Field Marshal Casey von Stengel

I got this fella who sucks up all the glory and plays only when he feels like playing. I never had one like that before.

— Casey Stengel on Joe DiMaggio

THE EMPEROR HAD TAKEN to his bed.

His marriage to Dorothy Arnold, the blonde actress, was shot. She’d thrown him out and lured him back and thrown him out again. She was still shooting her mouth off to the gossip columnists. Bad husband. Out all night. Indifferent father.

The Emperor was coming off a rousing season. In 1948, he hit thirty-nine home runs, fourteen more than the Boston Blowhard. Plus he could catch a fly and make a throw. But now it was another season and the emperor couldn’t play at all. Play ball? He couldn’t walk without wincing. He was thirty-four years old and shrewd beyond his years. Joe DiMaggio always knew the score. It could be over. He could be all washed up.

And after that? Icon, deity, emperor, DiMaggio faced questions that tore at every ballplayer approaching the middle of the journey.

Alimony and child support ran to almost $10,000 a year. How could he make those payments if he didn’t play ball? There was the family restaurant back in San Francisco, but the family was large. The money got cut up a lot of ways. If he didn’t play ball, how would he make a living?

The Yankees were paying DiMaggio $100,000 for the season of 1949. But if he didn’t get better, DiMaggio knew, that cold-eyed bastard George Weiss would stop paying him anything at all.

And after that? What was he going to do with the rest of his life?

The Emperor was feeling poorly. He listened to the radio and read the papers and watched television and took painkillers. Without him, and with a clown for a manager, the Yankees were running up a big lead. Tommy Henrich. Bobby Brown. Allie Reynolds. Stengel. Stengel. Stengel.

The Emperor sulked in his suite at the Hotel Edison and told the operator that he didn’t want any calls today, or any visitors except for Toots Shor and Georgie Solotaire.

DiMaggio had been suffering from heel spurs, tiny spikes of calcium growing like needles out of the bone. The spikes cut into soft tissue with each step. Walking hurt. It was impossible to run.

In April, Yankee medical people dispatched DiMaggio to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where an orthopedist named John Bennett was renowned for successful surgery on athletes. Bennett told DiMaggio that he could remove the calcium spikes but that pain would persist for some time. “Eventually, Joe, the pain should go away. It’s a mysterious kind of thing. But there have been cases where a month or so after this operation, a patient went to sleep one night in pain and woke up feeling fine.”

As orderlies wheeled DiMaggio toward the surgical theater, a photographer appeared in the white hospital corridor and flashbulbs popped. DiMaggio sat up and began to curse. Then he said to the photographer, “I’ve always cooperated with you guys. Why are you doing this to me?”

The photographer stopped shooting. “It’s my assignment,” he said.

“I’ve cooperated with every photographer who ever wanted a picture,” DiMaggio said, white-draped on the hospital gurney. “All I’m asking for now is personal privacy.”

“Sure, Joe,” the photographer said. “I’ll tear up the negatives. I’ll tell my boss I couldn’t get a shot.”

A few days later, DiMaggio returned to New York on crutches and boarded up in the Edison, near Times Square, his home for half a year. DiMaggio was a hotel fella, not subject to domestication.*

George Solotaire was a short, stocky ticket broker who spoke glib, Damon Runyon English. Divorce was “splitsville.” Bankruptcy was “brokesville.” Want two tickets in row F? “I’ll see if I can get ya a coupla Freddies.”

Solotaire idolized DiMaggio, hung his clothing, sent out his laundry, and ran huge Broadway-Jewish sandwiches from the Stage Delicatessen to the convalescent. With ties to theater, Solotaire seemed always able to find showgirls aquiver to meet DiMaggio. Solotaire became DiMaggio’s closest New York friend during the Era.

Toots Shor worshiped at Shrine DiMaggio in a different fashion. “Daig is the greatest ballplayer ever,” Shor lectured favored patrons, columnists Bob Considine, Red Smith, and Bill Corum, and the repetition had the effect of magnifying DiMaggio’s formidable skills. You got nowhere, or at least I got nowhere, in later years submitting to Shor that Willie Mays ran faster, threw better, was more durable, and caught fly balls DiMaggio couldn’t have reached. Shor’s response: “Don’t advertise yer ignorance.”

Solotaire handled food, laundry, and show girls. Shor was supervising press secretary, minister of propaganda. The most favored chronicler was Jimmy Cannon of the New York Post. Cannon was passionate, egocentric, talkative, unmarried, and gifted in remarkable ways. Describing many years later one boorish sportscaster, Cannon wrote, “If Howard Cosell were a sport, it would be Roller Derby.”

“Jimmy had certain excesses,” says Ed Fitzgerald, who edited Sport, the dominant sports magazine during the Era, “but I believe, even including Hemingway, Cannon was the greatest writer in the world on two topics: Joe Louis and Joe DiMaggio.”

In his bestselling Summer of ‘49, David Halberstam suggests that Cannon “created not just the legend of Joe DiMaggio as the great athlete, but, even more significant, DiMaggio as the Hemingway hero, as elegant off the field as on it.” Actually, Cannon did not create the image of a silent, towering hero. DiMaggio himself created that. Joe DiMaggio and nobody else invented Joe DiMaggio. Cannon was merely the scribe, albeit a good one.

To this day, debate continues to hum about the point: How good was Joe DiMaggio, really? How much of his reputation is image and hype? One interesting, although negative, perception comes to us through an unusual statistical gauge of offensive performance called relative performance measurement, or RPM. This was created by an Illinois statistician with a name that might belong to one of those old Chicago Bear linebackers: Ron Skrabacz. “The concept of dominance,” Skrabacz writes in The Baseball Research Journal, “can easily be quantified and can be useful in comparing players with their peers or with players from other eras. Relative performance measurement shows which players were most dominant over their careers. . . . Can you compare Babe Ruth against Hank Aaron based on seasonal numbers or even career statistics? They hit against different pitchers and fielders and played with different advantages.”

Ruth, of course, played only against whites, which made his working day easier. Aaron played against whites, blacks, and Latins. Ruth played by day and made his trips by train. Aaron traveled by jet and mostly played at night. Aaron hit against fielders armed and armored with big gloves. Ruth had to swing at spitballs. Aaron was cared for by skilled trainers and modern doctors. In Ruth’s time, sports medicine was primitive.

To pick up Mr. Skrabacz, “What you can compare definitively is how Ruth measured up against his peers and how Aaron stacked up against his. By neutralizing era-specific factors [jet travel vs. train travel], you can judge the players on how well they dominated their peers.”

