A TALE OF THREE CITIES: NEW YORK, L.A. AND SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER OF ‘62 (9 page)

The New York Giants featured Irish Meusel (born in
Oakland; brother of Bob Meusel). He also played for the Dodgers.
Dick Bartell (Alameda) was an All-Star shortstop over an 18-year
career. Bill Rigney (Alameda) was a journeyman second baseman in
the 1950s, later managing the Giants, Los Angeles Angels and
Minnesota Twins.
Pitcher Mike McCormick (Los
Angeles) played in New York briefly before the team moved to San
Francisco.

The Brooklyn Dodgers’ California
connection was also strong. It starts with the great
Lefty
O’Doul (San Francisco), who hit .398 in 1929, later managed the San
Francisco Seals, and is credited with making baseball popular in
Japan. General Douglas MacArthur said no single diplomat did more
to heal U.S.-Japanese relations after World War II than O’Doul did.
Rod Dedeaux (Hollywood High, USC) had a very
short “career,” but befriended his manager, Casey Stengel. Dedeaux
became the most legendary college baseball coach of all time at
Southern California. The long tradition of big league teams playing
exhibitions against colleges started when Stengel’s Yankees played
Dedeaux’s Trojans. Later the Dodgers played USC at Dodger Stadium
every year before heading to Spring Training.

1941 National League Most Valuable Player Dolf
Camilli was from San Francisco. Jackie Robinson (Pasadena’s Muir
High, Pasadena City College) was of course a UCLA football hero
whose place in the American pantheon is approached by few, if any.
Cookie Lavagetto (Oakland) broke up the Yankees’ Bill Bevens’s
no-hitter in the 1947 World Series. Infielder
Gene Mauch (Los Angeles Fremont High) later became the
manager of the Phillies, Expos, Twins and Angels. Dick Williams
(Pasadena City College, where Jackie Robinson went), later managed
World Series teams at Boston, Oakland and San Diego.

Bill Sharman (Los Angeles Narbonne High, USC)
sat on the Dodgers’ bench the day Bobby Thomson hit the “shot heard
‘round the world” before becoming a Hall of Fame basketball star
with the Boston Celtics, and coach of the 1972 NBA champion
Lakers.

Duke Snider (Compton High) was one of the three
legendary center fielders in New York during the “golden age” of
the 1950s (the others being Willie Mays of the Giants and Mickey
Mantle of the Yankees). A Hall of Famer, he also played for the
Mets. Gino Cimoli (San Francisco) was a power hitter.
Pitcher Don Drysdale was a teammate of Robert Redford’s at
Van Nuys High, where Natalie Wood was also a student at the time.
He turned down scholarships to Stanford and Southern Cal to sign
with Brooklyn and was their staff ace before the team moved to
L.A.

The New York (football)
Giants have a strong California connection.
Running back
Frank Gifford (Bakersfield High) was an All-American and a “golden
boy” at the University of Southern California before forging a Hall
of Fame career in the Big Apple. He was a staple on the
Monday
Night Football
broadcast team for years. At Army, in West
Point, New York: Heisman winner Glenn Davis out of LaVerne’s Bonita
High School. In 1960, the American Football League was formed. A
new California-New York rivalry would be born, between the Jets and
the Oakland Raiders.

"Nice guys finish last."

- Leo Durocher, manager of the Brooklyn
Dodgers (1941-47) and New York Giants (1948-55)

After baseball was supposedly "invented" by Abner
Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York in 1839, the game was
popularized on the Elysian Fields of New York. Rules were devised
and the game evolved. In 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockings became
the very first professional team.

Other professional clubs were formulated, fan bases
were established, and the newspapers wrote it all up. A man named
Jim Mutrie owned one franchise, which he admiringly called “my
giants.” The city was
giant
. The team became the Giants. An
organization, calling itself the National League, started in 1876.
Next to Manhattan was a borough called Brooklyn.

Americans did things, accomplished things, built
things that other countries never dreamed of. In Russia, a railroad
was built in Siberia on flat ground. It took decades, was fraught
with peril and mishaps. In the United States, the Trans-continental
railroad connected the East Coast with the West Coast. It was built
over both the Rocky and Sierra Mountain ranges, and as historian
David Ambrose said in the title of his book, there was
Nothing
Like It in the World.

Americans erected tall buildings, eventually calling
them “skyscrapers.” They defied nature, such as in the forging of
the Erie Canal. They built great structures, and in 1883 the
Brooklyn Bridge connected the borough to Manhattan. It was
therefore brought, in some cases kicking and screaming, into
official annexation with New York City. Immediately and forever
after, Brooklyn had an inferiority complex.

