THE OLD BASEBALL SCOUT comes down to us as a wise codger. His manner is gruff, his face is grizzled, and his car, in the old baseball movies, is a 1924 Model A, the one Henry Ford said you could get in any color you wanted, so long as the color you wanted was black.
The old scout doesn’t have much money. Never has. Although he’ll take a drink, he’s blind to women. The old scout’s life is a celibate journey, never brightened or distracted by a pretty smile, in search of the Rookie from Olympus.
In legend, the climax always is the same. Above the steaming radiator of his faltering car, the old scout suddenly perceives a ball in flight. It seems to be leaving village, county, state. Then he sees the kid who hit it.
Music pipes in here, a horn call commanding our attention.
The old scout has found his Rookie from Olympus. And, because he is an old scout, and wondrous wise, he knows at once what he has discovered.
The horn music fades. The rookie trots into the picture.
“Say, son,” the old scout says, in his gruff and kindly way, “have you ever heard of the. . .
major. . .
leagues?”
Three Olympian prospects who strode to glorious maturity during the Era were Willie, Mickey, and the Duke. Mays, Mantle, Snider; Giant, Yankee, Dodger; speed, power, grace, and youth, as well.
The Dodgers signed Snider out of Compton High School, in Greater Los Angeles, and brought him east to Bear Mountain, New York, where the team gathered for spring training in 1944. Ballclubs had to abandon spring training in the South during World War II, when the military commandeered the country’s rolling stock.) “Was I green?” Snider says. “It was late February and I didn’t bring a topcoat. Being a California kid, I didn’t own a topcoat.”
“Did you buy one in New York?”
“The Dodgers only gave me a bonus of $750,” Snider said, “and my family needed the money. No, I didn’t buy a topcoat. I was just cold a lot.”
After watching Snider exercise within the army fieldhouse at West Point, the Dodgers sent him to Newport News, in the Piedmont League, the bottom of the minors. There, at the age of seventeen, Snider batted .294.
The old scout in charge was one Jake Pitler, out of Olean, New York, later coach and caddy to the gabby Brooklyn manager Charlie Dressen. Old Scout Pitler filed his Snider report on September 2, 1944. His enthusiam was restrained.
“Well-built and moves good,” Pitler wrote. “Has lots of ability, but must improve on hitting curve ball.”
Pitler rated Snider’s outfield throwing as “very good,” an A minus. But in other categories — hitting, power, running, speed, and fielding — Pitler rated Snider only as “good,” no more than a straight B. Snider had a magnificent throwing arm. He was certainly among the ten best center fielders of modern times. He had astounding power. Pitler saw none of these things. Indeed, he reported that Snider “throws right, bats right.” Snider hit 418 major league home runs batting left-handed. He had batted left-handed from boyhood days.
Wise Old Scout Jake Pitler did not seem to have known what he had come upon in Snider. Later, after a hitch in service, Snider moved up quickly. By 1950, he led the National League in hits.
“He’s a great kid,” Old Scout Pitler said, reemerging as a Dodger coach the following spring.
By then everybody knew Duke was a great kid. Pitler’s onscene 1944 scouting report draws an F.*
Tom Greenwade, an old Yankee scout, is credited with having discovered Mickey Mantle, one early summer night in 1948, when he stopped off to watch a team of teenagers play a ballgame at Baxter Springs, Kansas. Greenwade dined out for years on Mantle stories. But there was little shock of recognition when Greenwade first saw Mantle, and precious little hurry to sign the young man.
Mickey’s father, Elvin “Mutt” Mantle, worked in lead and zinc mines in the northeastern corner of Oklahoma, literally scratching a living out of unyielding earth. He taught his son switch hitting, drilled the boy at shortstop, and once, about the time Snider was moving up through the minor leagues, drove all the way to St. Louis to ask the Browns to give Mickey a tryout. Sturdy Mutt Mantle had press clippings in his hand and his son in tow. The Browns, baseball’s weakest franchise, were not interested.
Later a St. Louis Cardinal scout named Runt Marr called on the Mantle home in the town of Commerce, Oklahoma. “I got to do a little more work, folks,” Runt Marr said, “but promise me this: Mickey won’t sign with another club until you give me a chance to make an offer.” That was in 1948. “I’m still waiting to hear from Runt,” Mantle said in 1992.
The Browns refused to discover Mickey Mantle. The Cardinals discovered him, then never made an offer. Tom Greenwade, who finally did sign Mantle, moved, as the southern saying is, slow as molasses in winter.
On the night in 1948 that Greenwade saw the Baxter Springs Whiz Kids, Mantle hit two home runs right-handed and another home run left-handed.
The exact date is lost. The precise postgame conversation is not. “Son,” Old Scout Greenwade said, “do you think you’d like to play for the Yankees?”
Mantle was not much at eloquence. His clear blue eyes looked right at Greenwade. “Shit, yeah,” he said.
Mantle was still a junior at Commerce High. The rules of organized baseball decreed that scouts could not sign boys until they had graduated or, since some players fell before algebra and history, the class with which they had entered high school graduated. Greenwade moved on, without further romancing Mantle. It was ten months before Mantle saw Greenwade again.
“That was my high school graduation day,” Mantle says. “Tom Greenwade talked to the principal. He wanted to see me play some more. He said could I skip the graduation ceremonies that night so I could play another game for the Baxter Whiz Kids. When Greenwade told the principal he was a Yankee scout, the principal said sure, whatever he wanted. The principal got real excited meeting a big league scout. I don’t remember being that excited myself. We didn’t have a television but we had a radio and I used to listen to the broadcasts from St. Louis. The best games were National League, the Dodgers and the Cardinals. My two idols were Stan Musial and Pee Wee Reese.* I wasn’t that much turned on by the Yankees. But they were the only big league team that wanted me.”
Greenwade’s first offer was a $500 bonus.
“My boy can do better than that staying here playing semipro,” Mutt Mantle said.
After considerable haggling, Greenwade agreed to make the bonus $1,500. Since that was the only offer, Mantle took it.
How, then, to rate Old Scout Tom Greenwade’s pursuit and evaluation of Mantle? Probably a B minus. In semipro ball, Mantle was playing shortstop, the wrong position, but speed and strength and power, the matchless switch-hitting power, must have been visible. Greenwade was less excited than he should have been. Indeed, if the forgotten Cardinal scout, Runt Marr, had been more alert, Greenwade would not have gotten to sign Mantle at all.*
Mantle went to play in Independence, Kansas, where he batted .313. The next year, 1950, he batted .383 at Joplin, Missouri. The following spring, Stengel saw him.
Casey, a better old scout than Hollywood scriptwriters could imagine, knew just what he was looking at right away. “You gonna send that flashy kid to Kansas City, Case?” a reporter asked in 1951, when Mantle was nineteen.
“I think,” Stengel answered, “it might be safer for the boy if he spent the summer up in New York City with me.”
The first pro baseball man to observe Willie Mays was Willie’s father, who played with Negro teams around Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1920s and ‘30s. The father, named William Howard after Taft, who was president when he was born, was fast and lithe. His baseball nickname was “Kitty-Kat” Mays.
I met Kitty-Kat late in the 1960s, after he had left the South and gone to work in Harlem as a supermarket checkout clerk. He was chubby by then, with a significant belly. “Sure,” Kitty-Kat Mays told me in a dugout at Shea Stadium, “I’ll be glad to tell you bout my boy, Willie. Ask anything you want.”
“When, sir, did you first begin to think your son was going to become a great ballplayer?”
Kitty-Kat offered a quick smile. “The neighborhood where we all lived” — Willie’s parents had been divorced — “had this ballfield, and when Willie was eight years old, he was so good he had to play with older kids.”
“I mean even before that, if possible.”
“Well, I’ll tell you a truth I ain’t never told no one,” Kitty-Kat said, slowly and seriously. “I knew he was gawna be special soon as he started walking, right around the time he got to be one year old. He’s one year old and I bought him a big round ball. Willie would hold that big round ball and bounce and chase it. If it ever got away from him, he’d start to cry.
“You couldn’t believe how good Willie was, one year old, chasing down that big round ball. Little bit of a thing, but even then his hands were sure and strong.
“I’m telling you the truth. Right then, when he was one year one, I knew he’d be a great one.”
