was more than a disappointment after a successful season that made history and gave the Dodgers a national following with the arrival of one courageous player. This time, the first chorus of Woulda, Coulda, Shouldas, Mightas could be heard. They didn’t just almost win; they probably should have.
It was during 1948 that my parents’ lives changed. Their happy, essentially carefree postwar life gradually unraveled as my father’s health slowly but inexorably deteriorated.
My mother described my father upon his return from the war as thin as a rail, pale, and weak. He had been through malaria and dengue fever as well as countless other bouts with germs Western medicine had not yet named. He was never down for long and rarely in medical facilities that offered much more than a little rest and symptomatic relief, but the cumulative effect got him assigned back to New York after the invasions of Saipan and Tinian.
With no memories of anything but a bubbly, strong man before the war, my mother was alarmed at his appearance and general condition at first, but thousands of men came home from the Pacific in poor health and thousands more had been seriously wounded. At first, he seemed to recover, but within six months what he thought was a chronic stomachache turned out to be a bleeding ulcer. Unable to imagine that his health was deteriorating, he braved his way through a quick recovery, only to get knocked on his back a few months later.
The syndrome slowly became chronic. At first, my father had to pass on the occasional writing assignment; eventually, he was passing on most of them. He did not have access to fancy medical care to begin with, but what really drove him to distraction was his difficulty in finding someone who could tell him what was wrong beyond the fact that the linings of his organs were weak, his digestive system didn’t work right, and he was in constant pain, sometimes agony. Eventually, he managed to get a firm diagnosis for one complaint and it was terrifying: a tumor on his right kidney that demanded surgery. Back then in the days before lasers and other modern marvels, surgery to remove a kidney was a huge deal; the scar went halfway around him.
What had begun as a frustrating irritant rather quickly became a family crisis. Fat savings accounts were for rich people; in those days most everybody was just a few missed paydays from disaster. There was never any doubt or discussion about what to do; my mother simply went back to work. Her old law firm was healthy and expanding, and she had been a valued secretary and office manager; she was welcomed back enthusiastically, but she returned with a heavy heart and budding doubts that her dreams of a secure life and another kid were just around the corner.
For me, it meant nursery school, at a place run by a church up First Avenue from us. It would be called day care today, but it was most of my day for the next three years—so that my father could work when he was feeling well and rest when he wasn’t. He bore his burden stoically, but his continual illness was accompanied by a constant battle for the official attention of the heavily burdened Veterans Administration. Years later, he told me we would have had a much less difficult time if he had returned from the Pacific all shot up instead of infected.
Anything courtesy of the Dodgers to distract him would have been embraced; it would have been the perfect time for the Dodgers to win. But alas, this was when they became the Dodgers of fable and lore.
Following their second and thrilling World Series, the Dodgers and the Yankees spent 1948 rebuilding teams that had been veteran-heavy. They also spent the year in turmoil. After a display of drunken brawling astonishing even for him, Larry MacPhail’s two partners, Topping and Webb, decided to get rid of him, bought him out for more than $2 million, and installed the highly respected George Weiss as their general manager. Headed toward a third-place finish just behind the Boston Red Sox and the eventual World Champion Cleveland Indians, the Yankees also decided that Bucky Harris was not their field manager of the future. They replaced him after the season with the man who would be running the team for more than a dozen years, including that day in 1955—Casey Stengel, the stylish, mischievous Brooklyn outfielder on the 1916 pennant winner who had managed mostly unsuccessfully after his playing days with the Dodgers and Braves before rekindling his reputation at the Pacific Coast League’s Oakland team.
The Dodgers’ experience was much more traumatic. After leading the abortive petition drive against Jackie Robinson’s promotion to the team, Dixie Walker had asked to be traded, and the Dodgers obliged him in one of the better steals of Branch Rickey’s fabled career. Shortly after the World Series, Walker was shipped to the Pittsburgh Pirates along with pitchers Hal Gregg and Vic Lombardi. In return, the Dodgers got a solid left-handed pitcher whose best years were still ahead of him, a tall Arkansan named Elwin Charles “Preacher” Roe; a third baseman, Billy Cox, who was a decent hitter but, more important, may have been the best-fielding third baseman of his day; and for good measure a utility infielder (Gene Mauch) who eventually became a famous manager.
But 1948 was also the year Leo Durocher tried to come back from his suspension only to run into the implacable ill will of Walter O’Malley, then beginning to flex his muscles on the Dodgers’ board. Unable to save Durocher’s job as the team lurched toward last place in late June, Branch Rickey put him in touch with the owner of the Giants, Horace Stoneham, who was also looking to make a managerial change. Just as the Giants were beginning their own rebuilding process, Durocher skipped across town in midseason, replaced once again by Burt Shotton. The Dodgers made a run at the pennant, but an August injury to Ralph Branca probably doomed their chances and they skidded to third place, just a game in front of Pittsburgh, a game behind the Cardinals, and eight games behind the pennant-winning Braves.
In 1949, the modern Dodgers burst on the scene. The year before, Durocher had moved Gil Hodges from backup catcher to first base. After Eddie Stanky was traded to the Braves, Jackie Robinson was installed at second base. (Stanky was another signer of Dixie Walker’s infamous petition.) From Compton near Los Angeles, a young Duke Snider was installed in center field as Furillo moved to right; and Roy Campanella had replaced Bruce Edwards as the catcher. Except for a hole in left field, it was almost instantly a powerful, fast, and superb defensive team. This was Jackie Robinson’s Most Valuable Player season; he led the league with a .342 batting average, drove in 124 runs, got more than two hundred hits, and stole thirty-seven bases.
This was also the year that Don Newcombe arrived in the major leagues with a flourish, pitching a shutout in his debut in late May and winning seventeen games in his Rookie of the Year season; Preacher Roe, with a delightful assortment of pitches that included the occasional spitball, added another fifteen victories, to go with Ralph Branca’s thirteen.
The Yankees were just as impressive, but both teams had to survive famous scares at the end of the season to slip into their third Subway Series by one-game margins. The Yankees, needing two victories against the Red Sox, got them; and the Dodgers had to beat the rapidly improving third-place Phillies to avoid another play-off with the Cardinals.
The World Series is typically described as a Dodger collapse, in part because that is precisely what it was as they lost in five games. Its place in Dodger mythology, however, is more interesting than that because the first three games were Series classics, nail-biters that could have gone either way, featuring fabulous pitching and enough what-ifs and might-have-beens to keep increasingly neurotic, truly knowledgeable Dodger fans talking for years.
The wild finish of the regular season disturbed the Dodger pitching rotation, with Preacher Roe needing an extra day of rest. In his place, Don Newcombe became only the second rookie to open a World Series (the first, Paul Derringer, had started the first game for Branch Rickey’s Cardinals in 1931). Newcombe was opposed by Allie Reynolds, whom Larry MacPhail had obtained from Cleveland after the 1946 season for veteran second baseman Joe Gordon. Part Native American from Oklahoma, Reynolds was already one of the league’s best pitchers, could relieve as well as start, and had won Game Two against the Dodgers in 1947.
For eight and a half innings, the two men pitched one of the best World Series games ever. Newcombe yielded four hits, Reynolds just two; Newcombe struck out eleven, Reynolds nine. If anything, the Dodgers had been slightly more threatening, getting three runners into scoring position at second base to the Yankees’ two. It all came down to the bottom of the ninth inning at Yankee Stadium, with Tommy Henrich, the Yankee right fielder who had struck out on the ball Mickey Owen let past him eight years before, leading off.
Newcombe fell behind Henrich, who took the first two pitches for balls. Behind the plate, Campanella signaled for a curveball, and said later that Newcombe obliged with his best pitch of the day. Henrich was ready for it and hit it hard into the right-field seats to end the game. This was as close as Newcombe, famously overworked during the regular season grinds that brought the Dodgers three of their pennants in his day, ever came to winning a World Series game (in all, he lost four).
Game Two was just as exciting, another 1–0 pitching duel that matched Preacher Roe against another solid Yankee, Vic Raschi. This time, fortune was with Preacher Roe, who scattered six hits and walked nobody in a masterful performance. Raschi was almost as good over eight innings of six-hit pitching before giving way to a pinch-hitter and then Joe Page in the ninth. The difference in the game was a two-out single in the second inning by Gil Hodges that scored Jackie Robinson, who had doubled.
