We weren’t a very subtle team. We didn’t pull a lot of squeeze plays. All we tried to do was hit the ball so hard it broke in half.— Robert W. Brown, third baseman and M.D.,
looking back on his days with the Yankees
IN THE LAST WEEK of May 1947, the champion Red Sox came to New York to play four games against the Yankees. As the Reliable Jersey House* foretold, Detroit and Boston were leading the league, with the Tigers out front of Boston by half a game. Pat Mullin of Detroit was leading American League batsmen at .355. Ted Williams was leading American League sluggers with ten home runs in thirty games. The Yankees, playing under .500 ball, stuttered in sixth place and L. S. MacPhail suddenly erupted.
He fined Joe DiMaggio $100 for refusing to pose for a special promotional newsreel. “I’ve been with this team since 1936,” DiMaggio said, “and this is the first damn time I was ever fined.” He fined outfielder Johnny Lindell $50 for telling some young Yankees that they didn’t really have to attend banquets arranged by the Yankee publicity department. MacPhail remained obsessed by his image of the high-flying (though sixth- place) Yankees, not all of whom trusted aircraft to retain their wings. “After May 31,” MacPhail announced, “any Yankee who refuses to fly, except Frank Crosetti, who has always refused to fly, will pay his own fare for train transportation.”
At the same time, with no publicity, MacPhail hauled in Phil Rizzuto and second baseman George Stirnweiss. “I know you two bastards met with Jorge Pasquel at the Concourse Plaza [a hotel a block away from Yankee Stadium].” Working outside the frame of organized baseball, Pasquel was scouting talent for his Mexican League and offering generous contracts.
“I thought it was a free country, Mr. MacPhail,” Rizzuto said. “I thought I had a right to hear what the man had to say.”
“Well, listen, you little bastard, and that goes for you too, Stirnweiss, if you guys talk to Pasquel again . . . just talk . . . you’re goddamn suspended. Got that straight?”
Thus within three days MacPhail publicly fined two-thirds of his starting outfield and privately threatened to suspend half of his starting infield. Recollecting, Rizzuto, the greatest shortstop not yet chosen for the Hall of Fame, said, “Whoosh.”
“What does that mean, Phil?” I asked.
“Nothing. Just thinking about MacPhail makes me go ‘Whoosh.’”
Stanley “Bucky” Harris, the Yankee manager, told Rud Rennie that “all this stuff just before the Red Sox series is regrettable. I mean, I got some guys with low spirits who aren’t hitting like they should. I’m afraid this will just depress them further.”
The Yankees seemed in disarray. But it wasn’t mere disarray at all. It was the first stage of labor. The Bronx Bombers were about to be born.
* * *
As far as most knew, it was a comfortable time. Anyone honorably discharged from the military could draw $20 a week in federal funds for one year. Loafing veterans said they were members of the 52–20 club. It wasn’t a fortune, about equal to $125 a week today, but you could buy bottles of Rheingold beer for a dime, play pinball at a nickel a game, or, if your bent was more serious, take your girl to see that surprising smash movie Gentleman’s Agreement, the first film in which Hollywood allowed itself a long look at anti-Semitism. (But you went at risk. Women found the male lead, Gregory Peck, irresistible. Peck played a Christian character named Green who changed his name to Greenberg to find out for reasons of journalism if anti-Semitism in America was real. As John Garfield — playing a cardboard serviceman named Captain Goldman with remarkable fire — explained to Mr. Green-Greenberg, anti-Semitism was “as real as perspiration.”)
Still, it seemed to be a comfortable time. We loved our radios in 1947. Any typical Tuesday night, we heard on the large boxy Imperial Model Capehart Radio Phonograph (with Flip-o-Matic record changer) the Bob Hope Show, with Jerry Colonna and Vera Vague and, as special guest star, dancer-actor-singer Van Johnson. A little later came the Milton Berle Show and after that the Red Skelton Show, in which Red played the famous country bumpkin Clem Kadiddlehopper. That same Tuesday, live on WJZ New York and on the seventy-one other stations belonging to NBC’s Blue Network, Serge Koussevitzky led the Boston Symphony in a program of works by J. S. Bach and Richard Strauss, who was still alive and busy explaining why he had not been — to put this charitably — more passionately anti-Nazi.
We comfortably read Kingsblood Royal, the novel in which Sinclair Lewis attacked phony charities in his increasingly shorthand but still commanding way. Or A. B. Guthrie’s fine Montana novel The Big Sky. Nonfiction bestsellers included the always readable John Gunther turning his sights homeward in Inside U.S.A., Toynbee’s classic Study of History, the Information Please Almanac, and a kind of consolation called Peace of Mind, written by a rabbi named Joshua Loth Liebman. Rabbi Liebman wrote of “the shock-proof balance achieved within a soul.” A year later, in 1948, when he reached the age of forty-one, Liebman committed suicide.
