It wasn’t tough at all. It was just like eatin’ spaghetti.— Pinch hitter Harry Lavagetto, after delivering the most dramatic pinch hit in history
THE CITY WAS THE CAPITAL of the world. The war-dimmed lights burned bright again from Coney Island clear to Westchester and the streets were safe and subway crime was less than deadly.
“Expectorating on Platform Prohibited!” warned signs in all the stations. “Violators Guilty of Misdemeanor!” Spitting in a subway station, like smoking in a subway station, drew a five-dollar fine in night court, if you were dumb enough to let matters go that far. Generally a spitter or a smoker got the cop to drop charges for a deuce. Two dollars cash. Indeed, police officers frequently approached subway smokers with the venal greeting: “Five bucks, buddy, or two?” Most of us, who spat and smoked, supported our local police.
The parks were tranquil. The word mugging had not yet entered the language. Roads and bridges were beautifully maintained. Infrastructure, as in today’s jargon, “crumbling infrastructure,” was still strictly a military term. We were safe and optimistic and prosperous and peaceful in our New York, the capital city of the world.
True, the new mayor was a crook. But few realized that. A glow, sometimes roseate, sometimes volcanic, lingered at City Hall in the wake of the great Fiorello H. La Guardia, mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945.
Pancreatic cancer killed La Guardia on September 20, 1947, and grief for this fiery part-Jewish, part-Italian American original was tangible and intense. Herald Tribune reporters recorded tributes to La Guardia from Herbert Hoover; George C. Marshall; Arturo Toscanini; Trygve Lie, secretary-general of the United Nations; Andrei Vishinsky, a customarily choleric Russian who was deputy foreign minister of the Soviet Union; and Eddie Rickenbacker, the old World War I fighter ace, now a devout right-winger and president of Eastern Airlines. Said Henry Agard Wallace, who would soon run for president from the left: “The people of the world have lost a friend when they needed him most. He was the most colorful, beloved figure in American politics and his loss is our greatest tragedy since April 12, 1945. First Roosevelt — now Fiorello. The fighters are taken from us when we need them most, but the fight must go on.”
Everyone agreed with that, but there was significant confusion over what fight it was that Americans should be fighting. To Hoover and Rickenbacker we were up against “godless, atheistic communism,” pronounced, by people like Rickenbacker and Hoover, “common-ism.” The Russians did not develop an atomic bomb until 1949, and in 1947 some felt that a sane U. S. foreign policy would have us atom bomb the Soviet Union into history. Millions would die, but, the right-wingers said, what was so terrible about sending atheists to hell?
Henry Agard Wallace was talking about a different vision: a parliament of man, a federation of the nations, and food for the hungry everywhere. Harry Truman snapped that Wallace was naive. Besides, the Russians always broke their promises. Clare Boothe Luce, beautiful, shrill, and cutting as a shard of glass, derided aid for developing nations as “milk for every Hottentot.” And that, said Mrs. Luce, was “Globaloney.”
The United Nations met in temporary quarters, an old World’s Fair building in Queens that has since evolved into a skating rink. Speaking with Gallic passion and remarkable foresight, Georges Bidault, the foreign minister of France, stood up in Queens and said that the developing conflict between the United States and Russia “imperils the very life of the United Nations.” Bidault cited rancorous speeches on the Flushing Meadow floor, mouthed recently by Marshall and Vishinsky.
Bidault’s comments were headlined on the front page of the Sunday Herald Tribune nine days before a great World Series began. Four columns to the right, a corollary Tribune headline announced:
43 FROM HOLLYWOOD SUBPOENAED
BY HOUSE UN-AMERICAN INQUIRY
COMMITTEE TO HEAR BOTH SIDES ON
COMMUNISM, PARNELL THOMAS SAYS;
Gary Cooper, Goldwyn, Disney,
Eric Johnston Among Those Called
So it was begun, the American witch-hunt, our very own, very homegrown Inquisition. Gary Cooper, Walt Disney, and Robert Taylor told tales of a red menace that curdled their true-blue Yankee Doodle blood. Eventually, it turned out that John Parnell Thomas, the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, was less honest even than Mayor William O’Dwyer of New York. Thomas was jailed in 1950 for putting relatives who did no work, who never even visited Washington, on his personal, tax-supported payroll. But before this crass porky politican was locked up in the federal correctional institution at Danbury, Connecticut, he had broken good men and women, wounded others, and conducted the overture for Joe McCarthy.
Yet in the bright October of 1947, few dark thoughts clouded the New York skies or outlook. Red Barber wrote in a memoir that the 1947 World Series was “the greatest Series ever played.” It was that, of course, and more. Along with the World Series of 1952 and the World Series of 1955 and the World Series of 1991 and, uh, oh yes, the World Series of 1905 and 1934 and . . .*
To call any Series, or any ballgame, the “greatest ever played” is sophomoric. None of us has seen every Series, much less every game, and even if we had, we’d still be adrift, trying to quantify words like great and exciting. So much depends not only on the game but on the viewpoint and criteria and possibly the digestion of the observer. Personally, I’ve seen the greatest ballgame ever played at least five times on five different occasions. The Greatest Series Ever is suitable for debating in sports bars but warrants no more sober consideration than the tabloid headline that it is. What one reasonably can say is this: The 1947 Series was very wonderful and very exciting. It kicks up controversy and rocks passions to this day.
Going to a ballgame was different more than half a lifetime ago. The Series of ‘47 was televised but camera lenses were primitive. Even if you owned an early television set by Admiral or DuMont, reception was chancy. Passing aircraft and electronic glitches troubled the picture. If you did own a television set, you could watch the Series at home, all right, but you’d see a lot of it through visual static, blur, and snow.
Some trekked to Yankee Stadium on the night of September 29, with jackets and blankets, prepared to camp out until morning. It would be an uncomfortable wait. The temperature that night dropped to 42. But queuing in the dark was the only way ordinary fans could be sure of getting into the Series. Reserved seats, sold only in strips for three or four games, ran to a whopping $24 a strip.
The Yankees opened the bleacher gates at nine A.M. Within twenty minutes every seat was filled. Later, in midmorning, 7,000 holders of standing room tickets swarmed into the park. The crowd would total 73,365, but sportswriters later complained that the grandstands, as opposed to the bleachers, were full of wealthy types, not ball fans. The Stadium crowd, they said, was rich and dull.
Ralph Branca started for the Dodgers. He was big, rangy, hawk-nosed, strong, and, at the age of twenty-one, coming off the season of his life. He had won twenty-one games, including several big ones. His fastball snarled, his big curve snapped. Still moving toward a baccalaureate at NYU, young Branca had the world before him. There was not a better youthful pitcher on earth.
“And I was confident,” Branca remembers. “I was twenty-one and I was confident that I could beat the Yankees. I’d beaten all the good clubs in the National League. I’d struck out Stan Musial with the bases loaded. I wasn’t afraid at all. And I went out there, big crowd and all, and I pitched four perfect innings.”