Skrabacz considers fifteen familiar categories, including runs, hits, singles, doubles, triples, homers, walks, steals, runs batted in, and batting average. Then he measures each player’s performance in each category against the performances of contemporaries. Since Skrabacz is seeking excellence, he flags only the top five players in each category, examining every season from 1900 to the present. “I calculate the numbers with simple arithmetic,” he says. “A point system awards the top player five points. That is, if you’re the leading hitter you get five. Second leading hitter gets four, down to the fifth leading hitter who gets one.”

With a little more arithmetic, Skrabacz has calculated the twenty-five most dominant offensive players in major league history. Here is his list:

From this list, Musial, Williams, Mays, Mantle, Mize, and DiMaggio played significant portions of their career during the Era. DiMaggio’s finish, twenty-second, places him in the second echelon of the top offensive players of all time. Commendable, but less than godlike.

Arthur Patterson suggested a rebuttal shortly before his death in 1991. “DiMaggio played for us at Yankee Stadium for thirteen years,” Patterson said. “During that time we won ten pennants. I’m sure I’m not as good with numbers as Mr. Skrabacz, but ten for thirteen isn’t bad, and we don’t win ten, or anywhere close, without DiMaggio.”

“Red,” I said, “after DiMaggio quit, the Yankees still won the pennant in six of the next seven seasons.”

“That tells us nothing about DiMaggio,” Patterson said. “It just says that Mantle was great and Stengel was a genius.”

As he lay about his hotel suite in sharp, persistent pain, DiMaggio did not want to see any sportswriters, not even Cannon. Any one of them, Cannon included, might start asking questions. Would he ever play again? DiMaggio did not want to see teammates, either. He missed playing ball. He missed the cheers. Seeing his teammates could just make that longing sharper. It hurt not playing and, to tell the truth, it hurt that the Yankees were winning all those games without him.

DiMaggio later said, “I guess I was . . . a mental case. . . . The team kept sending me checks. Whenever one came, I told myself, ‘You’ve certainly done a swell job of earning this money.’ . . . I had trouble getting to sleep. . . . If my playing career was over, what was I going to do? Lying awake, sometimes until five in the morning, I figured out at least a half dozen careers. I must have been really upset, because right now I can’t remember any of them.”*

He was close to emotional collapse one morning in June when the pain in his left heel eased, as mysteriously as doctors at Johns Hopkins had foretold. DiMaggio had looked over the abyss and hadn’t liked what he saw. He threw himself back into the world. He took batting practice and swung until his hands bled. He had special high shoes crafted, with heavy padding at the heel and toe spikes only. Eliminating heel spikes cut down on impact where the spurs had grown.

On June 27, DiMaggio went out to play his first game of the year. He had missed three months. His intensity glowed like Vesuvius, circa A.D. 79. Then he popped out four straight times.

The game was on a Monday night, an exhibition between the Yankees and the Giants to raise money for sandlot baseball and determine what the Herald Tribune called “the Trans-Harlem championship of Manhattan and the Bronx.” The Yankees defeated the Giants, 5 to 3.

DiMaggio did not hide from reporters. “I thought I was ready,” he said. “Now I’m not sure.”

The Yankees caught the Owl, an overnight train for Boston, where on Tuesday they would open a three-game series against the Red Sox. DiMaggio declined to accompany the team. Next morning he took two more hours of batting practice in empty Yankee Stadium.

He caught a three o’clock plane for Boston but declined to check in with Casey Stengel.

A dozen writers pressed Stengel at Fenway Park. Was he going to put DiMaggio in the lineup?

“I don’t know,” Stengel said loudly. “I’m waiting for him to tell me whether he can play.”

DiMaggio was sitting twenty-five feet down the bench, adjusting the laces in his high-topped semi-spikes. “What about it, Joe?”

“Yeah,” DiMaggio said, clearly, distinctly. “I’m going to play.”

He was not asking. He was announcing. Stengel silently prepared the Yankee lineup:

Rizzuto, ss
Coleman, 2b
Henrich, 1b
J. DiMaggio, cf
Berra, c
Johnson, 3b
Lindell, lf
Bauer, rf
Reynolds, p

DiMaggio led off the second inning with a line single to left field off Maurice “Mickey” McDermott, a twenty-year-old left-hander from Poughkeepsie, New York. McDermott walked Long John Lindell, and Hank Bauer slugged a fastball over the left field wall. The Yankees had a 3 to 0 lead.

Rizzuto led off the third with a single. McDermott struck out Jerry Coleman and Tommy Henrich. Then DiMaggio cracked a fastball high over the left field wall. The Yankees won the ballgame, 5 to 4.

Next afternoon, the Red Sox went with a tall, bourbon-gulping right-hander named Ellis Kinder and seemed to be making off with the game. Kinder was cruising in the fifth, two out, nobody on, and the Red Sox leading, 7 to 1. But he walked Rizzuto and Henrich, and DiMaggio hit another home run high over the left field wall, scoring three runs.

By the eighth inning the Yankees had tied the score. Earl Johnson, a tall left-handed pitcher who had been having arm trouble, was the Boston reliever. Johnson threw a breaking ball low and inside and DiMaggio hit his second home run of the game. As he loped across home plate, Stengel scrambled out of the dugout and began a series of ostentatious salaams. DiMaggio looked embarrassed. The Yankees won the ballgame, 9 to 7.

From Rud Rennie’s story in the New York Herald Tribune two days later:

Boston, June 30 — The DiMaggio did it again. For the third day in succession since returning to active duty, Jolting Joe walloped a home run over the wall. This one in the seventh inning was good for three runs, the margin as the Yankees defeated the Red Sox, 6 to 3, sweeping the series.

Joe is stealing the show and headlines from coast to coast with a devastating performance in which he has hit four home runs in three games for a total of nine runs driven in. He has the writers searching their brains for superb super superlatives and his teammates beaming in the reflected splendor of his stardom.

The Red Sox did not fold. They regrouped and played tough baseball and going into the final weekend of the season led the Yankees by one game. Williams was having a wonderful summer; he would bat in 159 runs. DiMaggio gave the Yankees a wonderful half summer, but late in September he retreated into his hotel suite again. This time it was flu or mild pneumonia or a ferocious cold or — none dared say this in the sporting world — just overwhelming pressure. DiMaggio looked pale. He felt weak. The pennant was unsettled. The last two games pitted the Yankees against the Red Sox at the Stadium.

DiMaggio’s status was uncertain, but the Yankees placed advertisements in each of New York’s nine daily papers:

Saturday Is Joe D. Day at the Stadium

A Great Day for a Great Player 1:15 P.M.

“But will you play him?” Leonard Koppett of the Herald Tribune asked Stengel.

“If he feels better,” Stengel said tightly.

“Joe told me there was no sense in his playing,” Koppett said, “if he was going to be a detriment to the team.”

