“She’s a plain kid . . . She’d give up show business if I asked her.”— Joe DiMaggio, describing his second wife
THE BEST, THE MOST gloriously competitive, the most wonderfully hostile, fastball-in-your-ear, spikes-in-your-shin baseball ever played illuminated New York during that decade half forgotten but also half remembered as the drifty, shifty, not entirely nifty fifties. As Joe DiMaggio remarked when a New York Times reporter asked him to summarize the experience of taking a shower with Marilyn Monroe, “Louie, you shoulda been there.”
We moved into the time warbling “How High the Moon” along with Les Paul and Mary Ford; proceeded mistily to “Secret Love” with that dewy, sexy sunflower Doris Day; and stumbled out as music became a wind of change, hammering, loud, rock-rock-around-the-clock:
Scramble my brains,
And fry me, honey.
I’m more than just a good little egg.
(Shaboom.
Doo-wop.
Yeah,
Yeah,
YEAH.
)
!
Some argue that baseball today, circa 1993, is better than ever. George Will, in the popular 1990 book Men at Work, declares that “things are better than ever . . . in baseball” and that talk about a “Golden Age” is “piffle.” Even if one resists the temptation to dismiss Will as an arriviste, it is difficult to agree with his conclusion.
It is true, to be sure, that many things today are better than ever: color television sets, ball gloves, thermonuclear bombs, Olympic long jumpers, high blood pressure pills, tennis rackets, jet fighter planes, and sneakers. But many things are not better than ever: epic poems, violins, presidents, concert halls, blondes, plays about royalty, and — to put a point on this — managers and ballplayers.
Indeed, many things are demonstrably worse. AstroTurf is a poorer playing surface than grass. AstroTurf has given baseball the trampoline bounce and the ground ball triple. Multisport stadia, those vast concrete coffee cups in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere, are worse than the old ballparks; they are not even designed specifically for baseball.
Generally the rich players of today are less driven to win than the forever hungry players who grew out of the Depression. Although one finds exceptions, today’s ballplayer is more the pampered house cat and less the tiger focused on the hunt.
Aren’t today’s athletes faster, bigger, and stronger than their counterparts of the 1950s? Certainly that applies to football players, runners, and Olympic basketball stars. But baseball is not a faster-bigger-stronger game.* Given a certain minimum standard, major league baseball is timing, coordination, and hand-to-eye response. Jim Thorpe, the strongest, fastest athlete of his time, was a bust as a big leaguer. For all his strength and speed, Big Jim could not hit major league curve balls.
The best recent big league shortstop has been Osborne Earl Smith, called Ozzie, who stands five foot ten and weighs 150 pounds. That is 10 pounds less than the playing weight of Harold Henry Reese, called Pee Wee, the Hall of Fame shortstop from the Era. (Are great fielding shortstops actually getting smaller?)
The strongest contemporary power hitter probably is Jose Canseco, who stands a formidable six foot four. But neither Canseco nor other large present sluggers, such as Mark McGwire (six foot five) and Cecil Fielder (250 pounds), hit for distance to match Mickey Mantle, who stands five foot eleven and played at 190 pounds. (Are great sluggers growing bigger . . . and weaker?)
An electronic timing device clocked balls fired by the Dodgers’ Joe Black at 96 miles an hour one night in 1952. “Allie Reynolds,” Black says, “was faster than me. When he was pushing it, he got up over one hundred.” Reynolds was big, but no giant, at six feet, 195 pounds. Many pitchers today are bigger. None throws faster.
The skills of managers are harder to quantify. Durocher was matchless across pennant races, keeping his players furious, focused, and sullen yet not mutinous.
As Yankee manager, Stengel practiced necromancy. I don’t believe you can say that about any baseball manager today.
During the Era, baseball had first and undisputed claim on the best athletes in America. Pro basketball was a minor sport, just bouncing out of armories and dance halls; pro football still struggled to convince fans and sports editors that not all of its heroes were potbellied, bald beer barrels. Baseball was totally dominant and baseball salaries were by far the highest offered in any team sport. An outstanding lineman during the Era, Don Colo of the Cleveland Browns, earned $6,000 a year. Before Allie Reynolds retired in 1954, the Yankees were paying him $65,000. With that sort of income differential, baseball was every athlete’s first choice.
