On dune and headland sinks the fire . . .
— Kipling
FRANK GRAHAM, JR., feels that the Era was foredoomed to its wrenching end. Graham worked as Dodger publicity director from 1949 until 1954 and saw Walter O’Malley almost daily. “His sense of rivalry with Rickey was ferocious,” Graham says. “He knew, although he didn’t like admitting, that when Rickey signed Jackie Robinson, the old man became baseball’s pioneer.
“O’Malley wanted to match that, to become a pioneer himself. That drove him against the wishes of family and friends to break ground for the Dodgers in California. He had to go.”
This being reality, rather than plotted drama, Exodus O’Malley did not proceed in a particularly ordered way. First O’Malley decided simply he would build the most wonderful baseball park in human history. Dos Passos reminds us that “man is a creature that builds.” O’Malley, venal and mendacious though he may have been, was a master builder.
Under Rickey, the Dodger field at Vero Beach, Florida, was a basic country ballpark: an outfield fenced in with slatted green. Fans sat on open bleacher planks. Along with an engineer named Emil Prager, O’Malley conceived an innovative, organic Florida field. First, he had earthmovers dig a yawning hole. The excavated dirt was bulldozed and shaped into an outfield barrier. The new Vero Beach outfield “fence” was earthen. He replaced the bleachers with comfortable grandstands. The slope of the new outfield barrier was planted with Bermuda grass and topped with long-trunked royal palms. The little field was a beauty.
In his high-style, frugal way, O’Malley had underground streams tapped into the nearby yawning hole, creating a pond. He stocked that with trout. “Everything indigenous,” he said with pride, “except the trout. But I can justify that expense. A lot of my players like to fish. The trout keep ‘em on the base and out of paternity suits.”
O’Malley claimed warm memories of Ebbets Field, a claim many found suspect. He was no more sentimental than a hippopotamus, which his enemies claim he resembled. He saw Ebbets Field not as a shrine but as a relic, with rotten parking and smelly urinals, both of which kept customers away. If a ballpark was a relic, businessman O’Malley reasoned, let it go. “The secret,” he said, “is to eliminate the reasons people have for not going to your ballpark. Stated positively, you want your ballpark to be a place where a feller loves to take his girl on Friday night.”
Although he has been dead since 1979, O’Malley still is hated in many quarters. Jack Newfield, a New York newspaperman, told the writer Peter Golenbock, “Once Pete Hamill and I were having dinner and we began to joke about collaborating on an article called ‘The Ten Worst Human Beings.’ “ They agreed to each write on a napkin the names of the three worst. “Each of us,” Newfield said, “wrote down the same three names in the same order: Hitler, Stalin, Walter O’Malley.”
“Listen,” says Harold Rosenthal. “Walter was straight with me on serious things and I was straight with him. Back in the 1950s, I’m trying to do magazine work, the Herald Tribune doesn’t pay much, and O’Malley is going off on a safari to shoot polar bears. The first safari to the North Pole. Sports Illustrated wants to cover it and O’Malley says your photographer can come with us on one condition. Harold Rosenthal writes the story. They said they’d pick the writer, so Walter trying to help a friend, me, told this powerful media company to go to hell.
“I have no idea what Newfield is talking about. He wasn’t there. I never saw Newfield at the ballpark or on a field or in a press box. Hamill, either. Haven’t they got better things to do than knock the dead?”
After Thomson’s home run, O’Malley was riding an elevator at the Biltmore Hotel, where the sporting press was gathered. Someone in the elevator, neither baseball man nor journalist, cursed Ralph Branca and O’Malley asked the man why he was angry.
“I lost a bet. Branca’s home run ball cost me a hunnert bucks.”
“I sympathize with you,” O’Malley said. “I lost money, too.” He did not identify himself nor mention his calculation that missing the World Series had cost the Dodgers at least a million dollars.
O’Malley told that story with brio to Red Smith and me during a time of triumph, 1955. When O’Malley moved on, I remarked that it was a pleasure to cover someone that available. “Blarney or no, he’s always offering yarns.”
“I understand why you like him,” Smith said and sipped the Scotch O’Malley had bought us, “but I’m uncomfortable in his presence. He makes me feel as if I were a page sitting before a feudal lord. It may be personal taste, but O’Malley is too much the grand seigneur for me.”
With the Dodgers defeated on the last day in 1951, O’Malley entertained thoughts of firing Charlie Dressen, brought in to replace Rickey’s man, Burt Shotton, after the Dodgers had lost the 1950 pennant on the last day. The new man, Dressen, had now done the same damn thing.
But Dressen was getting along with the writers, including Dick Young of the Daily News. O’Malley had flat-out ordered him to get along with all the writers. At least once a week, when the Dodgers were traveling, Dressen threw a party in his hotel suite just for the press. The Dodgers bought food and drink and even paid to have a particular delicacy, crab fingers, flown north from Florida.
“All right,” O’Malley said to his new general manager, Buzzie Bavasi, “Dressen gets along with Jackie Robinson and Dick Young. I give him that. But the son of a bitch lost me the pennant. For this team to make money, we have to win. I’ve studied history. In Brooklyn, your baseball team is either in first place or bankrupt.”
Bavasi, earning $17,000 as general manager, had hoped to bring the conversation around to a pay raise for himself. Now that was impossible.
“Who the hell picked Branca?” O’Malley said.
“The bullpen coach, Clyde Sukeforth.”
“Then that’s the son of a bitch we fire. We’d better stay with Dressen. It doesn’t look good to change your manager every year.”
“I’ll fire Sukey,” Bavasi said. (This removed another Rickey loyalist from the Dodger organization.)
O’Malley puffed a cigar from a cache sent to him by Roberto Maduro, president of the great Cuban ballclub the Havana Sugar Kings. “One more thing, Buzzie,” he growled. “Tell that son of a bitch Dressen that if he doesn’t win the 1952 pennant — win, not second place — he’s unemployed.”
Charles Walter “Chuck” Dressen was the least of three remarkable New York managers during the Era. That is not a denigration any more than it is a denigration of Mantle to point out that he was not as good a center fielder as Duke Snider or Willie Mays. The basal line runs high as a mountaintop.
Dressen, a stocky fellow out of Decatur, Illinois, started as quarterback for the Chicago Staleys, ancestor of the Bears, at a height of five foot five and a weight of 145 pounds. He played eight major league baseball seasons, mostly at third base, and managed for four seasons in Cincinnati without finishing in the first division. By all accounts he was quick and observant. He was a good sign stealer. When Leo Durocher ascended in Brooklyn, he appointed Dressen a coach.
When the Herald Tribune assigned me to cover the Dodgers in 1952, manager Dressen, thirty years my senior, said, “Stick with me, kid, I’ll learn ya the ropes.” I had been playing baseball all my days and Dressen was extremely kind in helping me discover that the baseball I’d played and major league baseball were different games. He showed me how to throw a spitball and a wonder of details on everything from tag plays to a particularly favorite sign: clutching his throat. In general baseball lore, a throat clutch suggests your opponent is “choking up.” Dressen used the clutch as his sign for the squeeze play. He might yell at an opposing pitcher, “Choke, ya bastard,” and grab his throat. What appeared to be one more bit of nasty needling was an order for the squeeze. “Believe me, kid,” Dressen told me, over and over and over, “there’s tricks to this game. Believe me. I know ‘em all. I ain’t no Ned-in-the-third-reader.”
Dressen talked — preached may be more accurate — on a variety of topics. Arm trouble was interfering with the career of Clem Labine, a young pitcher of courage and sensitivity. At least, judging by the visible muscle knot on his right forearm, it looked as if Labine had arm trouble. “Kid,” Dressen told me, “it ain’t his arm. I happen to know after Labine got borned in Rhode Island, he was put in a incubator. That’s the problem. Them incubator babies can never last nine innings.”
Dressen not only sounded absurd at times, he tended to extemporize extensively on his own wisdom. Some Dodgers liked to play a parlor game on the Pullman — guess a name from a set of visual clues. Branca once challenged a group by pointing toward his eye.
“Dressen,” shouted relief pitcher Clyde King. The pun on “eye” and “I” was excellent by the standards of ballplayer wit.
Reese remembers a game at St. Louis in 1952 when the Dodgers, losing by three runs, went out to take the field in the eighth inning. “Hold ‘em, fellas,” Dressen said. “I’ll think of something.”
But Jackie Robinson regarded Dressen as the best manager for whom he played. In turn Dressen described Robinson as the best ballplayer he had managed. I was intrigued by the ease with which Dressen accepted black ballplayers and asked if he knew anything about prejudice.