Certain aspects of existence were uncomfortable. The mood was materialistic, like the mood of our own present, but at the Stork Club or El Morocco late in the 1940s, women did not look like women of today. Hair was lacquered. Cuts were severe. And women’s bodies seemed to be shaped differently.
The corset salon at Tailored Woman on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street advertised a free-lift contour control corselette for a hefty $29.50. “Your bottom stays pocketed,” said the advertisement in the Herald Tribune, “its natural curves sweetly rounded.” Perhaps, but with all the corsetting and girdling, women’s bottoms seemed unitary, so to speak, like the rearmost segment of a honeybee.
And, of course, no one knew that the national sense of comfort was a delusion. For all its silly, ingenuous, manic surface optimism, 1947 deeply was something darker and indeed terrifying.
The year 1947 was the gateway to the cold war.
On the last Friday night in May at Yankee Stadium, Allie Reynolds held the Red Sox to two hits. One was a grounder that took a bad hop off Bobby Brown’s chest. The other, Billy Goodman’s single to center in the sixth inning, was the one clean hit Boston made. Reynolds held Pesky, Dom DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Rudy York, and Bobby Doerr hitless. He started a big Yankee inning with a double. The Yankees won, 9 to 0, and afterward MacPhail told everyone who would listen, “Watching the big Indian [Reynolds] is a helluva lot more fun than watching some fucking seal with an oboe.”*
On Saturday, 42,219 fans paid their way into the Stadium, pushing attendance up over half a million after just seventeen home games. The Yankees started thirty-nine-year-old Spurgeon Ferdinand “Call Me Spud” Chandler, who supposedly had lost his fastball. Ol’ Spud worked the corners, took a little off, and threw a wicked, dipping forkball. Across nine innings, the Red Sox were able to drive only seven pitches beyond the infield. Five were gentle fly balls. Once again, Dom DiMaggio, Doerr, Pesky, and Williams went hitless. Journeyman George McQuinn, a first baseman MacPhail had acquired, played brilliant defense and batted in two runs. The Yankees won this game, 5 to 0. The New York pitching staff had now flung back- to-back two-hitters into the faces and hearts of the Red Sox.
The Sunday punch was memorable. The Yankees assaulted three Boston pitchers for seventeen hits. They scored five runs in the first inning. After three innings, the Yankees led by ten. Joe DiMaggio, Billy Johnson, George Stirnweiss, and catcher Aaron Robinson hit doubles. Phil Rizzuto tripled. Charlie Keller and George McQuinn hit home runs. With two out in the ninth inning and a runner on first base, Ted Williams cracked a home run into the third tier in right field. He caught one of Bill Bevens’s zapping fastballs just right. Just right, but nine innings too late. The Yankees won their third in a row from the champion Red Sox, this one by 17 to 2.
Not only were the Yankees suddenly awesome, the Red Sox were playing nervous baseball. Boston made five errors during the 17 to 2 rout. Bevens held them hitless into the seventh inning by which time the Yankees were ahead by eleven runs.
Williams hadn’t hit in the World Series against the Cardinals. Now he wasn’t hitting against the Yankees. He was taking a lot of bases on balls, but that, some said, was not leading a team as great sluggers, Ruth and Greenberg, had done. They led with their strength; they led with power.
Why all the walks when the Red Sox needed batting punch?
“If I swing at a pitch a half inch off home plate,” Williams said, “then the next time I may swing at one an inch off, then two inches, then six inches. And that’s no way to hit. You have to wait for your pitch.”
But the Yankees were not giving him his pitch. Williams had been neutralized. Some baseball men suggested that the chatter about inches was mostly a diversion. DiMaggio and Henrich swung at bad pitches when the Yankees needed a big hit. Williams was less than the perfect team player.
“It’s worse than that,” said Moe Berg, a major league catcher for fifteen years, and after that a noted linguist. “The truth is Williams is a choker.”
Berg’s listener (myself) expressed shock. The Splendid Splinter, John Updike’s Great WASP God, light on competitive fire, possessed of a heart of Jell-O?
“It’s plain enough if you look,” Moe Berg said. “For Christ’s sake, the Red Sox don’t win big ones, do they?”*
By Monday night nobody was talking about trained seals or circuses. New York and much of the country was galvanized by the hammer job the Yankees were beating on the team some writers called “the Crimson Hose.” The sporting press, fickle as an April day, or a May night, began writing with great enthusiasm about the “rejuvenated Yankees.” MacPhail himself was transmogrifying with incredible speed from clown to genius.