Then as now, great athletes were gifted in many sports. Stan Musial and Jackie Robinson were fine basketball players. As a youngster Joe DiMaggio loved tennis. Duke Snider was a wonderful football quarterback. Willie Mays could have become the greatest pass catcher in the annals. All these athletes chose baseball; under today’s conditions they might make a different choice.
John Elway, quarterback at Denver, was a promising shortstop. Baseball lost him to the National Football League. Jim Courier abandoned baseball for tennis. Bo Jackson, a developing power hitter, has had his baseball career hampered by a football injury. Baseball stars during the Era were forbidden by fiat or contract to play another team sport.
“Football?” the Dodgers farm director Fresco Thompson roared in the face of a young prospect who wanted to supplement his baseball income on the gridiron. “Football? What is it you’re looking for, young man? A major league contract or a limp?”
Today baseball has a harder time first in attracting the best athletes. Then, the best talent it does sign is diluted by endless mushrooming of new franchises. During the Era there were sixteen major league teams. With the newest expansion, we have twenty-eight. Once there were four hundred major league jobs for ballplayers. Today there are seven hundred. Some of the best baseball players in America are not playing ball; they’re working in other sports. Many of today’s major leaguers could not have made any big league team in the 1950s.
* * *
Approaching the years of the Era ruled by Walter O’Malley, we run into another persistent misconception. This one suggests that people, particularly New Yorkers and Brooklynites, lost interest in baseball. In his one-volume history Our Game, Charles C. Alexander, Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio University, describes the Era as a time of “shrinking crowds and shifting franchises.” From 1947 to 1957, attendance at the three New York ballparks dropped from 5.6 million to 3.2 million. But these attendance figures mean less than they appear to mean. During the Era, televised baseball took hold.
The television set was exotic in 1947; televised baseball had novelty appeal. Earlier, during most of the 1930s, the three New York teams collectively (and probably illegally) blocked radio broadcasts of their games. They believed that fans offered baseball on the radio would not come out and buy tickets. When Larry MacPhail brought Red Barber to Brooklyn in 1937, it was established very quickly that broadcasts did not keep people away. Broadcasts sold tickets. Barber and later Mel Allen were the greatest ticket salesmen in town.
Considering television, the three teams determined not to repeat the radio blackout mistake. From 1947 on, the Dodgers, the Giants, and the Yankees televised every one of their home games and most road games as well. By 1955, the Dodgers earned $787,155 for local television and radio rights, roughly $250,000 more than the combined salaries of all their players. “We were in the black before Opening Day,” Buzzie Bavasi remembers, “but we never told that to anybody. I mean, you don’t exactly advertise a gold strike, do you?”
Unlike radio, television carried troubling side effects. More and more people bought sets from DuMont and Admiral and Philco, and old habits began changing. People grew accustomed to baseball on a 13-inch black-and-white screen, where a blizzard broke out every time an airplane flew over the antenna. When a sellout crowd jammed Yankee Stadium one summer afternoon in 1953, Rud Rennie wrote: “Many were surprised to learn that the grass was green and that there were nine men on the field at all times.”
As people embraced televised baseball, fans grew querulous. The parking was crowded at the ballpark. The seats were harder than a sofa. Besides, it was just a little cloudy. A summer shower? You never could tell.
Let’s sit at home tonight, people said, and watch the ballgame on the one-eyed box. It’s cheaper that way and more comfortable and if the game gets lopsided we can switch to Milton Berle. Fanus televiendis americanus. The group proliferates.
Professor Alexander’s observation on “shrinking crowds” is true in a narrow sense. The crowds at the ballparks shrank. The crowds watching televised baseball multiplied and grew.
Interest, as opposed to attendance, never flagged. The ballplayers were godlike. The managers were giants in the earth.
The Era was the greatest age in baseball history.