In Brooklyn, incredibly, the third game was tied 1–1 after eight innings. Ralph Branca battled first Tommy Byrne and then Joe Page for the Yankees and had two outs in the ninth inning around a walk to Yogi Berra when he once again collapsed. Three singles and a walk later, the Yankees had scored three runs, but with Page tiring after more than five innings in relief, the Dodgers rallied in their half of the inning. With one out, the answer to one of the better Dodger trivia questions hit a home run into the left-field bleachers. His name was Luis Olmo. He was Puerto Rican, had played regularly only during the war, and had only appeared in thirty-eight games that season. Two months later, he was gone to the Braves for the last two seasons of his career.
With two outs, it was Roy Campanella’s turn to put one in the bleachers to bring the Dodgers within one tantalizing run, but Bruce Edwards (batting for relief pitcher Jack Banta) took a called third strike to end the maddening game. It was only then that the team truly fell apart, losing the next two games 6–4 and 10–6, with late rallies in both games shut down first by Allie Reynolds and then by Joe Page. It was the beginning of a historic winning streak for the Yankees and the beginning of a long nightmare for the Dodgers.
Looking back on his epic career, Duke Snider observed that exactly two innings kept the Dodgers from doing what the Yankees amazingly did beginning in 1949—win five pennants in a row. With two more chances against them in the World Series and fielding what Dodger after Dodger from Buzzy Bavasi to Johnny Podres say were their strongest teams, it is possible that the Yankees might not have done what they also did that had no precedent—win five World Series in a row. As it was those two innings were the exclamation points on a mind-boggling string of late-September and October catastrophes that set the stage for 1955.
Those two innings Snider was referring to are among my first baseball memories as a child. In the fall of 1950, I was in my final year of nursery school at the church up First Avenue from our apartment building. I was home with my father every afternoon. When he was working, he arranged his life so that he wrote late at night and saw people in the morning. The afternoons were for me, and they were idyllic. I was given lunch at the church, after which my father would be waiting downstairs. We only took the bus down to 42nd Street when the weather was bad; the rest of the time, hot or cold, we walked. On afternoons when the Dodgers were playing, the radio was always on; the family lore was that I could recite the Dodgers’ lineup that year, stumbling only over the name of the more-or-less regular left fielder, Gene Hermanski (the first few times, I’m told, it came out “Waterski”). This was the heyday of the Red Barber era, and if I close my eyes I can still hear that soft voice with the strange but pleasantly odd accent of his native Mississippi. Because Barber was free of the hype germ, my memory is more of a third person in the room, conversing. My father and I would sit at the card table in front of the Murphy bed where my father set up his typewriter; he took his notes on long, legal-size yellow pads that my mother brought home from work; it was on those pads on those afternoons that he taught me the odd art of keeping score.
My actual baseball education commenced in the parks of Tudor City, true fields of dreams. All we had to do was turn right out of our building and head up a flight of stairs that matched the layout on the other side of 42nd Street. On each side were two parks, a lower playground for older kids with a sandbox and an upper park that had gravel paths and benches along with swings for toddlers. At all the entrances, the city had a sign that said No Ball Playing, but it was never obeyed during my childhood; in fact, cops walking beats in the neighborhoods often joined in the pickup games that punctuated life between April and November.
Baseball for me began in the sandbox. For what seemed like hours, my father and I played catch; he taught me to slide in the dirt; and with a kid’s bat in my little hands he tossed soft underhand pitches to me that I gradually learned to hit. For a ball we used a New York icon, a pink rubber ball that the Spalding people made for the city’s concrete handball courts and for stickball in the streets; it was known then and will always be known through the slightly nasal New York accent as a Spaldeen. This was the middle of the Baby Boom, so the parks were always filled in the afternoon with kids and their mothers. Naturally, the sight of a man playing ball with his son lured the curious and the jealous to us. In short order, my father was supervising the baseball education of a dozen children at a time, arranging and then supervising makeshift games. Through a child’s eyes, he was the man who operated the Tudor City baseball clinic, not a writer who got sick regularly and couldn’t work full-time.
I remember the last day of the 1950 season, a Sunday, sitting in our apartment and hearing my mother and father shout, “Shit,” at the same time. I was so impressed that for weeks I, too, shouted it in moments of excitement until it was explained to me that either I would stop doing that or there would be no baseball in the park for an entire weekend. I was so pleased with my obedience that in a long-distance chat with my grandmother back in Indiana (a big and rare event in our household) I told her in response to the standard question about what I was doing, “I’ve stopped saying ‘shit,’ Grandma.”
My parents were reacting to one of the plays that looms huge in the Dodger saga, the failed attempt by Cal Abrams to score from second base on a single by Duke Snider in the bottom of the ninth inning against the Philadelphia Phillies. It left the game tied, but only until the Phillies won it convincingly in the following inning.
The Dodgers’ predicament was slightly worse at the end of that season. The year before, they had to win their final game to get into the World Series; in 1950, they had to win their final three games to force a play-off with these same Phillies, an exciting team of mostly young players remembered as the Whiz Kids: a relentlessly consistent, winning pitcher named Robin Roberts; a durable second starter in Curt Simmons; one of baseball’s first star relief pitchers, Jim Konstanty; a very fast center fielder, Richie Ashburn; and a collection of dangerous sluggers in outfielder Del Ennis, catcher Andy Seminick, and third baseman Willie “Puddin’ Head” Jones. They had dominated the league all year, and the Dodgers had to climb back from as many as ten games behind on Labor Day to even have a chance to tie them. They won the first two games at Ebbets Field, setting quite a stage for the final one.
The game offered the ideal matchup—Robin Roberts against Don Newcombe, who had won another nineteen games that year, as had Roberts. After eight and a half innings, the score was 1–1. In the Dodger half of the ninth, the first batter was one of the many outfielders who tried to catch on with Snider and Furillo in the outfield—Cal Abrams—but who rarely got a chance to show his skills despite excellent minor-league credentials; for Brooklyn, with a million and a half Jews anxious to cheer someone besides first-base coach Jake Pitler, he would have been perfect. He had played more than usual that year because he had been called up from the farm team in St. Paul, Minnesota, after an injury to Furillo.
With Roberts pitching a bit too carefully, Abrams worked him for a walk. The next batter, Pee Wee Reese, got a sign to bunt him over to second base but was unable to get one fair through two strikes. As can happen in baseball, his adversity was followed by a single that left two men on and nobody out.
That brought up Duke Snider, far from the greatest bunter in history but fresh from a learning experience earlier that year that caused him to pause—when there was no signal for a sacrifice—and walk over to the Dodger dugout to be certain. In the spring, Snider had failed in the same situation, popping his bunt up. After the play, he threw things in the dugout and yelled about the silliness of having a power hitter bunt. Manager Burt Shotton heard him, fined him fifty dollars on the spot, and gave him a lecture about team play after the game.
As Snider recalled, Shotton told him to swing away that Sunday. He did just that, hitting a clean single up the middle. Richie Ashburn, charging the ball from center field, had a relatively weak arm, but his throw this time went quickly through to catcher Stan Lopata as Abrams rounded third, was waved toward home by coach Milt Stock. He was tagged out by a mile.
The Dodgers were far from dead, Reese and Snider having advanced to third and second base respectively on the throw, Jackie Robinson having been walked intentionally to load the bases, and Carl Furillo coming up to hit. He failed, however, popping up to the right side of the infield. When Gil Hodges flied deep to left for the third out, the game was still tied, but the fans and the Dodgers had lost their spirit.
In the Phillies’ tenth, Newcombe gave up two singles to Roberts and first baseman Eddie Waitkus, but got a crucial out when he fielded a sacrifice attempt by Ashburn and threw to Billy Cox at third, a split second before the sliding Roberts arrived. The next hitter was left fielder and left-handed hitter Dick Sisler, who already had three hits that day. Sisler’s father was one of the game’s most famous hitters, George Sisler, who after a Hall of Fame career with the St. Louis Browns had stayed in the game as a hitting instructor. One of his most satisfying projects had been a young rookie with the Dodgers, Duke Snider.
