Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (17 page)

As predicted, the Dodgers captured the National League pennant with ease and then went on to defeat the Yankees in the World Series. Campanella proved to be a critical component of that success. He hit thirty-two home runs and drove in 107 runs in only 123 games during the season and posted the third-highest batting average (.318) in the league. His role in the team’s World Series victory was no less important—two home runs and then a double in the seventh game that led to the Dodgers’ first run. It was indeed a remarkable year, which was capped by his third MVP award and a new annual contract for $50,000—the most money ever paid to a Dodger player.

To anyone who asked, Campanella would provide assurances that he had many years left to his playing career, but his body showed otherwise in 1956. His hands continued to give him problems—the nadir being the time in June when he tried to pick a runner off at first base but inadvertently broke his right hand when it struck the batter’s bat. The result was predictable. He could not grip the bat or throw the ball with the same authority, and the frustration of the experience was sometimes difficult to handle. “It meant such pain,” remembered his son Roy Jr., “that I think even his disposition occasionally off the field wasn’t as sanguine or as playful as it usually would be.” Campanella’s injury was, unfortunately, a poorly kept secret, and by the end of the summer, sportswriters were reporting that Campanella “simply cannot throw with his beaten right hand, and opposing clubs now know that.” The statistics reflected the downslide. Although he caught 121 games, he hit twelve fewer home runs in 1956 and saw his batting average drop ninety-nine points to .219.

 

There are no thoughts of retirement as Campanella gives Sal Maglie the sign for the first batter in the bottom of the third inning at Yankee Stadium on October 8, 1956. The Dodgers need to win the fifth game, and the Brooklyn catcher is all business as Gil McDougald steps into the batter’s box.

The Yankee shortstop swings at Maglie’s first pitch and sends a ground-ball foul to the left side of third base, which is picked up by Frank Crosetti, the Yankees’ third-base coach. Maglie follows that pitch with a sharp curve, prompting radio announcer Bob Neal to say that “the Barber, not to be outdone by the great pitching so far of Don Larsen, is matching him, pitch-for-pitch.” Maglie then tosses another curve, which McDougald hits sharply down the third-base line, but Robinson is there and easily beats the Yankee shortstop with a throw to first base.

Andy Carey, the Yankees’ third baseman, follows McDougald to the batter’s box. A right-handed hitter, Carey pops Maglie’s second pitch up into foul territory to the right side of the plate. Campanella flips off his mask and quickly moves under the ball for the second out.

Don Larsen—who had a single in the second game that drove in a run—moves up to the plate. “Larsen is big enough and strong enough and brave enough to swing that bat,” Neal tells his listening audience. But the right-handed Larsen has no success now against his adversary. After getting to a count of one ball and one strike, Larsen hits a pop-up to the left side of the plate. Campanella jerks his mask off again and easily pulls in the ball for the last out.

Having retired the first nine Yankees he faced, Maglie walks off the mound to the security of the Dodger dugout.

7

B
ob Wolff watches from the press box as the Yankees take the field in the top of the fourth inning. “In those days,” he remembers, “the dream of every broadcaster was to be a World Series announcer.” And now he has been given the chance. He had toiled for many years as the voice of the Washington Senators on both television and radio before being selected to provide the play-by-play commentary on the 1956 All-Star game that was played in the nation’s capital in July. People liked what they heard, and soon enough Gillette—the sponsor of the 1956 World Series broadcasts—called upon Wolff to make his first appearance in the fall classic by doing the radio broadcast with Bob Neal. It was not only a welcome acknowledgment of Wolff’s considerable skills in the broadcast booth. Gillette’s decision also gave the Senators’ broadcaster the opportunity to watch the Yankee players he knew so well. And few Yankees commanded as much attention from Wolff as Billy Martin, the slim, five-foot-eleven-inch California native who had patrolled second base for the club during the season and is now performing the same role in the series.