“I know everything about prejudice,” Dressen said. “My parents was Catholics, I don’t go to church myself, and where we grew up in Illinois when you wasn’t even born, there was a lot of Klan. One night to let my parents know how they felt about Catholics, the Klan set fire to a cross on our front lawn. Kid, there’s nothing else you have to know about prejudice. See a cross burn on your lawn. I was nine years old.”
Primitive, intuitive, Dressen also was capable of cruelty. He didn’t care for Cal Abrams and Duke Snider remembers that on June 6, 1952, at Cincinnati he issued a hard order. “Abrams, you ain’t hitting. The only thing that can keep you with this club is your mouth.”
The Dodgers broke nicely in 1952. By June 9, the team was in first place.
“The guy managing the Reds is Rogers Hornsby,” Dressen said.
“I know that,” Abrams said. “I know who Rogers Hornsby is.”
“If you want to stay with my club, get on him,” Dressen said. “Call him every goddamn name you can think of. I want you to get him so mad he can’t think straight.”
Abrams spent the first game of a double-header bellowing and screaming taunts at Hornsby.
The Dodgers won the first game, 6 to 1. Hornsby was raging. In the clubhouse, Dressen said to Abrams, “Don’t bother to dress here. You’ve been traded. You’re playing for the Cincinnati Reds. Abrams, your new manager is Rogers Hornsby.”
* * *
Dressen spotted the Dodgers’ key deficiency. There was no big, rough, volcanic pitcher, no Allie Reynolds, no Vic Raschi, no Sal Maglie. In his second spring as Dodger manager, Dressen noticed Joe Black, a six-foot, two-inch right-hander out of Plainfield, New Jersey, who had graduated from Morgan State, majoring in psychology, and then gone to work in the Negro leagues. The Dodgers signed Black in 1950, but his minor league record during 1951 was undistinguished. Watching him in the spring of ‘52, Dressen liked the way this big and polysyllabic right-hander carried himself.
“You throw great, Joe. Just throw where I tell ya. When we want it high, throw it high — and tight. When we want that hard curve low, throw it down — and away. When I want you to brush a hitter, I want you to go right at his head. I want to see his bat go one way, his cap go another and his ass go somewhere else. Do what I tell ya, Joe, and you’re gonna be a big leaguer, and the hitter will be whoops, Good-bye Dolly Gray!”
“Okay, Number Seven,” Joe Black said. By June of his rookie season, Black was the best relief pitcher in baseball.
Race hatred lingered like a plague. To rattle Black in Cincinnati, some bench player began singing “Ol’ Black Joe.”
The hitter was a rangy outfielder, Wally Post. Black threw a fastball toward Post’s skull. The rangy outfielder hit the dirt. The singing stopped.
Increasingly, people wondered why the Yankees had no blacks. Increasingly people thought and feared that they knew. On one popular television show, Youth Wants to Know, a panel of young people guided by bright, blonde Faye Emerson, directed questions at a celebrity guest.
Jackie Robinson appeared on Youth Wants to Know and a young person asked if the Yankees were prejudiced.
“I’m not volunteering anything,” Robinson said, “but you asked me a question and my job here is to answer questions.” Robinson drew a breath. “Yes, in my opinion. The Yankees are prejudiced.” Among Robinson’s viewers that day was Casey Stengel.
The Dodgers rolled to the 1952 pennant and, with great help from Black, fought off another late Giant onrush. The Yankees also rolled. For the third time in six years, the Dodgers and Yankees met in the World Series.
Politics continued its ominous way. Stalin said war between capitalist nations was inevitable once “governments rise up against the imperialist slavery imposed on them by the United States.” Speaking for the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, Harry Truman told a Montana audience that Dwight Eisenhower had misread Soviet intentions in 1945. “Liberal” Democrat Truman maintained that the Republican Eisenhower had been “soft and misguided” when he asserted the Russians wanted to be our friends.
Six New York City teachers were dismissed for declining to answer questions “about Communist party membership.” On September 30, the day before the 1952 World Series began, the Office of Civilian Defense staged a “mock nuclear attack” on Manhattan. Flights of “hostile” bombers flew north over Times Square, where soldiers with searchlights tried to pick them out. The city’s 572 air raid sirens sounded a red alert at 7:45 P.M. Ten minutes later a “simulated atom bomb” was dropped on the Upper West Side. More than fifty thousand civilian defense volunteers responded and Arthur Wallander, the civil defense director for New York City, announced that the imitation atomic holocaust was “a great success.”
That was Tuesday night. On Wednesday afternoon, Joe Black outpitched Allie Reynolds, and the Dodgers won the first Series game at Ebbets Field, 4 to 2. Raschi won a game for New York. Roe won a game for Brooklyn. Reynolds started again in game four and, defeating Black, 2 to 0, struck out Jackie Robinson three times.
Stengel was grim in victory. He pointedly reminded the writers of Allie Reynolds’s Creek tribal background and Jackie Robinson’s remarks to Faye Emerson.
“Before he tells us we gotta hire a jig,” Stengel said, “he oughta learn how to hit an Indian.”
Sunday, October 5, was memorable; a crowd of 70,536 at Yankee Stadium was treated to a magnificent game. “Eleven tremendous innings,” Red Smith pronounced. The passionately Republican Herald Tribune was reporting that Dwight Eisenhower’s campaign to recapture the White House from the Democrats was more than a campaign; it was a crusade! Working to inform his readers rather than to delight his employers, Smith reported in the Herald Tribune: “Crowds at the Stadium yesterday expressed their emotions by wild animal cries, by boos and cheers for a California politician named Richard Nixon — first Republican to be jeered by a World Series crowd since Herbert Hoover got it in 1931.”
Helen Rogers Reid, the Iron Maiden who owned the Tribune, was not amused, but neither did she want the column killed. The Tribune of the Era was a collegial place. Helen Rogers Reid and her son Whitelaw considered criticism of Nixon unfortunate. Censorship was unconscionable.
Carl Erskine pitched for Brooklyn and took a one-hit shutout and a 4 to 0 lead into the fifth inning. Erskine remembers: “I had first-class stuff. My curve was sharp. It was October 5. That was my fifth wedding anniversary.
“In the fifth inning my control slips. A walk. Some hits. Mize rips one. I’m behind five to four. And here comes Dressen.
“I’m thinking, ‘Oh, no. I got good stuff.’ I look at Dressen coming closer and I think, the numbers are against me. October fifth. My fifth wedding anniversay. The fifth inning. I’ve given the Yankees five runs. Five must be my unlucky number. . . . The fives have done me in. Suddenly Dressen says, ‘Isn’t this your anniversary? Are you gonna take Betty out and celebrate tonight?’
“I can’t believe it. There’s seventy thousand people watching, more than lived in my hometown, Anderson, Indiana, and he’s asking what I’m doing that night. I tell him yes, I was planning to take Betty someplace quiet.
“‘Well,’ Dressen says, ‘then see if you can get this game over before it gets dark.’ I get the next nineteen in a row. We win in eleven. I took Betty out to dinner and we celebrated the first World Series game I ever won.”
Without anointing anything as the greatest ballgame ever played, I can say that this was the most enjoyable ballgame I’ve seen. Jackie Robinson showed up the Yankees with brilliant base running, a delayed steal in the second inning. Snider homered and made a magnificent leaping catch in deep right center. (“Not quite as magnificent as you think,” Snider said recently. “I could have gone closer to the wall, but I sorta shied. Hard catch, but if I’d played it better, I wouldn’t have had to jump that high.”) Andy Pafko and Carl Furillo each made leaping catches and they did have to leap as high as they did. They jumped well above box seat railings and snagged what appeared to be home runs. Billy Cox, the great third baseman, made a backhanded stab on Phil Rizzuto in the tenth inning that moved Stengel to a fuming rave: “He ain’t a third baseman. He’s a fucking acrobat.” Finally, John Sain, a good-hitting pitcher who worked six strong relief innings, was called out on a ground ball in the tenth inning when he beat the throw. Red Patterson displayed a photograph in a press room at the Biltmore which showed Sain’s foot creasing the bag while the baseball was still several feet from the glove of Gil Hodges. Art Passarella, an American League umpire, is calling Sain “Out!”
“That’s how it goes in baseball,” Fresco Thompson told Patterson. “You don’t make decisions hours later, Red. Leave the photos to Belmont and Hialeah.”
Erskine and Robinson; Rizzuto and Mize; Snider and Cox; Nixon and Stengel. And luck — the bad call — actually going against the Yankees. One’s cup ran over, provided of course the cup itself had been forged in Brooklyn.