The New York Giants played at the Polo Grounds (built
in 1891) and were the most successful organization in baseball.
Brooklyn had a team, but it was always in search of an identity.
The team never knew what to call themselves. They were the
Atlantics, the Superbas and the Robins. Their fans arrived at their
games via a precarious trolley car system in Brooklyn. They
required a certain amount of dexterity in order to avoid being run
over by the trolleys, and soon came to be known as “Trolley
Dodgers.” Eventually, the team came to be known simply as the
Brooklyn Dodgers. They played at Ebbets Field (built in 1913), a
bandbox ballpark in the Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed/Stuy) section of
Flatbush, Brooklyn.

The Dodgers featured a player and later a manager
named Casey Stengel. He was considered a “clown act” despite being
a fine player and first class baseball man. Stengel reportedly
missed one season because he had gotten a dose of venereal disease.
On another occasion, Stengel doffed his cap and a sparrow flew out.
As a manager, he presided over losing teams.

Wilbert Robinson managed Brooklyn to two losing
World Series appearances (1916, 1920). The 1920 loss to Cleveland
was marked by Brooklyn victimized by the only unassisted triple
play in Series history. A roly-poly, comic character, Robinson once
tried to catch a baseball dropped from an airplane. Instead of a
baseball, the aviatrix dropped a grapefruit, which splattered all
over Robinson. Feeling the warm juice and pulp all over himself,
Robinson’s first reaction was that he had been struck by the
baseball and was bleeding to death. He called out to his “lads” to
come to his aid, like a soldier taking his last breath on the
Somme.

In the 1920s, Brooklyn’s baseball identity was
considered part-carnival act. Columnist Westrook Pegler dubbed them
the “Daffiness Boys.” Pitcher Dazzy Vance was a Hall of Fame
hurler, but his reputation was that of a clown. Old photos of Vance
reveal a man who looked to be 60 when he was 30 or 35. He looked .
. .
daffy
. Photos of ballplayers in those days reveal
extraordinary faces; hollowed cheekbones, ears sticking out like a
cab driving down the street with both doors open, sunburns, bad
skin, haunted eyes.

Life was difficult. Diets and training regimens were
not what they are today. They drank heavily but had to play all day
games with hangovers. Hygiene was a problem. Amenities like air
conditioning were non-existent. They traveled by train, breathing
soot along the way. Diseases like VD, polio, Rocky Mountain spotted
fever, pneumonia and mumps cut people down. In 1918, a worldwide
influenza epidemic killed millions.

Nicknames were freely given in those early years.
There were the “Thundering Herd” USC Trojans out west, the
“Galloping Ghost,” Red Grange of Michigan. George Herman Ruth was
“Babe,” the “Sultan of Swat,” and the “Bambino.” Lou Gehrig was the
“Iron Horse.” Christy Mathewson was known as “Big Six.” His mound
partner was “Iron Joe” McGinnity

Everybody, it seems, was named “Rube.” There was
Rube Marquard, Rube Bressler and Rube Waddell. Charles Stengel got
“Casey” because he was from Kansas City (K.C.). Chris Berman would
have had a field day with the Dodgers of that era, who featured
“Uncle Robbie” Robinson, “Chick” Fewster, “Babe” Herman, “Jigger”
Statz, “Watty” Clark, “Sloppy” Thurston, “Jumbo Jim” Elliott,
“Lefty” O’Doul, “Pea Ridge” Day, “Ownie” Carroll, “Boom Boom” Beck,
“Curly” Onis, “Whitey” Ock, Maximillia Carinus (Max Carey), “Buzz”
Boyle, “Rabbit” Maranville, “Snooks” Dowd, and “Frenchy”
Bordogaray.

Why not? The alternatives were Hollis, Walter,
Manuel, Ralph, William, Raymond, Francis, Harold, Wilson, Clyde,
Owen, Arnold and Clarence (Dazzy).

“What baseball fan of sound mind and body would
choose to root for Hollis and Clyde and Clarence when offered the
option of cheering for Sloppy and Pea Ridge and Dazzy?” wrote Glenn
Stout in
The Dodgers: 120 Years of Dodgers Baseball
. Then
there was Van Lingle Mungo, whose actual lyrical name inspired jazz
ballads.

Many players wore white, long-sleeved undershirts.
Vance took the white undershirt and sliced it up with scissors so
that it hung in strands off his right arm. Wilbert Robinson often
saved him to pitch on Mondays at Ebbets Field. Why?

“You couldn’t
him ‘im on a Mundy
,” said Rube
Bressler in
The Glory of Their Times
. He pronounced Monday
Mundy
. “On a clear
Mundy
the batter never had a
chance.”