Newcombe was ahead of Dick Sisler in the count, one ball and two strikes, when he swung late on a fastball and sliced a line drive into the left-field bleachers. When the Dodgers went down meekly to end the game, the first vigorous second-guessing of the long postwar Dodger nightmare began—focusing almost entirely on the Abrams play instead of Newcombe’s pitching in the final inning.
A few years later, during one of our Saturday morning outings to the public library, my father and I for some reason began talking about that day. Ever alert to the chance to instruct me on some point, he went off to the magazine room while I busied myself with a school project. When he returned, he announced that I was about to learn why the things you hear about immediately following a major event are often not the whole truth or even the truth at all.
In the newspapers at the time, most fingers pointed at Milt Stock, the third-base coach. Within days he had been cruelly fired by the Dodgers, and he never worked in baseball again. It seemed like callous treatment of a man who had been in the game since 1913, played more than a decade as an everyday infielder, and finished up with the Dodgers in the mid-1920s. One reason for the intensity of the reaction to his having waved Abrams home was what happened after he was out. Had Stock held Abrams at third, the long fly ball Gil Hodges hit would have been the second out and Abrams would have scored the winning run on the play with ease.
Other fingers pointed at Abrams, who according to several players had seemed to hesitate before running on Snider’s single and had also taken a very wide turn as he rounded third base.
And still other fingers pointed at Burt Shotton, who perhaps might have been expected to put in one of his faster players to run for Abrams. He, too, was gone after the season, though for other reasons.
What was missed, my father said as he put two magazine articles in front of me to read, was what actually happened on the play. Several of the Phillies said much later that before Roberts’s pitch, a sign had flashed from Stan Lopata calling for an attempt to pick Abrams off second base. Even before Roberts threw the ball, Ashburn was running in as a precaution in case the throw to second base was wild. Roberts, however, did not see Lopata’s signal and threw to home plate. As a result, the charging Ashburn had the ball in his hand even as Abrams was rounding third. It is fair to argue Stock should have seen all this and held Abrams at third; it is equally fair to argue that with nobody out it was a decent gamble that he could score anyway if Ashburn made a typical throw. The argument has gone on for fifty years, but my father’s point was that it was not resolvable. In terms any Dodger fan could understand, it was a fluke.
My father’s other point was that the second-guessing missed the larger point that Newcombe had then proceeded to give up a single to the opposing pitcher and a home run to a man who hit only fifty-five in an eight-year career. Losing a pennant in the last inning of the season on a three-run home run was a bitter pill to swallow. Surely nothing like that could ever happen again to such a talented team.
But it did.
In addition to the arguments over the famous ninth inning, the off-season was also dominated by arguments over the boardroom maneuvers by Walter O’Malley that had sent Branch Rickey—the team’s architect and the man with the plan to fracture the so-called color line—packing. Famously ambitious and single-minded, O’Malley was determined to take over the team, he had the controlling power (the catalytic event was the death that year of his partner, John Smith, following which O’Malley convinced his widow to allow him to run her business affairs), and he used it. His leverage came from the fact that over his opposition Rickey could not get another contract to run the Dodgers as president.
In order to get another job in baseball (the Pirates quickly beckoned), Rickey had to sell his interest in the Dodgers under league rules, and, believing he had him over a barrel, O’Malley tried to make him sell for no more than the few hundred thousand dollars he had paid years before. But when Rickey found a potential buyer—real estate magnate William Zeckendorf—O’Malley had to match his $1 million offer and was then forced to pay him an additional fifty thousand dollars as the disappointed suitor. That last requirement drove O’Malley to distraction, and his continuing feud with Rickey would eventually cost the Dodgers four years later when Rickey backed out at the last minute from a deal that would have brought the widely praised young outfielder to Brooklyn from Puerto Rico—Roberto Clemente.
There is no one who followed baseball at midcentury who cannot recall where he was when a twenty-seven-year-old outfielder from Scotland named Bobby Thomson hit the home run for the New York Giants that became forever known as the Shot Heard ‘round the World, the three-run blast off Ralph Branca that ended the Dodgers’ next season; there is not a Dodger fan who doesn’t still wince at the endless replays of that stab-in-the-heart moment when Giant broadcaster Russ Hodges began shrieking, “The Giants win the pennant,” over and over again.
I was with Abe Slutsky in his station wagon.
That fall I had started school in Miss Allen’s kindergarten class at the Browning School for Boys on 62nd Street, between Park and Madison Avenues. To this day, I have not the slightest idea how my father got the school to help us so I could go. I had been at least dimly aware of the stakes for both my parents, which must be why I remember sitting in Miss Allen’s room taking the entrance test a few months before and hearing my father tell me at nursery school that I had been accepted. What they did to wangle a scholarship out of a place that, as near as I could tell in grammar school, didn’t give them then remains a mystery.
Browning, which had opened in 1888, was in a small building with four classrooms on each floor and room for a cafeteria, a woodshop on the ground floor, and a gymnasium in the basement. It is little different today, except the school has acquired the building next door. Browning was rigorous and demanding on the fundamentals but culturally nurturing as well. We were drilled and drilled on grammar and arithmetic but encouraged in music and art; sports were in the afternoon. A jacket and tie were required even for Miss Allen’s class, which met (all nine of us) around small tables in her room.
I had not been conscious of much outside my own neighborhood to that point, except for Ebbets Field. This was a different world. All of my classmates either lived in huge apartments on Park or Fifth Avenue or in town houses on Upper East Side streets. By some miracle I was conscious of the difference but not obsessed with it. I was acutely aware that my parents were struggling and that my father was often sick and that my classmates lived in places that were palatial by my confined perspective, but for some reason I was not preoccupied by the difference. They were almost all Yankee fans and therefore much more severely disadvantaged.
In part, my attitude was conditioned by the fact that my parents had prepared me superbly for school. I was already reading voraciously by then, every argument or misbehavior episode at home ended with my having to write my way out of trouble, and my parents and I talked all the time. I had been taken through the fundamentals of music lovingly by my father and could already read and play simple pieces. I had my unique neighborhood, and I had the Dodgers. I thought I was fortunate. The only emotion I bottled up was my frustration that for all their loving attention to me, my parents were not happier. In school, I was not cocky, but I felt confident from the beginning, and except for sloppy penmanship and a chronic inability to draw, my preparation and habits helped me excel.
Abe Slutsky worked in my neighborhood at one of the buildings in the amazing complex known as Tudor City. On the side, for not many extra bucks, he drove kids in the area to and from private and parochial school in Manhattan. He was an older man from Brooklyn, pleasant and warm to me once he discovered I was a Dodger nut, and fun to be around. New York was not a car town, so the idea of having a ride in a station wagon twice a day was more than a novelty at first. I remember that Mr. Slutsky’s had red leather seats.
In the late summer and fall of 1951, the Dodgers were going through the same torture that the Phillies had endured the previous year, losing a huge lead in the pennant race and trying to hang on for dear life down the stretch. The torture was especially severe because the team gaining on them was the Giants. If the Dodgers-Yankees rivalry seemed grand, battling the Giants was more like a neighborhood grudge match. Before I was born, it was the Giants who had initially dominated baseball life in New York when legends like John McGraw and Christy Mathewson were around, and it was the Giants-Yankees rivalry in the 1920s and early ’30s that captured the city’s attention while the Dodgers wallowed in entertaining mediocrity. That all changed just before and after the war.
I was of course too young to have any memory of Leo Durocher as the Dodgers’ high-profile manager in the Branch Rickey period. By the time I came to baseball awareness in 1951, he was managing the Giants and therefore a figure who to a Dodger kid conjured up both fear and loathing. They had two other figures that inspired the same feelings: a hard-nosed shortstop, Alvin Dark, a mean-looking man who had been involved in some of the early harassment of Jackie Robinson while on the Boston Braves; and the meanest-looking man I remember as a child, a pitcher with a perpetual five o’clock shadow named Sal Maglie, who was known as the Barber for the pitches he threw close enough to a hitter’s face to give him a shave. I was also aware, however, that like the Dodgers the Giants had not only been desegregated early; they were also integrated. That year, their regulars included a legitimate slugger, Monte Irvin, a solid third baseman, Hank Thompson, and a rookie from Alabama who could hit with as much power as Mickey Mantle, play center field acrobatically, and run like the wind—Willie Mays. The contrast with the rigidly still-segregated Yankees was obvious.