“Billy Martin,” Wolff would later say, “was a one-of-a-kind ballplayer who played with such intensity that, in a way, you didn’t forgive, but you understood why, at times, the intensity was too much for his own good.” Wolff had no difficulty remembering an incident—long after Martin had been traded from the Yankees and was playing for the Minnesota Twins—that epitomized the second baseman’s inability to control his emotions. The manager had taken him out of the game after he had struck out, and Martin, enraged by the slight, had stormed away in the dugout after throwing his bat and glove down in front of the manager. Wolff—only about seven years older than Martin—wanted to impart the kind of guidance that an older brother would give to a sibling. He had already predicted that Martin would someday be a manager. He went down to the clubhouse after the game and encouraged the frustrated player to view his own behavior from that perspective. “If you do that stuff,” Wolff cautioned him, “you’re not going to be a manager. You wouldn’t like it if you were a manager and the player did that to you.”

Years later—after he had compiled an exceptional record as a manager for five different teams in the American League—Martin approached Wolff at a luncheon being held at Yankee Stadium as part of an Old-Timers’ Day celebration. “I just want you to know,” said the now-experienced manager, “I’ve never forgotten those words of advice you gave me. It meant a lot to me.” Wolff was touched by the gesture. “So my feelings about Billy Martin,” he later admitted, “have always been tinged with a feeling that this guy may have made many mistakes, but he had goodness in his heart.”

The show of gratitude was not something that came easily to Billy Martin. Growing up in West Berkeley in the 1940s, his social life revolved around the gangs who hung out in Kenney Park, and his predominant concern in those early days was to avoid getting beaten up by other kids—many of whom would poke fun at his abnormally large nose. “Pinocchio” or “Banana Nose,” they would often call him. They no doubt assumed that Martin would slink away because of his small size. (He was four feet eleven inches tall and weighed only ninety-five pounds when he entered high school.) But appearances—at least in the case of young Billy—were deceiving. “They figured they could take advantage of me,” he later explained. “This is where they made their mistake. I was stronger than I looked.” He had spent hour after hour hitting a punching bag. (“It got to the point,” he remembered, “where I could make that bag talk.”) And so, he would later say with considerable pride, “I never got whipped.”

There is little doubt that Billy got his small size and his fighting spirit from his mother. Jenny Salvini—who stood only four feet eleven inches herself—was one of ten children whose volatility and irreverence were belied by her petite figure. (“I have the best-looking ass in town,” she once told her son, “and don’t you forget it.”) Her parents—immigrants from Italy—had little money but great faith in established traditions, one of which was to arrange for their daughters’ marriages. One day in 1917, Jenny’s parents told their sixteen-year-old daughter that she would be married later that month to one of the men who rented a room in her parents’ house in West Berkeley.

It was not, to say the least, a marriage made in heaven, and three years later Jenny, now with a young son, was divorced and dating Alfred Manuel Martin, a tall man with a small mustache and a wandering eye. Their relationship lasted longer than Jenny’s marriage to the boarder, but life took a turn for the worse in 1927 after they got married and Jenny became pregnant with Billy. Al began spending many evenings away from home, and his wife soon learned that a high school girl was wearing her husband’s watch. “I went to the school,” Jenny later explained, “took the watch off the girl, and beat the hell out of her.”

It reflected a perspective that the mother passed on to her younger son—after she had thrown Alfred Manuel Martin out of the house—“Take shit from no one.” Those words became Billy Martin’s mantra. Never—not even when he was a sixty-year-old manager for the New York Yankees—would he walk away from a fight. (Mickey Mantle once said of his good friend that “he was the only man alive who could hear someone give him the finger.”)

Although the second marriage had soured, Jenny named her infant son after his father: Alfred Manuel Martin Jr. It may have been evident on the birth certificate, but it was hardly clear to the young boy as he grew up. He spent much of his time in those early years with his grandmother, who repeatedly called him Bellissimo—meaning “beautiful” in Italian. Others (who did not speak Italian) interpreted the words to mean Billy, and soon enough that was the name by which he was known.

Billy never knew otherwise until that day in seventh grade when the teacher kept asking for Alfred Manuel Martin. When no one answered, the teacher proceeded to call out the names of the other students until Billy was the only one left standing. In response to the teacher’s inquiry, the young student said that his name was Billy Martin. The teacher then explained that he was not Billy Martin but Alfred Manuel Martin Jr. The surprised teenager ran home after school and confronted his mother with the obvious question—why had she not told him? “Because,” she explained, “I didn’t want you to know you had the same name as that jackass.”