For the first time ever, the Reliable Jersey House installed the Dodgers as favorites to win a Series from the Yankees. To bet Brooklyn, you had to put up eight dollars to win five. For what seemed to have been eons, Brooklyn fans bleated in October, “Wait till next year.” Now in 1952 it seemed that Next Year had arrived.
But on Monday at Ebbets Field, Stengel managed with triumphant desperation, and the Yankees won because Billy Loes, Brooklyn’s starting pitcher, lost a ground ball in the sun. Stengel started Raschi and relieved with Reynolds. That meant he had no suitable pitcher for a seventh game. Tomorrow’s problem. Today Stengel focused on making sure the Series actually went to seven games.
Duke Snider’s home run in the sixth inning gave Loes a 1 to 0 lead. Berra tied the game with a home run in the seventh. Woodling singled. As Loes wound up to pitch to Irv Noren, the ball dropped out of his glove. Balk. Woodling took second.
Loes struck out Noren. Billy Martin popped to Cox. Two out, Woodling on second, Raschi up. The Yankee pitcher hit a bounding ball toward Loes. Late afternoon sunlight flooded into Ebbets Field through arches behind seats on the third base side. The grounder bounced up in front of the low October sun and Loes was blinded. The ball struck Loes’s knee and skittered past Gil Hodges into right field. Running with two out, Woodling scored.
Eighth inning homers by Mantle and Snider canceled one another. The Yankees won, 3 to 2.
“There were only 30,037 persons at Ebbets Field for this game,” Rud Rennie wrote, “which would have had the effect of an A-bomb with noodles if the Dodgers had won. It was the smallest crowd of the Series, probably because many did not think they would be able to get tickets; or maybe because many people did not want to stand in line and preferred to stay at home and look at it on television.”
Stengel next started Ed Lopat, whose left-handed slow stuff would not long stop a Brooklyn lineup consisting of seven right-handed batters in Ebbets Field. Stengel knew that. Lopat pitched three scoreless innings and, as soon as the Dodgers started to cuff him, Stengel summoned Allie Reynolds. Another three innings. Then Raschi again.
The Dodgers started Joe Black and relieved with Roe and Erskine. In the seventh, with the Yankees leading, 4 to 2, the Dodgers loaded the bases with one out. The batter was Snider, who had hit four home runs so far in the Series.
Stengel brought in a journeyman left-hander, Bob Kuzava, whose name reminded Red Smith of “some kind of melon.”
“I knew Snider a little bit from the International League,” Kuzava says, “and good as he was, I never had trouble with him.” The count went full. Kuzava threw a rising inside fastball. Snider popped to second base.
“I thought,” Kuzava says, “that Casey would lift me then for Johnny Sain, bring in a right-hander to face Jackie Robinson. Sain had pitched in the National League; he knew how to work Jackie. I turned and looked for Sain, but Casey kept me in.”
Kuzava threw Robinson a snapping outside curve and Robinson hit a pop fly to the right side. “I saw the ball,” Kuzava says. “I coulda caught it. But this is the major leagues. The World Series. Pitchers don’t chase down pop flies.
“I hollered, ‘Joe! Joe!’ “
That was the call for first baseman Joe Collins. But Collins lost the pop fly, as Loes had lost the grounder, or he froze. Billy Martin, running at top speed, made a wonderful catch when the ball was barely shoelace high. That was the ballgame and the Series.
“Them Brooklyns is tough in this little park,” Stengel said, “but I knew we would win today. My men play good ball on the road. Now, you are gonna ask me why I left in the left-hand fella [Kuzava] to face the right-hand fella [Robinson], who makes speeches, with bases full. Don’t I know percentages and etcetera? The reason I left him in is the other man [Robinson] has not seen hard-throwing left-hand pitchers much and could have trouble with the break of a left-hander’s hard curve, which is what happened.”
Stengel now had managed four consecutive World Series winners. The benchmark managers, John McGraw and Connie Mack, won successive World Series on three occasions. No other manager matched Stengel and his lineal predecessor Joe McCarthy with four straight.
“Nice Series, young man,” Rud Rennie said to Mantle, who batted .345. “What are you up to now?”
“Headin’ back to Oklahoma. I got me a job working down in the mines.”
“Work in the mines?” Rennie said. “You don’t have to do that now.”
“Yes I do,” Mantle said. “You know my dad died and I got seven dependents who’re counting on me.” Mantle named three brothers, a sister, his mother, and his wife.
“That’s six,” Rennie said.
“A baby is due in March,” Mantle said.
High above Ebbets Field, I looked at my Royal portable and quested for a lead. I was twenty-three, about Mantle’s age, and seated between two elegant veterans, Red Smith and Rud Rennie. My assignment was the lead story that would run on the front page of the Herald Tribune.
I thought of Brooklyn’s bent dreams, but I thought, too, of how the Yankees had responded with power and endurance and great courage. I began with a short sentence:
“Every year is next year for the Yankees.”
ON A SLOW PLANE TO FLORIDA one bright spring morning in 1953, Allan Roth was having difficulty reviewing charts. Roth was the Dodger statistician and kept extraordinary records, breaking down the performance of players in ways widely used today but novel then. He worked with pencil and graph paper but on this flight, as he tried to review “Hodges, G. vs. right-hand pitchers’ curve balls,” he was jabbed repeatedly by a T-square.
Hodges set a record in the 1952 Series by getting no hits at all in the seven games. He had small luck with hard outside curves and sliders and Dressen wanted to teach Hodges to hit to the opposite field. Roth was compiling a record of futility that Dressen hoped would convince the big first baseman to change his batting stance.
“But I couldn’t get much done,” Roth remembered. “The T-square hit me. Then a drawing board. Then the T-square again.” In the cramped and crowded DC-3, Roth was sitting next to the eminent industrial designer Raymond Loewy. For the entire flight, six hours, Loewy scrawled and sketched. His assignment: design a new baseball park for Brooklyn.
O’Malley took me into his confidence that March. “Did you ever ask yourself,” he began in the modest Florida office where he worked, “why in an electronic age we play our games in a horse-and-buggy park?”
I had never asked myself anything like that. Ebbets Field was a Brooklyn fixture, like the Soldiers and Sailors Monument at Grand Army Plaza and the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island.
“The aisles are too narrow,” O’Malley said. “The stairs are too steep. Poles obstruct the views. We can’t park enough cars. We need twice as many seats. The bathrooms smell. The girders holding up the whole thing are rusting away.”
He puffed his cigar, looking unhappy, then brightened. “Imagine a new park. Seventy thousand seats just like the Yankees have. No poles. You can cantilever construction now. Escalators take the fans to their seats. Plenty of parking. Restaurants and train stations right in the park. Then, to end worries about rain, we put a dome over everything.”
After a while I said, “Walter, as far as I know, grass won’t grow under a dome.”
“We can get agronomy people to work on that, or maybe we can find a substitute for grass.” His face was beaming; he was serious.
“Where on earth did you get this idea for a dome?”
“History,” O’Malley said. “I wondered about the Coliseum; did the Romans call off battles between gladiators when it rained? I did some research and found out they did not. The Romans developed a retractable canvas dome. It was tied in with winches. When rain started, slaves cranked those winches and the Roman citizens did not get rained on. Or overheated, either. There was a hole in the center of the Coliseum dome that let the warm air out. The warm air rushed up so quickly no raindrops fell through. A dome worked in Rome. It will work in Brooklyn.”
O’Malley became intimate and deferential. “Just thought this might make a story for you sometime.”
I thought it did, but when I wrote a brief piece, Bob Cooke, the sports editor, would not run it. “You’re supposed to be writing baseball,” he said, “not Walter’s fantasies.”
The author’s son, Gordon J. Kahn II, an architect, recently ran down O’Malley’s Roman tale in a professional library. The “Coliseum or Flavian Amphitheater” inaugurated by Titus in A.D. 80, was designed to take fifty thousand spectators. Those of “equestrian rank or higher” had cushioned marble seats. The seating higher up was wooden. “At the top,” reports Fletcher’s History of Architecture, “there are brackets and sockets to carry the masts from which a canopy, known as a velarium, was hung to give shade.”
Not a retractable top, really, but enough to give O’Malley his inspiration for the dome. (How many other baseball men have ever had any clue to the architecture of ancient stadia?)
After Loewy built a model, people made dismissive jokes about O’Malley’s Pleasure Dome. Walter was the wrong man to dismiss.
* * *
As the Dodgers worked their way North, I had a beer with Carl Furillo. “It’s gotta stop,” he said.