In our apartment, the Dodgers were always on the radio—a black Zenith box—when they were playing, but when they were playing the Giants we really paid rapt attention. It was an exciting rivalry, central to baseball’s most glorified decade when three marvelous teams fought in the same city, and for the most part it was an enjoyable one because the Dodgers usually won. Just not that year.
As I began to actually follow the Dodgers, there were four things about them in 1951 that were different. In June, my father got a chance to explain to me what a trade was because the whole city was buzzing about the one the Dodgers made to get what it was hoped would be (at last) a solid left fielder. He came from the Chicago Cubs and his name was Andy Pafko. To get him, along with a new backup catcher (Al “Rube” Walker) and two other players, the Dodgers sent four players west: their older backup catcher, Bruce Edwards, pitcher Joe Hatten, the swift infielder Eddie Miksis (whom the second-guessers thought Burt Shotton should have put in to run for Cal Abrams the year before), and Gene Hermanski. The trade, however, happened during a year when Pafko was struggling, and while he had an excellent 1952 he was gone in another trade to the Braves by 1953.
There were also two more pitchers whose major contributions to the team began that year. After getting burned in the World Series by the likes of Joe Page and Allie Reynolds, the Dodgers finally found a pitcher who could start or relieve—Clem Labine. A right-hander from Rhode Island, he could throw an assortment of breaking and sinking balls to go with a fastball, and he excelled in his first full season. His best opportunities came in midseason after an injury to one of the stars of the first part of the year, Clyde King. The favorite in my family, however, was Carl Erskine, because like Gil Hodges he was from my father’s Indiana (the small industrial city of Anderson in the north-central part of the state). Erskine was relatively small, under six feet tall and never weighing more than 170 pounds. He threw hard, however, with a smooth delivery, very high kick, and almost overhand throwing motion. A popular and religious family man in Bay Ridge, he was the famous “Oisk” in Brooklyn. But perhaps because he threw so hard for his size, he had shoulder problems for much of his career. He had first come up in 1948 but was down and up from the Montreal farm team more than once over the next three seasons and was often used in relief. In 1951, his hard work and talent paid off with sixteen victories to go with Preacher Roe’s twenty-two (his best year ever) and Don Newcombe’s twenty.
It was also the first year as manager for Charles Dressen—a coach under Leo Durocher when Larry MacPhail was in Brooklyn who had followed MacPhail across town to coach for the Yankees. In addition to teaching Johnny Podres to throw the changeup, Charlie Dressen loved to talk baseball, to be quoted in the papers, and to gamble. He was the precise opposite of Burt Shotton’s understated dignity in demeanor and quickly became a Brooklyn favorite again.
With banner seasons from the stable lineup of well-established hitters (1951 was Roy Campanella’s first Most Valuable Player year), the Dodgers exploded from the start of the season. By August they were more than thirteen games ahead of the Giants, at which point just about everything started to go wrong. At first it was injuries to the pitching staff—to Clyde King especially and then to Ralph Branca, who strained his pitching arm and, after winning more than ten games by the summer, finished up with only thirteen. To make matters worse, Pee Wee Reese and Duke Snider each endured horrific hitting slumps after July.
The Giants chipped away at the huge Dodger lead and then chipped away some more. In September, the Giants went on a tear (they were 38–7 over the last forty-five games) while the Dodgers were losing as much as they were winning, and actually tied them at the end. On the last day of the season, the Giants won first, over the Braves, and only heroic relief pitching by Newcombe and Clarence “Bud” Podbeilan and a home run by Jackie Robinson in the fourteenth inning got the team past the Phillies.
After 1946, the last-day heroics in 1949, and the crushing disappointment in 1950, the Dodgers were headed into still another play-off. There was a coin toss again, won by Brooklyn, which elected to open at home this time, meaning games two and three (if necessary) would be in the Polo Grounds.
With pitchers on both sides tired from the crazed stretch drive and with the pitching rotations out of whack, the teams’ best pitchers did not start the series. Leo Durocher opened with Jim Hearn, a decent pitcher over seven seasons with the Giants who won the most games of his career that season (seventeen); Dressen countered with Ralph Branca. It was a good, low-scoring, exciting game. Not for the first time, the Dodgers scored first—a home run by Andy Pafko in the second inning.
The person who beat Branca that crucial day was none other than Bobby Thomson, who would play a role of some importance later in the series. It happened in the fourth inning. After breezing through the first third of the game, Branca started the fourth by hitting Monte Irvin. With two out, Thomson hit a fastball he later said was right down the middle of the plate, belt high, into the left-field bleachers. In the eighth, Monte Irvin hit another Branca mistake into the seats, and while the Dodgers largely slept at bat (five hits and four double plays), Jim Hearn had enough support to win. The second game was a 10–0 Dodger blowout: four home runs (another by Pafko and one by the other player in the Cubs trade, Rube Walker, who was playing for the injured Roy Campanella, who pulled a thigh muscle in the final game against the Phillies and aggravated it during the first play-off game at Ebbets Field). Clem Labine, asked to start for the depleted staff, responded with a six-hitter.
The final game of the fateful series begin with the perfect ingredients for a pitching duel (Newcombe versus Maglie) and that was precisely what happened. Through seven innings, the score was 1–1. The Dodgers (the script rarely seemed to change) scored first in the first inning—two walks by Maglie and a single by Jackie Robinson. The Giants tied the game in their half of the seventh inning on a hit (hardly anyone remembers this fact) by Bobby Thomson.
It was in the top of the eighth inning that the Dodgers appeared to break the game open as Maglie tired—he allowed three runs on a wild pitch and singles by Pafko and Billy Cox. Newcombe retired the Giants routinely in their half of the inning but had begun complaining in the dugout that after more than 270 innings of work that year he was running out of gas.
The inning that epitomized the postwar Dodger experience began just as I walked out of school and got into Abe Slutsky’s car, his final pickup before the drive downtown. It started with what they call a bleeder in baseball, a ground ball by Alvin Dark that just made it through the hole between first and second base. With Gil Hodges holding Dark on first, the Giants’ right fielder, Don Mueller, took advantage of the inviting gap on the right side by hitting a sharp single between Snider and Furillo in right-center field. By the time Furillo got to the ball, Dark was headed safely to third. A brief respite followed when Monte Irvin hit a pop fly that Hodges caught in foul territory, and then the roof fell in.
By now, I think Mr. Slutsky was across town and had turned onto Second Avenue. There were four other kids in the car besides me. Before the next Giant batter came up, I have a fairly clear memory of Mr. Slutsky pulling over to the right side of the street and stopping to listen.
The next Giant batter was a slender first baseman—a good but not powerful hitter who had been playing with the Giants since he came up in 1945 at the age of nineteen. His name was Carroll Lockman, and he was called Whitey because of his light hair. A left-handed batter, Whitey Lockman sliced a line drive into left-center field that was far enough away from both Pafko and Snider that Dark could walk home and Lockman could easily reach second base with a double. On the play, Don Mueller also had an easy time making it to third base, but he slid very hard coming into the bag and broke his ankle—forcing a pause in the game while he was being removed from the field and a pinch-runner was being inserted. For the historical record, his name was Clint Hartung, he was huge (nearly six feet, six inches), he was fast, and after four years as a mediocre pitcher he was in the first of two years as a reserve outfielder; he was from the small town of Hondo in Texas and in those days of nicknames he was called the Hondo Hurricane.
While Clint Hartung was jogging to third base, Charlie Dressen was walking to the pitcher’s mound. On the phone to his bullpen he had been told by coach Clyde Sukeforth that Ralph Branca had thrown decently while warming up, so Dressen took the ball from Don Newcombe and signaled for the man who wore the number 13 on his Brooklyn uniform. Bobby Thomson was due up, with Willie Mays on deck. With men on second and third and only one out, the historical consensus is that walking Thomson intentionally was not an option because that meant putting the potential winning run on base, but the situation also dictated that he not be given easy pitches to hit with first base open, even if that meant he ended up being walked anyway.
Also by historical consensus, Branca’s first pitch was a huge mistake—a fat fastball right down the middle of the plate, not unlike the pitch Thomson hit into the bleachers two days before. Fortunately, Thomson took it for a strike. The second pitch, all the participants agreed at the time, was supposed to be off the plate, inside. Instead it was also out over the plate.