Spec Shea of Naugatuck started for the Yankees and, after getting Eddie Stanky on a fly ball, walked Jackie Robinson. With Pistol Pete Reiser, the plagued and gifted center fielder, batting, Robinson stole second. “He didn’t steal it off the pitcher,” Berra says. “I didn’t get rid of the ball good. Robinson stole that one off me.” Reiser bounced slowly to the mound and Robinson fled for third.
He couldn’t make it. You can’t go from second base to third on a bounder back to the pitcher. Shea threw to Billy Johnson, the third baseman, and Robinson stopped short. No one could stop shorter than Jackie Robinson. Johnson chased Robinson toward second, where Phil Rizzuto waited. Another short and dusty stop. George Stirnweiss ran over from his second base spot to help. Spec Shea ran behind third to back up. Robinson dodged and lunged, dodged and lunged. By the time Rizzuto finally was able to tag out Robinson, Reiser had slid safely into second base.
Technically, Robinson had made a bad play. But he had shown the Yankees basepath magic. The Yankees, if not rattled, were impressed. Dixie Walker lined a hit to left, Reiser scored, and the Dodgers led, 1 to 0.
In Ring Lardner’s phrase, the Yankees didn’t molest Branca none. Soft flies, strikeouts, grounders. In the third inning, Robinson drew his second base on balls. He led far off first, making small, aggravating hops. Shea moved to pick him off first base with four straight throws. Then he balked.
Robinson had not made a hit but he was dominating. Pete Reiser flied to Tommy Henrich and the Dodgers failed to score. But they held their 1 to 0 lead and Branca was overwhelming. He struck out John Lindell. Rizzuto popped to left. Branca struck out Spec Shea. That was his third inning.
George Stirnweiss looked at a third strike, a big, snapping curveball. Henrich flied out. Berra struck out swinging. That was Branca’s fourth inning. He was pitching perfect baseball. Branca says that he has replayed what happened next “maybe five hundred times.
“I knew I was dominating. I knew I had a perfect game and then in my youth — I’m a twenty-one-year-old kid from Westchester County pitching a perfect World Series game ten miles from home at Yankee Stadium — in my youth I get excited. I start pitching too fast, not taking enough breathing time between throws. I start overthrowing and with that I get a little wild . . .”
DiMaggio led off the fifth with a hard grounder to deep shortstop. Reese ranged far to his left and made a marvelous backhanded stop. But DiMaggio, who was thirty-two, still had fair speed. He beat the throw to first by a step. Base hit. Now a more experienced pitcher would have slowed his pace, deliberately. Losing a perfect game is a jolt. A man needs time to refocus.
Instead Branca remembers “just wanting to get the next guy out as quick as I could.” He walked George McQuinn on four pitches. He wanted to start Billy Johnson with a fastball on the fists, but still working too quickly, Branca lost the edge of his control. A fastball nicked Johnson. Bases loaded.
Branca threw a strike to John Lindell, whom he had struck out in the third inning. Then Lindell cracked a fastball down the left field line for two bases. DiMaggio and McQuinn scored. The Yankees led, 2 to 1.
Branca was still working too fast. He walked Rizzuto on five pitches, loading the bases for a second time. Bucky Harris sent Bobby Brown up to bat for Shea. Branca threw two outside pitches to Brown and Burt Shotton sent a coach to lift his rattled starting pitcher. A journeyman named Hank Behrman replaced Branca and walked Brown, forcing home another run. Before the inning ended, the Yankees had scored 5 runs. Joe Page, the free spirit whom sportswriters were calling “the Gay Reliever,” replaced Shea. “Page,” Red Smith wrote, “had no romp, but the confident lefthander got by. His manner said, ‘Gimme the ball and lemme at those Bums.’ “ The Yankees won the ballgame, 5 to 3.
Bucky Harris had outmanaged elderly Burt Shotton. Some Dodger players said as much. “That was a helluva move, lifting Shea and putting in Joe Page,” Ed Stanky said. “That won the game.”
Shea had been pitching adequately, against Branca’s perfection, and when he was scheduled to bat in the fifth the Yankees had taken that 2 to 1 lead. Thus Harris lifted his starting pitcher for pinch hitter Bobby Brown when the starter was ahead. “Bucky Harris,” Smith said, “had resolved to wring every last drop of blood out of his big inning.” In later years Casey Stengel perfected this sort of managing. Go for it! Don’t save pitchers and pinch hitters for the late innings. If a typhoon hits, we’ll never play them anyway. Go For It Now!
That tactic in 1947 was just about unheard of.
“You got to hand it to Bucky Harris,” Stanky repeated in the Dodger clubhouse.
“What about Shotton?” a reporter said to Pee Wee Reese. “Did he say anything before he let the writers in the clubhouse?”
“Yes, he did,” Reese said. “He said there would be another game tomorrow.”
Branca was the Dodgers’ best pitcher through 1947. In winning twenty-one games, he’d pitched 280 innings with a fine earned run average of 2.67. He had overpowering stuff.
Now — there is simply no accounting for this — the Dodger high command, Shotton, Rickey, and the rest, went into panic. Branca, the ace, did not get another start in the World Series. The kid had one bad inning and they quit on him.* Panic does not usually win a World Series. The Reliable Jersey House was favoring the Yankees 2 to 9. In other words, nine dollars bet on the Yankees to win the Series would return two dollars. The gamblers were not impressed with the performance under pressure of elderly Burt Shotton.
Wednesday, October 1, came up cool and hazy and the Dodger team appeared to disintegrate. At the center, the embodiment of the Brooklyn collapse was Harold Patrick “Pistol Pete” Reiser, who was coming apart at the age of twenty-eight.
Sometimes Leo Durocher used to say that Willie Mays was the best ballplayer he ever saw. Then, if he were feeling even a little contemplative, Durocher added: “Willie was, but Pete Reiser coulda been.”
In his first full season at Brooklyn, 1941, Reiser led the National League in doubles, triples, runs scored, slugging percentage, and batting average (.343). He could bat right-handed or left-handed and he could throw right-handed or left-handed. In full baseball uniform, wearing spikes, Reiser sprinted 100 yards in 9.8 seconds. Although he didn’t compete at track, Reiser was probably the fastest man on earth. He had it all, everything, and he was tough.
That first year in Brooklyn, Reiser was beaned twice, cracked into the cement center field wall head first, and still led the league. Next year he ran into another wall head first. “We were in the twelfth inning, no score, two outs, and Enos Slaughter hit the ball at Sportsman’s Park, St. Louis. I caught it and hit the wall and dropped the damn ball. I had the instinct to throw it to Pee Wee Reese, and we just missed gettin’ Slaughter at the plate, and they won, 1 to 0.
“I made one step to start off the field and I woke up the next morning in St. John’s Hospital. My head was bandaged. I had an awful headache.” He would suffer dizzy spells for the rest of his days.