“What’s gotta stop.”
“Maglie throwing at my head. I know why he’s doing it. Durocher orders him to do it. Next time Maglie throws at me, I go for him.”
“Who?”
“Durocher. I’m gonna get him.”
The Dodgers reached their mountaintop in 1953. As a team, Brooklyn batted .285. No club has matched that for more than a quarter century. The ‘53 Dodgers led all baseball with 208 home runs. They scored 955 runs, about 200 more than any other club in the league, and they were the best defensive team as well. The Dodgers made eleven fewer errors than any other team in the league. The Brooklyn weakness — and this was relative — was the pitching staff. The Dodgers had a good strikeout staff, but the team earned run average was unimposing: 4.10. By contrast, the Yankee pitching staff, with Reynolds, Raschi, and Ford, posted an ERA of 3.20. The difference, a run a game, would be significant.
The Dodgers ran off from everyone else and on September 6, eleven games out front, they played their last game of the season against the Giants. The Dodgers had beaten the Giants nine times in a row.
The Giants went ahead in the first inning when Al Dark hit a home run, but the Dodgers took the lead in the second on Roy Campanella’s two-run homer.
Gil Hodges bounced out. Ruben Gomez threw an inside fastball that hit Furillo on the left wrist. Furillo walked toward the mound. He pushed aside two umpires who tried to stop him. He pushed into Charlie Dressen, who threw both arms around him. Gomez, a willowly six-footer, stood his ground. To reach him, Furillo would have to trample his own manager. Gomez now circled back toward second base. Dressen talked urgently, “Come on. Come on. Get hold of yourself.” At length Dressen led Furillo to first base.
Order returned. Gomez threw two strikes and two balls to Billy Cox. Furillo stared into the Giant dugout. He saw Durocher glaring at him, lips moving. He could not hear what Durocher was saying. Durocher made a beckoning gesture with one finger. Furillo bolted from first base toward the Giant dugout.
Durocher, flanked by ten players, rose to meet Furillo. They grappled and fell to the ground. Furillo clamped a headlock on Durocher, who lost his cap. Durocher’s bald pate went pink, then red, then purple. Two powerful Giants, Monte Irvin and Jim Hearn, moved to rescue their manager. Clawing and stomping they worked Durocher’s bald head free. Someone stamped on Furillo’s left hand. The umpires threw both Furillo and Durocher out of the game. (The Dodgers defeated the Giants, 6 to 3.)
Furillo’s hand puffed. In the clubhouse, he seemed oblivious to pain but his breath came in snorts. “I told you I’d get him,” he said. “He made them throw at me one time too many.”
I said that taking on Durocher at the Giant dugout stacked the odds.
“I wasn’t worried about the other players ganging up on me,” Furillo said. “A lot of the Giants hate him too.”
Furillo played no more that season. He suffered broken bones in his left hand. He was batting .344 and his average froze. While on the bench, Furillo won the batting championship, beating out Red Schoendienst of the Cardinals (.342) and Stan Musial, who hit his customary .337.
More than one baseball writer fell to temptation and wrote that Furillo’s fractures were a lucky break.
Primed, rested, the Dodgers played a dreadful World Series. The Yankees, performing brilliantly and methodically, defeated them in six games. The highlight was a moment in game five when Mickey Mantle took one mighty, dramatic, and defining swing.
The teams had split the first four games. Stengel then started a forgotten right-hander, Jim “Hot Rod” McDonald, who would win only twenty-four games in nine big league seasons. Charlie Dressen started his sleek young left-hander Johnny Podres, who turned twenty-one on September 30. Dressen wasn’t quite sure about using the youngster, so he also warmed up Russ Meyer, a thirty-year-old right-hander whose furious temper earned him the nickname “Mad Monk.”
For an hour and five minutes, while Podres warmed up and worked his way into the third inning, Monk Meyer threw baseballs to Rube Walker in the Dodger bullpen. The Yankees scored a run in the first inning. The Dodgers scored a run in the second. Meyer continued throwing — this was not exactly a show of confidence in young Podres.
Starting the third, Podres walked Rizzuto. McDonald sacrificed. Podres seized Woodling’s hard drive up the middle and threw him out, as Rizzuto went to third. Joe Collins grounded to Hodges and the ball kicked off the heel of the first baseman’s glove. Rizzuto scored on the error. Pressure again asserted itself. In 145 earlier games that season, Hodges had made only nine errors, none critical.
Trailing now, Podres got ahead of rugged Hank Bauer with two strikes then hit him on the forearm. He walked Berra, and Dressen had seen enough of his boy starter. Russ Meyer came in to pitch to Mickey Mantle.
Mantle would be batting left-handed against the right-handed Meyer, whose best pitch was a screwball. “I want ya to set him up for the scroogie,” Dressen said. “Give him good breaking stuff. Don’t give him a fastball he can hit. Keep the breaking stuff at his knees.”
Meyer had thrown perhaps a hundred pitches to Rube Walker in the bullpen. Now, as the game resumed, he threw one to Roy Campanella behind home plate. It never got there.
Mantle swung — at a hip-high curve — and crashed a monstrous fly ball to left center field. The ball sailed and sailed, carried and carried high into the upper deck, landing with such force that some said they heard the sound of furniture splintering.
That sort of thing just didn’t happen, a left-handed batter reaching the upper deck in left center at Ebbets Field. Not many right-handed batters could clout a ball that far. I remember sitting in the press box in disbelief. Mickey Mantle’s batting power was a thing apart.
Red Smith wrote: “Collins, Bauer and Berra trotted around to the plate and waited there for Mantle, the fourth man in Series history to hit a home run with bases loaded. Berra straddling home plate flapped his fins like a circus seal applauding his own cornet solo. They leaped upon Mantle as he arrived and struck him repeated blows. Jubilantly they convoyed him to the dugout where the whole Yankee squad had come boiling out onto the lawn to pummel the young man.”
Mickey had arrived. In the press box I glanced toward the forlorn figure on the mound. “Meyer didn’t warm up long enough,” Rud Rennie said.
The Yankees won the game, 11 to 7, and won the sixth game, 4 to 3, on Billy Martin’s twelfth hit. This was Stengel’s fifth consecutive World Series victory, an unmatched accomplishment. On this occasion the Yankees defeated the very best of all the wonderful Brooklyn teams.
In the dressing room several Dodger players broke down and cried. “Not me,” Pee Wee Reese says. “I didn’t cry till I got home.”
O’Malley was tiring of Dressen. The manager got along with the reporters, as ordered; better than ordered, in fact. The papers brimmed with stories of the guile and wisdom of Charlie Dressen. Walter O’Malley had difficulty with egos other than his own.
Dressen had finished second, then won two pennants and lost two World Series. He was working on annual contracts, which troubled Dressen’s wife, Ruth, a slight woman and a great fancier of toy poodles. “Durocher has a long-term contract,” Ruth reminded her husband. “So does Stengel. You deserve a long-term contract, too.”
She prodded and nagged, and Dressen, one week after losing the World Series, presented himself at O’Malley’s office. “I need a three-year contract.”
“Chuck, as we are both aware, the policy of the Brooklyn ballclub is one-year contracts and only one-year contracts. It’s clear to me you’d be happier managing somewhere else.”
“Course, I would settle for just two years, not three, Mr. O’Malley.”
“Somewhere else, as I was saying, and we’ll call a press conference quickly to make clear that I won’t stand in the way of your getting a multiyear contract somewhere else.”
“The thing is, my wife says . . .”
“Buzzie!” O’Malley shouted. “Get in here and get Frankie Graham.”
The next morning, October 16, O’Malley and Dressen jointly announced that Brooklyn would have a new manager next year. Reese was the popular choice, the logical choice. He was intelligent, respected, gentle, and a wonderful competitor. But Reese, as manager, could overshadow Walter O’Malley.
“With Dressen gone,” Reese says, “I knew that people were saying I should manage. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to.
“Bavasi came to me. I don’t remember his exact words. The sense was, ‘Pee Wee. You don’t want to manage this club, do you?’ I knew I didn’t want to manage after a proposal like that.
“So you can’t say they didn’t offer me the job, but you can’t say they did offer it to me, either.”
Reese sighs slightly and says one word with affection and perplexity.
“Brooklyn!”
The Dodgers hired a drab organization man, Walter Emmons Alston, to manage in 1954. (Eventually Alston managed for twenty-three seasons, always on a one-year contract.) In his first year as Dodger manager Alston took the team out of the race. He quarreled with Jackie Robinson. He bickered with the press. His racial attitude was suspect. He provided no leadership. Few experienced players warmed to him. “He was used to managing in the minors,” Dick Young remembered, “where you had a roster of seventeen players. He didn’t know how to function with a twenty-five-man squad. In head-to-head contests, Durocher, who used everybody, ate Alston alive.” The Giants won the pennant by five games.