Jenny had the good fortune to meet another man—Jack Downey—who had a more suitable perspective, and he soon became Jenny’s third husband and the father young Billy had never known. Downey was a hard worker who treated the family well, and his effort did not go unappreciated. (“Because of Jack,” Martin later said, “we always had a roof over our head and plenty of food, even in the middle of the Depression.”) Not that life was always tranquil in the house. Jenny demanded respect from her children (which later included another son and two daughters), and she was not shy about making her feelings known if one of them showed any sign of disobedience. There was the time when Billy’s younger brother, Jackie, interrupted Jenny at the dinner table after she had told her children not to “butt in” when she was talking. Jenny’s reaction was swift. As Billy remembered, she “punched him on the mouth so hard she made his teeth bleed.”

Billy exuded that same combative attitude when he played high school sports. He had talent in basketball and baseball, but he was ultimately kicked off the varsity team in both sports because of fights—in basketball, with a fan who kept calling him “Pinocchio” (and who was subjected after the game, as one Martin friend recalled, to “the quickest barrage of punches I’ve ever seen”), and in baseball, with an opposing team player who had threatened to “get” Billy after the game (but who was knocked out cold by Martin in the confrontation that ensued in the locker room after the game).

None of those experiences soured Billy on a career in baseball. To anyone who asked what he would do after high school, he would say that he was going to play baseball with the New York Yankees. It was a bombastic prediction—Billy Martin did not have the kind of talent that might attract the many scouts who scoured the Bay Area for major-league prospects. Still, he did have an abundance of determination, and that quality was duly noted by Red Adams, the trainer for the Oakland Oaks in the Pacific Coast League. He had seen Billy play in high school and had watched him when he worked out at the Oaks’ field. Adams relentlessly pestered the team manager—Casey Stengel—to take a look at this young high school graduate.

Stengel finally agreed. On a June day in 1946, Adams brought Martin to the Oaks’ field where Stengel could test the young player’s skill in fielding grounders at shortstop. At first, the grounders were not very challenging. Martin handled them with ease, and Stengel began hitting the ball harder and harder. Martin fielded them all and finally yelled to the manager, “Is that the best you got?” Stengel pushed as hard as he could, but nothing got through. “That little son of gun,” Stengel later told Adams. “I’ve hit him so many grounders, I think he’s trying to wear me out. He doesn’t catch them all, but he doesn’t back off from any either.”

The result was an offer for Billy to play in the Oaks’ minor-league team in Idaho Falls. It was a modest start, with Billy hitting only .254 and making sixteen errors in thirty-two games. But there were no fights—only a belief among the Oaks’ management that the young player could improve with further seasoning. So, in the spring of 1947, Stengel sent him down to the club’s farm team in Phoenix, where young Billy Martin became, as one sportswriter said, “the sensation of the Class C Arizona-Texas League.” He led the league with a .392 batting average, hit forty-eight doubles, and drove in a remarkable 174 runs in only 130 games. It was a record that could not be ignored, and Stengel promoted the young player to the Oaks in 1948.

It was the beginning of a close relationship between the two men that would—except for one period of seven years immediately after Martin was traded from the Yankees—survive until Stengel’s death in 1975. “That fresh punk,” Stengel told reporters when Martin first joined the New York club in 1950, “how I love him.” The feeling was reciprocated by Martin, who would always be prepared to do whatever his manager wanted. When Stengel called a clubhouse meeting of the Yankee players in the early 1950s to say that he would give one hundred dollars to any player who would let himself get hit by Harry Byrd, the sidearm-throwing pitcher for the Philadelphia Athletics, Martin earned himself three hundred dollars. And never would the Berkeley native tolerate another teammate ignoring a directive from the crusty manager. Yogi Berra learned about Martin’s devotion to Stengel when he called for a pitch in one game that was different from the one Stengel had demanded and the batter hit a home run. Martin ran into the dugout after the inning was over to confront the All-Star catcher and ask why he had “crossed up the old man.”