The participants also agree that the line drive off Bobby Thomson’s bat was hit very hard as it went over Billy Cox’s head toward the left-field wall just three hundred feet away, but that it lost speed and height as it traveled farther. For a second or two, it was not clear whether it would make the stands, hit high off the wall, or fall into the glove of Andy Pafko, who stood with his back pressed against the barrier. It made the stands, just barely, falling in with its last gasps of kinetic energy.
I will always remember Mr. Slutsky pounding his steering wheel with an open hand over and over again before turning off the radio and driving on; I can see the scene clearly but have no memory of saying anything, which is why I’m convinced that shock is the right word for my young reaction. I also have no memory of arriving home after the tragic end of the first baseball season I followed. What I do remember is sitting at the card table in front of the Murphy bed, writing on one of my father’s legal pads.
It was a letter to Ralph Branca. Apparently after solemn embraces that afternoon we had eaten supper in near silence (very, very unusual for my loquacious family). When conversation finally began it had been about “poor” Ralph Branca and how terrible he must feel about what had happened. Ever alert for a chance to use an event for its probative as well as sentimental value, the idea of writing a letter was my father’s. I have no memory of what I wrote, but my mother mailed it the next day on her way to work. I never got an answer, but on a half-dozen other occasions in my childhood I wrote similar letters—always to Dodger players who were having a tough time. There was no dearth of subject matter.
The reaction by my family to Ralph Branca’s ordeal was not common. According to Duke Snider—whose parents had come east in anticipation of seeing their famous son play in the World Series and whom he gallantly took out to dinner in Brooklyn after the game—there were already effigies of a stuffed figure with the number 13 and a Dodger hat hanging from light poles as he drove home to Bay Ridge. After the disappointments that began in 1941 and continued through 1949, the reaction had been almost entirely pained sadness and frustration. It was after Cal Abrams was thrown out at home the year before that second-guessing became part of the ritual. After the Bobby Thomson home run it became epidemic. Through the years, three questions remain for eternal argument in addition to the obvious one that Branca threw two fat fastballs in a row over the plate to a power hitter who had homered off him earlier and had two hits already that day:
First Charlie Dressen erred in not acceding to Campanella’s intense desire to play. He could have either helped Newcombe through the final inning or issued a definitive opinion that he was too tired to continue. Campanella also would never have let Branca’s first fat pitch pass without an angry comment to the pitcher.
Secondly, Dressen erred in ordering that Erskine and Branca be the pitchers to warm up in the bullpen during the inning. There were three other pitchers who had performed regularly during the season and were available—Preacher Roe, starter-reliever Erv Palica, and Bud Podbeilan. Roe was relatively rested and Podbeilan had a decent record against the Giants. According to Snider, Roe had tried to get loose before the ninth inning but couldn’t. Also according to Snider, Clem Labine was not warming up because of his complete game shutout the previous day and because the Dodgers had not yet learned that Labine had a rare “rubber” arm and in his youth could routinely pitch with no rest; interestingly, however, Labine was up and throwing after Branca had walked in to pitch. Bud Podpeilan is the more credible, and unresolvable, might-have-been.
And finally, Dressen erred in not making a public stink about cheating by the Giants at the Polo Grounds, specifically the stealing of signs by binoculars from a spot inside the center-field scoreboard and the flashing of them by walkie-talkie to the bench. The Wall Street Journal published a long account of the affair in 2001, but it was not unknown at the time and was the subject of frequent discussions between Dodger coaches and Dressen. Sign stealing is to an extent part of the game, but a ruckus about the Giants’ elaborate system would have disrupted it and disrupted them.
Interestingly, none of these issues involved the bullpen coach, Clyde Sukeforth. When Dressen called him instants before making his decision, Sukeforth was an accurate reporter of the facts. Erskine, who was always observed closely because of his arm woes, had bounced at least one of his curveballs into the bullpen dirt, while Branca was throwing normally. Naturally, even more flagrantly than the previous year’s case of Milt Stock, it was Sukeforth who got blamed in public by Dressen. The Dodgers offered Sukeforth a minor-league job during the off-season and after the team got criticism for such cruelty even offered him his old job, but sensing the withdrawal of support, Sukeforth moved on to Pittsburgh and back with the man (Branch Rickey) he had helped make history.
Ralph Branca hurt his back the following spring and never recovered his pre-Bobby Thomson form or spirit. One of the best young pitchers ever was inconsequential in 1952, gone to the Detroit Tigers in 1953 for cash, and gone from the major leagues after two farewell games with the Dodgers in 1956.
The Cold War military got Don Newcombe for 1952 and 1953 at the comparatively advanced age of twenty-six. Despite the loss of an All-Star workhorse and the obvious aging of Preacher Roe, the team on balance improved. In each season they won the National League pennant going away, and in each season they had a better record in a tougher league than the Yankees. The Dodgers also lost the World Series twice more in succession to their nemesis, both times under exasperating circumstances.
This was the period when my devotion to the team flowered. My parents took me to at least a dozen games each season—on the weekends and usually on Ladies Day, when my mother got in at a deep discount. She loved these family outings. Being a pure Scandinavian, my mother was famously reserved—except at Ebbets Field, where she yelled and laughed and groaned and beamed. She never joined one of Hilda Chester’s famous parades through the bleachers behind the famous woman with the clanging cowbells and borderline vulgarity, but my mother was a genuine, loud baseball fan. My mother always brought a paper bag with her on the subway to the games; in it were three sandwiches, three pieces of fruit, and three paper cups that she filled with water from the drinking fountains at the ballpark. During the games, she would get me an ice-cream sandwich from which she and my father always demanded one bite each.
Our time in the bleachers was one of the infrequent occasions when I didn’t see my mother as someone who dressed with meticulous care every morning to go downtown and be a secretary on Wall Street and then came home to make us supper in impossibly cramped circumstances. She taught by example that there was a place for neatness and order that complemented the chaos of my father’s life and his effusive romanticism around me. In the bleachers, when she was laughing and yelling, I got a glimpse of the immigrant’s daughter who fished and did farm chores, played with Indian kids, and walked to school through deep drifts in the bitter winter wearing snowshoes.
For those days in 1950s America, the reality in my household was radical; it didn’t take me long to realize that my mother was the principal breadwinner and that she was the mortar in the family’s foundation. Because that was our norm, it never struck me as odd. When my father was sick—his problems came in waves a few weeks apart when the ulcers would bleed or his digestion would just stop working and he was either groaning in the bathroom (I hated the sound) or stuck in bed, exhausted, for days—I can never recall feeling scared. My mother by this time gave me things to do in the apartment. I could wipe furniture and surfaces; I could even stand on a chair over the sink in the kitchenette and wash dishes; my little space in the second room was never cluttered because the apartment had no room for a kid’s clutter. Sometimes, when my father would be asleep during the day on weekends when she had chores to do and I couldn’t go down to the park by myself, she would take me on long walks. She talked to me the way my father did; in effect, we conversed. These were the occasions when I heard about Norway and Minnesota and learned rudimentary Norwegian, while we were folding clothes or putting dishes away. On the East Side and at school, I felt and acted like a kid—but never at home.
On our floor—an atmosphere where most of the doors were usually open and many of the dozen residents were in one another’s apartments a lot of the time—I was the only child and therefore a continual object of attention. My father had introduced me to the basics of reading music and playing the piano primitively, but it was in the tiny studio of a young, budding Canadian pianist from Vancouver that I first heard music that seemed to soar. His only possession of consequence was a concert grand that took up least a third of his space. Normally he played and practiced with a felt damper over the strings to mute the sound, but on the occasions when he took it off I would sit spellbound in the middle of the symphonic noise.
Down the hall was another Canadian, from Quebec—a young diplomat at the UN who shared an apartment with his artist sister. They spoke French and took it upon themselves to slowly introduce me to their language. The war widow in 2509 who often shopped with my mother and sometimes looked after me also worked at the UN, and it was through her that I escaped one childhood ritual, dressing up in costumes to go trick-or-treating on Halloween. Instead, beginning the year Don Newcombe went into the armed services, I would go around the building in the early evening, with my mother tactfully behind me, collecting money for the United Nations Children’s Fund, for which she worked, known better as UNICEF. The money was usually accompanied by candy (a forbidden commodity in my apartment), which provided the incentive to keep going. I can’t remember how much I collected, but I turned out to have had one of the largest hauls in the city that first outing. To my mother’s shock, this produced an invitation to the giant Secretariat building on First Avenue, where there was a little ceremony in which a bunch of other kids and I got certificates from the secretary-general. For my mother, this moment was from heaven, because the secretary-general was a Norwegian, Trygve Lie. For the occasion, I practiced a few phrases over and over under her guidance so I could respond in Norwegian. I have no memory of the occasion beyond the sight of her talking in Norwegian to one of her heroes, who she had explained to me had helped lead his government into exile after the Germans invaded in 1940.
