Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (34 page)

The other change Gilliam encountered in those first days at Sulphur Dell was to his name. He was only sixteen years old when he started playing professional ball, and, as the youngest member of the club, his teammates began to call him “Junior.” It was a name that stuck throughout the rest of his career—long after he ceased to be a teenager. After his rookie year with the Dodgers, being called “Junior” infuriated the twenty-five-year-old Gilliam, and he urged sportswriters to abandon the practice. “The name’s Jim,” he explained, “and Junior is just for kids.” Unfortunately, the sportswriters could not be turned aside, and some began referring to him as “Junior (‘Call Me Jim’) Gilliam.” By the time he retired thirteen years later—after publication of hundreds of articles that referred to him as “Junior” Gilliam—the Nashville native said that the reference no longer bothered him.

Whatever name others may have used for him, Gilliam continued to impress people with his talent on the field and at the plate, and by 1946, the seventeen-year-old youth was promoted to the Baltimore Elite Giants. Within two years, Gilliam—now standing almost five feet, eleven inches tall and weighing about 175 pounds—was selected to be on the Negro League East’s All-Star team.

Part of that success had to be attributed to George Scales, an Elite coach who persuaded Gilliam—a natural right-handed hitter—to become a switch-hitter. It was not an idle suggestion. “I couldn’t hit curves,” Gilliam later confessed. And he knew that he would ultimately be able to bat left-handed. “When I was twelve years old,” he remembered, “I fell out of a tree and broke my wrist. They put my right arm in a sling. But I didn’t want to give up baseball. So I stood out there and swung the bat one-handed with my left hand. After that, I always knew I could do it.” He was certainly pleased with the results shortly after he started switch-hitting on the Elites. “I soon discovered,” he later explained, “I wasn’t missing so many curveballs when I was hitting left-handed against a right-handed pitcher. I could see the ball curving toward me—not away from me. It made them easier to hit.”

Not surprisingly, several major-league clubs expressed an interest in Gilliam, and the Chicago Cubs invited him to join their farm club in Springfield, Massachusetts, for the 1950 season. But the Cubs lost interest after two weeks and dropped him from the roster. Gilliam never understood the basis for the decision. “I thought I was playing good ball,” he later said. But Jack Sheehan, the manager of the Springfield club, told Baltimore Elite president Richard Powell that “the boy wouldn’t be able to hit Triple-A pitching.”

There was one dissenting voice: Mickey McConnell, who worked in the Dodger offices with general manager Branch Rickey. McConnell had seen Gilliam play in a Negro National League play-off game in Baltimore and expressed his opinion of the Elite second baseman at a meeting that Rickey had convened with his managers and scouts to review the club’s player-development program. In the course of the discussion, Rickey explained that it was important to have a good team in Montreal—where the Royals enjoyed substantial support from the community—but that the team lacked a good second baseman. Rickey asked for suggestions. “When nobody else spoke up,” McConnell recalled, “I said Junior Gilliam was a possibility. I explained that he had good running speed, was a switch-hitter who made good contact but didn’t hit with power, had good range and good hands and only a fair arm but could get the ball away quickly and throw with accuracy.” Rickey liked the suggestion, and the Dodgers ultimately bought the Elite contracts for Gilliam and pitcher Joe Black (both of whom ultimately joined the parent club) as well as an option for pitcher Leroy Farrell (who never made the club). And so Junior Gilliam found himself playing second base for the Montreal Royals in the 1951 season.

His first day with the Brooklyn farm team—at least at the plate—could not have been better. In the opening doubleheader, Gilliam had eight hits—including a grand-slam home run—as well as three walks. His performance in the field was less spectacular. Alston—then managing the Royals—had Gilliam play right field, and he dropped the first ball that was hit to him. Alston cringed as he watched the play. “This kid’s gonna have trouble with pressure,” he told himself. But Gilliam quickly redeemed himself. “The next ball was hit over his head,” said Alston, “and he went back and got it like DiMaggio.”

Never again would Alston have to worry about Gilliam’s errors in the field. “In the two years I watched him there,” said one of Junior’s teammates, “I never saw him make a mistake—and I’ve seen him make some great plays, both at second base and in the outfield.” George Shuba, another Royals teammate who would join Gilliam on the Dodgers, agreed that the Nashville native’s performance in the outfield was as good as one could expect. “He can run like a streak,” Shuba told one sportswriter, “and his arm is very good.”