What turned out to be the largest crowd to see a single game in baseball annals up to the Era jammed subway and elevator lines to the Stadium. That Monday night, the twenty-sixth of May, 74,747 people paid their way into the Bronx ballyard (and 1,140 people who had bought standing room tickets demanded and got their money back when it turned out there was no place left to stand). The seating capacity of the old triple-tiered Yankee Stadium was officially 67,000, a round number because the bleachers consisted of benches rather than individual seats. Something like 7,000 people stood through all nine innings on that long ago Monday night.
The Yankees started Frank “Spec” Shea, a strong right-handed rookie from John Brown’s hometown in Connecticut, whom the Yankee publicist called “the Naugatuck Nugget.”
The Nugget was dull. By the third inning, the Red Sox led, 3 to 1 — the first time they led any game in the series — and had runners on first and second with nobody out. The next three Red Sox batters were Ted Williams, Rudy York, and Bobby Doerr — a Hall of Famer, a home run champion, and another Hall of Famer. Not exactly a pitcher’s dream of peace.
Bucky Harris lifted Shea for Joe Page, a strapping free spirit, of whom John Lardner said, “Joe had a lot of stuff. He drank a lot of stuff so he had a lot of stuff. He was a lefthanded pitcher, but a switch drinker. He could raise a glass with either hand.”
Page roomed with DiMaggio for a time but when he came back to the hotel too late too loud too often, DiMaggio insisted that the Yankees room Page somewhere else. That Page’s habits disturbed DiMaggio, himself a passionate night owl, powerfully testifies to the pitcher’s dislike for rest in bed.
But he could throw. Hard, low sinking stuff and, some alleged, a dipping spitball. Trying to balance talent and discipline, Bucky Harris decided that if the Red Sox pounded Page that Monday night, he was going to send the pitcher to Newark, forever.
So here came genial Joe Page jumping over the bullpen railing. The three-tiered stands were packed. The night rang with ballpark noise. Page’s career swung in the balance. Williams, York, and Doerr were coming to bat.
Williams bounced to first. George McQuinn fumbled the ball and the bases were loaded.
Page threw three wide fastballs to Rudy York. Bases loaded, nobody out, and the count on a strong slugger three and nothing. “If he throws ball four,” Harris said, “he goes to Newark. Now!”
York swung on three and nothing and missed a fastball. He swung and missed two more. Mighty Rudy had struck out.*
When the cheers died down, Page fell behind to Doerr, three balls and one strike. Then he struck out Doerr, on two low, tailing fastballs. Eddie Pellagrini, playing short ahead of Johnny Pesky, flied to right. Given a chance, the Red Sox had not been able to break open the ballgame. This night, like so many others, belonged to Joe Page.
Across his seven innings, Page held the Red Sox to two singles. He struck out eight. His buddy, but no longer roommate, Joe DiMaggio, played a big game with three hits, including a decisive three-run home run. The Yankees won their fourth straight game from Boston, 9 to 3.
In four games against the strongest team in the league, the Yankees scored forty runs. Forty Yankee runs. Five for the Red Sox. I cannot think of one contending team so trampling another and so humiliating them in clutch situations. It may be hyperbolic, but only mildly, to point out that after this incredible May series at Yankee Stadium, the Red Sox could not win an important ballgame for a generation.
On June 20 the Yankees took over first place and never relinquished it. In 1946, they had finished seventeen games behind the Red Sox and five behind Detroit. Now in 1947, enacting an astounding reversal, they would win the pennant by twelve games over the Tigers. Boston in third place finished fourteen games behind. The Yankees made up no fewer than thirty-one games on the Red Sox from 1946 to 1947.
Early in the summer the Yankees won nineteen in a row. Over a slightly longer span, they won thirty-one games out of thirty-four. Sportswriters began referring to the team as a juggernaut, after the Hindi juggannath, which Eastern religion describes as “a massive, inexorable force that crushes whatever is in its path.”
Nice to have the sporting press citing Hindi — pajama and thug are better-known Hindi words — but not terribly accurate. For MacPhail’s Bronx juggernaut was really less massive than it appeared. The Yankees constantly needed patching and repair.
The field leader, trim, soft-voiced former infielder Bucky Harris, had become famous in 1924 when he directed the Washington Senators to a pennant. He was twenty-seven and earned the nickname “the Boy Manager.” He won again in 1925. After that, in seventeen seasons managing American League teams, Harris never finished higher than third. Thirteen times his teams at Washington, Detroit, and Philadelphia finished in the second division. By 1943, he dropped out of the major leagues. In the harsh charge of some journalists, Bucky Harris was a proven failure.
