23 WHITEY AND BILLY

There was a marked change in Casey in 1950. The world championship of 1949 won him more credibility than he’d ever had in the game. He had gone from clown to genius “overnight,” and suddenly he was baseball nobility.

If DiMaggio, Keller, Rizzuto, and Henrich preferred McCarthy, they still had to respect Casey’s accomplishment of overcoming seventy-one injuries and winning.

Though even Casey had been cautious in 1949, reining in his supersize personality while he settled in, by 1950 he was his old, relaxed, self-confident self again, pouring on the Stengelese at will. Television was becoming a more daily presence in the lives of Americans, and Casey took naturally to interviews, which could be informative and confounding at the same time. The camera loved his face.

As a first order of business, the Yankees decided to hold an early spring camp for prospects. They had to tinker with major-league rules to pull this off, because it was quickly seen as a Yankee advantage, the Yankees being the team of “haves.” The players who were invited received only a per diem for expenses, no pay, but this still gave the Yankees an edge: a spring camp before camps could legally open on March 1. It was conceived by Stengel and Weiss.

Branch Rickey, as general manager, had done something like this with the Cardinals in the 1930s.

To get around the rule, they called it an “instructional school,” as if it were not part of spring training, and further flouted the rules by designating some of the players as “instructors,” when in fact they had never even played a single major-league game.

Included among the forty-four Yankee farmhand invitees were Jackie Jensen, Billy Martin, Gil McDougald, Tom Morgan, and Tom Sturdivant, all of whom would play big roles in future pennants; both Jensen and Martin were called “instructors,” as were such veterans as Hank Bauer and Cliff Mapes.

The players who like most players in all organizations, held winter jobs (such as pumping gas, stocking shelves, or selling shoes), had to decide whether to keep earning that money or go to camp for no pay. Few declined.

The school, based on fundamental drills, lasted only a short time: complaints from other teams led to an early closure. Still, the concept of this school would be renewed in 1951 and go on for eight seasons before the Florida Winter Instructional League—with more teams participating, and games actually played—kicked in.

As spring training started (Casey interceded in holdouts by Berra and Raschi to help get them signed), Edna was back home in Glendale, recovering from a surgical procedure. She placed a framed photo in the den, of Casey and Rizzuto, in their handsome tuxedos, receiving their respective awards from the New York chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association. (Rizzuto had been voted Player of the Year for 1949.) The irony of the photo, of course, was that thirteen years earlier Casey had pretty much kicked Rizzuto out of a Dodgers tryout session. The story took on a life of its own after Rizzuto became a star for him with the Yankees.

Whitey Ford was not among the forty-four players invited to the early camp, nor was he on the forty-man roster, but he was invited to spring training. And why not? He had put in three minor-league seasons, moving from Class C to Class B to Class A, with forty-five wins against seventeen losses, and all the poise one might hope for from a slick kid who lived in Queens and went to high school in Manhattan. George Selkirk, who had been Babe Ruth’s right-field successor on the Yankees, had managed Ford at Binghamton in 1949, raved about his maturity. The Yankees’ trustworthy scout Paul Krichell, who had signed Lou Gehrig and Ford, was still touting him highly. He was going to open the season at Kansas City in 1950.

Casey described him as a “quiet, well-behaved, good living, earnest unspoiled kid from a quiet unspoiled lower financial bracket family, and that girl of Whitey’s isn’t going to hurt him either. I have met her.”

He also called him “whiskey slick,” which was his term for guys who could hold their liquor.

Jackie Jensen was a “golden boy,” blond, handsome, strong—he was Mickey Mantle without the switch-hitting and without the speed, but he had star quality. He had been an All-American football hero, played in the Rose Bowl, and married an Olympic diving champion. He was raw, with only one season in the minors after playing at the University of California, Berkeley, but at twenty-three he was considered nearly ready for the majors. Because he was a bonus player,^* the Yankees had to keep him anyway, or risk losing him to another organization.

Then there was Billy Martin, who at twenty-one already had four minor-league seasons behind him, including two with Casey at Oakland, and an additional one at Oakland in 1949 under Dressen. Early on, he was thought of as “Casey’s Boy,” not only because he had played for him in the minors, but for having the kind of personality and drive that Casey loved in ballplayers. Martin was an infielder who played at such a high level of intensity that he could take command on a diamond no matter where he was playing. Like Casey, he could live hard—he drank, he smoked, he got into fights, he battled umpires, he developed animosities. Casey was better at holding his liquor; Billy let it get the better of him. But as a ballplayer—and that is really all Casey cared about—Billy was the real deal.

In Ford, Jensen, and Martin, Casey was going to have “Stengel Yankees” continue to emerge, and make it even more his team. They were not McCarthy Yankees or Bucky Harris holdovers. They were his.