Gilliam’s two years with Montreal demonstrated the wisdom of McConnell’s recommendation. In 1951, he led the International League in runs with 117 and batted .287, and, in 1952, he batted .301, led the league in runs again with 111, drove in 112 runs, and won the league’s Most Valuable Player award. His elevation to the parent club for the 1953 season was all but assured, and Gilliam’s play during spring training only confirmed the likelihood of that promotion. “Playing alongside Pee Wee Reese,” one sportswriter reported, “Gilliam has looked so smooth, especially feeding double-play balls, that it looked as if the two must have done a lot of rehearsing.” Another sportswriter commented that Gilliam “continues to be one of the top sensations of spring training.” The former Baltimore Elite’s play did not surprise the thirty-four-year-old Jackie Robinson, who knew from the start that Gilliam’s addition to the roster might require him to play somewhere else. “I’ll have to admit,” he told one sportswriter with a grin, “that Junior covers more ground than I could cover.”

Sportswriters asked Gilliam after the first regular-season game whether he was nervous about his ability to handle major-league pitching. “No,” he replied. “It’s still baseball, and I’ve been playing it for nine years.” It was a self-confidence that Gilliam exuded throughout his career. (Years later, teammate Don Drysdale, who used his six-foot-six-inch size and blazing fastball to intimidate batters, remembered that Junior always had the same reaction when told that the opposing team’s pitcher had a good fastball. “Sheeet,” Gilliam would invariably say. “That guy ain’t got sheeet.”) With that self-confidence, Gilliam had no difficulty in assuming that he could make a contribution as the new leadoff batter for a team that had won the National League pennant the year before. Indeed, well aware of the power that the Dodger lineup included, Gilliam told his new teammates, “I’m going to have fun leading off for this team because I love to run so much.”

And run he did during that rookie season in 1953. He scored 125 runs (fourth in the league), stole twenty-one bases (third in the league), and led the league in triples with seventeen while batting a respectable .278. That productivity continued during the World Series. While the Dodgers lost to the Yankees, Gilliam amassed a .296 average along three doubles and two home runs—which tied the record for the most extra-base hits in a six-game series.

The season’s performance distinguished Gilliam from his peers, and he was voted the National League’s Rookie of the Year for 1953. For his part, the Nashville native was surprised. “I was figuring Harvey Haddix would get it,” he told one sportswriter, with reference to the St. Louis Cardinals’ rookie southpaw who won twenty games while losing only nine.

Success did not spoil Gilliam (who was often called “Sweet Lips” by his teammates because of the way he pursed his lips when he swung a bat). He had already learned to take his accomplishments in stride, and that perspective was reinforced by his close relationship with Jackie Robinson. Gilliam roomed with Robinson on the road and made no secret of his admiration for the major league’s first black player. But their personalities stood in sharp contrast. Unlike the outspoken third baseman, Gilliam was, as Roger Kahn observed in
The New York Herald Tribune
, “as quiet a rookie as any one could recall.” (Kahn recounted that Gilliam would speak to sportswriters in the beginning of the season only after they initiated the conversation but that, by July, “he was saying ‘hello’ with a sort of reckless abandon.”) His teammates had a similar reaction to their new teammate. “He wasn’t a holler guy in the clubhouse,” Carl Erskine remembered. “He wasn’t a holler guy on the bench. Even on the infield, he was a quiet presence who did his job in a workmanlike way.”

Still, there was no question that Gilliam treasured his status as a Brooklyn Dodger. “He and Campanella were alike in that way,” Erskine said many years later. “They seemed to be saying to themselves, ‘There’s nothing better than this.’ He played like he had a lot of fun.”

That sense of fun was also evident when Dodger players gathered around a pool table after a practice session during spring training. Gilliam would walk into the room wearing a large Panama hat tilted to one side, throw a twenty-dollar bill onto the pool table, and say, “Who wants part of the devil’s action?” No one could beat the Nashville native other than Alston (reputed to be the best pool player in baseball), and in time his teammates had a new nickname for him: “Devil.”

