Baseball (13 page)

Meanwhile, local broadcasters babbled on, with homespun familiarity, attuned to every nuance from the first day of spring training. Ernie Harwell from Georgia, more Barber than Allen, brought his Southern lilt first to New York before finding his destiny in Detroit. The Midwest had a grand postwar collection of Jack Buck in St. Louis, Bob Prince in Pittsburgh, and Harry Caray, who moved from St. Louis to Chicago but remained the ultimate beery, beefy hometown rooter, shirtless on a muggy day, myopic despite dark framed glasses, sputtering “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” at the seventh-inning stretch.

The new major league towns built their own traditions. Vin Scully, who joined the Dodgers out of radio station WFUV at Ford-ham University, studied at the right hand of Red Barber. When the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958, fans carried transistor radios to the ballpark, which had never happened in the raucous confines of Ebbets Field, where fans did not need to be educated or entertained. In quiet moments in L.A., you could hear Scully's mellow voice, tutoring the nouveau fans in the subtleties of major league baseball—at least until the seventh inning, when the nouveau fans would depart, to beat the traffic jam.

Just as people try to quantify the “greatest ever” in various disci-plines—Sugar Ray Robinson is the “greatest boxer ever, pound for pound,” and so forth—so baseball fans argue over who was the best broadcaster ever. Scully often comes in first.

In 2005, Curt Smith came up with an arcane rating system in the book
Voices of Summer: Ranking Baseball's 101 All-Time Best Announcers.
Smith ranked Scully first, using terms like “nonpareil” and “Base-ball's Olivier,” which sound about right. Out of loyalty to my ancient Brooklyn Dodger childhood, I'd still go with Red Barber first,
but Scully deserves all the kudos he gets. He has become a trifle slick and chirpy since moving to the Left Coast in 1958, but nobody calls a game like him, with wit and voice and knowledge.

Here is the quintessential Vin Scully, calling the 1980 postseason series between Houston and Philadelphia: In the fourth game, the Astros hit into a highly unusual double play on a fly ball to right field, followed by a relay to the pitcher and onward to the third baseman to catch a runner who had strayed too far off third base. As the music for the inning-ending commercial began to sound in the background, Scully summed it up quickly, using the scorecard symbols for the three participating fielders:
Just your basic nine-one-five double play
, Scully said, knowing that real baseball fans would understand the staccato eloquence of his call. Fade to commercial.

—

The first generation of broadcasters allowed fans to forget about the Depression, temporarily, at least, just as cheap movies got people out of the house, looking for cheap entertainment and maybe even the door prize of a free set of dishes. Baseball attendance fell after peaking at 10 million in 1930, and many owners lost money, with Connie Mack resorting to his old solution of selling off his best players.

One jolt of revenue and excitement came from an all-star game, first proposed by Arch Ward, the sports editor of the
Chicago Tribune
, who was trying to come up with a moneymaking sports event during Chicago's exposition in 1933. The first All-Star home run was hit, appropriately enough, by Babe Ruth. The All-Star Game had instant cachet as a novelty because the two rival leagues met only in spring training exhibitions and in the World Series.

The curious fans and players were rewarded by the 1934 All-Star Game, played in the Polo Grounds. Carl Hubbell, the angular screwball specialist with the Giants, struck out five consecutive sluggers who would one day be selected for the Hall of Fame— Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Jimmie Foxx to end the first inning and Al Simmons and Joe Cronin in the second. This is one of those career-defining baseball moments that can emerge from the timeless
clarity of a scorecard. Three decades later, when Hubbell was a senior executive with the now San Francisco Giants, the back of his left hand would hang abnormally against his left pants pocket, the result of a career of throwing the screwball, a reverse curveball. Young reporters would nudge each other at the sight of the grizzled old lefty, as we thought about the day in 1934 when Hubbell struck out five Hall of Famers.

An injury in the 1937 All-Star Game led directly to the end of Dean's pitching career but the commencement of his new vocation as broadcaster, much to the chagrin of schoolteachers and grammarians. Ole Diz was not the first ballplayer to become a broadcaster: a former Cleveland outfielder, Jack Graney, had replaced the radio pioneer Tom Manning in 1932. But Dean soon brought his uninhibited Arkansas patois (“He slud into third”) to the job.