Martin made the opening-day roster, and had a memorable debut in Fenway Park on April 18, getting two hits and driving in three runs in one inning, when he replaced Coleman at second late in the game. He got into only five other games before being sent back down in May, when rosters had to be trimmed to twenty-five players, but he returned in late June, made some sporadic starts, hit .250 for the season, and sat next to Casey on the bench, listening and learning.

Jensen made the team, debuting the same day as Martin, but he stuck around all season; he played in forty-five games, though he started in just twelve of them, and hit .171 with one home run. Though he wasn’t quite ready, he, too, was learning from the experience of being in the majors. One thing he couldn’t handle—and never would—was his anxiety over airplane travel. The Yankees still traveled mostly by train, but if he knew a flight was coming up in a few weeks, he’d let it bother him all that time.

—

Opening day at Yankee Stadium, April 21, 1950, included the raising of the 1949 world-championship flag (along with the American flag), at the pole in deep center field by the monuments. Casey did the honors, as he would many times over coming years, hoisting the huge flag with gusto as the crowd cheered. After a winter of banquets, awards, and accolades, this was the final cap to a wonderful first season with the Yankees. And now all that mattered was how things would go in 1950.

—

Whitey Ford had gone 6-3 in twelve starts at Kansas City. He was ready, perhaps overripe—he had even stopped at a pay phone one day to call the Yankee minor-league offices in the Bronx to say he was ready, and to ask when he was being called up.

It happened on June 29, with the Yankees in second place, four and a half games out of first. He made a relief appearance on July 1 and then made his first of 12 starts on July 6, beating the Philadelphia Athletics 5–4.

For Ford and Stengel, and of course for everyone else, playing the Athletics meant that Connie Mack was in the opposing dugout, in his final weeks as manager. Mr. Mack was eighty-seven. He had begun his pro career in 1884, and his managing career in 1894. He had been managing the Athletics since 1901. And this was going to be it. Maybe it wasn’t that big a deal to Casey, who went back to 1910 as a player, but to Ford and Jensen, and to Martin and all the other young players on the team, it was an amazing thing to ponder.

While Martin and Jensen sat and watched, Yogi Berra was doing the heavy lifting. Little thought was given to days off back then, partly because there were more off-days in the schedule (doubleheaders being more common), and partly because you were being paid to play, so stop whining.

The Yankees played twenty-two doubleheaders in 1950, and Yogi caught both games in nineteen of them, including back-to-back doubleheaders on September 25 and 26. And nary a complaint. This would come to be the norm. He pretty much did the same thing every year, peaking in 1954, when they played eighteen and he caught them all. He caught eighteen out of twenty in 1951, and in one, the first game went fifteen innings. Didn’t matter.

“Casey would walk by my locker before the doubleheaders and tell me, ‘You’re catching the second game,’ ” said Charlie Silvera, the backup catcher. “I was always sitting there to make sure no one took my uniform away. But if Yogi was feeling okay after one, he’d play the nightcap. I hardly ever got in.”

Yogi’s intelligence in calling ball games was unquestioned. “He calls his own games except for some occasional advice in a tight spot when a manager might give the pitch to any catcher,” said Casey.

If all the work behind the plate took a toll on his hitting, no one could detect it. In 1950, Yogi batted .322 in 151 games with 28 home runs and 124 RBIs. Though Casey occasionally complained that Berra swung at a lot of bad pitches and could have walked more, he struck out only twelve times in 656 plate appearances.

“One day he struck out,” recalled the batboy Joe Carrieri in a 2014 interview, “and when he came back to the dugout, Casey muttered something like ‘I told you.’ And Yogi, adopting an immigrant Italian accent, said, ‘Eh, Casey, go take a good crap for yourself.’ ”

For all of this, Yogi finished only third in MVP voting (Billy Goodman, .354 with Boston, was second), with the ultimate honor going to his pal Rizzuto, who played 155 games and batted a career high of .324 with sterling defense, an on-base percentage of .418, nineteen sacrifice bunts, and two hundred hits, which was rarefied air back then. (No one on the Yankees accomplished it again for another twelve years.)

Casey’s pitchers were reliable and often overpowering. Working through the season with virtually no bullpen to turn to (Page fell off to a 5.04 ERA in what would be his final season), Casey got 134 starts and fifty-six complete games from Raschi, Reynolds, Lopat, and Byrne, and then added Ford for a dozen more starts and seven more complete games.

In July, Casey got to serve as manager in an All-Star game for the first time, and promptly named six Yankees to Rizzuto and Berra, whom the fans had already picked; Casey added Raschi, Reynolds, Byrne, Coleman, Henrich, and DiMaggio. He also named his three coaches, Dickey, Turner, and Crosetti, to assist him, thus putting twelve Yankee uniforms along the baseline for introductions, plus the trainer, Gus Mauch. Call it executive privilege.