The captains and the kings depart (even as new legionnaires arrive) and in 1951, when Mays and Mantle reached New York, it had come time for Joe DiMaggio to go.
There was small glory in DiMaggio’s final year. He batted .263 — 66 points below his lifetime standard — and threw out fewer base runners than any other center fielder in the league. He told Gus Mauch, the Yankee trainer, “I got arthritis in every joint. The pain is terrible.” A wretched combination — slowed reflexes, physical pain, and resulting poor performance — produced a condition that seems akin to clinical depression.
Milton Gross of the New York Post reported in late summer: “DiMaggio no longer wants anything to do with his teammates. He won’t ride the team bus from hotels to ball parks. He takes a taxi by himself. He has pulled himself totally into a shell as though he no longer even sees the many men with whom he has performed and traveled for so many years. He will no longer even speak to his manager, Casey Stengel.”
DiMaggio’s wonderful last bow, the World Series of 1951, is generally treated as an anticlimax. Even before that Series began, the Liggett and Myers Tobacco Company purchased a full-page advertisement in the Herald Tribune for a victory ode:
Our hats are off to the Giant crew
When the chips are down they sure come through.
Though things looked black at the start of the race,
They didn’t quit ‘til they had first place —
Sound Off!
To the leader of this fightin’ team,
To the guy who kept them on the beam,
To Leo give a solid cheer
Our choice for manager of the year —
Sound Off!
Thomson with a mighty blast
Nailed the pennant to the mast
And Sal and Larry, Stanky and Dark
In triumph carried him from the park.
Sound Off!
Like the Giants, Chesterfield’s number one
Around New York with most every one
The reason Chesterfield sets such a pace
Is mildness plus no unpleasant after-taste
Sound Off for Chesterfield!!!
“They still gotta play us for the championship of the world,” Casey Stengel insisted, “which my men and I are much looking forward to, competing against them all, Mr. Durocher and his very excellent players, who will give us a fine contest, I am sure, when we play the Series games, which no matter what Mister Thomson has done remains as yet, if you catch the drift. My men are ready.”
The 1951 World Series, sponsored by Gillette, was televised coast to coast — a first — with Mel Allen and Jim Britt calling play-by-play, and broadcast nationally with microphones manned by Russ Hodges, the Giant broadcaster, and a former sidekick of Red Barber’s known as “Brother Al” Heifer.
“Al was not much of a broadcaster,” remembers Frank Graham, Jr., publicity director of the Dodgers for five seasons, “but if you were having a huge party and you needed a greeter, Brother Al would be your absolute first choice.”
As a World Series special, General Electric reduced the price on its 17-inch Black-Daylite television from $379.95 to $299.95. “Not a clearance!” GE announced. “Not a small screen model! Not plastic or metal! Television in genuine mahogany-veneered cabinet. Up to 78 WEEKS to pay. Weekly terms as low as $2.72!”
Out in Las Vegas, Clark Gable filed suit for divorce from the former Lady Ashley, and the Associated Press reported that Mrs. Gable was willing to leave the star for $200,000 down and $100,000 a year for life. Closer to civilization, Uta Hagen, the beautiful German-American actress who had been Paul Robeson’s lover, was appearing in the Cort Theater as St. Joan. At the St. James, Gertrude Lawrence starred in The King and I. Betty Grable’s latest movie was Meet Me After the Show.
All this supplied backdrop. On October 4, the stumpy left-hander George Bernard Koslowski, who pitched as Dave Koslo, subdued the Yankees with breaking balls and control. Mantle, DiMaggio, Berra, and Hank Bauer collectively went one for fifteen.
Monte Irvin, so long barred from the major leagues by bigotry, at last could show the entire country — “coast to coast” — what a great ballplayer he was. Irvin pounded out four hits and in the first inning, as Allie Reynolds went into a full windup, Irvin stole home. “Never before,” Red Smith wrote, “in the history of postseason amusements, had a Giant been so impudent; never had such humiliation been worked on a team of Yankee champions.” The Giants won in commanding fashion, 5 to 1.