While Alston was losing the pennant in Brooklyn, Willie Mays was winning it in New York. After two years in the army, Willie was discharged in March and flew to join the Giants in spring training at Phoenix. In his first appearance, Mays made two outstanding catches and hit a home run, bubbling and giggling and laughing exuberantly, passionately in love with playing ball.
Willie says that Jackie Robinson was the smartest ballplayer he ever saw and that Stan Musial was the best hitter. In the spring of 1954, Willie was the most joyous ballplayer ever.
We struck up an acquaintanceship. “You got to love the game,” Willie said, “else how you gonna play good? How you gonna be good at something you don’t love?”
“Some seem to be good, even when they complain all the time.”
“Complainin’ don’t mean you don’t love the game. You don’t know how they feel. You goin’ on your own.”
“Couple a guys tell me you love baseball so much, you’d play for the Giants for free.”
“Hey,” Willie said. “They’re going on their own.”
That springtime forty years ago comes back in a whispering rush and I see Arizona again, the wide pellucid sky, and the baked hills wanting grass, and the desert winds blowing whorls of sand. Strange country to one used to Berkshire hills, strange and lonely. But not when Willie was playing ball on scruffy, alkaline soil.
He played pepper games with Durocher and Monte Irvin, the men standing close. Leo hit smashes at Willie’s toes and knees, wherever. Mays’s reflexes were such that he could field a hard line drive at ten feet. Once in a while Willie bobbled a ball. Then he owed Durocher a Coke. Durocher made great shows of cheating Willie. One morning Leo hit a hard smash on one hop, well to Willie s right. Willie knocked down the ball with a prodigious lunge but failed to glove it.
“Coke,” Durocher roared. “That’s six you owe.”
“Ain’ no Coke for that,” Willie said. His voice piped high. “That’s a base hit.”
“Six Cokes you owe,” Durocher said.
“Monte,” Willie pleaded at Irvin. “What say, roomie?”
“Six Cokes,” Irvin said solemnly. Willie’s seamless face slumped into a pout. “I’m getting the short end,” his expression said, “but I’ll fix you guys anyway.”
People started coming to the Phoenix ballpark early just to watch Willie and Leo and Monte play pepper. The skills were awesome. The clowning would have done honor to Chaplin.
We had conversations most days and Willie always became very solemn and gave me serious answers. “Who suggested,” I asked, “that you catch fly balls that way?” The technique became famous: glove up, near the belt buckle.
“Nobody,” Willie said. “I just start it one day. I get my throw away quicker.”
“Nobody taught you?”
Willie’s eyes, which sometimes danced, grew grave. “Nobody can teach you nothing,” he said. “You got to learn for yourself.”
Day by day the Giants grew more cheerful and more confident. Willie so illumined the spring that even long-faced Sal Maglie began to smile. “It’s different pitching with the kid in center field,” he said. “All I gotta do with Willie there is keep the baseball in the park.”
A few hours’ distant from the Giants base a wonderful Cleveland team was training, with great pitchers like Early Wynn and great competitors like Al Rosen. The teams met frequently.
My enthusiasm for Mays irritated a Cleveland coach named Ralph “Red” Kress, who said that Willie was flat-out overrated.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“What the hell do you know about baseball?” Kress said.
Franklin “Whitey” Lewis, a Cleveland columnist, said, “Willie won’t bat .300.”
“Twenty dollars, Whitey,” I said. “I’ll let your friend Kress, here, hold the money.”
“Nobody has to hold anything,” Lewis said. “We’ll see each other down the road.”
Willie wouldn’t hit. 300? We made it, Willie and I, by 45 percentage points. Willie led the National League at .345 (with 41 home runs), and Whitey Lewis, an honorable man, mailed me a twenty-dollar check on September 1.
A lovely concession speech.
After a while the Giants and the Indians traveled East playing game after game in Wichita Falls and Beaumont and Shreveport and New Orleans. The teams had separate Pullman cars but a common diner, and I noticed that the Indian squad drank seriously before and after dinner. As Early Wynn remembers, “Martinis before dinner, stingers afterwards.”
When I returned to New York, Red Smith asked if I thought the Indians might finally beat the Yankees.
“No chance,” I said, “the way these fellers drink. Athletes can’t drink that much and win.”
Months later, when the season ended, the hard-drinking Indians had won 111 games and beaten the Yankees out of the 1954 pennant by eight games. Then the Giants, with Willie, swept the World Series from the Indians in four straight.
New York got good hitting from Al Dark (.412) and Don Mueller (.389) and Dusty Rhodes, who helped decide two games with home runs and a third with a pinch-hit single. This Series turned in the eighth inning of the first game, when the score was tied at two.
Bob Lemon was pitching against Maglie, who walked Larry Doby in the eighth. Al Rosen singled to deep short. The Indians had two runners on with no one out, and a tough left-handed batter named Vic Wertz came to the plate. Wertz had hit Maglie hard, two singles and a triple. Durocher replaced Maglie with left-hander Don Liddle, who threw a shoulder-high fastball. Wertz walloped a high line drive to center field. The green blockhouse in dead center at the Polo Grounds was 505 feet distant from home plate.
Mays turned his back and ran toward a point to the right of the blockhouse. He sprinted toward the bleacher wall some 485 feet away, and toward the Harlem River beyond. Time slowed. The ball was frozen in the air. Willie showed his back. Number 24. Then time began again.
The ball was hit too far and too hard to be caught. Willie ran and ran. He ran past the farthest edge of the outfield grass. As his spikes touched the narrow cinder strip near the base of the bleachers, he took the ball over his left shoulder and he whirled and threw and went tumbling. His throw held Rosen on first base. “This,” Arnold Hano wrote, “was the throw of a giant.” The crowd at the Polo Grounds numbered 52,751; the roar of that crowd was thunder.
The Giants won the ballgame in the tenth inning, 5 to 2, when Dusty Rhodes pinch-hit a three-run home run. Rhodes’s homer traveled 251 feet. The ball Vic Wertz hit, the uncatchable wallop that Willie Mays caught, carried 455 feet.
“Leo,” Harold Rosenthal said in the dressing room, “was that the greatest catch Willie has made?”
Durocher was a nasty winner. “Fuck,” he said. “What kinda question is that? Willie makes great catches alla time. He’s made catches like that all year. Where you been!”
In the Cleveland clubhouse, manager Al Lopez said, “I don’t know what in the world Leo is talking about. I’ve been in the major leagues since 1928 and that was the greatest catch I ever saw. I believe that was the greatest catch ever made. I’m not even factoring in pressure.” Although the New York Giants had only three years of life left, they were triumphant in the autumn of 1954 as no Giant team before.
After the sweep, Mays liked to amble out of his apartment in Harlem. On mild days the greatest player in baseball wandered into the streets and played stickball until dark with young people from the neighborhood.
Dwight David Eisenhower, president during most of the Era, was regarded with some ambivalence by the old Roosevelt Democrats, so numerous around New York. After Eisenhower spent several years as president of Columbia University, someone remarked, “In a community of scholars, his best friend was the football coach.” Nor were austere Republicans that pleased with him. In 1952 as Eisenhower was wresting the nomination from the thin-lipped Cincinnati conservative Robert Taft, mid-western Republicans claimed that Eisenhower was as dangerously liberal as Thomas E. Dewey. “Pick Taft,” their placards demanded. “Beat Eisen-hewey!”
History informs us that Eisenhower was a centrist, somewhat wiser than he was given credit for during his presidency. He never had the nerve or spirit directly to reprimand the demagogue Joe McCarthy, even when McCarthy called General George C. Marshall a dangerous leftist. Marshall had been military godfather to Eisenhower. But Eisenhower resisted increasing demands from the French that the United States send troops to Indochina, in the war that evolved into the Vietnam War.
Eisenhower did send France $60 million in 1953 to prosecute the conflict and even agreed to train South Vietnamese soldiers. But unlike his successors John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, Eisenhower refused to commit American combat troops. “It makes no sense for the country to become involved in a land war in Asia,” he said.