Playing for an army team in 1943, Reiser dove into a hedge running down a fly. Behind the hedge was a ten-foot ditch. He landed on his right shoulder. His throwing arm was never the same. When he came out of the service and returned to the Dodgers, Pistol Pete, dizzy spells, gimpy arm, and all, stole thirty-four bases, the best in the league by twelve. Among the thirty-four he stole home seven times. That was 1946, a year in which Reiser knocked himself out again trying for a diving catch, dislocated his left shoulder, ripped muscles in his left leg, and broke his left ankle. “Pete,” Dixie Walker told me once, “was just the damnedest, son-of-a-bitchin’ best ballplayer in the world. Or woulda been, if only he hadn’t played so son-of-a-bitchin’ hard.”
On October 1, 1947, at hazy Yankee Stadium, Reiser suffered episodes of vertigo. He told nobody. It was not his way to complain. He wanted to play. The other center fielder was Joe DiMaggio. Maybe Pete felt he had something special to prove.
When autumn came, the outfield at the old Yankee Stadium posed harsh problems for the defenders. Autumn sunlight splashed into the fielders’ eyes. The three-tiered stands behind the plate seemed dark and vague. Everybody smoked in those days and the smoke and the haze and the autumn light made it difficult for an outfielder to pick up the ball as it left the bat, even if the outfielder was not suffering from bouts of vertigo, which Reiser was. Dizzy and queasy, Pete had to face a dreadful chiaroscuro.
Game two went terribly for him. In the third inning George Stirnweiss hit a line drive just over Eddie Stanky’s head into right center. Reiser broke late and never caught up with the baseball. He reached it on two bounces but it deflected off his glove and rolled behind him. Stirnweiss was credited with a triple. Reiser was puffing a little and looking grim when John Lindell, two batters later, hit a long fly to straightaway center. Essentially a routine out. But Reiser could not pick up the ball this time, either. He started in, turned awkwardly, ran and lunged, and the ball bounced a few feet beyond him. “DiMaggio puts that in his pocket,” someone said.
“Two DiMaggios pocket it,” someone else answered. “Joe and Dom both make that play.”
Another triple. Another ball Pete Reiser played into a triple. The Yankees took a 2 to 1 lead.
Dixie Walker opened the fourth inning for the Dodgers by lining a rocket into the lower stands in right. Tie score.
Billy Johnson led off the Yankee fourth with another long high fly to center field. Reiser started late yet again, backed up awkwardly, and, as the ball was descending, he tripped and fell backwards. The ball struck his glove and glanced off it. Another triple. A third triple. Phil Rizzuto lifted a fly to left field and Gene Hermanski, not suffering from dizzy spells, just an uncertain outfielder, lost sight of the ball. It dropped in front of him, almost landing on a great toe. Johnson scored and Rizzuto had a gift double. Then, in the fifth inning with a runner on second base, Reiser let a ground single go through his legs, for a two-base error. After that when Reiser caught an easy fly, some in the crowd of 69,865 cheered sarcastically. “Hey, lookit that. Pete Reiser didn’t drop the ball.”
The Yankees won the game for Allie Reynolds, 10 to 3, and the press was less than kind. “The Dodgers,” Rud Rennie wrote, “reverted to the style of play that has made Flatbush famous in song and story. And the Yankees slaughtered them.” Red Smith called Reiser’s performance “a re-birth of vaudeville.
“Pete,” Smith wrote, “had appalling difficulties with the sun on fly balls, and on ground balls too, for that matter. This at least will be spared when the carnival moves on to Ebbets Field for Game Three. The sun no longer shines in Brooklyn.”
Reiser would play parts of five more seasons, but that sunny October day at the Stadium was really the end. He couldn’t play much after that. The best prospect Leo Durocher ever saw was washed up at the age of twenty-eight.
Reiser, a trim five foot eleven in his youth, began to drink heavily. He put on a round belly and flapping jowls. In 1952 he played thirty-four games for Cleveland. He stole one base and batted .136.
Afterwards, coaching and managing in the minor leagues, Reiser was dominated by bitterness and drink. He lost his last bush league job, managing St. Petersburg, for drunkenness. When they told him he was through, ol’ Pete called a final team meeting.
The young players rallied round, wondering what message the great Pete Reiser could offer to help them on with life.
“I jes got one thing to tell you guys,” Reiser said. He paused and ran a finger along his teeth.
“None of you sonsabitches is ever gonna make the major leagues.”
The greatest prospect of his time died a forgotten man when he was sixty-two years old. The record book lists the date of his death as October 25, 1981.
How little the record book tells us. The great Pete Reiser died years and years before, in the hazy October sunlight at Yankee Stadium.
Surely it is worth remembering that once, before Willie, Mickey, and the Duke, there was a kid called Pistol Pete.
As Durocher liked to remind people, mister, this was a guy who could do it all . . .
Joe DiMaggio sat silently in the Yankee clubhouse, shirtless and puffing a cigarette. Younger players were making noise, triumphant noises, but DiMaggio was quiet.
“That was rough out there on Reiser, wasn’t it?” Bob Cooke of the Tribune asked.
“It’s always like that in the fall,” DiMaggio said, matter-of-factly. He wasn’t gloating. He was just saying how it was. “It gets a lot darker around home plate and the haze settles in from all those smokes. It’s no cinch to see a fly ball coming out of those shadows.”
“You didn’t have any trouble yourself,” Cooke said.
“Don’t you worry about the old boy. I’ve been playing in this park for a long time.”
The Reliable Jersey House quoted the Yankees to win the Series at 1 to 8. That is, you would have to put up eight dollars on the Yankees to get back one, when and if they sent the Dodgers home. The great confrontation, the Fall Classic, was turning into an October fizzle.
On Thursday, October 2, Mohandas K. Gandhi marked his seventy-eighth birthday and said, with what bystanders called “a terrible weariness,” that the masses in India were violent despite his pleas for peace. “Friends had hoped I would live to be 125,” Gandhi said, “but I have lost all desire to live long. I do not want to go on living at all while hatred and killing fill the atmosphere.”
That same day Mueller Macaroni of Jersey City, New Jersey, one of America’s largest pasta houses, was reorganized as a nonprofit corporation with all its net income earmarked for New York University Law School. Under sharp questioning, an attorney named John Gerdes, of 1Wall Street, conceded that “technically, yes. I can’t deny it. This does put NYU law school in the spaghetti business.”
At Ebbets Field, in a shabbily played and intensely exciting game, the Dodgers defeated the Yankees, 9 to 8. It was not purists’ baseball but it was a festive Flatbush day. Barred from managing, Leo Durocher was attending all the games, officially as a fan, accompanied by his actress bride, Laraine Day. “The slightly musical organization known as the Dodger Symphony [actually a reasonably competent four-piece band] materialized in the lower stands and serenaded Mr. and Mrs. L. Durocher with ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,’” Red Smith reported. “Mr. Durocher arose and shook the leader’s hand. Mrs. Durocher, a music lover, blushed.”