Stengel’s answer sailed over Koppett’s head. “It would be hard for him to be a detriment in any condition, wouldn’t it?” Stengel said. A very young reporter and a passionate Yankee fan, Koppett was too wide-eyed to recognize the bitterness between the tough old manager and the temperamental star. “Play or not,” Koppett wrote blithely, “Joe will be on hand today as the central figure in the greatest one-day baseball show ever put on in New York.”

“I got this fella,” Stengel remarked to his wife, Edna, “who sucks up all the glory and plays only when he feels like playing. I never had one like that before. What am I gonna do?”

Edna Lawton Stengel was a practical person. “Let him play whenever he wants to play, dear.”

The American League pennant race closed with a positively Aristotelian unity of place. The Yankees and the Red Sox, DiMaggio and Williams, Old Casey Stengel and Older Joe McCarthy eyeball to eyeball, nostril to flaring nostril at Yankee Stadium. By contrast, the National League race, though equally close, was diffuse. The Dodgers and the Cardinals would settle their great rivalry playing third parties. Here is the way the races stood on the morning of Saturday, October 1.

NATIONAL LEAGUE

AMERICAN LEAGUE

Often during the Era, Dodger managers assigned important ballgames to Ralph Branca, the large, hawk-nosed, right-handed pitcher out of Mount Vernon, New York, by way of New York University, where he starred on both the baseball and the basketball teams. Ralph was sensitive, open, and likable, with a fine fastball and a big snapping curve. He was just the kind of major leaguer you’d want to take the kids to meet. As a biggame pitcher, he evolved into a disaster.

He would go on to marry a wealthy woman and enjoy great business success in later years, but to this day anger and sadness play on Branca’s face when he discusses his pitching career. A twenty-one-game winner at the age of twenty-one, he was out of baseball, selling insurance, by the time he was thirty. He blames injuries. Others are not so sure.

“The tree that grows in Brooklyn is an apple tree,” Dick Young wrote in the Daily News, “and the apples are in the throats of the Dodgers.” Young meant that the Dodgers could not swallow, that they were choking. “Not all the Dodgers, of course,” Young told me. “No one in his right mind would call Reese or Robinson a choker. I meant the pitchers. Specifically I meant Ralph Branca. The other players agreed with what I wrote. Quietly they agreed with me. Sometimes it looked like everybody on the Brooklyn club knew who the chokers were, everybody except the ballclub manager.”

Branca started strong in Philadelphia on Saturday, but abruptly lost command in the sixth inning when Dick Sisler tripled and Del Ennis, a free-swinging right-handed slugger, cracked a home run into the upper deck in left field at Shibe Park. Branca went no further. The Phillies won, 6 to 4. But the Cardinals lost in Chicago. The Dodgers stayed one game out front.

On Sunday the Cards played a powerful ballgame at Wrigley Field. Musial hit two home runs and St. Louis won, 13 to 5. The Dodgers pulled ahead in Philadelphia but the Phillies overcame a five-run deficit and tied the score. Two in the tenth inning at last won the ballgame, 9 to 7, and the fiercely contested pennant for Brooklyn.

“C’mere,” Burt Shotton bellowed at Harold Rosenthal in the Dodger clubhouse. Shotton hugged the reporter and bellowed, “How about that win, Rosenbloom?”*

St. Louis had now finished second three straight times. Despite Musial, the Cardinals, the closest thing extant to a Confederacy team, were in decline. By the time the Cardinals won another pennant, long afterwards in 1964, their best pitcher and most of their best hitters were black men.

Joe DiMaggio’s haul, on October 1, was without precedent, either in baseball history or in the annals of excess in the Bronx. Gifts from “fans and organizations” included two automobiles, one motorboat, three watches, two television sets, one foam mattress with box spring, three sets of luggage, a deer rifle, a case of oranges, a pack of walnuts, a cocker spaniel, three sets of cufflinks, three hundred quarts of ice cream, a golf bag, a case of shoestring potatoes, a set of fishing tackle, an electric blanket, three money clips, and a set of rosary beads.

“How do you feel?” Red Smith asked DiMaggio.

“You know something, Red?” DiMaggio said. “I’m kind of worried.”

“You’ve been through tough ballgames before,” Smith said.

“I’m not talking about the ballgame. I’ve got to say thank you. It’s my speech that has me worried.”

DiMaggio withdrew into silence, mentally rehearsing what he would tell the crowd — 69,551 people assembled in triple-tiered, autumn-shadowed Yankee Stadium. After a while Mel Allen walked up to a microphone set up close to home plate and said, “It’s always best to be brief when introducing a great guy. Ladies and gentlemen, Joe DiMaggio.”

“The cheers that followed,” Smith wrote, “ricocheted off the eardrum, made conversation impossible and gave Joe an opportunity to rehearse his speech once more.” People screamed in adulation. DiMaggio stood silent and solemn.

Facing the seats behind home plate, DiMaggio began very gracefully: “First of all, I’d like to apologize to the people in the bleachers for having my back to them.” That started the ovation again.

“This is one of the few times in my career,” DiMaggio said, “that I’ve choked up. Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, right now there’s a big lump in my throat.

“Many years ago a friend of mine named Lefty O’Doul told me, when I was coming to New York, not to let the big town scare me. This day proves that New York City is the friendliest town in the world.

“I thank the good Lord for making me a Yankee.”

A fine, tough ballgame followed. Stocky, bespectacled Dom DiMaggio opened the game for Boston with a single to right field. After Johnny Pesky forced little Dom, Ted Williams handcuffed Tommy Henrich with a bounder. Williams hit ground balls with so much overspin that infielders likened them to grenades. Allie Reynolds bounced a curve ball past Yogi Berra and both runners advanced. Vern Stephens lined out to Johnny Lindell in left field and Pesky scored.

In the third, with the Red Sox still leading by one run, Reynolds walked Pesky, Williams, and Stephens. Early though this was, Stengel sent for lefty Joe Page, his great closer. Before Page got his head into the game, he walked two more. The Red Sox now led, 4 to 0. At this point Mr. Page went fully awake. Across the final six innings, he allowed the Red Sox only one hit.

Joe DiMaggio got the Yankee offense going in the fourth inning with a line drive to right that bounced over the low railing for a ground-rule double. Before the inning was done, the Yankees scored twice. In the fifth, Rizzuto, Henrich, and Berra singled on successive pitches for another run. With two out in the eighth, Johnny Lindell crushed a fastball deep into the lower left field stands. Noise ricocheted off the eardrums once again.

The Yankees won the ballgame, 5 to 4. With one day left and one game left in the season, the teams were tied.

Sunday, October 2, was an unsettling day. The Soviet Union announced that it was severing relations with the Nationalist China, now based on Taiwan, and would recognize the People’s Republic, ruled by Mao Tse-tung. The Times reported that the Russians would demand that the Chinese Communists replace the Chinese Nationalists at the United Nations. The world was moving slowly toward a withering war on the redolent peninsula of Korea.