The twenty-fifth floor was also home to a dark-haired woman who was beautiful and spoke with an unusual accent that turned out to be Russian. She could cook stuff I had never heard of, strong-smelling stews and vegetables, and sweets I can still taste. Vera Brynner had a brother who the previous year had made it big on Broadway in a new Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The King and I, which, thanks to Vera, was the first Broadway show I remember attending. The film version, four years later, along with The Ten Commandments and Anastasia, would be Yul Brynner’s breakthroughs to superstardom.
He visited his sister occasionally, including a few of the occasional evenings the people on our floor spent together when everyone contributed a supper dish. He was the first completely bald person I had ever met, a bit of a forbidding figure as I recall. On one occasion, my father decided that I was to perform on the piano for the famous man, the one aspect of his paternal behavior that I hated. I was marched down the hall to our place, where I was encouraged to play a simple melody I had learned by a well-known Russian émigré composer of this period, Alexander Gretchaninoff. Normally, I felt uncomfortable performing on command, but on this occasion before this mysterious man I recall being terrified. Somehow I got through the piece, at which point my mood was erased by the thrill of riding back down the hall on Yul Brynner’s shoulders.
One consequence of this casual-seeming but in fact relentless instruction was that school at first was easy for me—too easy. I was reading and writing by the time I started, my conversational French was decent, and I found Miss Hurt’s first-grade class a breeze. Apparently, the school worried that I was becoming restless and a little bored in this atmosphere, and the first minicrisis I remember in my own life was the discussion about whether I should be put into Miss Lamont’s second-grade room in the middle of the year. I remember liking it immediately because the work was harder and therefore more satisfying, but what I remember best was my introduction to the first teacher who deeply affected my life.
Margaret MacMillan was the music teacher, and second grade meant an hour a day in her classroom, for basic instruction in reading music and singing—back when the arts were considered part of elementary education. Mrs. MacMillan was widowed, a bit younger than my parents—a striking woman who was completely comfortable with music and awkward in everything else. From my parents she knew I was already playing the piano, but on her own she decided that I had a boy soprano’s voice that was worth trying to train, and she gradually cajoled me into stopping by her music room for lessons. My initial time with her was spent being taught how to breathe, to project, and (the great challenge for me) to jump octaves and sing arpeggios in key. I enjoyed it so much that my father began encouraging her to take me on in piano work as well.
Mrs. MacMillan was a professional, which meant long hours getting basic techniques and exercises under my belt. The real thrill, however, came because Mrs. MacMillan introduced me to expression. Her relentless instruction was that music expressed emotion, that it was a method of communicating, that it could be happy and sad, exciting and tragic, and that the reason to work on mechanics was to unlock emotion. Previously, I had learned via simple classics—mostly early Bach and Mozart. Mrs. MacMillan threw Chopin at me. She was demanding and warm at the same time, and it was with her that I first realized there was a way to get at the confusing mix of feelings I had as a youngster without having to worry about finding the right words for them. Audiences never meant much to me because it was not approval I was looking for; for me, music was above all personal.
Mrs. MacMillan had one other serious pupil from the school. He was eight or nine years older than I, much more advanced on the piano—a sensitive, warm, and friendly teenager who sometimes worked with me. His name was Arthur MacArthur, and he was the son of the most famous military man of the era—much more of a public presence than Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was on his way that fall of 1952 to being elected president. Douglas MacArthur, his wife, Jean, and their son had settled in New York in the apartment tower of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue after MacArthur was dismissed by President Truman following his Korean War insubordination. My parents couldn’t stand MacArthur’s politics, but because of World War II my father revered his leadership in the Pacific.
At school assemblies, Arthur MacArthur and I often performed on the piano (once, we played a simple four-hand sonata together), with both our sets of parents in the audience. I never forgot after we were finished how cold, aloof, and remote General MacArthur seemed, in dramatic contrast to his warm, encouraging, and friendly wife. I was too young to know very much about family economics or the nature of fame, but I was more than old enough to sense his son’s discomfort and to feel fortunate in my family’s embrace. Years later, I smiled upon learning that Arthur had eventually changed his name and lived his own life, actively involved in the arts, down in Greenwich Village.
Mrs. MacMillan’s voice instruction had more public consequences. In the congregation at the church we attended was a part-time talent scout for choral groups in the city. As my voice developed she suggested to my parents that I try out for some of them that paid their singers a few bucks a performance. Most of the work was in churches, and it was out of this activity that I was invited to audition for the opera. I did not have a stage mother or father, but their attitude was never discouraging. It was clear to me that they were always nudging me into a music world far beyond just taking lessons but it was always equally clear that they would never have done so over my adolescent resistance or discomfort. The real point was that I was the one pushing myself, for the same reason I couldn’t wait to be able to stop playing primitive games with my bat and glove in the sandbox and start getting into the pickup games with older boys in the park itself. I have often compared growing up in these circumstances in postwar New York to hanging around a candy store with an unlimited allowance. There were all these choices and opportunities and just a limited number of hours every day.
My mother never had trouble getting me up in the morning. I was always eager to get going, and that spring I had a new ritual to start each day from April until October—poring over the box scores of major-league baseball games I was learning to decipher.
I had Brooklyn Dodger memories before the season of 1952—images of the 1950 and 1951 heartbreaks—but this was the first season I remember as a season, when I was aware of actually following the team, knowing about the players, listening constantly to the soft voice of Red Barber on the radio, looking at least at the pictures in the papers, and being in what my six-year-old brain considered the enormous, cavernous green beauty of (actually) tiny Ebbets Field.
It was a good year to begin. The Dodgers were an astonishing, stable powerhouse of hitters, all of them well-established figures in the game. They even had a solid, productive left fielder for a full season in Andy Pafko. What was different was the pitching, an interesting collection of younger players and a now-settled star (Carl Erskine), who more than made up for the victories lost by Newcombe’s departure and Preacher Roe’s decline and arm woes. The Dodgers won the same number of games they had in the regular season the year before, losing three fewer. What was different in the National League was that neither the Giants nor the Cardinals were as strong.
This was the second season of Carl Erskine’s stardom. He anchored the starting rotation, winning fourteen games and providing my first happy baseball thrill that was attached to a Dodger story. It was the first of his two no-hitters in the majors (the second came in 1956), in the middle of June, just before the Dodgers began to pull away from the rest of the league (they had to survive a near collapse in September but won the pennant by five and a half games over the Giants).
I can still remember the way the excitement built over the radio. It was an odd game (against the Chicago Cubs) because it was a rainy day and in the third inning the rain was coming down so hard that the umpires actually stopped play and sent the players to their dressing rooms. This produced another bit of Dodger lore. After most games, some of the players played bridge in the clubhouse, a game I didn’t learn until I married into a bridge family years later, but which my mother played every day at work during her lunch break.
On this particular afternoon, the rain delay led immediately to a bridge game, with Erskine. According to Duke Snider, the pitcher had just finished making a four-hearts bid when an umpire reappeared to order the players back on the field. Erskine completed his masterpiece—the final score was 3–0 and only one runner reached base, on a walk—and the story of the bridge game made the papers. Shortly thereafter, the Dodgers got a call from Charles Goren, the reigning bridge authority, who had a syndicated column and wanted to reconstruct Erskine’s hand. My mother saved the clipping for years, as amazed at Erskine’s ability to make his bid as she was by his no-hitter. What she did not know, however, until Erskine revealed it years later was that in fact he had no memory at all of his bridge hand that day. Goren had simply made it all up for his column.
This was also the season when a succession of younger pitchers appeared as first Ralph Branca and then Preacher Roe went by the wayside. One of them was one of the few somewhat odd characters on the team. Billy Loes was a local guy, a native of Long Island City, brought up just over the Brooklyn border in Astoria. He won thirteen games that year, the first of a half-dozen consecutive years when he won more than ten.