He was also well spoken, intelligent, and ingratiating. He went to work in Buffalo for a couple of years before MacPhail brought him back. Red Barber wrote: “Bucky ran a happy ball club in New York. He managed quietly and didn’t raise his voice. He had a group of grown men and treated them as such.” That was one way of looking at matters. Another way was less kind. Harris was no disciplinarian.
He was not notably familiar with the characters and talents of his players. He had to rely on MacPhail for constant guidance, but MacPhail amid all the drinking, and on the way to self-destruction, was putting together one final, brilliant year, an outstanding farewell to the game.
Early, to acquire Allie Reynolds, he had given up Joe Gordon to Cleveland, reasoning that the less talented infielder, George “Snuffy” Stirnweiss, could play second and hit well enough. Gordon smacked twenty-nine home runs for Cleveland, but the Indians finished just over .500. Snuffy Stirnweiss was indeed good enough for a Bronx ballclub armored with Reynolds.
As the Reliable Jersey House reported accurately, via Stanley Woodward, first base seemed a problem. Nick Etten, the incumbent, couldn’t hit much anymore and had not been distinguished for his work with a glove.* George McQuinn was a journeyman who had spent eight seasons with the St. Louis Browns, nobody’s pantheon team. After employing McQuinn for a year in Philadelphia, Connie Mack released him. MacPhail acquired McQuinn for nothing, and suddenly as June arrived with rare days and blossoming roses, old journeyman George McQuinn was hitting better than Williams, DiMaggio, or Henrich. Ol’ Journeyman George briefly was the leading American League batsman at .381.
Yogi Berra could pound a baseball. In 1946 at Newark he batted .314 and hit fifteen home runs in half a season. MacPhail promptly promoted him. When the veteran catcher Aaron Robinson went down with a painful back, Berra became the starter. He was marginal defensively but he learned fast and he covered up for imperfections with consistently punishing swings. (“The guy fields with his bat,” Dick Young maintained.)
Charlie Keller, the beetle-browed veteran from Maryland, “has the most powerful swing in baseball,” MacPhail boasted in a paid advertisement in the Herald Tribune: “King Kong Keller slams out those home runs.” Like Aaron Robinson and unlike the super ape, Keller developed back miseries, which would destroy a fine career. He was well enough to play in only forty-five games in 1947. To replace him, MacPhail anointed tall John Lindell, a converted pitcher and an off-season policeman in the town of Acadia, California.
Was ever a juggernaut such a thing of shreds and patches?
Pitching is the mystery within the enigma. “Pitchers,” the other ballplayers say, “ain’t athletes.” They don’t work every day. They are a mass of phobias, beyond understanding, and aches that not even that greatest of baseball liniments, Atomic Balm, can ameliorate. “Pitchers are like women,” one old ballplayer says. “They’re impossible.” And like women they are singularly essential to the survival of a group. Pitchers are half-mad. Good baseball men know that. And knowing it, they resign themselves. As with women, the sensible way to deal with pitchers is to love ‘em. An imperfect choice, but the best available.
MacPhail found a great jewel, a diamond stud, in Allie Reynolds. MacPhail and Harris more or less stumbled upon the excellence of lefty Joe Page. They had a grand veteran in Spud Chandler and fine young fireballers in Bill Bevens, a big righthander from Oregon, and Frank Shea, the Nugget. But Bevens had wild, wild days and age suddenly overtook Spud Chandler and tough Frank Shea was wincing when he threw. Arm trouble.
MacPhail reached into the Yankee farm system and plucked Vic Raschi up from Portland in the Pacific Coast League. Big, glowering Raschi pitched ninety-seven complete games for the Yankees during the Era. A fine pitcher; a superb competitor.
Finally, in July, working under a theory that no team can have too much experienced pitching, MacPhail signed the swaggering veteran Louis Norman “Bobo” or “Buck” Newsom. A strong, imbibing right-hander who had come up with the Dodgers in 1929 and crashed before the stock market, Newsom became the most traded ballplayer in history. Here in order are the teams for which Bobo Newsom had pitched: the Dodgers, the Cubs, the St. Louis Browns, the Washington Senators, the Boston Red Sox, the Browns (again), the Tigers, the Senators (again), the Dodgers (again), the Browns (again, again), the Senators (again, again), the Philadelphia Athletics, the Senators (again, again, again), until on July 11, 1947, Washington released Newsom. MacPhail signed him forthwith. Newsom promptly won four ballgames in a row.