Justice William O. Douglas, the preeminent liberal on the Supreme Court, was bucked off a horse near Yakima, Washington, and broke thirteen ribs. But next day, the big news was baseball. Even the grim, gray New York Times published a breathless baseball story as its lead.

The Stadium was overflowing with fans — 68,055 paid — under a bright early autumn sky. The weather was gentle — high 60s. “Hey,” Casey Stengel said to Joe Cashman of the Boston Record, “how is your team today, Cashbox? Confident?”

“I think they are,” Cashman said.

“Well, so is my club,” Stengel said. He grinned without mirth. “But one team is gonna lose all its confidence before dark.”

Boston manager Joe McCarthy was tense and clipped. Managing the Yankees, McCarthy had won eight pennants from 1932 through 1943. A month into the 1946 season, Larry MacPhail fired him. The Red Sox hired McCarthy in 1948 on the supposition that a man who had won with the Yankees might know how to defeat the Yankees, as if, say, George III commissioned Benedict Arnold to lead an army attacking Washington’s Continentals.

McCarthy did outpace the Yankees in 1948, but still finished second to Cleveland. Now, at sixty-two, older even than Stengel, Joe McCarthy wanted to wrest the pennant from the Yankees, the team that he’d helped build and shape, the team that had fired him. McCarthy wanted to beat the Yankees as a climax to his life.

“Yeah, we’re ready,” he said tightly. “We been ready all year.” Plump Johnny Schulte, the Red Sox bullpen coach, was merrier. “I’ve got myself a couple of train reservations,” he said to Arthur Daley of the Times. “If we win, I’m on the six o’clock for Boston, and the World Series. But just in case, I’m also booked on the seven-thirty for St. Louis. That’s home.”

Joe DiMaggio allowed himself one light moment. “Joe,” he said archly to Page, the team’s preeminent pub crawler, “how did you sleep last night?”

“Good,” Page said. “I always sleep good. That is, I always sleep good when I get to sleep.”

Then it was time to play ball: Vic Raschi, 20 and 10, against Ellis Kinder, 23 and 5, for three months the most effective pitcher in baseball. Raschi handled the Sox easily in the first inning. Rizzuto led off for the Yankees with a line drive over third base. It was only 301 feet down the line. The drive looked good for two bases at most. Williams rushed over but did not get his glove down, and the ball skittered past him for a triple. “Ted played that,” Red Smith said, “as though the baseball were a viper.”

Ellis Kinder was a country boy, a drinking man. He had been up much of the night, but he was rugged. He felt okay. Hell, Kinder wondered, what was going on with Williams? He knew what was going on with Williams. Pressure was going on. Then Old Joe McCarthy played the Boston infield back. McCarthy was conceding a run for an out. That’s what baseball textbooks said to do, go for the out early; you’ll get the run back.

Except . . .

except . . .

The Sox were swinging against Vic Raschi in a big game. The textbooks, such as they were, told you also that in big games, runs against Raschi came very, very hard.

McCarthy, managing the biggest game of his career, was playing it safe. Henrich grounded out to second and Rizzuto scored.

Joe DiMaggio lifted a fly down the right field line. Al Zarilla ran hard but fell down. DiMaggio slid safely, painfully, into third base. Another triple. One inning. Two bad Boston outfield plays. A questionable call by the Boston manager. Still, DiMaggio was stranded at third.

Raschi gave nothing away, no runs at all. Bulky, big-shouldered, glowering, black-browed, superb. The Yankees led, 1 to 0, in the eighth inning and Kinder was scheduled to hit first. McCarthy called him back and sent up a left-hand-hitting rookie outfielder, Thomas Everette Wright, who had behind him a total of six major league turns at bat.

Kinder began to curse. He could hit better than that kid. The way he was pitching, Kinder thought, how the hell could you take him out?

Wright walked. Dom DiMaggio grounded into a double play. The Yankees retained their one-run lead, and Kinder was out of the game. The Yankees broke through with four more runs against the Boston bullpen.

Boston came back in the ninth inning. With one out, Williams walked. Vern Stephens singled. Bobby Doerr hit a long fly to center. DiMaggio broke slowly and the ball sailed over his head, good for three bases and Boston’s first two runs.

With Birdie Tebbetts batting, DiMaggio suddenly shouted, “Time. Time out!” to Charlie Berry, the second base umpire. DiMaggio shook his head. He felt dizzy, he said. He began a slow jog from center field toward the Yankee dugout. He was taking himself out of the game. With that, he drew an ovation, sucking up, as Stengel said, more glory.

Raschi threw a high fastball and Birdie Tebbetts hit a pop foul that Tommy Henrich caught. The game was over. The Yankees had won, 5 to 3. The Yankees had won the pennant. Coach Bill Dickey leaped with jubilation. His head hit the dugout ceiling and Dickey went bubble-eyed.

“That is the seventy-second injury our courageous ballclub has suffered this season,” Arthur Patterson announced in the press box.

Afterwards, Casey Stengel sought out McCarthy. “Well, you won a lot of pennants for this here New York nine. You been splendid,” Stengel said. “I guess this year it was just my turn.”

After Stengel and the photographers and the reporters left, Ellis Kinder sought out McCarthy with harsher words. “You gutless old clown,” Kinder said. “You choking old bastard. You couldn’t manage my dick.”

McCarthy had managed a pantheon of stars: Rogers Hornsby, Gabby Hartnett, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio. Twenty-three years managing in Chicago, New York, Boston, the greatest players in the greatest towns. No ballplayer had cursed him out before.

Overall, McCarthy teams won nine pennants. His World Series winning percentage, .698, was and is the loftiest in history. He hadn’t managed badly against the Yankees, just routinely, which was not good enough when opposing Stengel.

After the Kinder confrontation, McCarthy lost both authority and respect. The Red Sox fired him the next season. He retired to Buffalo, New York, where he pursued obscurity and declined to grant interviews, much less compose his memoirs. He was approaching his ninety-first birthday when he died in 1978 on a cold January day. The local ballfields were buried under two feet of snow.

ON WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 5, Sherman Minton of Indiana, a new appointee to the Supreme Court, paid an afternoon call on the White House and found Harry Truman staring at a television set.

“Sit down, sit down,” Truman said. “We’ll talk business later. This big colored guy for Brooklyn is throwing hard. I wonder if DiMaggio will get to him.”

“He better watch Henrich,” Sherman Minton said. “Henrich is the Yankees’ best clutch hitter now.”

“Down home in Missouri,” Truman said, still watching intently, “we called a good clutch hitter Mr. Pork Chops. He was the guy who’d bring the pork chops home.”

“Henrich has a German background, Mr. President,” Minton said, “but believe me, he sure is Mr. Sauerbraten.”