But champions the Yankees were, and a day later Ed Lopat outlasted Larry Jansen at the Stadium and the Yankees won, 3 to 1. Irvin hit three more singles, but the Giants made only two other hits. It was a hard-bought Yankee victory; Mickey Mantle tore ligaments in his right knee.
The injury came in the fifth inning when Mantle and DiMaggio broke for a short fly hit into right center field. On hearing DiMaggio’s commanding voice — “I got it” — Mantle stopped short. He lost his footing, crumpled, and lay motionless. He felt no pain, but suddenly his knee and most of his right leg went numb.
“You okay, kid?” DiMaggio said.
Mantle was unable to speak. He was crying in terror.
Sid Gaynor, the Yankee orthopedist, said Mantle’s knee had taken “a terrific jolt. Why, with an older man, the cartilage would have torn right out of there. He’s out for the Series, of course. It’s a bad sprain. I’ll x-ray it tomorrow morning and he’ll be all right.”
Dr. Gaynor was a good orthopedist, but Mantle’s knee would not be all right ever again. For the rest of his career he had to wear a cumbersome metal brace. Some of his magic speed fled forever.
This memorable short fly ball, rising above DiMaggio and Mantle, produced a remarkable confluence of center fielders. The man who hit the fly was Willie Mays.
Years later, in a Dallas drinking club, Mantle remembered the play with anger. “DiMaggio always wanted to look good out there. That was very important to him. So he waited to call Willie’s fly until he was damn sure he could reach it in stride. That’s why I had to stop so short. If DiMaggio called for it earlier — or if DiMaggio had backed off and let me take it — I don’t believe I woulda hurt my knee.”
Mantle looked into a glass of Jack Daniel’s and said, “Damn.”
The Giants took a 1 to 0 lead in the third game, as the Series moved a few thousand yards west from Yankee Stadium, at 161st Street, to the Polo Grounds, across the Harlem River on 155th.* On several occasions the Series has been played in a single ballpark, but 1951 presented the last World Series played at ballparks within walking distance of each other.
The Yankee Stadium crowds had been subdued and civil. “Corporate crowds,” some called them, as opposed to the “lunch pail guys,” who screamed themselves hoarse during the regular season as the Dodgers and Giants went at one another.
Then in the third game came a remarkable play. Writing in the Herald Tribune Al Laney observed:
“The somnolence and lassitude which had enveloped crowds at the first two World Series games passed suddenly and with something of a shock in the fifth inning yesterday. Up to that time everything had been about as it was at the Stadium. . . . People got up and wandered, seeking the refreshment stands rather than waiting to have things brought to them. Some sought out friends for visits. They seemed to feel they’d have plenty of time. . . . The weather helped the mood, midsummer in autumn. Laziness was easy to achieve. And then Eddie Stanky kicked the ball out of Phil Rizzuto’s glove. . . . The first truly spontaneous shout of the Series went up. People behind the stands, who had been eating and drinking calmly, came scurrying back to their seats, getting in each other’s way and obstructing the view. The voice of the crowd had a new note. . . . This was the real thing at last.”
With one out in the fifth, Eddie Stanky, the combative five-foot, eight-inch second baseman, drew a full-count walk from Vic Raschi. Al Dark batted next and Durocher called for a hit and run. The Yankees picked off the sign and Berra signaled for a pitchout. His throw to Rizzuto had Stanky by ten feet. Rizzuto waited, ball in glove, directly in front of second base. Stanky slid hard and with his right foot kicked the ball into center field. Then he got up and ran to third.
That is a legitimate play, just as it is legitimate for a fielder to tag a base runner on the nose. Rizzuto was charged with an error and the Yankees went into shock. Dark singled. Hank Thompson singled and, after another error, Whitey Lockman knocked out Raschi with a three-run home run. The Giants won, 6 to 2. Their best pitcher, Sal Maglie, was ready for game four.
“Tell me how you kicked that ball,” Rud Rennie asked Stanky, who was sitting naked on a trainer’s table.
“I consider that an incident of minor importance,” Stanky said, managing to be nude and formal simultaneously. “Let us discuss Lockman’s home run.”