It was sixteen or seventeen years before Mr. Mays’s magnificently prescient scouting report drew outside confirmation. Young Willie had started playing for the Birmingham Black Barons, which is where the Yankees spurned him out of bigotry. The Boston Red Sox also knew about Mays and, like the Yankees, went through the motions of scouting him. They declined to make an offer. (No black played for the Red Sox until 1959.) Finally, the Dodgers knew about Mays as well. There is no written evidence (this is not the sort of thing people put on memo pads), but by 1949 the Dodgers were backing away from further good black prospects. With Robinson, Campanella, and Newcombe already signed, Rickey elected to slow down integration, even if it meant losing good ballplayers. He thought three blacks in a starting lineup of nine was a good balance. “It would not have been prudent,” he remarked privately years later, “to have had too many Negroes on any one club.”
The road was open for the Giants. “We decided we were going to integrate in 1948 or ‘49,” Chub Feeney says, “so we were looking at the black leagues pretty carefully. We sent one of our scouts, Ed Montague, who was white by the way, down to Birmingham to look at a first baseman named Alonzo Perry. He wasn’t impressed by Perry, but he burned up the telephone lines about a kid named Willie Mays. Quick bat. Great hands. Terrific speed.
“You know, Willie’s parents split when Willie was young and the main person in Willie’s life was his Aunt Sarah. As I understand it, after the divorce he went and lived with her.
“Aunt Sarah was a pretty good agent. She said we could have Willie, all right, but we’d have to pay a bonus. Five thousand dollars. That’s what, fifty thousand dollars today? And mind you this is in an Alabama town that’s so poor they haven’t been able to pave the streets.
“Eddie Montague argued a little with Aunt Sarah, but his heart wasn’t in it. All Eddie wanted to do was sign the kid.
“So we came up with the $5,000 bonus and no, don’t ask me, I have no idea whether Aunt Sarah charged Willie a commission.”
The Giants dispatched Mays to their farm team at Trenton, class B in the old minor league classifications. These ran from Triple A down to D. Trenton was four rungs from the top, a lower level of baseball, Mays says, than he had been playing for the Birmingham Black Barons. “I had to hit against Satchel Paige for Birmingham. There wasn’t nobody, no way, near Satchel Paige playing baseball down in class B.” (Mays batted against Paige in only one game in Negro ball. He remembers it. He went one for two.)
Mays hit .353 at Trenton, but the assessment of manager Frank “Chick” Genovese remained conservative. Genovese evaluated Mays’s throwing arm at 4, the highest number in the Giant rating system. But Genovese gave Mays only a 3 in power, a 3 in hitting, a 3 in running, and a 3 in fielding. (He actually gave the greatest outfielder in history a B in fielding!)
It was not until a year later, 1951, that a stocky, weary old catcher out of Savannah, Tennessee, named John Herman “Hank” DeBerry filed a scouting report that is more than a report. Old Hank DeBerry wrote a scouting poem.
In thirty-five games that season at Triple A Minneapolis, Willie Mays would bat .477. Hank DeBerry watched Mays play minor league ball from May 6 through May 10. This is what he sent to the Giant offices, overlooking Bryant Park on 42nd Street in New York City:
“Sensational.
“The outstanding player on the club.
“He’s now on the best hitting streak imaginable.
“He hits all pitches. He hits to all fields.
“Everything he does is sensational.
“He runs and throws with the best.
“He makes the most spectacular catches.
“He slides hard. He plays hard.
“The Louisville pitchers knocked him down plenty. It had no effect on him at all.
“He’s as popular with local fans as can be — a real favorite.
“This player is the best prospect in America.
“It was a banner day for the Giants when this boy was signed.”
On September 10, 1951, the Giants were closing in on the Dodgers. After a torporific start, the team had fallen thirteen games behind. But with Mays in center field, the team awakened. By September 10, the Dodger lead was less than six games. That day in Savannah, Tennessee, a heart attack killed the old scout Hank DeBerry.
I like to think that before he died, when he gazed at Willie Mays, Hank DeBerry saw his promised land.
In 1950, when Mays was dominating in Trenton, Mantle was tiring outfielders in Joplin, and Snider was becoming a major league star, the Yankees called up a slim, sandy-haired lefthanded pitcher out of the borough of Queens, a bartender’s son who by his own account “was all bright and street smart. I knew my way around.” Rookie Whitey Ford would win nine games and lose only one that season and the Yankees needed just about every victory. Quite suddenly old 100-proof Joe Page was finished at the age of thirty-two. Page lost seven games in relief and his earned run average jumped to a sorry 5.04. The booze turned his arm to rust all at once.
Around the American League fans groused about the Yankees’ damnable good luck. “Just when that lefty Joe Page is drinking himself out of the league, they come up with this slick kid left-hander.” And, of course, luck had nothing to do with the Yankees’ getting Ford, who, sportswriters later wrote, was really a Cadillac pitcher.
“I always loved to play ball,” Ford remembers. “I just loved it. When I was five years old, I used to play with a broom handle and a red rubber Spalding ball. I played in high school, Manhattan School of Aviation Trades, mostly first base. Then I went to a tryout at Yankee Stadium. I’m five foot, eight inches tall and they figure I’m too small for a first baseman. But Paul Krichell, the scout, sees me throwing in infield practice and says I ought to think of switching and becoming a pitcher. I had a good arm. Krichell gave me tips on throwing the curve. The good curve ball just came to me real easy.”
Ford became a New York City sandlot pitching star. The Red Sox and the Giants grew interested but hesitated. The kid still looked awfully small. The Yankees signed Ford in September 1947 for a $7,000 bonus, which they split into two equal payments. Ford cashed the first check, taking seventy $50 bills, and walked to Times Square. There he bought his parents a radio-phonograph combination priced at $175.
“I was wearing dungarees and a T-shirt and when I whipped out my roll, thirty-five hundred dollars in fifties, the salesclerk called the police.
“A cop grabs me and says, ‘Where did you steal this money, kid?’ After a while, I got them to call my mother, and she explained that the cash was really mine. I didn’t get arrested buying a present for my parents, but the cops sure spoiled my plans. I meant the radio-phonograph to be a surprise.”
Three seasons later, in 1950, Ford became a Yankee star. The team pumped his dimensions on its roster sheet, claiming he stood five feet ten and weighed 180, exaggerating by two inches and fifteen pounds. Hype, to be sure, but there was no luck in the Yankees’ landing Ford, no luck at all. The Yankees had him switch from first base to the mound, taught him the curve ball, tracked his progress with great care, and then outbid two other wealthy teams to sign him. (Scout Krichell gets an A.)
The 1950 Yankees finished three games ahead of the Detroit Tigers, who were bunched with Boston and an improving Cleveland team. Since Ford saved one game, in addition to the nine victories, he had a major hand in ten games the Yankees won. Older chaps named DiMaggio and Mize helped with good home run years, but without ten big victories from twenty-four-year-old Edward Charles Ford, Field Marshal von Stengel could not have won his second straight pennant.
In 1950 the Giants, with two blacks in the line-up, had their best season in eight years, finishing third. Most regarded the Dodgers — Robinson, Reese, Campanella, Snider, just to mention future Hall of Fame players in the Brooklyn lineup — as the strongest team in the National League. But Burt Shotton could not fire up the club, which dawdled about in third place as late as September 19, nine games behind a fast, young Philadelphia squad, nicknamed the Whiz Kids and managed by a gentle, fatherly character called Eddie Sawyer. The Phillies were still all white, but their days of spewing apartheid garbage were done.
Through late September, the Dodgers closed like thunder, winning thirteen out of sixteen games. The Whiz Kids lost Curt Simmons, a wonderfully fast left-handed pitcher, to the military. Injuries and pressure took tolls. While the Dodgers were, in Red Barber’s recurrent phrase, “tearin’ up the ol’ pea patch,” the Phillies were losing nine out of twelve. In another recurrent phrase, sportswriters took to saying “The Whiz Kids are looking like the Fizz Kids.”
On Sunday, October 1, 1950, the last day of the regular season, the Phillies led the Dodgers by a single game. The drama of things working with a vivid flair, the Phils would have to play their final regular season game at Ebbets Field, and on a curiously superheated autumn afternoon. The temperature climbed to 88 degrees and Red Smith announced that pulses ran rapidly “in the old Flatbush ballyard. A Dodger victory would force a play-off between a spurting Brooklyn ballclub and the Phading Phils. Few doubted who would then speed away with the pennant.”
A magnificent game developed with intensity, comic relief, and unrelenting excitement. Indeed, this would be yet another of what magazine editors like to call the Greatest Ballgame Ever Played. Some in Philadelphia still believe it really was.