The great pennant races had focused almost everybody’s attention on baseball. Still, John Foster Dulles, a dour and doctrinaire Republican functionary, maintained weaponry trained on the Red Menace. Running for the Senate in New York, Dulles charged that Herbert H. Lehman, the Democrat, was the darling of the radical left. Lehman, a devout capitalist, had inherited a Wall Street banking fortune and resided in opulence at 820 Park Avenue. Meant nothing, said Dulles. Lehman was soft on communism; he was just one more Park Avenue pinko. How nice, many thought, to flee such lewdness for the ballpark, where with minimum peril you could admire real left wingers, Joe Page and Preacher Roe.

This would be Casey Stengel’s first World Series since 1923, the season of his ninth-inning home run, and he made a grand return to the sold-out ballparks with three-colored bunting, the raucous folk festival with hustlers, which is what every World Series used to be. Casey would employ only five pitchers in five games. Burt Shotton by contrast used nine. One, Rex Barney, posted an earned run average of 16.88; two others, Carl Erskine and Joe Hatten, recorded ERAs of 16.20. Embarrassing.

Pee Wee Reese is the only man who played in every game in every one of the great Brooklyn-Yankee World Series, from 1941 through 1956, seven confrontations, forty-four games. Not Rizzuto, not DiMaggio, not Berra, but Reese, a thin, wellmuscled, graceful athlete.

Reese had a gentle, compassionate nature, formed about a core of pure competitive flame. His seamless youthful face led writers to describe him as “puckish.” He stood five feet, ten inches and played at 160 pounds, hardly a pee wee. Indeed, the nickname came not from his size but from the game of marbles. Reese won the national boys’ marble championship when he was fifteen years old. The large marble was called a shooter. The small marble, the one you aimed for with the shooter, was a pee wee. “What I got in this young feller,” Durocher remarked, when Reese reached Brooklyn in 1940, “is the Babe Ruth of marbles. On our ballclub, he’s a rookie. In the world of marbles, he’s an old man.”

Durocher was phasing himself out of the Dodger infield; he wanted to concentrate on managing. He loved to strut in silk shirts, gold cufflinks, wingtip shoes; he intended to put his playing days behind him and Reese was a perfect instrument toward that end.

“Kid,” Durocher said, “anything you want to know about playing shortstop in the majors, come to me,”

Reese nodded. He was a quiet rookie. Durocher talked about shading hitters, cheating toward second, moving with the pitch, going into the hole, turning the double play. He talked and talked, begging Reese to ask questions. But no questions came.

Finally, in late June Reese said, “There is something I do want to ask you, Skipper.”

Durocher beamed. Several thousand ganglia snapped to attention.

“Anything, kid. Anything.”

“Leo,” Reese said, “where do you buy your clothes?”

Reese became a dominant Dodger through quiet leadership rather than flash. You had to see him every day to realize what a wonderful ballplayer he was. He became captain of the Dodger team in 1947 and he championed Jackie Robinson’s cause, without ever deifying his double play partner. Robinson was often loud, often cutting. Sometimes Robinson’s needling became downright nasty.

“You know, Jack,” Reese remarked one day, “some of those pitchers knocking you down are throwing at you because you’re colored. But for some others color has nothing to do with it. They just plain don’t like you.”

Robinson winced and nodded. No other ballplayer, white or black, spoke to Robinson as Reese did. There was touching love between them and touching candor.

With all this, it was possible to forget how splendidly Reese played under pressure, how tough he was when a game was on the line. “You throw him a good curve,” Stengel said, in admiration and annoyance, “and he goes down with that bat of his and gets it like a fisherman getting his hook down for a fish. The little son of a bitch hits my good pitchers’ very good pitches, which shows that hitting is more than batting average, as my very good pitchers will confirm if they feel like talking to you.”

Reese had a good Series in 1949, batting .316, with a home run. But Duke Snider and Jackie Robinson, both Hall of Famers, batted under .200 and Carl Furillo, plagued by a torn muscle, could start only two games. “Where did you tear it, Skoonj?” Harold Rosenthal asked. “Where does it hurt?”

“It’s in my groining,” Skoonj Furillo said.

Furillo’s unusual nickname came from his fondness for scungilli, chopped conch served in a spicy Neapolitan sauce. Sturdy Carl had come into his own at the age of twenty-seven. Earlier, he’d had a nasty time playing for Durocher. “That bastard said I couldn’t hit right-handed pitchers,” Furillo told me in anger and disgust. He was a guileless man never schooled beyond the eighth grade. “Durocher was making it seem like I was afraid of curve balls. That I was backing off. That I was gutless. Hey, Meat, the year I like to squeeze his fucking head off, Durocher found out how gutless I was, right?”*

Healthy, Furillo was a good Series hitter. Now he was hurt. Reese and Gene Hermanski, an irregular outfielder, were the only Dodgers who batted over .300 in the Series. Dodger fans said, as the Series seemed to slip away, “It’s a damn shame our good hitters slumped. Otherwise we woulda kilt them Yankee crumbs.”

This is the Flatbush version of the Grand Illusion. The Dodgers never had a true fence buster of a Series against the Yankees. Twice Duke Snider hit four home runs in one Series, but overall the Yankees consistently outhit and outslugged the Dodgers. In their thirty-nine Series games from 1947 through 1956, the Yankees hit forty-five homers. The Dodgers hit fourteen fewer, a significant difference, some thirty-one percent. Lifetime, Jackie Robinson was not much of a World Series hitter, batting only .234. By contrast, Billy Martin hit five Series home runs against the Dodgers and batted .333. Gil Hodges, Brooklyn’s strongest right-handed slugger, got no hits at all in the seven-game Series of 1952. He went 0 for 21 and 0 for October.

This was not coincidence, or what was damned in Brooklyn as Yankee luck. It is a tested axiom that good pitching stops good hitting and this is what worked mightily against Robinson, Hodges, and the others. The Yankees had very good pitching and a manager who knew how to use good pitching better than anyone else on earth. Didn’t the Dodgers have splendid pitchers as well? Indeed they did. “A lot of their fellers really threw hard,” as Bobby Brown points out. “Newcombe, Branca, Barney were very fast. But it happened we were a great fastball-hitting team.” Brown speaks without smugness, although when he retired to work in medicine full-time, his World Series batting average, pounded mostly against Brooklyn fastballs, stood at .439.

Allie Reynolds started the first game against Don Newcombe, power pitcher against power pitcher. The Dodgers brought back stars from a 1916 Brooklyn team that won a pennant, and Stengel chattered cheerfully with old teammates Zach Wheat, “Chief” Meyers, “Rube” Marquard. “Damn,” Stengel said, clearly and sadly, “where did all those years go?”