“Listen, gentlemen,” Leo Durocher shouted. “You cannot tag Mr. Stanky with the ball held nice and easy in your glove. You got to hold it in your bare hand and go for him like that and maybe you get spiked but maybe you get him out. It ain’t a fucking tea party out there. Not against my guys.”
“It was a bad game by both teams, I would say,” Stengel began, “but it was particularly bad for us, because we lost. You all saw what happened at second base.” Stengel kicked, to remind the swarming press. “They come up with a field goal good for five points. That beat us. I may have my men work overnight on blocking field goals.”
The next day, a Sunday, brought rain, a steady October rain soaking the Polo Grounds and washing away the ballgame everyone was awaiting. “That rain killed us,” Monte Irvin says. “It took away our momentum. It gave them a chance to regroup. The Yankees always had the luck. I’m not denying that they were a fine team, but they always got a break when they needed a break most. And that gave them confidence. Those Yankee teams beat you with confidence and with Casey; the talent just flowed easily under those conditions.”
Salvatore Anthony Maglie won twenty-three games in 1951. Scowling, heavy-featured, with hooded eyes and a jet-black beard that always showed a shadow, Maglie was Mephistopheles on the Mound. He was nicknamed Sal the Barber, to a small extent because so many Italian Americans cut hair and to a larger, much larger, extent because he threw fastballs at batters’ chins. Sal the Barber offered terrifying shaves.
He was genial enough off the mound, and frank in discussing tactics. “You have to make the hitter afraid of the ball,” he said. “A lot of pitchers think they do that by throwing at a hitter when the count is two strikes and no balls. The trouble there is with that count, a knockdown is routine. It’s expected. You don’t scare a guy by knocking him down when he knows he’s gonna be knocked down.”
“Then when, Sal?” I asked.
“A good time is when the count is two and two. You knock him down two and two, he gets up shaking. Then curve him and you have your out. Of course, you have to be able to get your curve over the plate on a three and two count. Not every pitcher can do that.” Maglie could break two or three different curves over the plate with the count full. He worked his intimidating style so well under pressure that he beat Brooklyn, the National League’s best hitting team, twenty-three times over the years, against only eleven defeats.
Maglie was thirty-four in the autumn of ‘51, and he had pitched 298 innings. He was tired. His back hurt. Durocher, compassionate and loving to Mays, respectful of Monte Irvin, believed in motivating Maglie with a lash. As it happened, on Monday, October 8, Sal Maglie felt considerable pain in the lower right area of his back. It was not his nature to complain; the steady needling to which Durocher subjected him had the effect of making it just about impossible for Maglie to complain, even when he should have.
On the Yankee side, Stengel called a meeting. “Now, uh, men,” he began, “we have not done well, and I am including everybody when I say we, including you very excellent ballplayers and including the manager. You have not done well and the manager has not done well but we are going to be all right if you just go out and play the way you can and I commence managing as I should be managing. We have all been lousy together. Now, let’s all be goddamn good.”
The Yankees awoke. In the first inning, DiMaggio, who had not hit a ball well for three games, scorched a curve ball against the facade of the left field roof, just foul. Another pitch, another foul, this one a fierce low liner that crashed against a fence. Then Maglie fooled him with a fastball and DiMaggio was called out. He had come to bat twelve times without a hit. “Even though I struck out,” he said later, “I felt good. I dropped my bat weight down from thirty-five ounces to thirty-four ounces. I was swinging better.”
The Giants scratched a run off Allie Reynolds in the bottom of the first and the Yankees tied the score in the second. As Maglie came into the dugout, after having given up one run, Durocher said, “C’mon, you son of a bitch. Pitch like you can.”
DiMaggio lined a single in the third inning. His first hit was a signal. The Clipper was back. In the fifth, with Berra on base, DiMaggio cracked the eighth and final World Series home run of his career, a line drive that rose into the left field stands.
Durocher called Maglie several names. The Yankees won, 6 to 2, and the Series was tied at two games.