The Dodgers tore into the Yankee starter, Bobo Newsom. “As soon as the attack began,” Smith wrote, “the species of fauna described as typical of Brooklyn began coming out of the woodwork. With half the capacity of Yankee Stadium the joint shuddered with twice the noise. Colored balloons floated from the stands. A blimp rode overhead, almost obscuring Bobo Newsom in its shadow. The joint was jumping.”*
Joe Hatten managed to subdue the Yankees in the first. George Stirnweiss whaled a line drive off the right field wall. Dixie Walker played the carom deftly and held Stirnweiss to a single. Then Tommy Henrich bounced into a double play and Lindell grounded out.
The Brooklyn crowd made throaty noises as the Dodgers came to bat. Stanky bounced out to Newsom. Jackie Robinson lined a single to center. As he took his daring, hopping lead off first, the crowd began to bellow. The rooting was palpable. Come on, Jackie. Come on, big guy. Steal these Bronx bums blind.
Yogi Berra was not catching for the Yankees. He had thrown a ball away the day before and he had failed to catch a pop fly near home plate. “Worst World Series catching I ever saw,” grumbled the tall patriarch Connie Mack. Bucky Harris had heard of Connie Mack. He benched Berra for the rookie, Sherman Lollar.
Robinson’s big lead rattled Newsom, who fell behind as he pitched to Pete Reiser. When the count reached 3 and 1, Robinson stole second. The ball got through Rizzuto, and Robinson took a few steps toward third. Stirnweiss backing up the play flipped to Rizzuto, who tagged out Robinson.
Reiser walked. With Dixie Walker batting, he raced for second, but Lollar’s accurae throw to Rizzuto caught him. Then Reiser could not rise. He had jammed his ankle. He felt better after a while but the pain came back and he had to leave the game (and the Dodger starting lineup) a little later.
The Dodgers broke out in the second. With one out Gene Hermanski walked and scored when catcher Bruce Edwards doubled off the left field wall. Reese singled to left center, scoring Edwards. After a fly ball, Joe Hatten singled Reese to second. Both advanced when Lollar mishandled a low pitch. Eddie Stanky doubled them home.
Harris lifted Newsom for Vic Raschi, and Robinson lined a missile into right. Henrich scooped it on a bounce and held Stanky at third.
Reiser was the next hitter, but by now he could barely walk. Shotton sent Carl Furillo in to hit for Reiser, a move sportswriters questioned. The criticism of Furillo, then twenty-five years old, was that he couldn’t do much with tough righthanded pitchers. Raschi was one tough right-handed pitcher. The sporting press buzzed querulously and Furillo slammed an outside fastball off the scoreboard in right. Stanky and Robinson ran home and the Dodgers led, 6 to 0.
The Yankees came back with two runs in the third inning. The Dodgers scored one more. The teams clawed at one another through the day. DiMaggio hit a long two-run homer in the fifth. Berra, whose Series batting average up to this point was nothing, literally .000, went in to bat for Sherman Lollar in the seventh inning, at which point Lollar’s Series average was .667.
Before the second-guessing of Bucky Harris could gain much footing, Berra cracked a fastball over the scoreboard in right field. The score was now Dodgers 9, Yankees 8. Shotton finally sent for his glowering, guzzling relief star, Hugh Thomas Casey, out of Buckhead, Georgia. The game came down to a fascinating eighth inning.
Tommy Henrich walked and Lindell singled him to second base. No one out, a one-run game, and Joe DiMaggio coming up to bat.
“What would you do now, if you were Hugh Casey?” Red Smith said to Rud Rennie.
“DiMaggio’s swing is grooved,” Rennie said. “He’s got two hits already. I’d walk him. Third base is empty. Walk DiMaggio, load the bases, and pitch to George McQuinn.”
That wasn’t the way Hugh Casey played the game. He snapped a curve ball across the outside corner. Strike one. Another curve missed wide. One and one.
DiMaggio was looking for a third curve, but Casey fooled him with a fastball, up and in. DiMaggio started an awkward swing, then tried to hold up. The pitch hit his bat and rolled to Stanky, who tagged Lindell in the basepath and tossed to Jackie Robinson. DiMaggio was doubled up by thirty feet. Henrich, the tying run, moved to third, but there he stayed as Robinson made a nice play on George McQuinn’s hard bounder. The Yankees did not threaten in the ninth. The Dodgers won, 9 to 8, after three hours and five minutes of play, up to then the longest game in World Series history.
DiMaggio neither shunned the press nor granted usable interviews. He sat smoking and cursing himself for taking a half swing into a double play.
“You hit a good homer, Joe,” Harold Rosenthal said, trying to shake free a quote.
“Fuck that,” said the Yankee Clipper. “We got beat.”
On May 3, 1947, Branch Rickey had dealt the Pittsburgh Pirates five shopworn Dodger ballplayers for $300,000* and an obscure five-foot, six-inch left-hand-hitting outfielder named Albert Francis Gionfriddo, from the metropolis of Dysart, Pennsylvania. The Dodgers owned a rich supply of young left-hand-hitting outfielders: Duke Snider, George Shuba, Dick Whitman, Marv Rackley, all of whom seemed to be better ballplayers than Al Gionfriddo. No one could understand why Branch Rickey wanted him. Then someone was struck with a punch line. Rickey was bringing Gionfriddo in from Pittsburgh because he needed somebody to carry the money, the three hundred grand.†
By 1991, Al Gionfriddo had evolved into a delightful and spirited party of sixty-nine, residing in Goleta, California, just outside Santa Barbara, where he supported himself by selling golf clubs and fishing lures he crafted with sure hands. “I know you want to talk about the catch,” he said, when I came calling. “Red Barber called it the impossible catch. Joe DiMaggio said it was better than the catch Willie Mays made in 1954. Joe D. said it was the best catch in Series history. I’m not arguing with that. Heck, I made the catch. But can I tell you something else, first?”
“Sure, Al.”
“When I came over to Brooklyn from Pittsburgh, the locker next to Jackie Robinson was empty and that’s the locker they gave me, next to Jackie.
“And that was fine. I come from Pennsylvania. I was not a southerner. A lot of southerners were against Jackie comin’ up, the southern players, the southern managers. Some owners were against him. But Jackie held himself together real fine.
“I’ll tell you this and I won’t say any more about it. When I got to Brooklyn in May, Jackie would not take a shower with the other players. He always waited and he showered last.
“And I seen this and I said, ‘Jackie, what the hell are you doing? You’re part of this team. You’re one of the main members.’
“Most of the old Dodgers ignored me, when I come over from Pittsburgh, like I didn’t belong. I said to Jackie, ‘You know, they’re treating you a little like they’re treating me and, hey, we’re both members of this team.
“‘Jackie, let’s go in the shower together. If those southern guys don’t want to be in a shower with you — with you and me, Jackie — let ‘em get the hell out.’”