Shotton started Mighty Don Newcombe, out of Madison, New Jersey, six foot four and 220 pounds, the first successful black pitcher in the major leagues.* Big Newk, the players said, could throw through a damn brick wall. Sawyer countered with sturdy six-foot Robin Roberts, just two years out of college but already in full stride toward a career that won him election to the Hall of Fame. Not only could these right-handers throw very hard; each had control. Fast balls high and tight, hopping and buzzing up toward the letters. Sharp, low curve balls cutting the black outer marker of home plate. In Brooklyn, this day was particularly warm for hitters.
The seating capacity of Ebbets Field varied over its forty-seven-year life. In 1950 the park seated 32,111. Somehow on this October day a crowd of 35,073, almost 3,000 above capacity, paid its way into the old arched ballpark. People stood behind seats and sat in the aisles and climbed girders and settled into uncomfortable iron nests. Crowds milled outside on Sullivan Place and Bedford Avenue. A swarm stormed the roof of a six-story apartment building at 250 Montgomery Avenue. From that roof, you could see the infield and the mound, much of right and center field, none of left. Wasn’t this ballgame televised? Indeed it was, on channel 9. But in 1950, people preferred to see baseball live, live and visceral and bloody and real, no matter how distant or perilous the perch.
“General admission fans,” Harold Rosenthal reported in the Herald Tribune, “began collecting outside the Ebbets Field gates at midnight. “Police and fire officials estimate that by game time, as many people had been turned away as gained admission.”
“I remember very clearly,” Rosenthal said forty-two years later, “that I took the BMT subway to the ballpark and I got out at the Prospect Park station. There was a terrific crowd in the streets and I had to push a little. But it was a genial crowd, all upbeat. ‘We can do it,’ people were saying. ‘We’ve come from way back and we can do it.’ Remember, an upbeat 1950 Brooklyn crowd was nothing alarming, nothing like an angry urban crowd today.”
The two right-handers dominated through five innings, with Roberts a shade more imposing. Nobody scored. Eddie Waitkus, now in a remission from tragedy, led off the sixth for Philadelphia with a sharp grounder to the right of first baseman Gil Hodges, who made a lunging snare. Then Hodges tossed to Newcombe covering first base for the out. Richie Ashburn, a fine center fielder who lived to become a New York Met a generation later, hit a replica of Waitkus’s smash. Another out, Hodges to Newcombe. Dick Sisler, on the biggest day of his life, smoked a single to right. Del Ennis, a strong right-handed slugger, followed with a short fly ball into right center. Duke Snider, playing Ennis to pull the ball into left center, couldn’t race in fast enough. Nor could Carl Furillo, playing a deep right. Jackie Robinson at second base had a chance to make the play but broke slowly. The short fly dropped beyond Robinson for a base hit. Then Willie “Puddin’ Head” Jones, a strong country boy from South Carolina, lined a Newcombe fastball cleanly into left field and Sisler ran home with a Philadelphia run.
Pee Wee Reese, the Dodger captain, batted .260 in 1950, but Reese was the best .260 clutch hitter on the planet. With two out in the sixth inning, Reese cracked an outside fastball high and deep to right.
The right field wall in Brooklyn angled back for about eight feet, then rose vertically to a point fifteen feet high, where it was topped by a stiff screen that went forty feet into the air. Right field in Brooklyn wasn’t deep — 297 feet down the line and 344 to right center — but it was high. Reese’s drive struck just at a point where the screen rose from the fence. And there, for the only time in Ebbets Field history, the baseball stuck. It neither bounced off the screen nor dribbled down the fence. The baseball stuck, wedged between fence and screen.
Reese sped around the bases.
“Slow down,” Frank Dascoli, the second base umpire, shouted. “Slow down, Pee Wee. The ball is stuck.”
Reese did not slow down. (“I knew the ground rules,” he says. “If that ball started rolling down the right field wall, it was in play.”) He rimmed the bases at top speed, turning his head two or three times to see the baseball but never slowing, sprinting all out until he crossed home plate with the tying run.
No one had ever seen a ball stuck on the wall before. No one would ever see a ball stuck there again. “The Dodgers,” growled Red Smith, who always rooted against them, “have adopted germ warfare.”
A boy of twelve or fourteen crawled out along the top of the right field wall between innings and retrieved the baseball. Scrambling back, he tossed it to a cohort in the crowd. Before ballpark police could react, boy, ball, and cohort escaped into a keyhole of history.
The game itself remained tied into the last of the ninth inning. The Dodgers had gotten only four hits; Reese had two of them. Cal Abrams — Calvin Ross Abrams, born in Philadelphia and raised in Brooklyn — was a left-handed, opposite-field hitter. He led off the Dodger ninth by drawing a walk on a three and two pitch. Reese tried to sacrifice Abrams to second but fouled off two bunt attempts. Then he lined a single to left center, his third hit. The Dodgers had men on first and second with nobody out.
The hitter was Duke Snider, a poor bunter. But Richie Ashburn in center field suspected the bunt anyway, at least on the first pitch. He moved in, playing more shallow than he normally played Snider, to back up the infield in the event of a bunt and a subsequent throw to second base.
Snider cracked Roberts’s first pitch on a hard low line into center. The ball bounced. The Brooklyn crowd made a great triumphant sound. Surely Abrams would score the winning run. But quick Richie Ashburn raced in from his shallow post, scooped the ball, and fired it toward catcher Stan Lopata. Milton Stock, the Dodger third base coach, waved Abrams home. The throw was perfect and beat Abrams by fifteen feet. Lopata, a six-foot, two-inch 210-pounder, set his body and blocked the plate. Abrams ran into the tag gently, like a pacifist.
The Dodgers were a good base-running team. Reese reached third and Snider took second on the play at home. Two men on for Brooklyn, only one out, and Jackie Robinson, the best batter in the league that year (after Stan Musial) stepping in to hit. Roberts walked Robinson deliberately, a move that both took the bat out of Robinson’s powerful hands and set up a potential double play.
Bases loaded now. Still one out. Tie game. Roberts jammed Carl Furillo with a fastball and Furillo swung weakly and lifted a low pop foul to Eddie Waitkus. Two out. Then Gil Hodges hit a long fly ball to right center that Ennis caught. The Brooklyn flurry was over. The game went into the tenth inning.
Roberts bounced a ground single up the middle. Waitkus lifted a pop fly single to center. Ashburn bunted, but Newcombe threw to Billy Cox at third base, forcing Roberts. Newcombe got two strikes on Dick Sisler, wasted a pitch high, and then tried to throw an outside fastball past the hitter. Sisler batted left. He slapped the fastball into left field where it carried 350 feet, into the first row of box seats in the lower deck.
Home run. 4 to 1, Phillies.
The Dodgers went out in order in the bottom of the tenth. The Phillies had won their first pennant since 1915. Roberts’s victory was his twentieth, the first Philadelphia pitcher to win twenty since Grover Cleveland Alexander had a great year in 1917.
October 2, 1950, was an unsettling day in Brooklyn and beyond. The Korean War, which had quieted, flared into fresh violence on that day when South Korean troops rolled north across the 38th parallel and General Douglas MacArthur called upon the North Korean army to surrender “and avoid useless shedding of blood and destruction of property.” MacArthur’s arrogance would wane in November when the Chinese Communists intervened with a million foot soldiers and put his armies to rout. President Truman removed MacArthur from command the following April and the general made his famous farewell speech to Congress. (“Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.”)
MacArthur settled in Manhattan after that and became a frequent visitor to Ebbets Field. The American Caesar, as William Manchester called him, turned out to be an enthusiastic Dodger fan.
Walter O’Malley was flattered to have the general as a guest, but in time MacArthur annoyed the sportswriters. The general insisted on riding the press elevator to O’Malley’s private box but would not enter an elevator occupied by reporters. An aide-de-camp imperiously cleared out all journalists before the general would step aboard.
“What are we, cholera?” Dick Young wanted to know.
Having exhausted their ace in the great Sunday victory, the Phillies did not start Robin Roberts against the Yankees on Wednesday, October 4, when the World Series began in Philadelphia. Instead, Eddie Sawyer worked a rugged right-hander from upstate New York, Casimir James Konstanty, who answered to Jim. Konstanty threw with reasonable speed; his “out” pitch was a palm ball, which dipped sharply as it approached home plate, much like the popular split-fingered delivery of recent years. He had appeared in seventy-four games that year, winning sixteen and saving twenty-two, but he had not started any at all. Konstanty was a relief pitcher. Before the 1950 Series, he had not started a ballgame since 1946.
He pitched with surprising endurance, giving up only a single run. But Vic Raschi pitched a two-hitter and the Yankees won, 1 to 0, the second straight October in which they opened the Series with a 1 to 0 victory.