He was fun to watch, but he marched to his own drummer. He was famously superstitious, always pitching in the same filthy uniform jersey. He also appeared to lack the competitive fire that characterized the decidedly blue-collar image that baseball in general and the Dodgers in particular projected in those days. Buzzie Bavisi confirmed one story to me that seemed too off-the-wall to believe. The following year, Loes had a clause in his contract guaranteeing a bonus if he won fourteen games. When he had done so by August, he demanded his money immediately and appeared to slack off on the mound, claiming that if he won twenty games the management would expect it of him every year. He was, however, one of the 1950s Dodgers’ better pitchers.
The unexpected star that year and in fact the league Rookie of the Year was a twenty-eight-year-old African-American from New Jersey named Joe Black. He was almost as imposing a figure as Don Newcombe and could throw just as hard, and for that one magical season before his arm wore out he was magnificent. If there had not been segregation and he had arrived earlier instead of spending the first years of his career in the Negro Leagues, there is no telling what he might have accomplished. Charlie Dressen used him (some would say used him up) almost exclusively in relief in 1952; he appeared in more than a third of the team’s games, starting just two of them, and pitched more than 140 innings. In the end, he won more games than any other pitcher on the team (fifteen), but the total understates his importance.
The Dodgers won one more game in 1952 than did the Yankees, who squeaked past the Cleveland Indians into the World Series. As had been the case in previous years, the Dodgers’ late-season frustrations were famous, but there was no clear reason to consider them underdogs (especially since this was the first year the Yankees were without Joe DiMaggio) with the possible exception of their pitching. As it turned out, that very slight edge was pivotal in another, agonizing, seven-game Series.
This is the first year I can remember sitting in my school’s gymnasium-auditorium, with the 21-inch television set perched on the edge of the stage. Amid a throng of noisy Yankee fans, there were just three of us sitting off to the side rooting quietly for the Dodgers: John Steinback’s son, a second-grade classmate whose father was running the Bulova Watch Company at the time, and Mr. Kenrey, the fifth-grade teacher.
For the weekend games, we walked across the neighborhood to the apartment of a fellow writer whose son was a playmate of mine, because they had a television set (a Philco), which was our occasional visual entertainment in those pre-Scarlet days.
At Ebbets Field, the Dodgers won the first game. In a bit of inspired managing, Dressen started Joe Black, who pitched all nine innings of a 4–2 victory over Allie Reynolds, the very first in a World Series game for an African-American. All of the Dodger runs came on home runs by Reese, Robinson, and Snider. Snider’s two-run blast was the first of four home runs he hit in the Series, something that only Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig had done to that point; when Snider did it again in 1955, he stood alone.
Game Two, however, was a dispiriting 7–1 thrashing of Carl Erskine, who uncharacteristically walked six Yankees and lasted just three batters into a five-run sixth inning. There was more to it than a simple thrashing. Before the game, on a cloudy day, Erskine had stood on a stool in the dressing room to look out a window at the threatening sky. As he climbed down, his knee (tender from a high school injury) banged against a radiator. The pain was so intense, according to Snider, that Erskine actually fainted on the floor and had to be revived with smelling salts. Conscious, with a bandage over a cut on his chin from the fall, he went out to pitch in the World Series. The legions of second-guessers, my parents included, were certain that Dressen left Erskine in the game too long.
The third game, in the Bronx and won 5–3 by Preacher Roe, appeared to atone for Mickey Owen’s infamous passed ball eleven years before. Going into the ninth inning with a lead of just 3–2, Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson each singled and then executed a very rare double steal of second and third. With Roy Campanella at bat, a pitch from reliever Tom Gorman got past the normally flawless Yogi Berra, and both Reese and Robinson raced home. The daring base running and Berra’s passed ball proved decisive because Johnny Mize pinch-hit a home run for the Yankees in the bottom of the ninth.
After Reynolds pitched a complete game shutout against Joe Black in the fourth game and Carl Erskine courageously went eleven innings to win Game Five (the contest with Vin Scully’s famous fives), the Dodgers actually headed home needing but one victory to win the Series. They came maddeningly close.
In Game Six, behind Billy Loes, the Dodgers took a 1–0 lead, off the first of two Duke Snider home runs into the seventh inning. But Yogi Berra tied the game, with a lead-off home run, and after the Yankee left fielder, Gene Woodling, singled, everything fell apart.
Standing on the pitching rubber and about to go into his stretch with Woodling on first, Billy Loes then inexplicably let the ball fall from his right hand onto the ground. That is called a balk under the rules, and Woodling was awarded second base.
The batter was the Yankees’ reliable pitcher Vic Raschi, on his way to winning his second game of the Series but never known for his hitting. He sent a bouncing ball straight at Loes, who seemed to freeze as it hit his leg, and by the time it was retrieved, Woodling had scored what proved the winning run. In the papers, Loes claimed to have been blinded by sunlight on the play, a comment that drew derision at the time, but over the years several Dodgers have backed him up, explaining that there was a space between the upper and lower decks of Ebbets Field through which the sun hit the pitcher’s mound in late afternoon. In simple English, the Dodgers lost their chance to win the Series that day because a pitcher lost a ground ball in the sun.
Game Seven, the second time the Subway Series between these teams had gone the distance, was, if anything, more dispiriting. The seesaw game was tied, 2–2, after five innings, at which point the Yankees scored twice, first off starter Joe Black and then off reliever Preacher Roe, to go ahead 4–2 with the Dodgers coming up in their half of the seventh inning.
The tension built as Carl Furillo led off with a walk and with one out moved to second on a single to right field by Billy Cox. When Reese walked, the bases were loaded with but one out. At this point, the Yankees’ pitching staff was exhausted, but Casey Stengel went to the mound to pull Vic Raschi from the game for one of those pitchers the Yankees always seemed to produce just for such moments.
Robert LeRoy “Sarge” Kuzava, out of someplace in Michigan, had been in the league for six years at this point. He was on his fourth team and would be on three more before ending up his career with a total of forty-nine victories. To this point, after appearing in just twenty-eight games for the Yankees during the regular season, he had not been used in the World Series at all. On this one day, however, he was ideal for two innings and two batters.
Most accounts of this Dodger disaster focus on the third out of the inning, but according to Duke Snider the second out (which he made) was just as important. It was a classic pitcher-batter duel; with the bases loaded, the count went full and Snider fouled off more than one pitch after that.
In the end, though, Kuzava threw him a fastball low and outside, which Snider more reached for than swung at, popping up to Gil McDougald at third. Two outs; Jackie Robinson coming up.
This time, Kuzava threw a fastball inside, and Robinson popped this one up, too. The ball was hit above a kind of no-man’s-land between the pitcher’s mound and first base. With Billy Martin playing deep at second, the ball was hit over an area where it wasn’t clear who should come over to catch it. In fact, both Kuzava and the Yankee first baseman, Joe Collins, appeared frozen.
Eventually, the ever-hustling Martin began to run—and run and run and run. He caught the ball near the mound no more than six inches off the ground, saving at least two runs and the game. Kuzava’s next two innings were almost anticlimactic.
To make the experience even more dispiriting, this was the World Series when Gil Hodges famously didn’t hit—not once in twenty-one times at bat. Worse: except for Duke Snider, the entire heart of the Dodgers’ batting order didn’t hit. For the Series, Hodges, Robinson, Furillo, Campanella, and Pafko came up 116 times and got just fourteen hits.
The evening after the last game had ended, I sat down under my father’s supervision and wrote the second fan letter of my life—to Gil Hodges. My very dim memory of my first attempt at contact with the person who was already my idol is that it included a feeble attempt to make Hodges feel less exposed; I noted that I also made out nearly every time I batted.
If anything, 1953 was even more crushing because the expectations for the Dodgers had been even higher. Branch Rickey went to his grave (in 1965) insisting that his 1949 Dodgers were the best team of the postwar period; most of the Dodgers who stayed with Brooklyn insisted that it was the ’53 team.
No matter. It was a season during which the only suspense was whether the Yankees would beat the Dodgers yet again to win their fifth consecutive championship—an unimaginable accomplishment. The Dodgers won, for them, a record 105 games during the regular season, finishing 12 games ahead of the former Boston (now Milwaukee) Braves.