By and large, despite jokes about Eisenhower’s intelligence and syntax, the country trusted the old general. When Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in Denver on Sunday, September 25, 1955, shock was intense. “Few men,” began James Reston’s passionate outburst in The New York Times, “in the public life of the Republic have wielded such power yet retained such affection. Accordingly, his intimates were in despair tonight and political leaders of his party were dismayed.” What Reston could not see was that the dismay was not simply a matter of fondness for Eisenhower. National distaste for Eisenhower’s vice president was palpable. The vice president, of course, was Richard Nixon. “Can you imagine if Ike died and Nixon became President?” people asked one another. Many shuddered.
To enormous relief, Eisenhower held on to life at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital and a Nixon presidency was thus delayed for almost two decades.
On September 30, James Dean, smoldering and intense, was ticketed for driving a Porsche Spyder 65 miles an hour on Grapevine Road, south of Bakersfield, California. Two hours later Dean plowed into a larger vehicle driven by Donald Turnupseed of Tulare and lost his life at the age of twenty-four.
Back East, the champion Giants had been sagging, except for Mays, who hit 51 home runs. The Dodgers and Alston began to get along. Brooklyn finished in first place, thirteen and a half games ahead of the Milwaukee Braves. The Giants slipped to third. Durocher seemed to lose interest in his job, arriving at the Polo Grounds just a few minutes before game time. “You can’t believe what I put up with,” he told Spencer Tracy. “The boss [Horace Stoneham] is a full-time drunk.”
“I used to be a drunk myself,” Tracy said. “That was in the old heimerdeimer days.”
“Not like Horace,” Durocher said. “We got to make some moves. He says, ‘We’ll be okay, pally.’ I’m sick of this.”
The Yankees outlasted the Indians, and for the third time in four seasons the World Series matched the Yankees against the Dodgers. Each ballclub was somewhat past its peak. Allie Reynolds, who owned oil wells, retired to Oklahoma. George Weiss sold Vic Raschi to the Cardinals. At long last the Yankees brought up a black, the catcher-outfielder Elston Howard. But this was a lesser team. The shortstop, Billy Hunter, batted only .227. No one on the pitching staff won twenty games. Mantle had a strong year with 37 homers, but going into the World Series his left knee hobbled him. He could not play every day.
The Dodgers, of course, were older too. Reese had reached thirty-seven. Robinson, at thirty-six, was having trouble with his legs and incipient diabetes. These teams were heavyweights, but flabbier than they had been. They were also crabby.
The Yankees won the first game, 6 to 5, on Joe Collins’s two homers; Jackie Robinson stole home in the eighth inning. “What a lousy, showboat play,” Berra announced in the Yankee clubhouse. “They’re two runs behind. Anyway, I had him out. The damn umpire blew the call.”
“Lousy?” Robinson said to a reporter. “Whitey Ford was winding up. With me on third? Anytime they give me a run that way, I take it. And Berra didn’t have me. He made a lazy tag. He stayed behind the plate. By the time he put the ball on me, my foot was across the plate.”
The Yankees won the next day, 4 to 2, knocking out Billy Loes in the fourth inning. They were up by two games. Mantle had not played an inning.
Al Laney interviewed fans at the Stadium. “The Dodgers got a better team,” someone told him. “There ain’t a doubt. But when they go up against the Yankees, they can’t win. It’s the hawks get em. The hawks. They can’t get away from the hawks.”
Johnny Podres held off the Yankees at Ebbets Field on his twenty-third birthday and the Dodgers won, 8 to 3. Mantle limped into action and hit a home run, but after that he was in too much pain to be a factor. (“If Mickey says he hurts, believe me he hurts,” the orthopedist, Sid Gaynor, said. “His pain threshold is remarkable, ten times higher than DiMaggio’s.”)
The Dodgers won two more in Brooklyn. Snider hit two home runs in the fifth game and a small Cuban outfielder named Edmundo Isasi Amoros, nicknamed Sandy, knocked in two more runs with another homer. “Wait till you see this kid hit,” Al Campanis of the Dodgers had told reporters. “His wrists are so quick, he hits the ball right out of the catcher’s glove.
“I’ll do some work for you guys. Give him a nickname Edmundo ‘Miracle Wrists’ Amoros! How’s that?”
The nickname didn’t work in 1955. “Miracle Wrists” batted .247. He was a cheerful sort, but he had a hard time learning English. Some said the only three words he knew were “shrimp cocktail” and “steak.”
The Series returned to the Bronx, and the Yankees won the sixth game, 5 to 1. The Reliable Jersey House favored the Yankees, 7 to 5.
Duke Snider sprained his left knee in center field. He could play the seventh game, but he was hobbled. Jackie Robinson bruised his left heel so severely he could not play at all. Mantle could not start. The famous ballgame of October 4, 1955, matched a pair of tired, wounded clubs.
The deposed manager, Charlie Dressen, had spent months teaching Johnny Podres a change of pace. “Think fastball,” Dressen said. “Throw a fastball. Just when you release — zip! Pull down the window shade.” The downward motion takes speed off the pitch at the same time as it increases rotation. The batter sees a rapidly spinning baseball. Fastball, he thinks. But the rapidly spinning pitch is moving slowly. Rotation is the fooler. Podres frustrated the Yankees with good fastballs and spinning changeups. The Dodgers chipped away — “beating at the Yankees with butterfly wings” — and scored single runs in the fourth and in the sixth.
Alston started infielder Jim Gilliam in left field. In the last half of the sixth, he moved Gilliam to second base and sent Amoros to left. Billy Martin walked. McDougald beat out a bunt. Yankees on first and second. Nobody out.
Podres threw Berra an outside fastball and Berra stroked a drive far down the left field line. Amoros, left-handed, wore his glove on his right hand. He ran full tilt and speared the ball in the glove and threw to Reese, who spun and loosed a perfect throw to Gil Hodges at first base. McDougald, running on what might have been a hit, was doubled. It was a fine catch and an absolutely spectacular relay throw. Pee Wee Reese at his very best.
The game ended at 4:44 P.M. The Dodgers won, 2 to 0. Brooklyn had won its first World Series.
Francis Sugrue of the Herald Tribune described victory night in Brooklyn. “The Fourth of July, New Year’s Eve, St. Patrick’s Day, V-E Day, and Bastille Day, all in one. Add to that a touch of Mardi Gras. The minute Pee Wee Reese threw out Elston Howard for the last out at first base, Brooklyn police headquarters sent out an alert for all to be on the lookout for Dodger fans. As this edition went to press, there were no fatalities.”
Somehow, Reese and I ended up toasting the universe on West 57th Street. His face was shining, a child’s face when school is out, or when Christmas morning finally has come.
“Can I ask you something, Pee Wee?”
“Sure.”
“Two out in the ninth. You’ve played on five losing World Series teams. You’re one out away from winning a Series. Elston Howard’s up. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking,” said Pee Wee Reese, the greatest, bravest shortstop of the Era, “I hope he doesn’t hit the ball to me.”
Walter O’Malley summoned the press a few days later. He had commissioned “Buckminster Fuller of Princeton” to design the new Dodger Stadium as a geodesic dome.
A sportswriter asked how to spell the word.
“Dome,” Buzzie Bavasi said. “D-o-m-e.”
“Are you gonna give Podres a raise?” someone else asked.
“We’re here to talk about the geodesic dome,” O’Malley said. Nobody took him or Bucky Fuller seriously.
Durocher continued telling Hollywood friends that his employer was a drunk. A group of actors and agents threw a stag for Durocher at the Friars Club, and a special feature was Danny Kaye’s imitation of a drunken Horace Stoneham. Kaye had the words right — “pally,” “by golly.” Kaye’s mimic drunken diction was brutal.
“The greatest thing,” Durocher said later, “was when Danny opened his fly and pulled out his pecker and put it on a saucer. He’s doing Horace. I mean, the sloppy talk and the stupid speeches and the rest. He’s doin’ Horace with his pecker hanging out. I never laughed so hard in my life.”
William Joseph Rigney of Burlingame, California, was hired to manage the Giants for 1956.
DICK YOUNG INSISTED O’Malley told him he wanted to leave Ebbets Field “because the area is getting full of blacks and spics.” O’Malley denied having said any such thing.
“Oh, yeah,” Young parried when I pressed him. “O’Malley also said the trouble with Brooklyn was that the place had too many blacks and spics and Jews.”
Certainly O’Malley was most comfortable with his Roman Catholic cadre, Bavasi and Fresco Thompson. Jackie Robinson disquieted O’Malley, not just because Robinson was Rickey’s man but also because he was a challenging, defiant black. Walter liked blacks docile. He preferred Pullman porters to Jackie Robinson.
The Dodgers brought Sandy Koufax to spring training in 1955. Al Campanis, who scouted Koufax, said, “Only twice in my life has my spine actually tingled. Once was when I saw the Sistine Chapel. The other time was when I saw Sandy Koufax throw a fastball.”