Roberts returned to work on Thursday and pitched another fine game. Allie Reynolds was just a little finer. Joe DiMaggio hit a homer in the tenth inning and the Yankees won this one, 2 to 1. “Yes, sir,” Stengel told the swarming reporters at Shibe Park, “them Philadelphias is a very fine team, make no mistake. It is difficult to beat them, which is why it took us an extra inning today.”
Back at the Stadium next afternoon the Yankees won the third game 3 to 2, scoring the winning run with two out in the ninth on successive singles by Gene Woodling, Phil Rizzuto, and Jerry Coleman. Never had there been three such close games at the start of a World Series. “The Phils,” Jimmy Cannon said, “are playing just well enough to lose.”
“After this tense and exciting contest,” Rud Rennie wrote, “manager Eddie Sawyer left the field in a daze. Following three one-run losses, he felt like a man on an operating table, trying to fight the anesthetic.”
“Yes, sir,” manager Stengel said, “the Philadelphias are very difficult to beat, as I have told you. Why today, as you gentlemen saw, my fine team was unable to beat them again until the very last inning we were permitted to play.”
Factors at work this October included toughness, pressure, and the remarkable tenacity of Stengel and his field hands. Those who despised the Yankees — there was no shortage of Yankee haters in the country — railed once more against Yankee luck. But winning close World Series games is not primarily a matter of fortune.
With their third victory, Stengel’s Yankees now had a World Series winning streak of six, three against the Dodgers in ‘49 and three more against the Phillies in ‘50. Across those six games, the Yankees had made only one error. They didn’t give anything away. By contrast, the Phillies actually invited the Yankees back into game three, after taking a 2 to 1 lead.
In the eighth inning, Ken Heintzelman, a thirty-four-year-old left-hander, got two quick outs and walked three Yankees in a row, loading the bases. Sawyer brought in Konstanty to pitch to Bobby Brown, a devastating World Series hitter. Konstanty bothered Brown with the sinking palm ball; Brown stroked a routine grounder to shortstop. Then Granny Hamner having a great Series — he would bat .429 and steal a base — dropped the ball. It was his only error of the Series; the tying run scored.
Is it luck when you score the tying run on three walks and an error? Possibly, although one is reminded of Branch Rickey’s metaphysical pronouncement: “Luck is the residue of design.” The Phillies handed the Yankees a run, but that happens all the time in baseball. The Yankees handed Philadelphia nothing back!
Consider the principal players:
Heintzelman pitching the only World Series game of his life, trying to remain composed at vast, intimidating Yankee Stadium, where he had never pitched before, while a crowd of 64,505 looked on. Heintzelman had never pitched in front of that many people either. He kept his poise for seven and two-thirds innings. Then he cracked.
Young Hamner, a shortstop with great fielding range, had never played in the Stadium either. With bases loaded and two out in a one-run game, he suddenly became unable to pick up a ground ball. Errors under pressure happen often, but the Yankee shortstop, Phil Rizzuto, did not make an error all World Series. Like Reynolds and Raschi and DiMaggio and the rest, Rizzuto had played under World Series pressure before. “It never gets easy,” Rizzuto says. “But you learn how to live with it, block out the crowd and the noise, and you make yourself play not the situation but the grounder.”
Little Phil, white-haired and trim at the age of seventy-six, offers a twinkly smile. “Now you know, huckleberry, what I just told you is easier to talk about than to do.”
Bobby Brown: “As a cardiologist, I’ve had to apply heart massage in an emergency room. Could I keep my patient alive or would I lose him? The stakes are completely different in the World Series, of course, but just in terms of personal pressure, will I succeed or will I fail? . . . On that level the pressure of a life and death emergency, for a conscientious doctor, which I was, and a tight spot in a World Series, for a dedicated ballplayer, which I also was, can be said to be comparable.”
For game four, Stengel could have come back with Raschi, “my finest pitcher to win one game,” but with a lead of three games to none, he could take a bit of a chance. He chose the Astoria rookie. Before Whitey Ford was finished in baseball, he started twenty-two World Series games, more than any other pitcher. (Christy Mathewson and Waite Hoyt, in second place, each started eleven.) Ford leads in Series victories, strikeouts, and also losses, with eight. (Mathewson lost five.)
“I remember when Casey told me I was going to start,” Ford says. “We were way ahead in the Series so I wasn’t too nervous, but I had to run around buying a bunch of tickets for all my relatives and a lot of friends.”
The Yankees scored twice in the first inning and three more times in the sixth. Ford carried a 5 to 0 lead into the ninth inning. The Phillies scuffed him a bit, getting runners on first and third with two out. Then Andy Seminick, the Phillies’ starting catcher, hit a high fly to left field. “It was just a fly ball with two out in the ninth,” Rud Rennie wrote. “It was the end. But it wasn’t the end.”
Gene Woodling had trouble picking up the fly through haze and cigarette smoke and slanting late afternoon sunlight. He finally spotted the baseball, lunged, and dropped it. The Phillies scored two runs. Then Mike Goliat singled, bringing the tying run to the plate.
Stengel tramped to the mound and lifted Ford for Allie Reynolds. “Casey got a lot of booing for taking me out,” Ford says. “‘Let the kid finish. Give him a chance.’ Stuff like that. Hell, half the people booing were my relatives. But I admire Casey for what he did, making the move he thought he should, and the hell with the booing.
“The way Allie Reynolds looked when he come in, with those high Indian cheekbones of his. . . . He was the meanest-looking pitcher I ever saw. Walking off the mound, I was happy about one thing. I wasn’t going to have to hit against Allie Reynolds.”
Reynolds threw three fastballs past Stan Lopata and the 1950 World Series was done. The Yankees and Stengel were establishing baseball dominance without precedent.
“I’m sorry I had to take the young man out,” Stengel said later, “but as I have been telling you, the Philadelphias is hard to defeat, and I am paid by my employers to defeat them, which is why I went for the feller with the big fastball. Have a nice winter.”
THE BROOKLYN FAMILY O’MALLEY, destined to change the face of baseball, crossed paths with my own family long, long ago, in 1937. Viewed from the declining years of this century, the setting was unlikely: an Episcopally oriented grade school, called Froebel Academy, located at the corner of Brooklyn Avenue and Prospect Place, such a conservative institution that in 1936 a straw poll of upper school students showed Alfred M. Landon defeating Franklin Delano Roosevelt by a margin of 10 to 1. (In the November election, Roosevelt won forty-six of the forty-eight states.)
Froebel education was rooted in Anglican traditions: chapel every morning with psalms and hymns and sermonlike talks by the headmaster. Very early, Froebel students were required to memorize the Gettysburg Address and “An Old Athenian Oath” and to sing the Doxology. Most of the student body was staunchly Protestant, but the entry of two Roman Catholic children named O’Malley was accepted easily enough. Shanty Irish would have been unwelcome, but Terry O’Malley and her younger brother Peter were well dressed and generally well behaved. Terry was a spirited tomboy; Peter, tall for his age, bespectacled, serious and skinny, wasn’t much good at sports. In the gossip that buzzed through recess or preceded football practice, I learned that the father was a lawyer, not particularly wealthy, but one who could pay his bills.
At the request of Carlton M. Saunders, M.A., the headmaster, my father took over the Froebel athletic program in 1937, actually coaching football and baseball across many afternoons on the gravelly field that stretched behind the schoolhouse. At the same time, Walter O’Malley moved on to the board of trustees of Froebel, eventually becoming chairman. Neither my father nor O’Malley accepted a fee. My father loved sports and seemed to enjoy coaching us, which, helped by several paid assistants, he did with verve and towering authority. When he said jump, we jumped without comment, except perhaps to say, “How high, sir?” (The noun Coach had not yet become a title, like Professor or Doctor.)
O’Malley enjoyed making policy and manipulating, and it was under his aegis that Froebel, in a startling break with tradition, replaced Mr. Saunders with someone named Florence McCormack. She would work more cheaply than Mr. Saunders, which pleased O’Malley mightily, and she, like Walter, was Roman Catholic. O’Malley was burningly aware of ethnicity and in time created in Dodger management an entirely Roman Catholic hierarchy.
I have known the O’Malley background intimately since my own childhood. No version I have read is close to accurate, hardly the fault of the writers. Walter O’Malley, the Great Manipulator, was something of a novelist. He enjoyed making up stories, inventing familial wealth and creating for himself a distinguished career, say as an admiralty lawyer, which had not in fact existed. There was a touch of megalomania to O’Malley, but aside from that he loved games, golf, poker, even baseball. Getting The New York Times to print his fabrications as truth amused him. He sure had put one over on that old Scotch-Irish Protestant sportswriter Roscoe McGowen and on that silk-stockinged Park Avenue publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who by the way just happened to be Jewish. *
O’Malley’s father, Edwin, was a Democratic party ward heeler, who became commissioner of markets for New York City and was dismissed after a contentious — but now obscure — scandal in 1922. O’Malley’s mother’s family was southern German and as staunchly Catholic as the Irish-American father. Even after his dismissal, Edwin O’Malley retained some money. He sent his son to the University of Pennsylvania to study engineering, and later to Fordham, where Walter got his law degree.