“For eight and a half innings,” Red Smith wrote, “nothing happened yesterday at Yankee Stadium. Reynolds and Newcombe wouldn’t allow anything to happen. There were no fielding plays of great distinction, no hits of special note. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall sat looking on, as silent as the 66,224 other witnesses. They’ve put on more spectacular battles themselves in El Morocco.”

Across nine innings, Reynolds struck out nine Dodgers, including Snider three times. Across eight and a half innings, Newcombe struck out eleven, every Yankee but Rizzuto and Henrich. He walked nobody.

Henrich led off the ninth inning. Newcombe missed with an inside fastball. He missed with another. His curve was a fast, sharp-breaking pitch. He threw the curve to Henrich, low, where he wanted it. Henrich cracked a long drive to right. Newcombe gave the ball a quick look and started off the mound. Henrich’s homer won the ballgame, 1 to 0. At the White House, Harry Truman clapped Sherman Minton on the back.

“Taking nothing away from the Brooklyn team,” Stengel told the sportswriters, “you would have to agree after what you just saw, that they are pretty nice, the ballplayers I got.”

“The plate umpire [Cal Hubbard] is an American League guy,” Jackie Robinson said, “and he called an American League game. I’ve never seen so many bad strikes called against us. Reynolds was missing the corners all day.”

When A. B. “Happy” Chandler, the commissioner, read Robinson’s remarks, he ordered Robinson to wire an apology to Hubbard or face suspension. Then Chandler issued a press release stating that he personally had ordered Robinson to “stop popping off.”

“Is this because of my color?” Robinson said, echoing a question someone asked. “Ask yourself this. There are fifty ballplayers on the field and most of them yap at the umpire. One ballplayer is singled out by the baseball commissioner. The one ballplayer is colored. Aside from that, I have no comment.”

Brooklyn’s best pitcher — as distinct from hardest thrower — was a left-handed stringbean, all bones and angles and Adam’s apple, out of northeast Arkansas hill country. Elwin Charles Roe had been nicknamed “Preacher” during a gabby childhood, and Preacher Roe was a droll and remarkable character. His father, a failed pitcher, practiced medicine out of a tin-roofed house in Viola, the only doctor in a wide area, patching and treating farm families, collecting his fees in grain and dairy products, and dreaming about the major leagues. “Arkansas,” Preacher recalled, “was Cardinal country, and when I finished college down at Searcy, muh Dad came up to St. Louis with me to meet Mr. Rickey and read the contract afore I signed.” Roe pitched a single three-inning stint for the 1938 Cardinals and gave up four runs. He was then dispatched into the farm system — baseball people called it Rickey’s Chain Gang — and languished there, a fast, wild hillbilly of uncertain promise.

At length Roe made the major leagues with a good wartime Pittsburgh team in 1944 and a year later led the National League in strikeouts. Winters in Hardy, Arkansas, Roe taught high school math and coached basketball. “One night,” he said, “I didn’t care for a referee’s call and I shouted something.

“The ref shouted back at me, ‘Shut up.’

“I thought he shouted, ‘Stand up.’

“He decked me. My head hit the gym floor. I got a skull fracture and a lacerated brain. The fracture ran eight inches long.”

Recovering slowly, Roe stayed with the Pirates through two more seasons. Both went badly. He could throw an occasional hard one but would not be a consistent strikeout pitcher ever again. “I commenced thinking,” Roe said, “about pitching to spots, changing speeds, fooling them hitters instead of overpowering them, and, of course, I commenced to develop my wet one.”

On December 8, 1947, Branch Rickey dispatched three ballplayers to the Pirates: Vic Lombardi and Hal Gregg, journeyman pitchers, and Fred “Dixie” Walker, who wanted to be traded rather then play on the same club with a Negro. In exchange, the Dodgers got Billy Cox, who became the finest fielding third baseman of his time; Gene Mauch, who was to become better known as a manager; and the remarkable, evolving spitball-throwing Preacher Roe.*

Twice in Brooklyn Roe would lead the league in winning percentage. With success he went to considerable lengths disparaging his fastball. “I got three speeds,” he said. “I got my change of pace [slow ball]. I got my change off my change [slower yet]. And I got my change, off’n my change, off’n my change.” Slow, slower, slowest. Actually he could throw a good fastball now and again, but he tended to keep that pitch high and wide. He wanted batters to see it, to upset their timing. He wanted them actually to swing at slower and deceptive breaking balls.

The spitball is thrown with a straight fastball motion. At the instant of release, you squeeze, as when squirting a watermelon seed. Properly squeezed, a spitter breaks down sharply, a most difficult pitch to hit. Roe jiggled through interesting tableaus on the mound. He moistened his fingers and then carefully dried the fingers on the bill of his cap. Or he pretended to moisten his fingers. He wanted his spitter to surprise, when it broke down, but Roe was aware that a fake spitball, yet another pitch, helped keep hitters off balance.

The fingers were not his repository of moisture. What Roe wet purposefully was the meaty part of the hand below the thumb. Then, in an intricate gangling windup, he transferred the moisture to his left index finger before the delivery and squeezed. Once in a while a Dodger infielder walked a moistened ball in to Roe with a quick remark, “It’s there if you want it.”

How come Roe was never caught? He was not only droll but tricky. Once, when Roe was holding a premoistened ball, umpire Larry Goetz came charging in from second base yelling, “The ball, Preacher. I want to see the ball.”

Roe tossed the ball obediently to Goetz. By this time Roe was the best control pitcher in baseball. Somehow the soft toss went over Goetz’s head. Pee Wee Reese scooped the ball and flipped it to Jackie Robinson, who rubbed the ball and tossed it to Gil Hodges. After another rub, Hodges tossed the ball to Billy Cox who flipped it to Roe. Ten hands had now rubbed the baseball dry.

“Here, Larry,” Roe said mildly. “Here’s the fucking ball.” Red Smith called Roe “an angular, drawling splinter of gristle.” The Preacher stood six foot two and weighted 163 pounds. Stengel started broad-shouldered Vic Raschi, and Jackie Robinson led off the second inning by cracking a double to left field. Gene Hermanski hit a foul pop fly into short right and Jerry Coleman made a good running catch with his back to the infield. Robinson sprinted to third. When Gil Hodges singled to left, the Dodgers had a run.

That was all Roe needed this mild October afternoon. Roe showed his fastball but kept it out of reach. He broke curve after curve around the black borders of home plate. From time to time, Preacher broke a spitter down below the knees.

In the fourth inning, Johnny Lindell cracked a line drive that caught Roe on the fourth finger of his right hand. He made the play but soon had to have a hole drilled in the nail to relieve pressure. “The pain made me sick to my stomach,” Roe said later, “but good thing it wasn’t my pitching hand.”

His slow stuff and his remarkable control stopped the Yankees on six hits. Roe did not walk a man. The Dodgers won, 1 to 0.