They walked into the shower together, Jackie Robinson and Al Gionfriddo, and nobody got out. Nobody said a word. Another barrier, that shouldn’t have existed in the first place, came tumbling down.
Game 4 is Cookie Lavagetto’s triumph. It belonged to Big Bill Bevens for eight and two-thirds innings and then, with one level swing, Cookie Lavagetto took it away. That’s true. The game is Lavagetto’s triumph. But Little Al Gionfriddo owns a piece. Without Small Al, Cookie could not have swung his famous swing.
Floyd Clifford “Bill” Bevens, out of Hubbard, Oregon, stood almost six foot four, and he could throw. Firing was never a problem for Bill Bevens. Firing on target was something else. Still, Bevens won sixteen for the somnolent Yankees of 1946. During the regular season of 1947, he won seven games but lost thirteen. Successful pitchers give up fewer than one hit for every inning pitched. Bevens worked 165 innings and yielded 167 hits. Good pitchers strike out significantly more batters than they walk. Bevens struck out seventy-seven and walked seventy-seven. There was no indication on his 1947 record that Bill Bevens was about to pitch the ballgame of his life, the World Series ballgame of the half century.
Recovered, Mantle spent the winter working in a lead mine near Commerce, Oklahoma. Here he poses with his father, Elvin “Mutt” Mantle, left, and veteran Yankee outfielder Cliff Mapes.
On the afternoon of Friday, October 3, Bevens walked ten Dodgers. No pitcher had walked ten batters in a World Series game before. But until the end, the very end, he yielded not a hit. Rud Rennie wrote: “Bill Bevens, in the most strangely beautiful performance ever seen in a World Series, broke three records* only to have Lavagetto break his heart.” Nobody who saw that game or played in that game can forget it. “I remember very well,” says Pee Wee Reese. “The golden time. I was the fella who was gonna come up after Cookie. And was I glad Lavagetto came through. Whatever the ballplayers tell you, nobody wants to come to bat in a situation like that, with all the pressure in the world on every swing.”
“Holy cow, that game was something,” Rizzuto says.
“Not a classic,” Henrich says. “You know, Bevens couldn’t find the plate. But exciting. There just can’t be a more exciting ballgame for the fans.”
“Did Tommy mention,” asks Rizzuto in a bland, impish way, “that he kinda bobbled the ball Lavagetto hit?”
Harry Taylor started for the Dodgers. Taylor was a blackhaired handsome kid with a fine curve ball and a flawed attitude. “Nothing that went wrong,” someone remembers, “was ever Harry Taylor’s fault. If somebody got a hit, it was the catcher didn’t give Taylor a good target. He was a real good-looking guy. Like a movie star. A real good-looking guy who was always complaining.”
He had plenty to complain about in a hurry. George Stirnweiss lined Taylor’s first pitch safely to left. Henrich singled up the middle. Berra, back catching, bounced to Robinson at first base who threw to Reese at second to retire Henrich. But Reese dropped the throw and the bases were loaded. Taylor walked DiMaggio on four pitches, forcing in a run, and now he could complain in privacy.
Hal Gregg, another Dodger pitcher who was pretty good but no more than that, replaced him. George McQuinn popped out and Billy Johnson hit into a double play, ending the inning. A war of attrition had begun.
Bevens walked two Dodgers in the first inning. Gene Hermanski fouled out, stranding them both. Bevens walked another in the second. No damage.
DiMaggio drew another base on balls in the third and McQuinn topped a ball, an infield single, that the Dodger catcher, Bruce Edwards, threw over Robinson’s head, toward a sign in foul territory on the right field wall advertising The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a movie starring Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo, the Blonde Bombshell.
Maybe the Blonde Bombshell distracted DiMaggio. He had a weakness for such items. He rounded second base, rounded third, and Dixie Walker’s throw caught him by a good margin at home plate. DiMaggio didn’t slide, a rare bad play.
In the fourth, Billy Johnson hit a triple off the center field fence, well beyond the reach of Carl Furillo. Johnny Lindell doubled to right, scoring Johnson. The Yankees were ahead, 2 to 0.
The Dodgers came back after a fashion in the fifth inning. Bevens walked third baseman Spider Jorgensen and pitcher Gregg. Stanky bunted the runners to second and third. Reese grounded to Phil Rizzuto, who threw out Gregg, wrong-headedly trying to advance to third. But Jorgensen scored on the play. The Dodgers had a run. Reese stole second and went to third when Berra’s throw sailed into center field. With the tying run at third, Bevens struck out Jackie Robinson.
Bevens walked one in the sixth. He walked another in the seventh. Journeyman Hank Behrman replaced Gregg in the eighth and managed to retire the Yankees. Then came a ninth inning to remember. Rud Rennie wrote of the Brooklyn crowd that “33,443 spectators were dying 33,443 deaths, hanging in suspense to know whether Bevens would have a no-hit game or whether the Dodgers would do something.” But the first thing the Dodgers had to do was retire the Yankees in the ninth.
Lindell singled to left. Rizzuto bounced to the mound and Behrman turned and threw out Lindell at second. Bill Bevens bunted. Edwards charged out from behind the plate and threw the ball to second. Rizzuto beat the throw. Two on, one out.
George Stirnweiss popped a short single into center field. The Yankee scouting reports on the Dodgers were, as we shall see, imperfect. But you didn’t have to be a superscout to note the throwing arm of Carl Anthony Furillo. It was a wonder of the age. Rizzuto, fast but also smart, stopped at third base.
At this point Burt Shotton woke up. He yanked Behrman for his great relief pitcher Hugh Casey. (Why on earth hadn’t he had Casey pitching the entire ninth?) Mighty Casey threw one pitch to Tommy Henrich, a marvelous clutch hitter, and it was an even more marvelous down-breaking curve. Henrich rapped the ball to Casey, who threw to Edwards, forcing Rizzuto. Edwards threw on to first and the Dodgers had their third double play.
Everybody knew, you could see it on the big scoreboard in right, Bill Bevens was just three outs away from a no-hitter.
Bruce Edwards led off the bottom of the ninth inning with a fly ball that DiMaggio caught against the wall in center. Carl Furillo, often an impatient hitter, walked. Spider Jorgensen lifted a pop fly near first base. Dick Young of the Daily News reported that George McQuinn “was white as a sheet as he made the catch.”
Two out. The Yankees led, 2 to 1. Furillo was at first, but Bevens was only one out away from pitching the first no-hit game in the forty-four-year history of the Series.
“Gimme the little guy,” Burt Shotton said. Ol’ Burt at last came fully awake. “Hey, Reiser, can you run from home to first?”
Al Gionfriddo, the little guy, went to run for solid Carl Furillo. Limping on a tightly taped ankle, Pete Reiser made his way to home plate to bat for Hugh Casey.