Actually, the Series was over. Next day at the Polo Grounds, Gil McDougald, the young Yankee infielder, walloped the third grand slam homer in Series history, scoring Berra, DiMaggio, and Johnny Mize ahead of him. McDougald was an odd-looking hitter. As Smith described him, “he plants his right foot barely within the rear inside corner of the batter’s box and spreads his legs like an adagio dancer . . . his left foot points toward third base, his right toward the box seats behind first. His body is twisted awkwardly as he peers slantwise at the pitcher. He holds the bat slackly as though it is too heavy . . . it droops behind him like a bent banana.”
Still, the man hit a grand slam home run. “Red,” Stengel said, “the kid won the most valuable player prize in the Texas League last year and how do you think he did that? By goin’ around buyin’ votes? However you think he looks, the kid can hit.” The Yankees won the game, 13 to 1.
Hank Bauer’s three-run triple in the sixth inning of game six gave the Yankees a 4 to 1 lead, which they carried into the ninth.
Stanky singled. Dark bunted safely. Whitey Lockman singled, loading the bases. Monte Irvin hit a long fly that scored Stanky and advanced the other runners.
The hitter was Bobby Thomson. Everyone remembered. Thomson flied out. Another run. The teams now were a single run apart.
Durocher ordered Sal Yvars, his backup catcher, to pinch hit. “I hit .317 that year,” Yvars says, “and Durocher didn’t use me up to then for the whole Series. We had an incident during the season. I ended up taking a swing at him. I got a hot Italian temper, but you better know, too, that Durocher was a vulgar, filthy guy who treated me and Maglie like dirt. When I ask why he ain’t using me in the Series, Durocher says, ‘I’m teaching you a lesson. Now get the fuck away from me.’ He hated me. I got so mad I went and broke all my bats, six Louisville Sluggers. Now, finally, Durocher’s got to use me. He’s got nobody else. And I gotta borrow a bat.
“I was a good contact hitter under pressure. I hit a helluva line drive . . .”
The ball carried into right center where Bauer made a lunging, skidding catch. The Series was over. The Yankees had won in six games.
“For me,” Irvin says, “hitting in that Series was almost too easy. Allie Reynolds threw me serious heat; it was brutal hitting against him and Raschi. Except sometimes you’re on a roll and the pitcher, whoever he is, throws it and you see it and you hit it and it drops. In that ‘51 Series for me, it was see the ball, hit the ball, and the ball fell in.
“It wasn’t just the rain that beat us. I think of games that got away, especially the second and the sixth, and then I remember Don Mueller getting hurt in the playoff.
“Don was a wonderful hitter. When he went down in the playoff, it took away an absolutely key element.
“There’s no doubt in my mind, none at all, that if we had Mueller, we’d have beaten the Yankees.”
Rud Rennie called the Giants “wide-eyed.” In achieving their third consecutive World Series victory, the Yankees were “lordly.”
On the same day, October 10, the FBI announced a victory of its own. Gus Hall, national secretary of the Communist party, was slapped into the federal prison in Texarkana to serve five years. His crime: “teaching the overthrow of the government.”
Hall had done nothing violent. He was arrested because he might do something violent. The times were disappointing for Sal Yvars, the New York Giants, Gus Hall, and free speech.
Life magazine struck a week later and before that fallout settled, Joe DiMaggio broke down and cried. During the last month of the pennant race, the Dodgers assigned Andy High to scout the Yankees. High reviewed the Yankees clinically; most of his judgments were sound. When the Giants won the pennant, the Dodgers delivered High’s scouting report to the Giants, in a gesture of National League solidarity.
The statistician for the Giant broadcast team was a young man called Clay Felker, quite frantic to further his career. Felker wangled an appointment with Sidney L. James, assistant managing editor of Life. He wanted to work for Life, Felker said. He could help because he had great baseball contacts.
“If your contacts are so great,” James said, “get us a copy of the Dodger scouting report on the Yankees. If you bring that in, I’ll hire you.”