Koufax was wild. Today he is remembered as a Hall of Fame player, but it was not until 1963, in Hollywood, that Koufax became a twenty-game winner. Alston and others in the Dodger organization handled him poorly. It may not, however, have taken Koufax eight years to throw a strike under pressure. He is a closemouthed man but he has remarked that Alston would have made him a starter earlier, except that he was Jewish.
O’Malley was aware of everyone’s ethnicity. It is excessive to accuse him of bigotry, but he did harbor stereotypes. Brooklyn blacks were moving southward out of Bedford-Stuyvesant toward Eastern Parkway and Crown Heights. Ebbets Field stood in the path of the black advance. This became another reason he wanted to move.
O’Malley did not relish the Dodgers’ great 1955 World Series victory as a sportsman would have relished it — triumph after half a century of failure. It was good; it was fine; but it cost him extra damn dollars for a victory party. Most of all O’Malley saw the triumph as a wedge. The mayor and the governor had better start working with him on his new Brooklyn ballpark forthwith, now that he was presiding over the greatest baseball team on earth.
Dodger attendance in 1955 ran slightly over a million, a disappointing total. The Yankees drew five hundred thousand more. The upstart Braves, who had moved from Boston to Milwaukee, drew two million.
“This is a very serious problem,” O’Malley told me. “With the Braves making more money than we are, they’ll hire the best scouts away from us and before you know it, they’ll have a better team. That would be ruinous. You know what I say. In Brooklyn, you’re first or bankrupt.”
I had enough sense to ask for numbers and he had enough fondness for me to provide them. “Not for last year, those numbers aren’t in yet, but for two years ago, 1953, typical Brooklyn numbers.” This was the Dodger balance sheet Walter O’Malley gave me.
RECEIPTS
| Tickets sales, including World Series, and minor league clubs | $4,500,000 |
| Concessions and parking | 450,000 |
| Player sales | 200,000 |
| Total Dodger income | $5,150,000 |
EXPENSES
| Federal, state, and city taxes | $ 926,000 |
| Team salaries; players’ pension contributions and all traveling expenses for major and all minor league squads | 1,119,000 |
| Team replacement costs: scouts, payments to free agents, spring training costs, minor league team deficits | 428,000 |
| Maintaining Ebbets Field | 589,000 |
| Games expenses; ticket printing and selling, ushers and staff | 184,000 |
| Advertising and publicity, office personnel and staff salaries, and insurance | 80,000 |
| Administrative expenses, including executive salaries, telephone, and office supplies | 417,000 |
| Total Dodger expenses | $3,743,000 |
The single-season profit O’Malley admitted was $1,407,000. He would not admit $750,000 from radio and television, but that ran his annual profit to more than $2,000,000. Gaining control of the Dodgers cost O’Malley $1,250,000. Now the team was making more than that each season. O’Malley was earning about two hundred percent on his investment. His team had won the World Series.
He was not satisfied.
In November, O’Malley told Irving Rudd, of his publicity office, that he was booking the Dodgers into an old minor league park, Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, for seven games in 1956. On December 12, he told Rudd to move into a one-room office at the Hotel Plaza on Journal Square (in Jersey City). “Thus, I became the only general manager of a major league baseball team in New Jersey history,” Rudd recalled in a memoir called The Sporting Life. “Of course, if you take into account that the Dodgers were playing only seven of their regularly scheduled 77 home games in Jersey City, this made me the one-eleventh general manager of the Dodgers.
“More seriously,” Rudd says, “it was clear what O’Malley was threatening.
“Today Jersey City.
“Tomorrow California.”
Firing Durocher did not revive the Giants. The team had finished third in 1955. Under Rigney, the Giants did no better than sixth in 1956 and 1957. They traded Bobby Thomson to Milwaukee in February of 1954, a move defiant of decent sentiment, but one that brought them the good left-handed pitcher Johnny Antonelli. In the middle of the 1955 season, they sold Sal Maglie to the Cleveland Indians. The following year the Dodgers bought Maglie’s contract from Cleveland.
The Brooklyn clubhouse was electric as Maglie entered it on the afternoon of May 16, 1956. He had knocked down Dodger hitters for six years. Carl Furillo continued to swear vengeance.
As Maglie entered, Erskine and Reese and Campanella looked curiously toward Furillo.
“Hello, Dago,” Furillo said.
“ Lo, Skoonj,” said Maglie.
Maglie won thirteen games for Brooklyn. The Dodgers won the pennant from Milwaukee by a single game; quite simply, Sal Maglie, Mephistopheles on the Mound, had won it for Brooklyn.
“That may be,” Carl Erskine says, “but when I saw Maglie standing in our clubhouse, wearing our uniform, I knew nothing in this world would ever surprise me again.”
Mickey Mantle came into his own in 1956, which he now calls “my favorite year.” He batted .353, hit 52 home runs, and drove in 130 runs. Unlike Mays, Mantle had not been anointed rookie of the year. (Gil McDougald beat him out.) But in ‘56, Mantle was indisputably the American League’s most valuable player.
The Dodgers jumped to a lead in the World Series. Maglie won the opening game, 6 to 3. Next day the Yankees knocked out Don Newcombe and handed Don Larsen a 6 to 0 lead in the second inning. But the Dodgers knocked out Larsen and won going away, 13 to 8.
Larsen broke in with the St. Louis Browns in 1953, the year the Browns went bankrupt. The team underwent a kind of breech rebirth as the Baltimore Orioles, and the Yankees acquired Larsen in an eighteen-player trade with Baltimore in the winter of 1954. Larsen quickly established himself as a pretty good pitcher and a free spirit.
He demolished a car at four A.M. one predawn during spring training at St. Petersburg, driving into a pole.
“The pole was speeding,” Larsen told reporters. “I hope Stengel don’t fine me.”
“Fine him?” Stengel said. “He oughta get an award, finding something to do in this town after midnight.”
The Yankees won the next two games at the Stadium. On October 8, with the Series tied at two games each, Larsen went out to pitch against the remarkable Mr. Maglie. Larsen felt stressed. He had failed in this World Series. He had failed in the Series of 1955. He was having trouble making ends meet. His estranged wife, Vivian, twenty-nine, had obtained a court order requiring the Yankees, Larsen, and Commissioner Ford Frick to show cause why his World Series share should not be seized by the Bronx Supreme Court.
“While this baseball hero is enjoying the luxuries of life and the plaudits of the public,” argued lawyer Harry Lipsig, “he is subjecting his fourteen-month-old baby girl and his wife to the pleasures of starvation existence.”
The night before the game, Larsen went out for drinks with a group that included the Yankee backup outfielder Bob Cerv. “I am not going to say much,” Cerv told me, “I left him at four A.M.”
“I got no comment at all on that night,” Larsen says.
“I called his hotel in the morning,” Cerv says, “to make sure he got out of bed. He said, ‘Noooooo.’ At the ballpark, he took a whirlpool bath, a cold shower, and had a rub. You know what happened next.”
Maglie was marvelous, limiting the Yankees to five hits. Larsen was better. He pitched the only perfect game in the history of the World Series. Fastballs and sliders. A few slow curves. Superb control. A novel no-windup delivery.
With two out in the ninth inning and twenty-six men retired, Dale Mitchell pinch hit for Maglie. He took a ball, high and outside. A slow curve broke over for a strike. Mitchell missed a curve. Strike two. He fouled a fastball. He took a quarter swing at a fastball that seemed to be eye-high. Babe Pinelli, the umpire, called Mitchell out.
“Damn,” Dick Young said in the press box. “The imperfect man just pitched a perfect game.”
“Casey,” Louis Effrat of the Times shouted in the winning clubhouse, “was that the best game you ever saw Larsen pitch?”
“So far,” Stengel said.
Shirley Povich of the Washington Post wrote a lead people remember:
The million-to-one shot came in. Hell froze over. A month of Sundays hit the calendar. Don Larsen today pitched a no-hit, no-run, no-man-reach-first game in a World Series.
By nightfall, Larsen dispatched four hundred twenty dollars to the lawyer for his wife and daughter.
“This man is still no hero,” Harry Lipsig, the lawyer, said. “In these proceedings, he has brazenly suggested when his daughter was born she immediately was to be given out for adoption.”
In California Larsen’s mother, Charlotte, a housekeeper at a retirement home in La Jolla, said she had been weeping tears of joy.
* * *
Labine shut down the Yankees, and the Dodgers won the sixth game, 1 to 0, in ten innings. The next day the Yankees won, 9 to 0, putting Don Newcombe to rout in three innings. It was the seventeenth time the Yankees had won the Series.