Bevens threw a ball, a strike, another ball. He wound up and Gionfriddo broke for second base, getting a fair jump, not a great one. Yogi Berra’s throw sailed a shade high. Gionfriddo slid into second base head first.
“I think I got him,” Phil Rizzuto says. “Not a good throw from Yogi, but I had it, and I was coming down from a jump and I’m sure I tagged him before he reached the base.” One man who disagreed with Rizzuto was Ralph Arthur “Babe” Pinelli. A civil disagreement among Romans, but an important one. Pinelli was the second base umpire. He called Al Gionfriddo safe. A call of out would have secured Bevens’s no-hitter and ended the game.
“Phil tells you he got me?” Gionfriddo says. “I’ll tell you how it really was. Phil almost got me.”
The pitch had been high. The count on Reiser was now 3 and 1. With no hesitation, Bucky Harris signaled Berra to step out from behind home plate. Throw the fourth one wide. Put Reiser on base.
One enduring rule of baseball strategy goes like this: Never willingly put the winning run on base. If Gionfriddo somehow scored, the game would be tied. Should Reiser score, however improbable that was, the Dodgers would win. Keep Reiser, the winning run, off base by all means short of gunfire. Bucky Harris knew the rule and he defied it. A small tragedy for Harris was under way.
Reiser limped to first. Ed Miksis, a reserve infielder, ran for him. Shotton called for Harry Arthur “Cookie” Lavagetto to bat for Eddie Stanky. Lavagetto was an old Brooklyn favorite but he had appeared in only forty-one games that season. His time was winding down.
Bill Bevens and Yogi Berra both knew what the Yankee scouts said about Lavagetto. This feller was almost thirty-five, a baseball ancient. Don’t throw him slow stuff. The old guys love to take their swings at changeups. Don’t throw them curves. If there is one thing old batters still can do, it’s hit the curve. Throw hard. Throw the ball by them. At thirty-five the reflexes begin to slow.
Lavagetto liked to pull the ball. The Yankees knew that also. Tommy Henrich in right field shaded several steps toward center. Bevens fired a fastball, high and away. Lavagetto swung and missed.
Berra put down one finger again. Another fastball. He made a fast hand waggle, up and away. Same pitch.
“I didn’t want to throw it there,” Bill Bevens said, years later. “I don’t know if I wanted to throw a fastball but I definitely didn’t want to throw him a fastball up and away. I kinda felt he was zeroing in on that.”
Then why did you throw it, Bill?
“Because that’s what Berra called for. Yogi was a smart kid, whatever you hear.”
Why did you call for the outside fastball, Yogi?
“Because that’s what them scouting reports told me to do.”
Lavagetto cracked a sharp line drive toward a sign in right field advertising Gem Single-Edged Razor Blades. Tommy Henrich lost the smallest fraction of a second, picking up the ball against the crowd. He ran toward the wall, an unfamiliar wall, and made a little leap. He couldn’t reach the ball and now he was positioned too close to the wall, the carom point.
The drive crashed off concrete and glanced between Henrich’s legs. It hit a part of his glove and spun to the grass. Henrich grabbed once or twice and threw the ball in to George McQuinn.
Al Gionfriddo was scoring. The game was tied. Ed Miksis, the twenty-one-year-old pinch runner, never slowed. He slid across home plate on his bottom, wearing a broad and insolent grin.
Bill Bevens, a disciplined Yankee pitcher, was backing up home plate. Gionfriddo scored. Young Eddie Miksis scored. The Dodgers won the ballgame, 3 to 2.
Slowly Bill Bevens walked out from behind home plate and started toward the mound. He had thrown 136 pitches. Still, he was ready to face another hitter.
He who had pitched with such a strange and moving beauty did not understand that the game was over.
Dodger fans stood under the Gem sign, as the lame and the halt stand at the shrine in Lourdes. Dick Young of the Daily News wrote an extravagant lead:
Out of the mockery and ridicule of “the worst World Series in history,” the greatest ball game ever played was born yesterday.
Young knew better than that. But like everyone else, he was wildly excited (or suddenly depressed).
I admire Red Smith’s final sentence on this stirring drama, played out at Ebbets Field.
“The unhappiest man,” Smith wrote, “is sitting up here now in the far end of the press box. The ‘V’ in his typewriter is broken. He can’t write ‘Lavagetto’ or ‘Bevens.’”
“I’m benching McQuinn and Berra,” Bucky Harris announced truculently. “We’re no worse off than when we started. They’re just about out of pitching.
“I wouldn’t trade places with them . . .”
DiMaggio walked up to Bevens in the clubhouse. “Tough luck, stud,” he said. “We’ll get them tomorrow.”
Bevens made a little shrug.
“My husband,” Bevens’s widow, Mildred, was remembering not long ago, “was very quiet when we got home that evening. Just very quiet. He was as disappointed as could be, but he knew you could win them and you could lose them. He never was a very talkative person.
“He was real quiet and we went to bed early. There wasn’t anything that we could say about the ballgame, that we wanted to say about the ballgame. I gave him a little kiss and we went to sleep.”
They played a lovely game at Ebbets Field next day, combining sturdy elements of drama. Rex Barney, the fastest, wildest pitcher in captivity, started for Brooklyn. He pitched bravely. Spec Shea, the Naugatuck Nugget, finally glowed for New York. DiMaggio homered. Jackie Robinson crashed a clutch hit. Gionfriddo found work as a pinch hitter. Cookie Lavagetto pinch hit once again.
What a ballgame.
Except, except . . .
The day before, the players had staged Hamlet . Now As You Like It (if you were a Yankee fan) came across as anticlimax.
Rex Edward Barney, out of Omaha, Nebraska, could throw yet harder than Bill Bevens and he was yet wilder than Bill Bevens. He survives as a footnote to lighthearted sportswriting. Summing up his effort one day, Bob Cooke wrote in the Herald Tribune , “Barney pitched as though the plate was high and outside.”*
Here was how he made his first World Series start while Branca, the best Dodger starting pitcher, sat on a bench.
Barney walked George Stirnweiss on five pitches. Right-handed Clyde King began warming up in the Dodger bullpen, down the right field line. Tommy Henrich cracked a double off the wall in right center. Knowing Furillo’s arm, Stirnweiss stopped at third.
Barney walked Johnny Lindell on four pitches. He struck out Joe DiMaggio on five pitches. George McQuinn — Harris had not benched him, after all — tapped to Barney, who tossed home, forcing Stirnweiss. Barney struck out Bill Johnson. Two walks; one hit; two strikeouts; no runs. Something was happening every minute.
Aaron Robinson was catching for the Yankees. Harris did bench Berra, but only for one day. After that Yogi played two games as an outfielder. Harris was too smart to bench the Berra bat.
Shea handled the Dodgers easily. In the second inning, Aaron Robinson slammed a long fly that Furillo caught at the wall in right center field. Barney walked Rizzuto. He wild-pitched Rizzuto to second base. Rizzuto tried to steal third but Bruce Edwards’s throw caught him. Spec Shea lined out.