“You must have had great stuff,” Harold Rosenthal told Roe after the shutout.

“My breaking stuff was better than usual,” Roe said. “My fastball wasn’t hardly no use. I was lucky I had my forkball working good.”

“Forkball?” Rosenthal said. He had covered the team for two years. “I never knew you threw a forkball.”

“Sure do,” Roe said. “I struck out DiMaggio with my forkball.”

Like the spitter, a forkball drops. “He was telling me in his country-slick way that his spitball was working well,” Rosenthal said afterwards. “But he was too slick for all us city guys, including me, including Joe DiMaggio.”

After back to back 1 to 0 games, the Series was tied.

New York Telephone Company operators reported the precise time to any caller dialing Meridian 7-1212. During the Series, the company also provided the World Series score throughout the afternoon to callers dialing the time number. The volume of calls for scores, the company reported, reached 224,526 on the afternoon of October 6. The shutout Series, Reynolds and Raschi, Newcombe and Roe, held New York, and the nation, in thrall.

Ralph Branca was twenty-three. He had started twenty-seven times that season and won thirteen, including every decision at Ebbets Field. Shotton chose him to start game three, on Friday afternoon in Brooklyn.

Stengel went with Tommy Byrne, a strong left-handed pitcher who walked more batters than anyone else in the American League. The Dodgers, a solid right-hand-hitting lineup, seemed good bets to win on the dyed green grass of home. But Branca was on the way to constructing that strange and troubling career. Too nice and too softly sensitive, some say until this day, to win big games in the caldron that was the major leagues around New York during the Era.

Branca pitched two perfect innings. Then in the third he walked Cliff Mapes, a journeyman outfielder who didn’t hit much. (Mapes’s lifetime Series record: one hit in fourteen turns at bat.) You don’t want to walk the first man to come to bat in an inning; you particularly don’t want to walk him if he doesn’t hit much. Branca struck out Jerry Coleman, but Tommy Byrne bounced a single to center and Mapes went to third. Phil Rizzuto scored him with a fly to right. “Damn,” Pee Wee Reese remembers thinking. “They haven’t hit a ball solid and we’re losing.”

Reese straightened that out soon enough. He slammed a home run into the lower stands in left, tying the score. Byrne gave up a single and, with one out, walked Robinson and Hodges, loading the bases. Joe Page had pitched the ninth inning for Stengel the day before. Page chiefly worked at short relief, two or three innings at a time. But here Stengel saw — he was phenomenal at this perception — the ballgame at an absolutely critical point. What might happen in the seventh or eight inning wouldn’t matter if the Yankees lost the ballgame in the fourth.

The Dodger hitter was Luis Olmo, a right-hand-hitting backup outfielder who had batted . 305. Stengel sent for Page, bringing in a left-handed relief pitcher to face the right-handed batter. Olmo fouled out. “Stengel,” someone said, “knows things that nobody else does.” Duke Snider bounced out. The game remained tied.

Gene Woodling had doubled for the Yankees in the top of the fourth, but after that Branca retired fourteen consecutive hitters. Lefty Joe Page all but matched him. Going into the ninth the game was still tied at one run. Then Branca’s mastery fled.

Robinson’s great stab robbed Henrich of a hit, but Branca walked Yogi Berra. After DiMaggio fouled out, Bobby Brown singled and Branca walked Gene Woodling, loading the bases.

The batter was Cliff Mapes. Clyde Sukeforth, the Brooklyn pitching coach, walked to the mound. “Get ahead of him,” Sukeforth said. “You’ve got great stuff. Just throw it in there.” Branca nodded. Sukeforth returned to the dugout. Suddenly as Branca was about to pitch, Stengel called time. As Red Smith wrote, “Field Marshal Casey von Stengel called for Johnny Mize, who has devoted a long and blameless life to the abuse of National League pitchers.” Long John Mize, of Demorest, Georgia, was a powerful left-hand-hitting slugger who had led the National League in home runs four times, twice with the Cardinals and twice with the Giants, and played in the All-Star Game nine times. High cheekbones gave him a feline look; Long John was the Big Cat.

“Cat was a helluva hitter,” Leo Durocher recalled, “but was he my kinda player? Not by 1949. Not anymore. They said Mize was strong as a tank, but by ‘49 he couldn’t move. On the bases he was a tank, all right, a stalled tank. At first base, he covered a dime on a good day. So when Horace Stoneham said he could get rid of him, I said, go right ahead. We got some young guys who move better than him.”

Under baseball rules, before selling Mize to the Yankees in an interleague transaction, the Giants had to offer him to every team in the National League. No one bid for the slugger, then thirty-six years old. George Weiss brought Mize from Manhattan to the Bronx for $40,000 on August 22.

Now in October the Dodger brain trust had primed Branca to pitch to Cliff Mapes. But here came Mize, six foot two, 220 pounds, all slugger. “I knew the bases were loaded,” Mize said. “I knew the score. Even if the kid walked me, it would force in a run.”

Clyde Sukeforth did not make a second trip to the mound. Branca fell behind Mize, two balls and one strike, and then threw a fastball that Mize said “looked big and fat.

“When I hit it, I didn’t know right off whether it was going to hit the right field screen or carry over it into the street there. I didn’t care. I just knew that nobody was going to catch the ball.”

The baseball struck the screen and scored two runs. Carl Furillo played the carom perfectly, holding Mize to a single, a rocketing 330-foot line-drive single. Still, two runs scored.

Jack Banta replaced Branca. Jerry Coleman singled in another run. The Yankees led by three.

The Dodgers didn’t quit; they were a gritty team. Luis Olmo and Roy Campanella hit home runs off Joe Page in the bottom of the ninth. Stengel tramped out to talk to Page. “Don’t hurry,” he said. “You’ll get him.” With two out, Joe Page had just enough left to overpower pinch hitter Bruce Edwards with a fastball that was called strike three. The Yankees won by a single run, 4 to 3. This tense and exciting game, on a gray day in Brooklyn, effectively settled the 1949 World Series.

“Damn. It had to be a Giant [Mize] to do it,” Burt Shotton said loudly in the Dodger dressing room afterwards, where one reporter said “the silence was so heavy it seemed to make even breathing difficult.”

Long-faced Ralph Branca sat in front of his locker. “One out away. One out away,” he mumbled. He had thrown Mize a good high inside fastball, he said. “I had good stuff. I got it in there. It just got hit.”

Cheerful and naked in the visiting clubhouse, Stengel said, “They got to win three out of four to beat us now. I don’t think they can do that.” The nude manager twisted his face into an enormous wink.

“Mize,” Rud Rennie said, trying to grasp Stengel’s thinking. “What made you decide to pinch hit Mize?”