O’Malley graduated from Fordham Law while the Depression raged and set about wheeling and dealing. He claimed to have made the definitive feasibility study for construction of the Triborough Bridge and after that — “with my engineering background” — rewritten the New York City building code. Perhaps. But when I was at Froebel Academy late in the 1930s my father knew O’Malley simply as “a lawyer for a bank.” O’Malley handled collections out of an office in Manhattan but also was a familiar figure in the courthouses and Democratic clubs of downtown Brooklyn. He was a glad-handing sort, offering cigars and buying drinks for what he called “the higher-ups.” Although O’Malley’s legal acuity left the famous lawyer Bill Shea unimpressed, his swarming, energetic style attracted the attention of George V. McLaughlin, president of the Brooklyn Trust Company, the bank that held the mortgage on Ebbets Field. O’Malley was an ingratiating, hustling young feller. McLaughlin came to trust him with problem collections.
The problem at Ebbets Field was clear. The Dodgers were not paying down the mortgage, said to exceed three hundred thousand Depression dollars. As Larry MacPhail began generating revenue by bringing in Pee Wee Reese, Dolph Camilli, and Billy Herman, he insisted that he needed more time before taking on the mortgage. “I need every cent I’ve got, George, to keep operating this club. We’re taking on the Cardinals and the Yankees. The mortgage comes next.”
McLaughlin accepted that, but bank examiners for New York State found the situation intolerable. They delivered an ultimatum: Either the Brooklyn Dodgers commenced making timely interest payments on the mortgaged ballpark or they would order the Brooklyn Trust Company to foreclose on Ebbets Field.
McLaughlin summoned O’Malley. “I want you to get over to Montague Street and tell me exactly what’s going on.”
“I’ll need to attend board meetings to get a good picture,” O’Malley said.
“I’ve arranged for that,” McLaughlin said. “I’m having you appointed lawyer for the Brooklyn Dodgers.* Understand, we simply cannot foreclose on Ebbets Field. The public reaction would be disastrous for the bank. We’d lose half our depositors. Aside from that, Walter, I’m a Dodger fan.”
O’Malley presently described the financial profligacy he found in the Dodger offices with wincing horror. Large sums of money came in at Ebbets Field, from ticket sales and hot dogs and beer. Concession receipts ran to about ten percent of the gate. A sold-out Ebbets Field meant receipts of about $75,000. That money, in dimes and quarters and dollar bills, was loaded into duffel bags and transported to the bank in downtown Brooklyn, where the duffel bags were dumped into a vault. “The bags weren’t sealed,” O’Malley recounted years afterward, “and some of our employees were supplementing their income by dipping into the unsealed duffel bags.”
“That’s called skimming,” I said.
“I know what that’s called,” O’Malley said irritably. Matters were so bad, he told McLaughlin, that he could not do much to correct the situation even as club lawyer.
“Terrible mess, George,” O’Malley insisted in his Tammany basso. “The only way I can get something meaningful done is if I myself become a director of the team.”
McLaughlin accepted O’Malley’s approach. The Brooklyn Trust Company lent O’Malley $250,000, with which he purchased twenty-five percent of the stock in the Brooklyn National League Baseball Club, Inc.* Timely interest payments on the Ebbets Field mortgage began soon after.
O’Malley sized up major league baseball with that consuming nonromantic intelligence of his and saw something both akin to and remote from grass and gloves and basepaths. He detected the road to El Dorado.
O’Malley set out immediately to invent a baseball background for himself “I played a little ball and pretty damn well,” he began one of the whoppers, “until at Penn a ground ball intersected with my nose and I thought better of participation on the field.” O’Malley has been described as looking like a cartoon of a capitalist drawn for a socialist magazine: jowls, glasses, paunch, cigar. But reporters accepted his story of athleticism partly because he had the sense to tell it with self-deprecating charm.
He’d always loved sitting in the box seats at Ebbets Field, O’Malley maintained. Even though his law office was “high up in the Lincoln Building in Manhattan,” he had taken favored clients to Dodger games “for many years.” Was this true? Probably not. But again O’Malley offered soothing self-deprecation. “I wasn’t fancy enough to get good seats at Yankee Stadium. That’s why I had to take my clients to Brooklyn. And when I got to Ebbets Field, darned if I didn’t like what I saw.” There was no stuffed shirt about O’Malley. Most people quickly liked him; his charm could have warmed an igloo in January.
After inventing the baseball background, O’Malley moved to form alliances with other stockholders, each of whom controlled a quarter of the Brooklyn ballclub shares. (Rickey held the other quarter.) John Smith owned a booming pharmaceutical company, Pfizer Chemical, which was brewing and selling penicillin. A woman called Dearie Mulvey had inherited stock; her husband Jim, the eastern boss of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, often represented her. O’Malley made fast friends of Smith and the Mulveys.
Rickey was the man who signed Jackie Robinson. (“But he couldn’t have done it without my approval,” O’Malley later said.) Rickey was the man who made the trades, hired and fired managers. In essence, Rickey ran the ballclub. But increasingly in the late 1940s, O’Malley ran the ballclub bank accounts. They moved onto a collision course.
O’Malley’s march toward power was subtle, leading Rickey to tell Red Barber, “He is the most devious man I’ve ever met.”
For his part, O’Malley conceded Rickey his flare and baseball brilliance. “But,” he told his fellow shareholders Smith and Mulvey, “we are never going to have a profitable franchise as long as that man is in charge.”
He cited Rickey’s own contract, which paid him a straight ten percent commission on all player sales. That, O’Malley said, caused Rickey to sign players who would not be right for Brooklyn but who could later be sold to lesser franchises such as Pittsburgh and the Chicago Cubs. Clearly a conflict of interest. “Besides,” O’Malley said, “he keeps bamboozling the writers by telling them Bob Ramazzotti and Joe Tepsic are great players. He uses the press clippings to make sales. But when the writers find out how bad Ramazzotti and Tepsic really are, they get mad at Rickey and everybody else at our ballclub for bamboozling them.”
Indeed, Dick Young at the Daily News and his boss, sports editor and columnist Jimmy Powers, ran frequent attacks on Rickey and the Dodgers. Young said he found Rickey duplicitous and pompous and also — perhaps the worst sin of all — not terribly interested in Dick Young. Like many driven newspapermen, Young had an ego as big as the Ritz. His distaste for Rickey carried over to Rickey’s manager, whom Young dubbed, with heavy tabloid sarcasm, KOBS, for Kindly Old Burt Shotton. The nickname was meant to suggest that Shotton was a mean old man, doddering and vicious. He was neither, by general testimony, although he was only a mediocre manager.
Jimmy Powers, a militant Roman Catholic, despised Rickey for championing Leo Durocher against the Brooklyn Catholic hierarchy. Powers couldn’t attack on the specific point, but he moved on and nicknamed Rickey “El Cheapo.” Rickey was indeed tightfisted but once, in 1946, when he wanted to give his entire team Studebaker cars as a bonus for good effort, the Dodger directors were talked out of authorizing the plan, an expenditure of about $20,000, by, of all people, the newest director, Walter O’Malley.
Powers ignored that episode. Unlike Young, he wasn’t much of a reporter. But Powers was shrill and his column was prominent in the News. El Cheapo was ruining the Dodgers. El Cheapo was breaking everybody’s spirit! El Cheapo was a windy fraud! El Cheapo was, well, very cheap!!
In the season of 1950, when these assaults peaked, the Daily News sold two million copies a day. It was by far the most popular paper in New York. Coincidentally, Dodger attendance dropped sharply; crowds fell off by more than one-third from the 1.8 million figure reached in 1947.
Was the Daily News driving away fans? Were Dick Young and Jimmy Powers, the tabloid twins, that powerful? After all, the Dodgers were televising their complete schedule, 154 games, and more and more fans owned television sets. Surely that was taking a toll on attendence. Regardless, O’Malley told Smith and the Mulveys, it was very bad business for a ballclub to go to war with the biggest newspaper in town.