With one out in the third inning and the game still scoreless, Barney threw four straight balls to Henrich. Then he walked Lindell. DiMaggio bounced into a double play, ending the flurry.
Someone in the press box remarked that Barney was playing with disaster, using DiMaggio to get his important outs. Someone else observed the Dodger Symphony tootling through the stands. All the musicians wore threads and patches — part of the act — except for the second cornetist. He sported clean pressed slacks and a neat bright yellow sweater. “It could be,” Harold Rosenthal remarked, “that the feller’s tramp clothes are at the cleaners.”
The Dodgers weren’t hitting Shea. Then with two out in the fourth, Barney walked Aaron Robinson and Phil Rizzuto. Basic Barney. Now the Yankee pitcher came up. Barney pressed. Trying to throw a strike, he let up on a fastball. Shea lined it to left field. The Yankees led, 1 to 0.
Then in the fifth with one out, DiMaggio stopped playing Barney’s fall guy. He slammed a high drive three rows deep into the upper stands in left. One batter later, Rex Barney was gone.
The Dodger rally came in the sixth. Gionfriddo pinch hit and drew a walk. With one out, Reese walked. Robinson cracked a low drive up the middle that glanced off Spec Shea’s glove and carried into center field. Gionfriddo scored and when DiMaggio threw to third, trying to get Reese, Robinson advanced to second. Home run or not, DiMaggio was having a rocky day. He turned things around a bit by running down Gene Hermanski’s long fly for the third out.
It came down again to the ninth inning. The Yankees led, 2 to 1, as they had the day before. Bruce Edwards singled. The pitcher Vic Lombardi ran for Edwards. Furillo bunted the tying run to second. After a fly out, Cookie Lavagetto pinch hit for the second day in a row.
He took an inside fastball for a strike.
Ball one. Low.
Ball two. Outside.
Ball three. Outside.
The noise level at Ebbets Field rose mightily.
Spec Shea threw a fastball past Lavagetto. Three and two. The game was on the line.
Shea threw another fastball. Lavagetto swung and missed. Heroism in the batter’s box is a sometime thing. At the request of photographers, DiMaggio kissed Spec Shea in the Yankee clubhouse.
The Series was moving back to the Bronx. The Yankees led, three games to two.
Some of these wonderful games came down to an inning. Others to a single at bat. Now, game six came down to what everyone called “the Catch.”
“Dammit,” said Al Gionfriddo forty-four years later, when he was sixty-nine. “I didn’t even think to keep the ball. I made the catch and Carl Furillo says somethin’ nice and I’m runnin’ in with Carl, you know, all excited. I made the catch and saved three runs and like a fool I drop the ball at the pitcher’s mound. I’m the first hitter next inning. They give me a big hand. I foul the first pitch into the seats. That’s the ball!
“Some fan got it. Maybe he kept it. Maybe he never knew that was the ball I saved a home run with, and saved the Dodgers.”
These teams pounded each other. The Dodgers scuffed Allie Reynolds for two runs in the first inning, two more in the third on successive doubles, cuffed by Reese, Robinson, and Dixie Walker.
The Yankees knocked out the journeyman left-hander Vic Lombardi with four in the third. They went ahead in the fourth when Berra, now a right fielder, singled home Aaron Robinson.
Branca, working relief, held off the Yankees fairly well into the sixth. Then the Dodgers broke through for four runs and an 8 to 5 lead. As a defensive measure, Shotton sent Gionfriddo to left field in the bottom of the sixth.
Joe Hatten replaced Branca and quickly pitched into trouble. Allie Clark hit a sharp line drive that Reese flagged down. Stirnweiss walked. Henrich poled a long drive to right that sailed into the stands a few feet foul. Then he popped out. Berra singled. Hatten was being pounded. Now this staggering left-hander was called upon to pitch to DiMaggio, among the best right-handed batters of all time.
If Shotton was not comatose, he was dozing. He had Hugh Casey in the Dodger bullpen. He let Hatten pitch to DiMaggio. A home run, and DiMaggio was swinging hard, would tie the game. In left field, Al Gionfriddo knew that. He knew DiMaggio would be trying to pull the ball against a left-handed pitcher. Gionfriddo moved toward the left field foul line.
In doing that, he also moved closer to home plate. The left field foul pole at the Stadium was 301 feet away from home. Dead left was a kind of box. If you shaded a man to pull, you played him shallow. A deep fly down the left field line was out of reach, except to customers in the stands who would have had to put down their beer cups to catch it.
Gionfriddo shaded DiMaggio left. Some have criticized him for playing shallow, but those were ignorant of Yankee Stadium geography. Nobody tells what happened next more vividly than the principal, Gionfriddo.
“DiMaggio comes to bat and we were leading 8 to 5, and they had two men on base and there were two outs and I’m playing him to pull, which was in close. It had to be.
“He hits the ball to left center. Very deep. I mean Joe really hit it. He took some swing.
“At Yankee Stadium, the left field bullpen, where the visiting relief pitchers warmed up, there were these gates that the relief pitchers walked through when they went in to pitch. The gates were metal, with an iron frame. Something between three and four feet high.
“I picked DiMaggio’s ball up good. He hit it high and deep toward those iron gates. I didn’t think I had a chance. I’m maybe three hundred forty, three hundred fifty feet out. Next to those gates, there’s a sign, big capital letters. It says; 415 FT.
“I put my head down and I ran, my back was toward home plate and you know I had it right. I had the ball sighted just right.” After all these years, Gionfriddo laughs in gorgeous triumph.
“The ball is going at the bullpen gate and I look over my left shoulder. My back is to the plate. Over my left shoulder. I am left-handed. I throw left. So the glove is on my right hand. I see the ball coming and as the ball is coming in, I make a jump.
“Since I am left-handed I have to reach my glove, which is on my right hand, over my left shoulder. I do that. I jump and make the reach.
“I’m turning in midair. I’m turning and reaching and I catch the ball. I crash the gate. I hit it hard, against my right hip. I hold the ball.
“I’m with DiMaggio years later. We re talking to kids. Joe D. is a lot more famous than me.
“He tells the kids, ‘Al’s kind of small. You know a small guy has to work extra hard to make it to the major leagues.
“‘Some big guy’ — this is still DiMaggio talking — ‘he probably wouldn’t have ever made the Catch. A big guy woulda backed off and left it to go over the fence.
“‘But this little guy. He always had to work harder than anybody else. That’s the way it is in baseball. The little guys always have to work harder. So he was used to working, Al, this little guy, and he never gave up and he made the greatest catch that anybody ever made in the whole history of baseball.’”
Bald now, with wisps of white hair, Al Gionfriddo, a little guy who doesn’t want to brag, affects a shrug. “Anyway, that’s what Joe DiMaggio says.”*
The Dodgers won the sixth game, 8 to 6.