“They tell me he always hit Branca hard,” Stengel said, “which I didn’t actually see because I wasn’t in the other league, but what I do know is that he is one of the great hitters in baseball and in that spot, tie in the ninth in the World Series, I want to have one of the great hitters in baseball at the plate for my team.”

Upstairs in the press box, Red Smith observed to Grantland Rice that Branca had walked four batters and three scored.

“Jack London ought to be covering this ballgame,” Rice replied. “Title it The Call of the Wild.”

“Steinbeck, Granny,” Smith said. “I’d go with Steinbeck.”

“Why is that, Red?”

Smith said, “Of Mize and Men.”

Smith’s great rival Jimmy Cannon curled over a Remington typewriter, trying to describe Casey Stengel’s craggy face. “Stengel had the look,” Cannon wrote, “of an eagle that had just flown through a sleet storm.”

To some of us, the press box during the Era was as exciting as the ballfield.*

Desperate, Shotton called on Don Newcombe to start with two days’ rest. Stengel tapped Edmund Walter Lopatynski, a stocky, genial, left-handed New Yorker who worked under the name of Ed Lopat and specialized in changing speeds. Newcombe threw three good innings. Then the Yankees knocked him out and continued pounding old Joe Hatten until they had moved ahead, 6 to 0, after five innings. The Dodgers chipped away at Lopat for single after single, seven sixth-inning singles in all, until Stengel called on Allie Reynolds to relieve. Like Newcombe, Reynolds was working on two days’ rest. Unlike Newcombe, he was not asked to go nine tough innings.

“Throw as hard as you can for as long as you can,” Stengel told him. Reynolds ended the long inning by striking out pinch hitter Spider Jorgensen. Then he blazed past the Dodgers, retiring nine in a row across the last three innings. The Yankees won the ballgame, 6 to 4.

Branch Rickey, integrator of baseball, empire builder in St. Louis and Brooklyn, elected to take over managing a team, that was losing the World Series three games to one. “I want Roe to pitch the fifth game,” he told Shotton.

“He’s a skinny guy to start with two days’ rest,” Shotton said. “Besides, he tells me his finger hurts real bad.”

“That’s on his right hand. Send him to my office immediately.”

Gangly Preacher Roe, in a suit and tie, walked into an anteroom at Ebbets Field and showed a swollen, misshaped finger to Branch Rickey. “Ah cain’t get my glove over that finger,” Roe announced.

“You could if you wanted to,” Rickey said. “This is the World Series. The team needs you.”

“I want to help,” Roe said, “but Ah cain’t pitch without a glove and with all this pain.”

“It wouldn’t be that Ebbets Field is a small ballpark and you don’t want to face those Yankee hitters here?”

Roe simply stared.

“It wouldn’t be that you’re afraid? I don’t want to think it is that,” Rickey said.

“Ah cain’t pitch with this finger, Mr. Rickey, in Brooklyn or anywhere else.”

Rickey glared at Roe in fury. He said a single word. “Coward.”

The Dodgers started Rex Barney in the fifth game. Barney was wild, fast, erratic. Concluding that Barney’s wildness was a problem of attitude more than coordination, Rickey had ordered him to visit a psychiatrist in Brooklyn.

A highly nervous but possibly well adjusted Barney lasted two innings. Stengel started Raschi and relieved with Page. The Yankees won the game, 10 to 6, and the World Series four games to one. Johnny Mize had a sore right shoulder. DiMaggio was still recovering from his respiratory infection. Yogi Berra had a badly swollen thumb. Tommy Henrich’s back was raging.

In defeat Dodger fans cited Roe’s finger and Carl Furillo’s groin. “Not everybody on either side was healthy,” Rud Rennie wrote, “but the fair conclusion is that the Yankees outplayed the Dodgers and outgamed them, as well.”

Rickey said, “We didn’t go into the Series at our peak. I’m concerned now with building a pitching staff to beat the Yankees.” He never would. For the rest of his time in Brooklyn, Rickey pitted himself against Walter Francis O’Malley in a battle beyond the ballfields for control of the Dodger franchise.

Stengel had given the world a lesson in modern managing. He’d won the Series with three pitchers, Reynolds, Raschi, and Page, plus a pinch hitter who was supposed to be washed up and platoon players who starred — Gene Woodling and Bobby Brown. In Stengel’s first triumphant Yankee series, Joe Dimaggio batted .111.

Not everyone immediately recognized the range of Stengel’s gifts, but baseball writers polled by the Associated Press did vote him manager of the year, with 101 votes out of a possible 116.

“I am, uh, pleased to accept this award from you gentlemen,” Stengel told the press, “and am fortunate to have it as I have been fortunate to be able to make a career in baseball, which is important, because as you know, not many people would actually have put their trust in a left-handed dentist.”

He was still funny, but after 1949 no one again called Stengel a clown.

*Years afterwards he traveled to Vietnam with Pete Rose on a trip to cheer up servicemen. The publicity man for the trip, Robert O. Fishel, said, “I had to pack and unpack for DiMaggio every day. He said he didn’t know how to pack a suitcase. All his life he’d gotten somebody to pack and unpack for him.”

*DiMaggio told these things to Marshall Smith, the sports editor of Life magazine, later in the 1949 season. Still worried about money, he sold his byline to Life for $5,000.

*Rosenthal says that Shotton, like numbers of old baseball men, disliked Jews. “When I finally stood up to him and told him to stop mocking my name, he shouted at me, ‘Okay, Rosenberg.’ After that, I never again mentioned Shotton’s name in the Herald Tribune. I’d write ‘the Dodger manager’ but not his name. A disservice to readers, perhaps, but that was how I felt.”

*At twenty-two, I weighed 138 pounds. With great geniality, Furillo nicknamed me “Meat.” I thought the nickname Skoonj had a distressing racial tinge, rather like addressing a Jew as “Matzo-ball.” Furillo called me Meat. I called him Carl. The astounding head-squeezing episode with Leo Durocher occurred, as we shall see, in 1953.

*After retiring following the 1954 season, Roe sold an article to Sports Illustrated which editors titled “The Outlawed Spitball Was My Money Pitch.” Roe reported that Beech-Nut chewing gum provided ideal saliva and demonstrated in a series of posed photographs how he “loaded” the ball. He later regretted collaborating on the article and made certain sounds of recantation. His real regret may be that he gave the magazine a sensational (and factual) article for a fee of only $2,000.

*Alistair Cooke covered game one of this Series for the Manchester Guardian. “Baseball,” Cooke wrote, “is an industrial development of rounders [an English game enjoying great popularity with schoolgirls]. The object is to hit the ball and run all around the bases and back to the wicket. Altogether, 54 batsmen came to the wicket yesterday [in Allie Reynolds’s a to o game]. Fifty three of them made a duck [failed to score].”