Felker approached Buzzie Bavasi, whom he knew slightly, and said that his career was on the line. According to Bavasi, “Felker begged me to lend him a copy of the report. He promised he wouldn’t show it to anybody else. He’d just make some notes for a story. Then he could get this great job at Life magazine. I took a chance. I decided to help the kid.”
Life published the entire Andy High scouting report in its issue dated October 22, 1951. “I got three different scouting reports,” Larry Jansen remembers, “two from our people and one from the Dodgers. Not one mentioned that Mickey Mantle was a helluva bunter. He led off against me in the second game and surprised all of us. He beat out a bunt. That led to a run. I end up wondering why none of the scouts noticed Mantle’s bunting.”
Life magazine was not interested in publicizing deficiencies in Andy High’s scouting. Instead the magazine quoted Leo Durocher: “High’s report was great. Never saw one like it. It has everything, all the little details.”
Life ran High’s comments on Berra, Mantle, Woodling, Reynolds, and the rest, but had a little trouble with DiMaggio. Here the report read:
JOE DIMAGGIO, CF
Fielding — He can’t stop quickly and throw hard. You can take the extra base on him if he is in motion away from the line of throw. He won’t throw on questionable plays and I would challenge him even though he threw a man or so out.
Speed — He can’t run and won’t bunt. [Actually High is talking about two things here, speed and attitude. Reluctance to lay down a sacrifice bunt is attitude, not speed.]
Hitting vs. Right-hand Pitcher — His reflexes are very slow and he can’t pull a good fastball at all. The fastball is better thrown high but that is not too important as long as it is fast. Throw him nothing but good fastballs and fast curve balls. Don’t slow up on him.
Hitting vs. Left-hand Pitcher — Will pull left-hand pitcher a little more than right-hand pitcher. Pitch him the same. Don’t slow up on him. He will swing at a bad pitch once in a while with two strikes.
* * *
After going hitless in twelve times at bat, DiMaggio hit his homer. Over the last three games he cracked out six hits in twelve turns, .500 hitting. Even Life conceded: “DiMaggio was a better player than the scouting report made him out to be.”
Life hired Clay Felker, who next made a splash by reporting on Stengel’s drinking. James subsequently was appointed the first managing editor of Sports Illustrated. “I am still waiting,” Bavasi said in 1992, “for one of those guys to return the scouting report I lent them in 1951.”
DiMaggio flew to Japan to barnstorm but quit after a few days. He knew, better than the people at Life, that High’s scouting report was broadly accurate. He felt humiliated that his shortcomings had been pointed out in public. The Yankees wanted him to keep playing; DiMaggio still drew fans. Dan Topping offered him $100,000 for 1952.
This ballplayer turned that down. On December 11, 1951, two weeks after his thirty-seventh birthday, DiMaggio announced his retirement at a crowded press conference in the Yankee offices. Reading from a prepared statement, he said, “I can no longer produce for my ballclub, my manager, my teammates, and my fans the sort of baseball their loyalty to me deserves.” Jolting Joe was history. He began weeping.
Stengel, relieved to be rid of a brooding, fallen star, announced with cynical charm: “He’s the greatest player I ever managed. I just give away the Big Guy’s glove and it’s going straight to the Hall of Fame.”
DiMaggio did not make major news again until January 14, 1954, at the San Francisco City Hall when in a civil ceremony he married Marilyn Monroe.
“She’s a plain kid,” he told his friend Jimmy Cannon. “She’d give up show business if I asked her. She’d quit the movies in a minute. Her career means nothing to her.
“Jimmy, this is one marriage that can’t miss.”
*Leonard Koppett and John Thorn, two generally sound observers, also argue that ballplayers are better than ever. In Clearing the Bases, a wonderfully reasoned study, the late Bill Starr, former major leaguer, longtime minor league guru, rebuts the arguments of Koppett and Thorn, with icy logic and great good humor. Ralph Kiner calls Clearing the Bases “the most penetrating book ever on technical baseball.”
*The playing field at the Polo Grounds was a few feet below the level of the Harlem. Drainage was terrible. A brisk shower at ten in the morning meant no Giant game that afternoon.