Vance applied whited lye to his torn undershirt and
pitched straight overhand. Between the bleached sleeve waving and
flapping white sheets hanging from clotheslines out of Flatbush
apartment houses behind the center field wall, “You couldn’t
hit
‘im on a Mundy . . .
diapers, undies, sheets flapping on
clotheslines – you lost the ball entirely,” said Bressler. “He
threw balls by me I never even saw.”

Vance was involved in the play that defined the
“Daffiness Boys.” With Babe Herman at bat, Hank DeBerry on third,
Vance on second and Chick Fewster on first with no outs, Herman hit
a ball to right that hit the wall, scoring DeBerry. Vance held up
to see if it was caught. He then rounded third but was too slow to
score, so he headed back to the bag. Fewster, running with his head
down, arrived at third at the same time as Vance. Herman, running
fast and also not looking, stretched out a “triple.” With Fewster
standing on third, Vance slid back into the base just as Herman
slid into it from the other side!

The third baseman, not knowing what to do, tagged
all three of them. The umpire was confused and a brouhaha ensued
amongst Fewster, Herman, the third baseman, the umpiring crew, the
third base coach, and both managers. The crowd hooted with laughter
while the sportswriters immediately thought of wild adjectives to
describe the hilarity.

Vance lay on the ground observing it all in bemused
silence. Finally he lifted up his head and began to speak in the
manner of a be-wigged English barrister. Silently, all eyes fell on
him as he stated: “Mr. Umpire, Fellow Teammates, and members of the
Opposition, if you carefully peruse the rules of Our National
Pastime you will find that there is one and only one protagonist in
rightful occupation of this hassock – namely yours truly, Arthur C.
Vance.”

He was right. Herman had “tripled into a double
play.” It was a “clown act,” an image of lovable boobs that would
be repeated by the New York Mets of the 1960s. But the concept of
clowns and losers, while humorous in Brooklyn perhaps, was
overshadowed by the excellence of the other two New York baseball
franchises.

Professional baseball clubs representing New York and
Brooklyn first met in 1889. "New York and Brooklyn were the
aristocratic, cultured gentlemen and the scrappy, slum-born cousin
who had fought his way up in the world; each openly disdained the
other's ways . . . and the baseball teams they fielded were the
chosen armies sent to fight this war, to crush the despised enemy,"
wrote author Eric Walker.

"Manhattan had the tall buildings, all the tall
buildings - Brooklyn didn't have any," said legendary Dodgers
announcer Red Barber. "Manhattan had Broadway and the theatre -
Brooklyn didn’t have that. Manhattan was the financial center, the
cultural center - it was 'The Big Town.' Brooklyn was called the
'bedroom of New York' and people resented this. With the Dodgers,
the people of Brooklyn had their only instrument to strike back -
at New York and the Giants."

John McGraw managed the Giants from 1902 to 1932. At
5-7, 155 pounds in his youth he was known as “Little Napoleon” and
even resembled the French dictator. To this very day, if an
“all-time all-star team” is chosen by truly knowledgeable baseball
historians, McGraw may very well be considered the finest manager
of all time. He was voted just that when the game celebrated its
100th year of professional baseball in 1969.

McGraw’s Giants won the 1905, 1921, and 1922 World
Series. They were the class of the National League. In his early
years, the Giants featured one of the finest pitching combinations
in baseball history. Christy Mathewson was a four-time 30-game
winner who achieved 37 victories in 1908. Mathewson’s performance
in the 1905 World Series may be the greatest in history, compared
to only by Sandy Koufax in 1963 and Bob Gibson in 1967. Mathewson
pitched
three shutouts
against the Philadelphia Athletics.
Over the course of his career, “Matty” won 373 games. His pitching
partner was “Iron Joe” McGinnity, a Hall of Famer who won more than
30 games in the 1903 and 1904 seasons.

Twice, McGraw’s Giants met strange fates that cost
them ultimate glory. In September of 1908 at the Polo Grounds, the
Giants and Chicago Cubs were tied in the ninth inning with two outs
and the bases loaded. Al Bridwell singled the winning run in from
third. Rookie first baseman Fred Merkle of the Giants, the runner
at first base, did not run and touch second. The crowd descended on
the field, as was the custom of the day, since they exited through
an open center field gate that led to the subway station. Chicago
second baseman Johnny Evers saw that Merkle never touched second.
Amid the confusion, he tried to retrieve the ball so he could touch
second base, but McGinnity saw what was going on, “intercepted” the
ball and threw it out of the stadium. Evers went to the
ball
bag
, pulled another baseball out, got the attention of umpire
Hank O’Day, ran to touch second, and O’Day declared Merkle out. The
crowd was unaware of what had happened and of course McGraw was
apoplectic when told, but the call stood. Instead of a 2-1 Giants
victory, the game was declared a tie to be replayed only if it
effected the final standings at season’s end.