Rickey regarded Young, whose philandering was well known, as a guttersnipe, and Powers, who hired ghosts to write his columns, as an ignoramus. He refused to salve Young’s ego or to buy Powers dinner. The assaults continued. Finally, after the grinding 1950 season, O’Malley had his way. Led by O’Malley, the directors decided to dismiss Rickey as Dodger president.
As Charlie Dressen, later a Dodger manager, told me, “They wasn’t just gettin’ rid of no Ned-in-the-third-reader [innocent youth]. That Rickey had been around.” Indeed, Rickey’s contract stipulated that if he were not rehired to run the team, others — in this case O’Malley — would have to buy his stock — twenty-five percent of the Brooklyn National League Baseball Club, Inc. In the interests of fairness, the others and O’Malley would have to match the highest outside offer, “I knew that the value had gone up,” O’Malley told me, “since I had bought my own twenty-five percent for two hundred fifty thousand. I guessed the value might have doubled.”
To O’Malley’s horror, Rickey produced an offer, from William Zeckendorf, a Manhattan real estate speculator, of one million dollars for twenty-five percent of the Brooklyn club. Although O’Malley believed until he died in 1979 that the offer was “fraudulent as a four-dollar bill,” he couldn’t prove fraud. O’Malley paid Rickey $1.25 million for a second twenty-five percent of the Dodgers. Rickey had to go to work in Pittsburgh. O’Malley had won control in Brooklyn for what turned out to be a bargain price. But O’Malley, the manipulator, raged at having been manipulated.
Walter O’Malley acceded to the Brooklyn Dodger presidency on October 26, 1950. “From this day forward,” he said, making his point but masking his anger, “anyone in the Brooklyn Dodger offices who mentions the name of Branch Rickey will be fined one dollar on the spot.”
O’Malley quickly fired Burt Shotton and also Milton Stock, the coach who sent Cal Abrams home, and engaged Charlie Dressen to manage. He named Buzzie Bavasi as vice president and de facto general manager. “Buzzie,” he said, “I want you to get these fellows Young and Jimmy Powers off our backs right away. Buy them dinner. Buy them suits. A full wardrobe if you have to. Spend what it takes. Just get them off our backs.”
Suddenly, Dick Young and Jimmy Powers appeared better dressed than they had ever been before. Young and the Daily News consistently came up with inside Dodger stories that somehow eluded the Tribune, the Post, and the Times.
Blessed with news leaks and clothing, Young and Powers underwent an epiphany. They and, with them, the powerful, popular Daily News became born-again Brooklyn Dodger fans.
THE NATIONAL LEAGUE PENNANT RACE OF 1951 belongs to the ages. There has been nothing like it before or since. Nor will it come again. Summarizing the 1951 race is akin to summarizing King Lear. Before anything else, your effort will diminish majesty.
Here is an episode. The Giants are lollygagging, going nowhere with Bobby Thomson playing center field. Thomson is swift and skilled but the team wants fire. Durocher has seen Willie Mays once and has a passion. All right. All right. The front office agrees to bring him up. “I’ll call him myself,” Durocher says.
The twenty-year-old Mays is playing for the Minneapolis Millers and he doesn’t want to leave Minneapolis, for two reasons. He’s afraid to play in the major leagues. He has fallen in love with a Minneapolis girl.
Durocher reaches Mays in a hotel room.
“You don’t want me, Mr. Durocher,” Willie says.
“Now just why is it I don’t want you, son?”
Willie is flustered. What is there to say? Aha. He’s got it. “You don’t want me, Mr. Durocher, cuz I ain’t good enough to play baseball for you.”
“What are you hitting, Willie?”
“Uh, .477.”
“Get your ass on an airplane, Willie, right now.”
The Giants are in fifth place when Mays joins the team on May 25. He makes out twelve straight times, hits a huge home run off Warren Spahn, then slumps again. His batting average slips to .039. He sits in front of his locker in the green blockhouse at the Polo Grounds and begins to cry.
Durocher approaches and puts a hand on Willie’s shoulder. “What the fuck is the matter with you, kid?”
Mays speaks amid sobs. “Send me back down. I knew I couldn’t hit big league pitching. Send me back down, Mr. Leo. I’m begging you.”
“Now look, Willie,” Leo says. “You are my center fielder. Today. Tomorrow. For as long as I’m managing this club. I’m not sending you back down. You are my center fielder. Now stop your fucking crying.”
Willie goes on a tear. “I got nine hits,” he says, “the next twenty-four at bats.” A small tear.
Willie proceeds, of course, to go on a larger tear than that. He becomes the greatest ballplayer in the world.
The Dodgers never really led the Giants by thirteen and a half games at sundown in 1951. On August 11, the Dodgers won the first game of a double-header against the Braves, moving thirteen and a half ahead; but the Dodgers lost the second game. At the end of the day, they led the Giants by an even thirteen games.
From that day forward, the Dodgers played .500 ball. The Giants won thirty-seven and lost seven. When the Giants defeated the Braves, 3 to 2, on September 30, they led the Dodgers by half a game. The Brooklyn club made an extraordinary comeback in Philadelphia and beat the Phils, 9 to 8, when Jackie Robinson hit a home run off Robin Roberts in the fourteenth inning.
“Just goes ta show ya,” announced Irving Rudd, a peppery little publicity man O’Malley had hired for twenty-five dollars a week. “If a ballgame lasts long enough, Jackie Robinson will win it for ya.”
A playoff, best two out of three, began at Ebbets Field October 1. Jim Hearn, a rangy and deliberate right-hander from Atlanta, won the first game for the Giants, 3 to 1. Monte Irvin and Bobby Thomson hit home runs. Once again Ralph Branca lost an important contest.
The Dodgers won the next day at the Polo Grounds, 10 to 0, behind crewcut Clem Labine, a poised twenty-five-year-old rookie right-hander out of Lincoln, Rhode Island. The game turned in the third inning, when the Dodgers led by two runs and the Giants loaded the bases with two out. The count went to three balls and two strikes. Labine threw his curve, a courageous choice for a rookie pitcher in that spot, and Bobby Thomson, guessing fastball, missed it by a wide margin. The pitch was outside. Thomson struck out, swinging at what would have been ball four. After that the Giants rolled over.
On October 3, the Dodgers and Giants played the last game of the playoff. Some years ago, when all the principals were still alive, I reconstructed that encounter. Although I have learned some things since then about this famous baseball game, I want to set down here an account that is as close as I can offer to contemporaneous. The nearer we remain to a primary source the better.
The night before, nearly everyone slept well. Bobby Thomson was troubled because he had struck out with the bases full, but after a steak dinner and a few beers, he relaxed. Ralph Branca fell asleep quickly. He had pitched on Sunday, the last day of the regular season, and on Monday in the first game of the playoff. Tomorrow, October 3, 1951, would be Wednesday, and Branca did not expect that he would have to pitch again so soon.
Sal Maglie, who knew he was to start for the New York Giants, spent a comfortable night in his room at the Concourse Plaza Hotel. For all his intensity, Maglie had learned to control his nerves. So, to a degree, had Don Newcombe, who would start for the Brooklyn Dodgers. “I can always sleep,” Newcombe said, a little proudly. “I don’t need to take pills like some guys do the night before they pitch.”
Charlie Dressen, who managed the Dodgers, went to an Italian restaurant called Rocco’s and ate a dinner of clams, mussels, lobster, and spaghetti with hot sauce. A few people asked how he felt about tomorrow’s game, and Dressen told them he wasn’t worried. “Our ballclub is ready,” he said.
One man who did feel restless was Andy Pafko, the new left fielder. The Dodgers had traded for Pafko at midseason, in a move the newspapers called “pennant insurance,” and Pafko, reading the papers, was impressed. Now he felt that the pennant was his personal responsibility. Lying in his room at the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn, he thought of his wife, Ellen, in Chicago. He had sent her a Pullman ticket to New York so she could watch him play with the Dodgers in the World Series. Next year there would be time to find an apartment together in Brooklyn, but for the moment Andy Pafko was alone. Perhaps it was loneliness as much as pressure that depressed him.
Although New York City was bright with the quickening pace of autumn, none of the ballplayers went out on the town. Everywhere, harboring their energies, they went to bed at about eleven o’clock, and soon, everywhere, they slept.
These were two tough and gifted baseball teams. The Dodgers had been built around such sluggers as Duke Snider and Gil Hodges, and in Jackie Robinson they had the finest competitor in baseball.
Under Leo Durocher the Giants were combative, strong in pitching and opportunism. Bobby Thomson, like the other Giants, knew none of the Dodgers socially; the teams did not fraternize. He thought that Gil Hodges was a pleasant man but that the rest of the Dodgers were unpleasant. This was a sermon Durocher preached ceaselessly throughout the last months of the season until finally the ballplayers came unquestioningly to believe their manager.