Shotton, dull, obdurate Burt Shotton, shuffled his lineup for the seventh game. And the first thing he did was bench Al Gionfriddo. He replaced him in left field with Gene Hermanski, in turn replaced by reserve infielder Eddie Miksis. And before long Miksis was playing a fly ball into a triple.
Bench Gionfriddo? After the greatest catch in history? If there is a God and God follows baseball, He noticed that Gionfriddo was benched. Surely Burt Shotton was foredoomed.
Al Laney, an elegant journalist, wrote a fine paragraph in the Herald Tribune. “This extraordinary World Series of 1947, which has provided perhaps more thrills and more hysteria than any other, finally came down to a pleasant, sunny afternoon on which people could sit back and enjoy an ordinary ball game without having their nerves worn raw or their emotions too heavily involved. This was a straight-forward game with reason and logic in it and never once did panic sit up and make a noise.”
* * *
The Western world focused on the Series. But as the cold war gathered, Eastern Europe didn’t seem to care. The Soviet army was throwing a party near Budapest, Walter Kerr reported in the Tribune, with vodka toasts and great bowls of rich food, to demonstrate its peaceful intentions. “Toward the end of the evening, the Russian commander escorted his guests through his quarters, including a secret map room that showed the disposition of Soviet forces.
“An American officer, suspecting the display was not genuine, deliberately forgot his gold-braided hat. Three hours later he returned to pick it up.
“The entire ‘headquarters’ had vanished.”
The Bronx was mighty and would prevail. Shotton started Hal Gregg, who was, quite simply, not a winning major league pitcher. (His lifetime record: 40 won and 48 lost.) Even though Branca had pitched the day before, a better manager might have started him, saying simply, “Throw as hard as you can for as long as you can.” A genius manager, a Casey Stengel, might have started Hughie Casey. The Yankees didn’t care for Hugh’s slants at all. He was a hostile man who liked to knock down hitters. DiMaggio. Henrich. The great ones. Hughie Casey put them on their butts.
There was no quit in this dogged Dodger team. Swinging against Spec Shea in the second inning, Hermanski tripled around Berra in right field. Bruce Edwards, the stolid catcher, singled Hermanski home. Furillo singled Edwards to second base.
Bucky Harris lifted Spec Shea for Bill Bevens. Spider Jorgensen bounced a double into the right field stands and the Dodgers led by two runs. But Rizzuto singled home a run in the bottom of the second and the Yankees went ahead with two runs in the fourth. Johnson walked. With two out, Rizzuto lined a single to left. Bobby Brown hit for Bevens and doubled to left. Behrman replaced Gregg.
Where was Branca?
where was Casey?
Where was Shotton?
Behrman walked Stirnweiss on four pitches. Henrich singled Rizzuto home. The Yankees had a lead they would not relinquish.
In the top of that inning Bill Bevens had retired three Dodgers, with a man on first. The last of the three, Gregg, bounced to second. Following that pitch Bevens grabbed for his right shoulder. Few noticed.
Joe Page replaced Bevens in the fifth inning. Across the final five innings of this Series, Page allowed only one hit, Eddie Miksis’s one-out single in the ninth.
Experienced people can tell about such things. The Yankees were going to win. A crowd of sportswriters swarmed about outside the Yankee dressing room in the Stadium catacombs, while the ninth inning still was being played.
Abruptly Larry MacPhail, the hard-drinking Yankee boss, cleared a path among the writers. “If we win this,” he bellowed, and the Yankees were going to win this, “I’m outa baseball.”
“What’s that?” asked Harold Rosenthal of the Tribune .
“You heard me. If we win this fucking game, I quit.”
“Why, Larry?”
“Cause I wanna. That’s why. That good enough for you?”
Relaxed in comfort at what he calls “Varicose Villa,” a retirement community in northern New Jersey, Rosenthal remembers that moment with electric memory.
The New York Times of 1947 employed pedestrian writers to cover baseball. The paper’s passion for lively sports coverage had not yet been born. The best Times baseball writer, though far from the best in New York, was James P. Dawson. “Jimmy could write better than the other two dinosaurs,” Rosenthal says, “but writing wasn’t his forte. Eating was Dawson’s forte. His particular forte was eating free food.
“The Series is handout time. Free eats for everybody.
“So we’re standing under the Stadium stands, waiting to cover the winning dressing room, and Jim Dawson is eating the biggest free hot dog in the world.
“And MacPhail announces he’s quitting. For emphasis, he smacks Dawson in the back.
“I remember that. What I remember even more is James Dawson of the New York Times damn near choking on his seventeenth free hot dog. That is a Series record, I believe.”
The Yankees won the seventh game, 5 to 2.
At some cost, MacPhail stole the next day’s headlines from his team.
*Barber was an exemplar of restraint when broadcasting, but a typewriter did funny things to his self-control. Writing on Jackie Robinson across the season of 1947, Barber not merely blows his own horn but blasts his own tuba: “I had the microphone at Brooklyn when Robinson came. It was the hottest microphone any announcer had to face.” Working in liberal New Deal Brooklyn, where most people supported Robinson and where the corporation that hired Robinson also employed the announcers, all Barber had to do was watch his Confederate drawl. Hot mike? Barber held a piece of cake.
*“That was pretty bad for our ballclub,” Branca says, “but not as bad as 1951, when the team was totally mismanaged by that piece of dreck Charlie Dressen.”
*Numbers of writers for the New York newspapers adopted a patronizing tone when writing about Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and Ebbets Field. Smith, for example, never referred to Yankee Stadium as “a joint.” The Dodger ballpark was a forty-five-minute subway trip or a five-dollar cab ride from Manhattan, neither popular with sportswriters. As Duke Snider mentioned, a number of Dodger players, including Jackie Robinson, picked up on the patronizing and resented it. Smith went to his grave insisting that Brooklyn was a provincial outpost. He himself was bom in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
*Macmillan’s Baseball Encyclopedia lists a figure of $100,000. Dick Young of the Daily News said the true number was $300,000. My suspicion is that Young was more accurate than Macmillan.
+Rickey’s contract with the Brooklyn National League Baseball Club, Inc., provided that beyond salary he was paid ten percent of all player sales. He pocketed a snappy $30,000 on this one May deal. Some, notably Walter O’Malley, regarded the Rickey arrangement as a conflict of interest. It figured prominently in the O’Malley-Rickey shootout, down the lane.
*Fewest hits, most walks, longest stretch of no-hit pitching.
*Trying to sharpen Barney’s control, Rickey ordered the young man to throw with a patch on one eye, then a patch on the other. The experimenting did not cease. For mysterious reasons, at the age of twenty-five, Barney dropped out of the major leagues.
*DiMaggio saw Willie Mays’s famous catch at the Polo Grounds. “That was a great one, too,” he says, “but Mays had plenty of room. Running back, all he had to worry about was the ball. On my drive, Gionfriddo had to worry about the ball and those iron gates. He had to worry about running out of room, about getting hurt. With all that, I say he made the greater catch.”