What was there about the Bronx, people wondered. The air? The water? The three-tiered Stadium? No one knew, so some composed essays on the Yankee mystique.
“We just had real tough players,” Bobby Brown says. “Every day we thought we were gonna win. I don’t want to get too psychological. You have to hit the ball and catch the ball and throw it. But beyond physical skills, emotions are terribly important. You will not succeed in the major leagues if you go to bat saying to yourself, ‘I just hope I don’t strike out.’
“And on this team, which didn’t have all the skills in the world, people did not go to bat like that. People went to bat saying to themselves, ‘Damn, I’m gonna hit a home run.’
“DiMaggio and Henrich, of course, but the rest of us, too. Lindell and myself and Billy Johnson. It seemed to flow from our best players. You knew DiMaggio and Henrich were watching and you wanted to look good in their eyes.
“I was a cardiologist, not a shrink, but can I give you a cross-disciplinary opinion?
“There was never a mentally tougher team than the 1947 Yankees.”
I called him Bob; older people called him Brownie. He seemed to be the quintessential good scout. He was handsome, rangy, gray-eyed, soft-voiced, well bred, a little stiff, and he could hit. He was trying to balance a career in the major leagues and a career in medicine and some of the writers thought that was kinda funny. Some of the writers were most comfortable with simpletons.
Here was a cum laude science student, and whom did the Yankees room him with on the road? Yogi Berra. Lawrence Peter Berra. Cum laude only at hitting bad balls into the cheap seats.
One night, in a forgotten hotel room, Brown sat at the desk studying his pathology text. Berra lay supine with a comic book. After a while, Brown closed the text. Farewell for now to tissues of the dead.
“You finish your book?” Berra said. “I just finished mine.”
Brown nodded. The pathology text had run 1, 132 pages.
“Say,” Berra asked, “how did your book come out?”*
Within the civility and the electric intelligence, Brown was a ferocious competitor. I remember a game in Boston when the opposing pitcher took a dust mote in the iris. The catcher tried to remove the speck and failed. An umpire tried. Finally the Red Sox trainer succeeded with a cotton swab. Through all this, the pitcher’s discomfort was obvious. But the batter, Robert W. Brown, M.D., never moved to help.
“Bob,” I said later over a beer. “The guy was suffering. What about the Hippocratic oath?”
“When I’m batting, and the pitcher is in trouble, fuck the Hippocratic oath.” Brown spoke without malice and, given the context, with elegance.
He would bat 1.000 in the 1947 World Series. He pinch hit four times and walked and singled and hit two doubles and batted in three runs and scored two more. The way Oakland Raider football linemen ate cars, Bobby Brown devoured Dodger pitchers. “They had a lot of strong young fastball pitchers,” he says. “Great strong young arms. As it happened, we were one hell of a fastball-hitting team.”
In a subdued Park Avenue office, brightened by a mix of baseball photos, Bobby Brown, clutch hitter, cardiologist, and now president of the American League, permits himself a smile, remembering old wars that he has won. “I suppose the medicine took away a bit from my baseball career. I was always studying or working as an intern and showing up late for spring training. No manager really likes that. Down toward the end, as I was getting to be thirty, an excellent residency opened at Stanford. Right smack in the middle of a season. I told the professor I wanted to finish out the year. Figuring my baseball salary and a World Series share, I was looking at about $20,000 more, if I was allowed to keep playing for the Yankees and start the residency in October.”
The professor, J. K. Lewis, a prosperous Bay Area cardiologist, was not intensely sympathetic. “The residency begins in June,” he said. “That can’t be changed. But about the $20,000 . . .”
“Yes, Dr. Lewis?” Bobby Brown said.
“In twenty years you’ll never miss it.”
Twenty years and many more had passed. Brown rose from behind his desk, eighteen stories above Park Avenue, and indicated an extraordinary montage photograph of the demolished shrine, the colossus of Brooklyn, Ebbets Field. Decades ago, in black and white, Brown has cracked a sharp drive to right field. “What’s interesting about this picture,” Brown says, “is not my hit, although that was plenty interesting to me, and still is. Rather, it’s that in this one montage, you can see seven Hall of Famers on the field.”
Joe DiMaggio and Berra are base runners. Considering the Dodger defense, a careful eye finds Roy Campanella, Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese. Coaching first base for the Yankees is Bill Dickey.
“I hit that ball good,” says Dr. Bobby Brown, the ballplayer.