No one expected the deciding game of the playoff to be easy, but no one, not Thomson or Branca or Durocher or Dressen, felt any dramatic foreshadowing of what was ahead. The game would be tense, but they’d all been tense lately. It was against this background of tension, which the players accepted as a part of life, that everyone slept the night before.
Robert Brown Thomson, tall, swift, and brown-haired, said good-bye to his mother at 9:50 A.M. and drove his blue Mercury to the Staten Island Ferry. The Thomsons lived on Flagg Place in New Dorp, once an independent village, now a community within the borough of Richmond. As he drove, Thomson thought about the game. “If I can just get three for four,” he mused, “then the old Jints will be all right.” The thought comforted him. He’d been hitting well, and three for four seemed a reasonable goal.
Ralph Theodore Branca, tall, heavy-limbed, and black-haired, said good-bye to his mother at ten in suburban Mount Vernon, New York, and drove off in his new Oldsmobile. He felt a little stiff from all his recent pitching. It would take him a long time to warm up, should Dressen need him in relief.
It was a gray day, darkened with the threat of rain. The temperature was warm enough — in the high 60s — but the crowd, waiting for the gates of the Polo Grounds bleachers to open, was smaller than the one that had waited in bright sunshine the day before.
Most of the players arrived by car. Andy Pafko came by subway, an hour’s ride from downtown Brooklyn. “I’ll beat the crowd,” he decided, “so there’s no sense wasting money on a cab.” The crowd, it was to develop, was scarcely worth beating: 34,320, some 15,000 under standing room capacity.
Back of center field stood the squat green building, the outsized pillbox that contained the clubhouses. Since both Durocher and Dressen believed in intensive managing, each team was gathered for a meeting in the green building shortly before noon. The announced purpose was to review hitters, although the two teams had played each other twenty-four times previously that season and there was nothing fresh or new to say about anyone.
“Jam Mueller on the fists,” Dressen told Don Newcombe. “Keep the ball low and away to Thomson. Don’t let him pull it.” Dressen concluded, with more warmth than he customarily displayed: “Look, I know it’s tough to have to play this game, but remember we did our best all year. So today, let’s just go out and do the best we can.”
“Don’t give Hodges anything inside,” Durocher told Maglie. Then, later: “We haven’t quit all year. We won’t quit now. Let’s go get ‘em.”
During batting practice Branca was standing near the cage with Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson. “You guys got butterflies?” a reporter asked.
“No matter how long you been playing, you still get butterflies before the big ones,” Reese said. Robinson grinned, and Branca nodded solemnly. Ralph’s long face, in repose, was sad, or perhaps deadpan. One never knew whether he felt troubled by what was around him or whether he was about to laugh.
The game began badly for the Giants. Sal Maglie, who had won twenty-three games and beaten the Dodgers five times that season, walked Reese and Duke Snider in the first inning. Jackie Robinson came up and lined Maglie’s first pitch safely into left field for a single. Reese scored, and the Dodgers were ahead, 1 to 0.
Newcombe was fast but not untouchable, and in the second inning Lockman reached him for a single. Thomson followed with a sharp drive to left, his first hit, and briefly the Giants seemed to be rallying. But very briefly. Running with his head down, Thomson charged past first base and had almost reached second before he noticed that Lockman had stopped there. Thomson was tagged out in a rundown, an embarrassing end to the threat.
When the day grew darker and the lights were turned on as the third inning began, the ballpark buzzed with countless versions of a joke: “Well, now maybe Thomson will be able to see what he’s doing.”
During the fifth Thomson doubled, his second hit, and Branca began to throw. Newcombe pitched out of the inning easily, but Branca threw a little longer. He wasn’t snapping curves or firing fastballs. He was just working to loosen his arm, shoulder, and back.
Branca threw again during the sixth inning, and when Monte Irvin doubled to left in the seventh, Branca began to throw hard. He felt loose by then. His fastball was alive. Carl Erskine, warming up next to him, was bouncing his curve, but Branca had good control and good stuff.
With Irvin at second, Lockman dropped a bunt in front of the plate, and Rube Walker, the Dodger catcher, grabbed the ball and threw to Billy Cox at third. Irvin beat the throw, and now Thomson came to bat with the tying run at third base late in a 1 to 0 ballgame.
Bearing down, Newcombe threw only strikes. After two, Thomson fouled off a fastball. Then he hit another fastball deep into center field, and Irvin scored easily after the catch. As the eighth inning began, the score was 1 to 1.
“I got nothing left, nothing,” Newcombe announced as he walked into the Dodger dugout. Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella, who was not playing that day because he had pulled a thigh muscle, took Newcombe aside.
“My arm’s tight,” Newcombe said.
“Bullshit,” Robinson said. “You go out there and pitch until your goddamn arm falls off.”
“Roomie,” Campanella said, “you ain’t gonna quit on us now. You gonna hum that pea for us, roomie.”
While the two built a fire under Newcombe, other Dodgers were making the inning miserable for Maglie and Thomson. Reese and Snider punched one-out singles to right, and when Maglie threw a curve in the dirt and past Wes “Nappy” Westrum, Reese scored and Snider sped to third. Then Maglie walked Robinson, and the Dodgers, ahead 2 to 1, once again had runners at first and third.
Pafko pulled a bounding ball up the third base line and Thomson, breaking nicely, reached backhand for it. The play required a delicate touch; the ball glanced off the heel of Thomson’s glove and skidded away from him. Snider scored, making it 3 to 1, Brooklyn. Pafko was credited with a single. Then Billy Cox drove a fierce one-hopper, again to Thomson’s sector.
One thought — “Get in front of it” — crossed Thomson’s mind. He did, lunging recklessly. There were other times at third when Thomson had thought of hard smashes coming up and hitting him in the face. This time he didn’t. He thought only of blocking the ball with his glove, his arm, his chest. But the ball bounced high and carried over his shoulder into left field. The Dodgers had their third run of the inning and a 4 to 1 lead.
Newcombe blazed through the last half of the eighth inning, his arm no longer tight, and Larry Jansen retired the Dodgers in the ninth. “Come on,” Durocher shouted as the last of the ninth began. “We can still get ‘em. Come on.”
Newcombe threw two quick strikes to Alvin Dark. “Got to get my bat on the ball,” Dark thought. “Just get my bat on it.”
Newcombe threw again. Dark rapped a bounder into the hole in the right side of the infield. Both Hodges and Robinson broke for the ball and Newcombe ran to cover first base. Hodges, straining, touched the ball with the tip of his mitt and deflected it away from Robinson. Perhaps if Hodges had not touched it, Robinson could have made the play. As it was, Dark reached first. A single, ruled the scorer.
Then Dressen made a curious decision. He let Hodges hold the bag on Dark, as though Dark as a base runner were important. Actually, of course, Dark could have stolen second, third, and home without affecting the game. The Giants needed three runs to tie, not one, and the Dodgers needed only outs.
A fine point, except that Don Mueller, up next, bounced a single through the right side — close to Hodges’s normal fielding depth. Now the Giants had runners at first and third. All around the Polo Grounds people stood up in excitement.
With Monte Irvin coming to bat, Dressen walked to the mound. Branca and Erskine were throwing in the bullpen, and Clyde Sukeforth, the bullpen coach, told Dressen that Branca was fast and loose. But on the way to the mound the Dodger manager thought about catching, not pitching.
Campanella had a way with Newcombe. He knew how to needle the big pitcher to fury, and this fury added speed to Newcombe’s fastball. Walking to the mound, Dresen wondered about replacing Rube Walker with Campanella. There was only one drawback. Foul territory at the Polo Grounds was extensive. A rodeo, billed as colossal, was once staged entirely in the foul area there. Campanella could catch, but with his bad leg, he could not run after foul pops. Dressen thought of Hodges and Cox, both sure-handed, both agile. They could cover for Campanella to some extent. But there was all that area directly behind home plate where no one would be able to help Campy. Dressen thought of a foul pop landing safely on the sod directly below the press box. He thought of the newspapers the next day. Dick Young. Jimmy Powers. The second-guessing would be fierce. He didn’t want that. No, Dressen decided, making the move he wanted to make wouldn’t be worth the peril of second-guessing. He chatted with Newcombe for a moment and went back to the dugout. When Irvin fouled out to Hodges, Dressen decided that he had done the right thing.
Then Newcombe threw an outside fastball to Whitey Lockman, and Lockman doubled to left. Dark scored, making it 4 to 2, but Mueller slid into third badly and twisted his ankle. He could neither rise nor walk. Clint Hartung ran for him, and action suspended while Mueller was carried to the distant clubhouse.