Baseball had an infusion of new stars in the 1930s, including Rickey's pugnacious Cardinals, later known as the Gashouse Gang. The Cardinals were about to clinch the 1934 World Series when Detroit fans, angered by the hard-sliding Joe Medwick, began heaping fruit on him in left field. Judge Landis, knowing he would only make matters worse if he ruled a 9–0 forfeit against the Tigers, asked Medwick to leave the game for safety's sake, and the Cardinals wrapped up their championship.

Even after Ruth left after 1934, the Yankees dominated the American League, but the league had plenty of other stars, including Hank Greenberg from the Bronx, a powerful first baseman with Detroit, the first great Jewish star. In 1936, a seventeen-year-old pitcher, Bob Feller, joined Cleveland, straight from the farm in Van Meter, Iowa. That same year, Joe DiMaggio, a graceful and powerful center fielder, joined the Yankees. And in 1939, a rookie named Ted Williams, brash and brilliant, was dubbed “The Kid” by the older Red Sox.

Nineteen forty-one was epic for all three young stars. Feller led the league with 25 victories and 260 strikeouts while DiMaggio hit in 56 straight games, one of the sport's most enduring records, and Williams batted .406, the last time any hitter has surpassed .400.

Nobody will ever know what Hank Greenberg might have accomplished that season. With war breaking out in Europe and Asia, the United States began its first peacetime military draft in October of 1940, and the Tiger star was drafted in May of 1941. On May 6, Greenberg hit two homers against the Yankees. The next day he reported for military duty.

I
n the terrible nights in the Pacific, when American and Japanese troops hunkered down in darkness only a few yards apart on the atolls and in the jungles, they hurled curses at one another. The American troops would shout vile things about the Japanese emperor, and in return the Japanese troops would chant the worst imaginable insults. Sometimes it would be “Fuck FDR!” Other times it would be “Fuck Babe Ruth!”

From the start of the war, there was reason to question whether America should cancel baseball, since manpower and materials were going to be in short supply. Not every American valued sport. Was it a luxury that a country at war could not afford? There was also the reasonable theory that the Japanese would take it as a sign of weakness if the U.S. were to call off the major league season.

Judge Landis wrote a highly diplomatic letter to the president on January 14, 1942: “Baseball is about to adopt schedules, sign players, make vast commitments, go to training camps. What do you want it to do? If you believe we ought to close down for the duration of the war, we are ready to do so immediately. If you feel we ought to continue, we would be delighted to do so. We await your order.”

Two days later, Roosevelt responded with what would be called his “green light” letter: “I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going. There will be fewer people unemployed and everybody will work longer hours and harder than ever before. And that means that they ought to have a chance for recreation and for taking their minds off their work even more than before.”

The president added that able-bodied players would have to serve in the military but that older players might continue to play, to provide employment for the players and entertainment, a sense of normalcy, for the American people. Bob Feller enlisted within days of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and Ted
Williams and Joe DiMaggio and hundreds of other players were soon in uniform, along with millions of more anonymous Americans.

Landis, not an admirer of President Roosevelt, kept his distance, knowing that Clark Griffith, the owner of the Washington team, occasionally dropped by the White House, reminding FDR that baseball was doing its part. FDR even allowed a few profitable night games, despite the frequent strategic blackouts and the energy shortage.

The major leagues decided to play a full schedule, despite crowded trains and lack of gasoline for cars and buses. In 1943, teams took spring training closer to home. The Dodgers trained in snow at Bear Mountain, north of New York, while other teams trained in dank armories, sometimes wielding bats like rifles as if somehow preparing for military combat. The White Sox gingerly forded swollen spring streams in French Lick in southern Indiana to get to a training field. The Cubs played in snow at the same site in 1944.

Night games were banned in most towns because of the fear of air raids. At other times, fans had to sit in darkened stadiums during sudden blackouts. Players were occasionally bumped from trains to make room for military personnel. Broadcasters and reporters were warned not to mention the weather conditions in their city, lest that information somehow get to the enemy.