Aaron Robinson wouldn’t fly. Neither would three others. And, of course, MacPhail relented and paid their train fare. DiMaggio’s leadership was essentially subtle. He was having a much better experience than his dreariness of 1946. Not in any sense a great year. He batted .315, with twenty homers and 97 runs batted in. Williams in Boston would hit .343, with thirty-two homers and 114 runs knocked across the plate. But at Yankee Stadium that season, Williams went nine for thirty-six, .250. DiMaggio hit .388 against the Sox.
The Yankees’ nineteen-game winning streak began on June 29 and when it ended on July 20, the pennant race was over. DiMaggio had ankle pain. Berra missed three weeks with a throat infection. Bone chips in the elbow finished Spud Chandler. Shea hurt his arm. Even Reynolds missed two weeks. But someone always picked up the slack and MacPhail always found the someone who could do that. For all the drinking and the tantrums, this was a bravura performance and on September 26, the last Friday of the season, MacPhail was asked to march to home plate before a game against the Senators.
“What for?”
“Just do it, will ya, Larry?” the broadcaster Mel Allen said.
DiMaggio and Rizzuto and Brown and the others stood silent as Allen handed MacPhail a seven-piece silver tea service. The players had gotten together for the inscription:
TO LARRY MACPHAIL
greatest executive in baseball,
whose zealous efforts were a major factor
in our 19-game streak and the winning
of the American League pennant.
From his Yankees, 1947
For once the Roaring Redhead was silent. But only briefly. Then he began to cry.
The Dodgers clinched their National League pennant on Monday, September 22, a day when they did not have to play ball. They were not scheduled. The Chicago Cubs split a double-header with the Cardinals in St. Louis that night. With the second game, the one the Cubs won, the Dodgers, as the saying is, backed in to the pennant. They stood seven and a half games out front, with seven left. The Herald Tribune reported:
Although it was past midnight when the news flashed from the midwest, Brooklyn immediately started a celebration. Flatbush Avenue was jammed with a mob that milled about, going nowhere and having a wonderful time. Focal point of the hilarity was the bar and grill operated by Hugh Casey, the Dodgers’ expert relief pitcher. Here most of the Dodgers players [but not Jackie Robinson or Pee Wee Reese] and their wives gathered to follow the progress of the Cardinal game by radio.
Seated in one booth at the tavern were Pete Reiser, Hank Behrman, Harry Taylor, Bruce Edwards, Vic Lombardi, Johnny Jorgensen and Hugh Casey. “We did it, we did it,” shouted Lombardi. “And we’ll take the series too,” yelled Taylor, outstanding rookie pitcher.
“Naturally, I’ll wire my congratulations,” Cardinal manager Eddie Dyer said in St. Louis. “I’d better not say more. It would seem like an alibi.”
On hearing that several Dodger fans said, “Natch.”
This was quite an extraordinary victory, only Brooklyn’s second pennant since the year 1921. Two factors, above others, made it possible. Jackie Robinson broke in with a wonderful year. He led the team in hits and runs and stolen bases. He rose above abuse in a triumph that lifted men and women everywhere. Then, on the Cardinal side, Stan Musial was sick. His infected appendix plagued him for the entire season — it was removed in October — and he had a perfectly wretched time trying to hit in Brooklyn. Healthy, in his prime, Stan Musial at Ebbets Field was the greatest hitter in the history of baseball. That is not theory or adolescent enthusiasm. Consider a number or two.
In eleven games at Brooklyn in 1948, Musial batted .522. Twenty-four hits, four homers, and seventeen runs scored in eleven games. In his twelve games at Brooklyn in 1949, Musial improved. He batted .535, with twenty-three hits, six homers, and nineteen runs scored. That is better than anyone can possibly hit major league pitching. Dodger fans called Musial “the Man,” as in “Uh-oh, two men on base and here comes the Man again.” At Ebbets Field the Man was Superman.
Except in 1947. Then, wrenched by abdominal pains, Musial batted only .225 in Brooklyn. Double Musial’s Brooklyn hits, have him bat, say, .450 at Ebbets Field, and the pennant race would have been a different story. Color it Cardinal red.
This was an interesting, not entirely attractive Dodger team. When Durocher was banished in April and Joe McCarthy turned down Branch Rickey’s offer to step in, sixty-two-year-old Burt Shotton became manager. Plodding, slow, methodical, Shotton talked to Ed Stanky and Dixie Walker and Pee Wee Reese and Hugh Casey, the shrewdest Dodger veterans, and absorbed a crash course in players around the league. He insisted that he was too old to climb into uniform and, as I’ve noted, managed entirely from the dugout. There he kept a record of each play in scruffy scorebooks.