“Branca’s ready,” Clyde Sukeforth told Charlie Dressen on the intercom that ran from bullpen to dugout.
“Okay,” Dressen said. “I want him.”
Branca felt strong and loose as he started his long walk from the bullpen. At that moment he had only one thought. Thomson was the next batter, and he wanted to get ahead of Thomson. Branca says he never pitched in rigid patterns. He adjusted himself to changing situations, and his thought now was simply to get his first pitch over the plate with something on it.
Coming into the infield, he remembered the pregame conversation with the newspaperman. “Any butterflies?” he said to Robinson and Reese. They grinned, but not widely.
At the mound, Dressen handed Branca the ball and said: “Get him out.” Without another word the manager turned and walked back to the dugout.
Watching Branca take his eight warm-up pitches, Thomson thought of his own goal. He had two hits. Another now would give him his three for four. It would also tie the score.
“Boy,” Durocher said to Thomson, “if you ever hit one, hit one now.” Thomson nodded but said nothing. Then he stepped up to the plate.
Branca’s first pitch was a fastball, hip-high over the inside corner. “Should have swung at that,” Thomson told himself, backing out of the box.
“I got my strike,” thought Branca. Now, he decided, it was time to come up and in with a fastball. Now it was time for a bad pitch that might tempt Thomson to waste a swing. If he went for the ball, chances were he’d miss. If he took it, Branca would be ready to come back with a curve, low and away.
The pitch came in high and tight. Thomson swung hard and the ball sailed out toward left.
“Get down, get down,” screamed Billy Cox as the line drive sped high over his head.
“I got a chance at it,” thought Andy Pafko, bolting back toward the fence.
Then the ball was gone, under the overhanging scoreboard, over the high wall, gone deep into the seats in lower left, 320 feet from home plate. For seconds, which seemed like minutes, the crowd sat dumb. Then came the roar. It was a roar matched all across the country, wherever people sat at radio or television sets, a roar of delight, a roar of horror, but mostly a roar of utter shock. It was a moment when all the country roared and when an office worker in a tall building on Wall Street, hearing a cry rise all about her, wondered if World War III had been declared.
As the ball sailed into the stands, Thomson danced around the bases, skipping and leaping. The Giants crowded from their dugout to home plate. Ed Stanky, the second baseman, ran to Durocher, jumped on the manager’s back, wrestled him to the ground, and embraced him.
In left, Pafko stood stunned. Then he started to walk slowly toward the clubhouse, telling himself over and over: “It can’t be.” Most of the Dodgers were walking before Thomson reached second base. Jackie Robinson held his ground. He wanted to make sure that Thomson touched all bases before conceding that the pennant race was over.
Clyde Sukeforth gathered gear in the bullpen, and nearby Carl Erskine turned to Clem Labine. “That’s the first time I’ve seen a big fat wallet go flying into the seats,” Erskine said.
As Thomson touched home plate, the Giants lifted him to their shoulders. Then, inexplicably, they lowered him, and everyone ran for the clubhouse. Champagne was waiting. “Gee whiz,” Thomson said. “Gee whiz.”
Wes Westrum and Clint Hartung grabbed Ed Stanky, who liked to boast that he had never been drunk, and pinned him to a rubbing table. Westrum poured champagne into Stanky’s mouth. “You’re gonna get drunk now,” he shouted. Westrum turned to the rubbing table, where Mueller lay, ice packs at his ankle. “Hey, Don,” he shouted and emptied a magnum over the injured leg.
“Isn’t this the damnedest thing you ever saw?” Durocher said.
“Gee whiz,” Thomson said. “Gee whiz.”
“How the hell did you go into second with Lockman there?” coach Fred Fitzsimmons said to Thomson. “But the hell with that,” he added, and kissed Thomson damply.
“Congratulations,” Charlie Dressen said to Durocher. “I told you we’d finish one-two. Well, we did, and I’m number two.”
“Gee whiz,” Thomson said.
In the Dodger dressing room Branca wept, showered slowly, and, after submitting to some questioning, asked reporters to leave him alone. Then he went to the Oldsmobile, where his fiancee, blonde Ann Mulvey, was waiting with Father Frank Rowley of Fordham.
“Why me?” Branca said inside the car. “I don’t smoke. I don’t drink. I don’t run around. Baseball is my whole life. Why me?”
“God chose you,” the priest said, “because He knew you had faith and strength enough to bear the cross.”
Branca nodded and felt a little better.
Thomson went from the ballpark to a CBS studio where he appeared on Perry Como’s regular Wednesday night television show. Everywhere he went he was cheered, and always three thoughts ran through his mind. The old Jints had won. He had pushed his runs batted in total up over one hundred. He had got his three for four.
When Thomson reached the house in New Dorp, his older brother, Jim, was waiting for him. “Do you know what you’ve done?” Jim said, all intensity and earnestness.
Only then, six hours after the event, did Bobby Thomson realize that his home run was something that other people would remember for all the rest of his days.
Several players have since been kind enough to offer further comment. “I don’t agree that if Hodges had played me deep rather than holding Dark at the bag the outcome would have been different,” Don Mueller says. “I always checked the fielders before I swung. [Mueller was such a deft place hitter that he was nicknamed Mandrake, after a popular comic strip magician.] I saw where Hodges was playing, that there was a hole on the right side, and I hit the ball through the hole on purpose. If Hodges had played deep, I would have swung differently and just as likely gotten a base hit.”
Jackie Robinson said he did not remember Branca’s first pitch to Thomson as being hip-high on the inside. “I thought it was right down the middle. I remember, Pee Wee and I exchanged looks. Like, if Branca throws another like that, we’re cooked.”
Branca’s grandiosity about a role for God in a baseball game persists, and he accepts criticism poorly. But some years ago Sal Maglie demanded of him: “How were you pitching to Thomson?”
“I wanted to get ahead of him,” Branca said, “throw a strike.”
“You did get ahead of him,” Maglie said. “Then what?”
“I wanted to get him with a curve. I threw the second fastball to set up a curve.”
“If you wanted to get him with a curve in a spot like that,” Maglie said, “you should have thrown the curve. What were you waiting for?”
Branca did not argue. Perhaps poor pitch selection, not the Divinity, was his undoing. God may not have been a Giant fan after all.
This ballgame had been televised from coast to coast on the brand-new coaxial cable. Thomson’s home run instantly became a moment in the consciousness of a nation, without equal in American sport.
There has never been a better rendering of that instant than the one in the Herald Tribune. Against a deadline in the Polo Grounds, Red Smith wrote:
Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.
A talented feller with whom to share a press box.
*“Don’t be too harsh on old Jake,” urges Leo Laboissiere, a crack scout with the Baltimore Orioles. “Most of us are wrong more often than we’re right.”
*During game one of the 1952 World Series, at Ebbets Field, Mantle slid hard into second base, breaking up a double play. He crashed into shortstop Reese, who came tumbling down on top of him. “All I could think,” Mantle says, “was, Oh, my God, I’ve killed my idol.’ “
*We would then have seen a pretty fair St. Louis Cardinal outfield, come 1951 or 1952: Stan Musial in left field, Enos Slaughter in right field, and Mickey Mantle in center. I suspect that outfield would have wrenched pennants away from the Dodgers and the Giants. The Era would have been a very different time, indeed.
*Bill Veeck brought Satchel Paige to Cleveland in 1948, when Paige was forty-two, or possibly forty-eight, and past his prime. Across six major league seasons, Paige won twenty-eight games but lost thirty-one. As Langston Hughes might have remarked, that is what happens to a dream deferred.
*When caught in a misstatement, O’Malley never missed a swaggering step. “Surely, you realize,” he told me once when I nailed him, “that only half the lies the Irish tell are true.”
One favorite O’Malley whopper: That Joseph Kennedy tried to buy the Dodgers in 1946 so his wounded son Jack could become club president. “If I’d let that deal go through,” O’Malley boasted some years after Oswald, “John Kennedy would be alive today.”
Another: “As president of the Dodgers I’m like everybody else at Ebbets Field. I’m just a fan.”
*The previous Dodger lawyer was Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential candidate in 1940. A remarkable and independent character, Willkie was too involved in such questions as U.S.-Soviet relations to give the Dodgers the time that Brooklyn chaos required.
*For all his bluster of early affluence, O’Malley entered baseball on borrowed money. After the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, Bill Shea told me, “George McLaughlin never again spoke to O’Malley. George loved the Brooklyn Dodgers. He hadn’t lent O’Malley money to kill his favorite team.”