Ford won his first nine decisions as a starting pitcher, although he was rescued a few times on bad starts that might have turned into losses. But each start produced more maturity, more command, and more respect from the league’s hitters. He did not lose a game until he relieved Lopat in the seventh inning on September 27 in Shibe Park. There, Sam Chapman hit a two run homer off him with one out in the ninth to send the Yankees—and Ford—to an 8–7 defeat. It was the next-to-last win of Connie Mack’s career.

Whitey’s regular season would thus end 9-1 with a 2.81 ERA.

“I knew Whitey could pitch,” boasted Casey. “I told you that as far back as March, but I did not look for the amazing poise and the veteran’s know how which he showed me right from the start in July. It’s the thrill of a lifetime in a manager’s career.”

A controversial point in the season came on July 3, when Casey decided to try DiMaggio at first base. Perhaps this was his way of reminding Joe who was the boss, maybe motivated by some small unreported incident in the days leading up to this. Stengel knew the move was not going to please “the Dago,” who never wanted to be in a situation where he might look bad. In fact, Casey didn’t even tell DiMaggio about it. They spoke only on occasion—theirs was an uneasy relationship. Casey told Weiss; Weiss told Topping; Topping told DiMaggio. The game got a lot of publicity, and Joe handled thirteen chances successfully. Two were unassisted groundouts to first; the other eleven were routine throws to first. No errors, no embarrassment.

“The time for me to learn to play first base is in spring training, not when we’re trying to win a pennant,” Joe said after the game.

He never played there again.

—

As for the season itself, the Yankees abandoned first place in mid-June and hovered in second or third for most of the summer without reclaiming first—to stay—until September 16, when Ford beat Detroit 8–1. The actual pennant clinching came on an off-day, September 29, with two games left. The team gathered in the Kenmore Hotel in Boston as Mel Allen read reports from a ticker and the players found the critical Indians–Tigers game on the radio. Red Rolfe’s Tigers lost 12–2, and the Yankees won the pennant. With the team dressed in suits and ties, the PR director, Red Patterson, summoned news photographers to capture their celebration at the hotel, as they tossed Casey up and down into the air.

“Hey, be careful,” he said, laughing, “you know I broke my leg in this town!”

—

The Philadelphia Phillies “Whiz Kids” won the National League pennant in 1950, edging Brooklyn on the last day. The Phils had not won a pennant since 1915, five years before Casey played for them. This would in fact be their only pennant between 1915 and 1980.

The Phillies had long been a sad-sack team. Just seven years earlier, the club had been sold for eighty thousand dollars to a New York businessman, William Cox. Cox was gone in just eight months, charged with betting on baseball games, and the team was then owned by Bob Carpenter, Jr., whose mother was a member of the DuPont Chemical family. (His father, Bob Sr., had died the year before.)

Beyond Robin Roberts and Curt Simmons, who won thirty-seven games between them, the Phillies’ best pitcher in 1950 was the reliever Jim Konstanty, who was 16-7 with twenty-two saves in a record seventy-four appearances. The manager, Eddie Sawyer, named him as starting pitcher in Game One at Shibe Park, but Raschi beat him 1–0 on a sacrifice fly by Coleman in the fourth inning.

Reynolds won Game Two in ten innings on a DiMaggio homer in the top of the tenth, and Lopat won Game Three, at Yankee Stadium, 3–2, on a walk-off single by Coleman that scored Woodling.

Casey turned Game Four over to his rookie, Whitey Ford. He hadn’t intended this to be the deciding game, but now it was, and a rather pressure-less one at that. It was pretty clear that the Yankees were going to repeat as series champs.

Ford, wearing his rookie number 19, put eight zeros on the scoreboard, and the Yankees led 5–0. Out to the mound he went for the ninth. He gave up a single to Willie Jones and hit Del Ennis with a pitch. Dick Sisler grounded into a force play to put runners at first and third with one out. Ford struck out Granny Hamner for the second out, and the catcher, Andy Seminick, came up.

Seminick lifted one to deep left that got the better of Woodling, left field being a particularly difficult sun field in October. Two runs scored.

Mike Goliat singled, and suddenly the tying run was at bat, in the person of Stan Lopata, pinch-hitting for Roberts.

Casey briefly talked to Jim Turner on the bench and headed for the mound, his hands characteristically tucked into his back pockets. He signaled for Reynolds, who had relieved six times during the season.

The fans cheered Ford as he departed, and then booed Casey as he followed Whitey off the mound. They wanted Whitey to get the complete-game win.

Lopata fanned on three pitches.

Stengel fulfilled his two-year contract with his second consecutive world championship. And he got bonus money, estimated to be ten thousand dollars, each year he won, on top of his World Series shares.