The stability that Gilliam exuded at the pool table and on the field did not extend to his family life. He had met Gloria while she was still attending a Baltimore high school, and by the time he joined the Dodgers in 1953 they had been married for almost five years and had two children. The family initially spent the winters in Puerto Rico so that Gilliam could play baseball there. But Gloria and Jim soon decided that the constant travel was too much for the children and relocated to a home in Rahway, New Jersey. It may have been a wise decision, but the union did not last. In 1957, Gloria sued for (and ultimately received) a divorce, alleging that her husband had confessed to adultery. On April 25, 1959, Jim married Edwina Fields in St. Louis, and in time they had two children as well.

In the meantime, Gilliam was a steady presence in the Dodger lineup, scoring more than or close to a hundred runs in each season, leading the Dodgers in stolen bases, sometimes batting near .300 (with a career-high average of exactly .300 in 1956), and never striking out more than thirty-nine times in a season (despite playing in almost all of the team’s games and usually having close to or more than six hundred at bats).

Rarely would he exhibit any anger. (“Jim’s calm is his characteristic mark,” said one sportswriter during his rookie year, and years later another sportswriter commented that Gilliam’s “deportment is exemplary and he’s one of the most popular and respected team leaders.”) Unlike most of his teammates, he was prone to dismiss verbal assaults and physical challenges with a quip instead of a fist. But there were exceptions—although, even then, Gilliam had learned from Jackie Robinson how to respond to challenges from other players without losing his temper.

There was the time when the Redlegs brought in Raul Sanchez to relieve the starting pitcher in a game at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. In the fifth inning, Gilliam, batting left-handed, dragged a bunt down the first-base line for a hit when he knocked the ball out of the hand of Sanchez, who was trying to make an unassisted out. When Gilliam came up to bat two innings later, Sanchez threw a pitch that was directed at Gilliam’s head and required the Dodger second baseman to duck. Junior believed that Sanchez was trying to knock him down in retaliation, and the former Negro league All-Star no doubt remembered Robinson’s tactic (used several times with mixed success against Sal Maglie) in responding to pitchers who threw at your head: lay a bunt down the first-base line and, when the pitcher ran to cover first base, barrel into him with enough force to remind the pitcher that there would be a high cost to throwing beanballs.

Gilliam used that tactic to get his revenge on Sanchez’s next pitch. As one sportswriter described the scene, “Junior dragged a bunt. It went foul, but Sanchez broke for it anyway, and Gilliam charged down the baseline, bowled the pitcher over, threw a punch at him, wrestled him to the ground, and began pummeling him, bringing both squads to the scene on the run.” The melee resulted in fines being imposed on both Sanchez and Gilliam, but the Dodger second baseman had made his point: he would respond in kind if any pitcher intentionally tried to knock him down.

 

Jim Gilliam is more concerned with getting on base than retaliating against a knockdown pitch as he steps into the batter’s box in the top of the seventh inning of the fifth game of the 1956 World Series. But Don Larsen is not making it easy for him. The Dodger second baseman takes a called strike, watches another pitch go by for a ball, and then fouls off a pitch. Now, with the right side of the field encased in shadows created by the towering facade of Yankee Stadium, Larsen throws a slider that tails away from Gilliam just above his knees. Junior knows it is a pitch he can hit. (“I have never been able to hit a bad ball,” he once explained to a sportswriter. “And I hit everything I swing at.”) He steps into the pitch and lines a low line drive toward the left side of the infield. But the Yankee shortstop is ready. “There’s a ball,” yells radio announcer Bob Wolff, “which is scooped up by McDougald. A nice play. And a throw to first for the out.”

Pee Wee Reese now steps into the batter’s box. As the Dodger shortstop later told the press, “When I came up in the seventh, I was looking to punch one into the outfield on the first pitch.” Larsen knows nothing of Reese’s plan, but it does not matter. Reese swings at the first pitch—a slider—and fouls it off. The Dodger shortstop does not abandon his aggressive strategy, and he swings at the next pitch as well—this one a fastball—and sends a fly into deep center field. Mickey Mantle moves to his right and pulls it in for the second out.

The tension continues to build as Duke Snider comes to the plate. The Yankees respect Snider’s power, and Hank Bauer is playing the Dodger center fielder deep in right field. But, after throwing a ball, Larsen sends a fastball to the outside corner of the plate. Snider swings and lofts a fly ball into left field that Enos Slaughter catches with ease.