By 1943, over 100 major league players were in uniform and over 1,400 minor-leaguers. A year later the figures were 500 and 5,000. Many of the best players were drafted or enlisted within the first year, while others were exempt because of physical shortcomings. Lou Boudreau, the player-manager of the Cleveland Indians, was classified 4-F because of bad ankles and led the league in hitting in 1944 with .327. There were some mutterings about exemptions like these, but many other men were also rejected from service for one reason or another.

“Baseball should have the right to use rejects if that would mean keeping the game going. Playing baseball is the most essential thing most of those fellows can do,” said Albert (Happy) Chandler, a senator
from Kentucky, who was fast establishing himself as a friend of baseball.

Among the old-timers willing to stumble back from retirement were Pepper Martin, Babe Herman, Jimmie Foxx, Lloyd Waner, and Paul Waner. Also donning major league uniforms were assorted policemen and sanitation workers, to say nothing of Eddie Basinski, a violinist with the Buffalo Philharmonic, who played for the Dodgers in 1944 and 1945.

Some Americans began talking openly about the injustice that blacks were dying for their country in service but were still shut out from organized baseball. “I can play in Mexico,” Negro League pitcher Nate Moreland had been quoted as saying, “but I have to fight for America where I can't play.”

Instead of hiring American blacks, the major leagues increased their recruiting in Latin America, looking for players who might not be pulled out by the draft. One of these wartime office temps was Preston Gomez from Cuba, who played eight games for Washington in 1944; twenty-five years later, in San Diego, Gomez would become the first Latino hired as a full-time major league manager.

Baseball had room for Joe Nuxhall, a schoolboy from Hamilton, Ohio—fifteen years, ten months, and eleven days old—who pitched two-thirds of an inning for the Reds in 1944, becoming the youngest player in modern baseball, and later a reliable pitcher and beloved broadcaster in Cincinnati.

The majors found room for Pete Gray, who had lost his right arm in a farm wagon accident at the age of six in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania. As a child, Gray learned how to hit one-handed, and he wore a tiny glove in the outfield, discarding it in order to throw. He played for Memphis in 1944 and was signed by the Browns in 1945, batting .218 in 234 at-bats.

Ballparks were utilized for war bond benefits and collections of clothing and scrap iron. Although many of their best young players went to service, the Cardinals won three straight pennants from 1942 through 1944, when they beat their crosstown rivals in the only World Series the Browns would ever see.

—

While the Grays and the Nuxhalls kept the sport going back home, many major-leaguers were directed toward service teams, both domestic and overseas. High officers competed for talent, and arranged cushy public relations posts for these stars between games, which were said to be good for morale. Wartime ball was no guarantee against combat. Murry Dickson, a pitcher with the Cardinals, was first sent to Fort Riley, Kansas, to join Harry Walker, Alpha Brazle, and Joe Garagiola of the Cardinals and Pete Reiser of the Dodgers, but that team was broken up and Dickson wound up on Omaha Beach in France on D-Day, June 6, 1944, and had a long fight just to get home.

Only two players with major league experience would die from combat: Elmer Gedeon, who had played five games for Washington, died in 1944 when his plane was shot down over France, and Harry O'Neill, who had played one game for the Philadelphia Athletics, was killed on Iwo Jima in 1945.

Some players were badly wounded, yet managed to struggle back into the majors. As the nation's most visible sport, baseball served up highly public examples of the human will to survive, to get back to normalcy. Bert Shepard, a minor league pitcher, had his P-38 Lightning fighter shot down over Germany on his thirty-fourth mission. He became a prisoner of war and his damaged right leg was amputated between the knee and the ankle. When he got home, he learned to walk with an artificial leg and trained with Washington. In July of 1945, Shepard pitched four innings against the Dodgers in an exhibition and then in August he pitched five and a third innings against the Red Sox in an official league game, giving up only one run. Shepard also visited the troops at the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington.

The war drastically damaged other careers, including that of shortstop Cecil Travis of Washington, who had finished second to Ted Williams for the 1941 batting title with a .359 average. Travis suffered severe frostbite in his feet at the Battle of the Bulge, and retired after the 1947 season. In later years, a baseball-loving lawyer
in Atlanta, Abe J. Schear, campaigned to have Travis, a .314 hitter, named to the Hall of Fame as a “war hero,” but to no avail.