“They beat the hell out of us,” Walter Alston said.
In December of 1956, O’Malley sold Jackie Robinson’s contract to the New York Giants for $35,000 and the rights to a journeyman left-hander named Dick Littlefield. O’Malley wrote the Robinsons a letter of farewell.
Dear Jackie and Rachel:
I do know how you and your youngsters must have felt. It was a sad day for us as well.
The roads of life have a habit of recrossing. There could well be a future intersection. Until then, my best to you both.
With a decade of memories.
Au revoir,
Walter O’Malley
“If it makes him so sad,” Jackie said to Rachel, “why did he go and trade me to the Giants?”
Robinson quit and sold the announcement of his retirement to Look magazine for $50,000. Then he went to work for Chock Full o’ Nuts, the coffee company, as director of personnel. In the summer of 1957, I traveled to Greenwood Lake, New York, to watch Sugar Ray Robinson train for a fight with Carmen Basilio. After a while, Jackie Robinson appeared carrying a carton and looking embarrassed. The carton contained cans of coffee. William Black, the president of Chock Full o’ Nuts, had ordered Robinson to pass out coffee cans free “to get some publicity from the boxing writers.”
Sugar Ray greeted Jackie with a hug; but a hero had been reduced to a handout man.
“By 1957 we had a terrible situation at the Polo Grounds,” Chub Feeney remembers. “The park was deteriorating. People were afraid of the neighborhood. At the very least, we needed three million dollars as a minimum to break even and we weren’t getting it. We offered Jackie fifty thousand dollars to play for us, although we knew he wasn’t in great shape. We were hoping desperately to boost attendance with Robinson. We were drawing only six hundred fifty thousand a year in a metropolitan area of twelve million.
“We could have sold the club, but my Uncle Horace didn’t want to sell the club.
“You knew him.
“He lived for baseball . . .”
Hulan Jack, borough president of Manhattan, proposed a new stadium for the Giants. It would be built on enormous stilts, Jack said, over railroad tracks on the West Side of Manhattan. This is where, thirty years later, Donald Trump proposed a development so enormous that its highest skyscraper would cast a shadow on Central Park. Hulan Jack was an eccentric; he talked of a 110,000-seat ballpark. He had no plan to raise construction money.
“We owned the Minneapolis Millers in the American Association,” Feeney says. “By June of 1957, Horace and I were finishing arrangements to move the team there. Then Horace’s phone rang. Walter O’Malley said, ‘Why not move to California with me?’
No one paid appropriate attention in 1955 when O’Malley sold Ebbets Field for three million dollars to a real estate developer named Marvin Kratter. He also sold ballparks the Dodgers owned in Fort Worth and Montreal for one million dollars each. “That five million dollars,” he said, “is the money that will, one way or another, go into our new Brooklyn ballpark.” But he also invested some of the money by acquiring the Los Angeles franchise in the Pacific Coast League from the Chicago Cubs. He now owned territorial rights to Los Angeles. He was ready to play his special game: stroke and tomahawk.
“My roots are New York,” O’Malley told Mayor Robert Wagner at City Hall on June 2, 1957. “People in Los Angeles want the Dodgers to move. They’ve made flattering offers. I am in no way committed.
“What do you want?” Wagner asked.
“Air rights over the Long Island Railroad station at Atlantic Avenue and Flatbush Avenue in downtown Brooklyn. The Dodgers don’t want anything else. We’ll pay for a new ballpark by ourselves.”
Wagner was a pleasant person, part Tammany hack, part liberal reformer, and totally overmatched in negotiating with O’Malley. Robert Moses, New York’s commissioner of parks, was the principal city player. Through a series of appointments, Moses controlled not only parks, but highways and urban projects as well. Urbanologists regard Moses as “the single most powerful figure in twentieth-century New York City government.” Moses put hard questions to O’Malley.
“You aren’t suggesting, sir, that four or five million dollars is enough to build the domed stadium you propose?”
O’Malley conceded that the cost would be higher. “The Brooklyn Dodgers are prepared to sell a bond issue to citizens of Brooklyn, backed by the full faith and credit of our franchise. I have no doubt, Mr. Moses, none whatsoever, about our ability to finance ourselves.”
Further, O’Malley said, he was negotiating with Mathew Fox of Skiatron, Inc., “to put our games on subscription TV.” The technology involved a coin box on television sets. Fans would have to put two quarters into the box to unscramble pictures of Dodger games. “These receipts will help pay for the new ballpark.”
Moses looked incredulous. “Engineers and electronic experts,” O’Malley said, “tell me coin box television is no problem at all.”
“As a matter of fact,” Moses said, “I just don’t want to see a baseball field in downtown Brooklyn at all. The streets will never handle all the cars.”
O’Malley said that his plans for the domed stadium, over the Long Island Railroad station, included such good access that most people would come to the park by train.
“You are in error, Mr. O’Malley. If I let you build your domed stadium, your ballgames will create a China Wall of traffic in Brooklyn. No one will be able to pass.”
“Where would you prefer that we relocate?” O’Malley said.
“I have a lovely parcel of land in Flushing Meadow, at the old World’s Fair site in Queens.”
O’Malley looked steadily at Robert Moses. “If my team is forced to play in the borough of Queens, they will no longer be the Brooklyn Dodgers.”
Next day the front page of the Herald Tribune announced that a new aquarium was being dedicated in Coney Island and that Margaret Truman, wife of Clifton Daniel, Jr., assistant managing editor of the New York Times, had given birth to a son. A headline in columns four and five, more prescient than the copyeditor knew, described the meeting among O’Malley, Wagner, and Moses as “a scoreless tie.”
In September the Los Angeles City Council voted to offer the Dodgers 307 acres in Chavez Ravine in exchange for a small parcel of land at the Los Angeles minor league park called Wrigley Field.
The last ballgame at Ebbets Field occurred on September 24, 1957. The Dodgers defeated Branch Rickey’s Pittsburgh Pirates, 2 to 0.
Gladys Goodding, the organist, played sad songs for the crowd, 6,702 fans in — as O’Malley said — “a borough of fully two million.” Goodding played in order:
“Am I Blue?”
“What Can I Say, Dear, After I’ve Said I’m Sorry?”
“Thanks for the Memory!”
“When I Grow Too Old to Dream”
“When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day”
“Auld Lang Syne”
That night Casey Stengel’s Yankees clinched their eighth American League pennant.
The Milwaukee Braves won the World Series, four games to three, with three complete-game victories from Lew Burdette, a right-hander out of Nitro, West Virginia.
I flew back on a United Airlines plane chartered by the Yankees. Stengel was angry and drank steadily for three hours. After we landed, he moved down the wheeled stairway to the tarmac at Idlewild Airport and a reporter from channel 11 rushed at him with microphone and cameraman.
“Did your team choke up out there?” the reporter asked.
“Do you choke up on your fucking microphone?” Stengel said. He turned around and clawed his buttocks.
“You see,” he told me later, “you got to stop them terrible questions. When I said ‘fuck’ I ruined his audio. When I scratched my ass, I ruined his video, if you get my drift.”
The Era was done. On October 9, when the Yankee-Milwaukee Series was tied at three games each, Arthur Patterson, wrongly characterized by Dick Young as “a third-string club official,” read a fifty-two-word statement ending: “The stockholders and directors of the Brooklyn baseball club have today met and unanimously agreed that the necessary steps be taken to draft the Los Angeles territory.”
Young wrote, “Following the Giants’ defection, New York is left without a National League club for the first time in 67 years.”
The United Press telephoned Bob Hope in Palm Springs.
“The Dodgers are going to be very big out here,” Hope said. “I can’t wait to see Duke Snider in a bare-midriff uniform.”
Benny Weinrig, a diffident little fellow who served sandwiches in the Ebbets Field press box, burst into tears that night. “This team,” he told his mother, “has been my whole life. What is it now?
“Just a joke . . .”
* * *
The Era was done. Durocher was gone and Robinson and DiMaggio; Reynolds and Raschi; Roe and Gionfriddo; Bobby Brown and Bobby Thomson; Koslo and Rizzuto; and Charlie Dressen, managing the Washington Senators, got himself fired very early in 1957. Fired in May.
The Era ended when it was time for the Era to end: Stengel defeated in the World Series, the Dodgers and the Giants moving West.
The Era ended when it was time for the Era to end and that, I believe, is everlastingly part of its beauty and its glory.
March 6, 1990–October 31, 1992
Croton-on-Hudson, New York