Still without Don Newcombe, the team was led from the mound by Carl Erskine, who won twenty games that year. While Joe Black’s famous rookie season was followed by his sudden decline, the blooming of Clem Labine as a starter-reliever occurred that year. With more than decent years by Billy Loes and Preacher Roe (his final Dodger season, at the age of thirty-eight), the arrival of young rookie Johnny Podres, and the acquisition of Russ Meyer (he had been on the 1950 Phillies), the team had a stable core of consistent pitchers.
In the field, this was the year of Junior Gilliam—the Dodgers’ fourth African-American Rookie of the Year out of the previous seven, following Robinson, Newcombe, and Black. The second throw-in player in the deal for Leroy Farrell at the end of Rickey’s tenure, Gilliam was twenty-five in his rookie season; had baseball been fully integrated all along, this gifted athlete almost certainly would have been in the major leagues long before 1953. He was fast, he hit line drives (he led the league that year in triples, with seventeen), and he was a graceful infielder.
Gilliam’s arrival meant a break for some of the Brooklyn veterans. An older Pee Wee Reese now could bat second behind him. With Gilliam at second, Jackie Robinson—by now in his thirties—could move to a position where he did not have to be so mobile; Dressen’s choice was left field, after Andy Pafko was traded that winter, and sometimes third base. That was of course Billy Cox’s position; he was still productive and enormously popular, but he was aging.
This was also the year when Duke Snider exploded into a superstar, as if the four home runs during the ’52 Series had been a harbinger; in 1953, he hit forty-two (only Eddie Mathews of the Braves hit more).
But as fate would have it, the Yankees were also excellent, again with a slightly more experienced pitching staff. The team (led by Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra and benefiting from the first big year by their brilliant left-handed pitcher Whitey Ford) won the pennant by ten games over the Indians. Still, the Dodgers won six more games that year than they did; they were not underdogs.
Through the years, the 1953 World Series has been mostly described as an almost routine Yankee triumph because they won it in six games. I remember it as a series of close, seesaw games, at least two of which the Dodgers almost won. They were within one break of sending the Series to another seventh game; they just didn’t get the break. It was a Series whose star was Billy Martin, who tied a record with twelve base hits and batted an astonishing .500; and it was a Series of relatively poor performances by nearly all the pitchers on both teams in four of the games. Mostly, it was an immense frustration after such an excellent season.
Carl Erskine, the Dodgers’ star that year, was the person on whom Charlie Dressen depended. Erskine was unable to come through in the first game at Yankee Stadium, giving up four runs in just one inning of work. What is usually forgotten is that the Dodgers had battled back to tie the game, 5–5, in their half of the seventh inning. It was the subsequent collapse of the bullpen that produced an 8–5 defeat.
It was worse the next day. Preacher Roe (no one knew he was making his last World Series appearance as a Dodger) pitched an excellent game into the late innings, and thanks to a Billy Cox double the Dodgers were ahead 2–1 going into the bottom half of the seventh inning. Roe tired; however, Dressen didn’t pull him from the game, and home runs by Martin and Mickey Mantle cost the Dodgers a second game.
It was a risk taken by Dressen—starting Erskine after just a day off—that produced the Dodger highlight of the year. For nine innings, his high kick and overhand fastballs and curves kept the Yankees off balance. He yielded just two runs and was striking out batters with a frequency that gradually created a frenzy in Ebbets Field. When he fanned pinch-hitter Johnny Mize in the ninth inning, Erskine had set a new Series record of fourteen strikeouts. As it turned out he needed to be that good, because Yankee starter Vic Raschi had only given up three runs.
The next day, the Dodgers tied the Series in exceptionally uplifting fashion. Not only did they jump on Whitey Ford for three runs in the first inning; they also kept on scoring, piling up four more as the game progressed. Billy Loes, en route to the only World Series victory of his career, had yielded just two runs through eight innings.
In the ninth, however, he and the Dodgers flirted with disaster. Two singles—by Woodling and Martin—and a walk to Gil McDougald loaded the bases with nobody out, meaning the tying run would be at the plate from then on. For once, Dressen made a timely and correct pitching change; in came Clem Labine.
In baseball’s ultimate tense situation, Labine began by striking out Phil Rizzuto. The next hitter, pinch-hitting again, was Johnny Mize, but his soft fly ball to Duke Snider in center field was much too shallow to even tempt Woodling to try to score on the play.
Mickey Mantle was next. Batting left-handed, the Yankee star sliced a line drive into left field for a single. Woodling scored easily, and Billy Martin came roaring around third, headed toward home plate as well. The left fielder, in the game that inning for his defensive ability (shades of things to come two years later), was a utility player named Don Thompson who had an excellent glove and arm but couldn’t hit. Thompson fielded Mantle’s hit cleanly and unleashed a strike to Roy Campanella. Billy Martin attempted to knock the ball out of the catcher’s mitt, but the much smaller runner merely bounced off the stocky Campanella.
I had been spending the weekend with a schoolmate whose family had a weekend home in Westchester County. We were watching the television in the lounge of a country club—not one of my usual hangouts—and I was again a tiny Dodger island in a sea of Yankee fans. I remember giving a little yelp at the third out, but I remember more the glares that my noise produced in the room.
The Dodger collapse that then ensued was primarily a collapse in the final game at Ebbets Field. This was the game Johnny Podres started and got yanked from after he loaded the bases in the third inning, following the critical and rare error by Gil Hodges. Not only did Podres’s replacement, Russ Meyer, then yield the famous grand slam to Mantle, but the rest of the relievers failed to do their jobs as well. It was a crushing 11–7 defeat.
Game Six, however, was exciting. The Yankees got to Carl Erskine early—three runs by the fourth inning—but then their hitting cooled off and the Dodgers began a comeback. They got one of the runs back on a classic bit of Jackie Robinson daring. With one out he doubled off Whitey Ford and then promptly stole third, coming home on a ground ball out by Campanella.
The ninth inning was at least thrilling. Allie Reynolds, pitching his final World Series inning after six years of brilliance and seven victories, walked Duke Snider with one out. The Dodgers were just two outs away from the end of their season when Carl Furillo lined an outside pitch into the right-field seats for the home run that tied the game. It was a remarkable feat by a determined baseball player who had been injured the final month of the season (Leo Durocher had stepped on Furillo’s hand during a fight).
In the gymnasium with my little knot of Dodger fans, there was a sense that the team had momentum going into the bottom of the ninth—if for no other reason than the fact that Clem Labine had been pitching effectively since the seventh.
This time, disaster began with a walk to Hank Bauer. After Yogi Berra hit a line drive right at Carl Furillo in right field, Mickey Mantle hit a strange high bouncing ball (called a Baltimore chop in baseball) that landed between Labine and Billy Cox at third. By the time Cox had picked the ball up, Mantle was on first and Bauer was on second.
That brought Billy Martin to the plate. His record-tying twelfth hit of the Series was a “bleeder”—a ground ball that just barely got through the middle of the Dodger infield into center field. Hank Bauer scored the winning run less than ten minutes after Carl Furillo’s home run—after a walk and two scratch singles.
The next day, after reading in the papers that Clem Labine had cried after the game (I almost did myself), I wrote him the third fan letter of my life.
I had actually experienced only the last few years of this long saga. From the library, from my parents and their Dodger fan friends, I had absorbed all of the rest. It was a rich, varied, interesting, exciting tableau of near misses and flops—from Babe Ruth’s pitching to Billy Wambsganss’s triple play, from Mickey Owen’s passed ball to Don Newcombes home-run pitch to Tommy Henrich, from Cal Abrams running around third base to Bobby Thomson’s shot, from Billy Loes’s balk to Billy Martin’s seeing-eye ground ball.
Duke Snider was correct. Only two agonizing innings separated the Dodgers from five consecutive National League pennants, but a variety of twists of fate had left them just short of victories when it counted for a dozen years of frustration.
That is why the seventh game of the 1955 World Series to any fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers anywhere was far more than just another thrilling game. With a 1–0 lead after five well-pitched innings, there was no context, no basis of any kind, for a belief that this was the game when it would finally happen. Off this kind of detailed, demoralizing experience, that was one more reason to dread the sixth inning.