Scoring ballgames employs universal symbols, as many know. Each position is assigned a number so that, for example, 6 to 3 is a ground out, shortstop to first. Shotton had his own symbols, F for fly and O for making an out, hardly as precise as the accepted hieroglyphs. All game long, every day, Shotton made odd vague notes in his book. Dick Young was no admirer. “With that goofy scorebook,” Young said, “no wonder the old bastard is always one out behind the other manager.”
As Young suggested, Shotton was not as quick as Durocher nor as assertive as Durocher, for that matter. He walked away from episodes that a more forceful man would not have tolerated. He simply ignored the terrible racial tension tormenting Jackie Robinson.
On a train ride to Boston early in the season, Robinson was invited into a club car poker game. He accepted happily. Hugh Casey had been drinking and could not see his cards well enough to play them properly. Casey lost money on every deal for twenty minutes. Finally he said to Robinson:
“Jackie, man! Am I in lousy luck today! Got to change my luck, boy. Back home in Georgia when my poker luck ran bad, Jackie boy, I’d jes go out and rub me the tits of the biggest, blackest nigger woman I could find.” Casey leaned forward and rubbed his teammate’s head.
Robinson went into shock. His vision blurred. His throat parched. He felt a jumble of anger and hurt. No one else at that poker table said anything. Robinson recovered — the whole episode lasted perhaps twenty seconds — and shook his head. Then he said to Casey in an even voice: “Just deal, man. Just deal.” Manager Shotton took no action, none at all.
In one game in May, Enos Slaughter ran across first base and planted spikes in Robinson’s right foot. Slaughter later made a mini-career out of denying the deed, but Robinson said, “He denies it? I still feel his spikes. They hurt like hell.” Indeed, in that same game, after the spiking, Robinson remarked to Stan Musial at first, “I wish I could punch the son of a bitch in the mouth.”
“If you did,” Musial said, “I wouldn’t blame you.”
Slaughter is not the only man who would rewrite history, as I learned when I tried to run down the charge that Joe Garagiola also tried to spike Robinson in 1947. “Let me tell you about my Robinson incident,” Garagiola said grandly one morning in 1991 in his office at NBC. “I was hitting, like, .356 [for the Cardinals] at the end of May 1950. That year, 1950, is the only year I still wish I could have finished playing because everything that could happen right was happening right. I was hitting the ball hard at least twice every game.
“We’re going to play the Dodgers and I figure I sit. You know I hit left-handed and Preacher Roe, that great old lefty, was going for Brooklyn. But all of a sudden Eddie Dyer has this meeting and says to me, ‘Kid.’ He didn’t know my name. ‘Kid, you’re catching because you’re hot.’
“First time I’m up we got runners on first and second and I get the bunt sign. Don’t believe it the way I’m hitting. But there it is.
“I make a lousy bunt. Robinson is playing second. He has to come over and cover first base. I have to bust my ass or else I bunt into a double play. It had been drizzling. Getting to first, Robinson fell. If you’re beatin’ a double play, you don’t care if the guy is black, white, or polka dot.
“I tried to step over Jackie’s legs. He lifted up and clipped me. I landed on my shoulder. I could never swing right after that. I had to have my shoulder wired. I still remember lying on the ground in terrible pain . . .
“I still get mail at the Today show. How could you have spiked Robinson in 1947? I didn’t spike Robinson. The only contact I had with him was 1950. I busted my career not spiking him.”
It is a risk to substitute memory for truth. Let me recount a picture caption from The Sporting News of September 24, 1947. (And let me repeat that I asked Garagiola about ‘47. Sidewinding to 1950 was his idea.)
The Sporting News caption reads:
QUICK THINKING by Umpire Beans Reardon broke up an incipient rhubarb between the Dodgers and the Cardinals at Sportsman’s Park, [St. Louis] September 11. Jackie Robinson (left) and Joe Garagiola (right) exchanged words when the Brooklyn first baseman came to the plate in the third inning after the St. Louis catcher had stepped on Jackie’s foot, ending a double play in the previous frame. Coach Clyde Sukeforth rushed from the bench to push Robinson away from Garagiola and, in turn, was vigorously pushed by Reardon who thus drew attention away from the Robinson-Garagiola flareup.
The Brooklyn bench gave Garagiola a going-over all night and members of both clubs stepped dangerously close to rivals’ tootsies. But no toes were cut off, although Ed Stanky took off his shoe to make sure.
Above this caption is a picture. Garagiola is raging at the umpire, Beans Reardon, who has an uplifted hand that seems to say peace. Robinson is watching with his palms pressed together as though in church. Lest there be combat, his bat rests at the ready against one thigh.
This episode is literally unforgettable. Garagiola wants me, and you, to believe that at the very least he has forgotten it.
The Dodgers were one fine baseball team, with a manager who could not leave the dugout. Ralph Branca, twenty-one, won twenty-one games. He threw hard and his curve ball snapped like a flag in March. Joe Hatten was a pretty good left-hander. Vic Lombardi, a five-foot, seven-inch left-hander, could win some games, without throwing hard enough to dominate. Hard-drinking Hugh Casey was the best relief pitcher on earth.
As we’ve observed, the Cards started poorly. Boston was a good team, featuring, as Boston writers reminded everyone, Spahn and Sain and two days of rain.*
Mostly what happened was that the Dodgers got out front by seven games and held on. A tall right-hander, Ewell Blackwell at Cincinnati, became the best pitcher in the league. But his team was weak. Dixie Walker hurt a hand and a young outfielder replaced him. That enabled rookie Duke Snider, facing Blackwell, to strike out five times in a single game.
“This young man is going to be a great one,” Rickey told Harold Rosenthal of the Herald Tribune.
“He just struck out five times,” Rosenthal said.
“He has steel springs for legs.”
“Five strikeouts.”
“Harold, this young man, who will be a great one, has no idea of what the strike zone is. My solemn responsibility is to instruct him.”
The Dodgers had a lot of talent. They learned to live with and to admire Robinson.
Pitchers hit Robinson with fastballs six times in his first thirty-seven games. Once a week he had to take a 90-mile-an-hour baseball in the ribs or in the arm. And he was agile. He was hard to hit.
If Robinson complained, no one heard him. He played the game.
The Boys of Summer, like the Bronx Bombers, were coming to birth.
On September 23 before a Giants game, the Dodger management staged Jackie Robinson Day at Ebbets Field. The park sold out. Ballplayers crowded to home plate.
Describing this, Robinson said, “There to honor me was Ralph Branca of New York and Joe Hatten of Iowa and Clint Hartung of Texas and even . . . Dixie Walker of Alabama.
“I looked at the Dodger box. It was all so beautiful. Democracy. Decency. Sanity. My wife, Rachel, in the Dodger box was crying.”
Tears of joy in the bloodshot blue eyes of Larry MacPhail.
Tears of joy in the clear dark eyes of Rachel Robinson.
It was going to be quite a World Series.
*A mythic bookmaking establishment created by the Herald Tribune’s Stanley Woodward. Real betting lines were available in the composing room of the Tribune from a printer who was wired, so to speak, to what was then called the Syndicate. Such activity, quoting odds and placing bets, was respectively immoral and illegal. Protecting the printer and other guilty parties, Woodward invented a gambling house, safely across the extradition barrier of the Hudson River. When a vice president of the newspaper protested Woodward’s use of odds in his column, the editor responded: “I’ll stop running betting odds on the day you stop running stock market tables.”
*MacPhail was responding to Red Smith, who wrote tartly that MacPhail was more a circus promoter than a baseball man.
*A countercomment on Berg’s view is offered by the baseball scholar Bill Deane, senior research associate at the Hall of Fame. “Without Williams,” Deane says, “the Red Sox wouldn’t have been playing any big games in the first place.” Another savvy sportsman, the noted attorney (and retired amateur shortstop) Charles Rembar, says Deane’s point does not touch Berg’s argument. “It only means Williams was good enough to get to the last round before losing.” I report these remarks knowing that they may set in motion debates that will continue till sunup, when there’s nothing left to drink but Aunt Ada’s Apricot Liqueur.
*York, himself a devout drinker, was coming apart at the age of thirty-three. That June the Red Sox traded him to Chicago. He was out of the major leagues by the next year.
*Etten was famous for trying to batter Joe Trimble, a reporter for the Daily News. When Etten signed for $17,500 to play in 1946, Trimble wrote: “The $500 is for Etten’s fielding.” Subsequently on a Yankee trip, Etten chased Trimble through a number of Pullman cars with ferocious intent. Trimble escaped injury by locking himself inside a women’s lavatory.
*Actually, Berra, though unread, possesses significant intelligence. As a catcher, he had to call 120 pitches a day. He mixed them in shrewd, calculating ways. On trains he liked to play a version of gin rummy called Hollywood in which scores have to be computed in three columns simultaneously. Berra could keep perfect score for Hollywood gin without making notes. He used only his sometimes maligned head.
*Warren Spahn, the great left-hander, won twenty-one games. Johnny Sain, a right-hander with a fine sinker, won another twenty-one. The Braves’ number three pitcher, Charles Henry “Red” Barrett, won eleven games and lost twelve.