Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (4 page)

 

Whatever his thoughts about Vivian and their young daughter, Larsen does not appear to be distracted when Dodger second baseman Jim Gilliam steps into the batter’s box to start the fifth game of the 1956 World Series. A five-foot-ten-inch switch-hitter who is batting left-handed against the right-handed Larsen, Gilliam—who goes by the nickname of “Junior”—has been the Dodgers’ only .300 hitter in the 1956 season (batting exactly .300). “He’s very selective,” Berra told Larsen before the game, “and he’ll make you pitch to him”—a point that no doubt registered with Larsen, because he had walked Gilliam when he pitched to him in the second game of the series. Larsen starts off with a fastball that is low and outside for a ball. On the next pitch Gilliam hits a ground-ball foul that caroms off the right-field wall and is retrieved by Hank Bauer in right field. Larsen follows with a fastball that is called a strike. Gilliam steps out of the batter’s box and looks at plate umpire Babe Pinelli, not believing that the pitch was really a strike but, as radio announcer Bob Neal observes, “The evidence is up on the scoreboard” with a count of two and two. Larsen follows with a “sneaky slider” that results in a called third strike, and Gilliam walks slowly back the dugout. Larsen has his first out.

Dodger shortstop Pee Wee Reese, batting right-handed, steps up to the plate. Reese fouls off the first pitch and then takes a ball. Reese takes the next pitch for a called strike but holds his bat while Larsen throws two more pitches, each of them balls. With a full count of three and two, Reese—mindful of Larsen’s lack of control in the second game—no doubt hopes that he will be the beneficiary of a walk. But it is not to be. Larsen throws a slider for a called third strike, and there are now two outs.

Larsen watches as Dodger center fielder Duke Snider steps into the batter’s box. He is a left-handed power hitter who has hit forty or more home runs in the last four seasons and led the National League in that department in 1956 with forty-three. Recognizing Snider’s tendency to pull the ball, all of the Yankee outfielders—Enos Slaughter in left, Mantle in center, and Bauer in right—shift toward the right-field foul line, which is only 296 feet from home plate. Shortstop Gil McDougald shades over toward second base, Billy Martin is playing deep at the edge of the outfield grass at second, and first baseman Joe Collins is situated well behind the bag near the right-field foul line. Knowing that Snider is a good fastball hitter, television announcer Mel Allen surmises that “Larsen will show Snider a change of pace,” and, after missing the plate with his first pitch, Larsen throws a slow fastball that Snider anxiously swings at and misses. As Bob Neal tells his radio audience, Larsen had taken something off the pitch, and Snider was “way out ahead on his swing.” After throwing another pitch that is wide of the plate, Larsen hurls a fastball down the middle, and Snider hits a line drive into right field that Bauer catches with ease.

Having gotten through the first inning without a problem, Larsen slowly walks off the mound toward the Yankee dugout for some rest and a quick cigarette in the tunnel that connects the dugout to the clubhouse.

2

W
ith the top of the first inning over, eight Dodger players move up the steps of the visiting players’ dugout on the third-base side of the field. Seven of them run to their various positions while Roy Campanella, the Dodgers’ rotund catcher, moves behind the plate. The ninth player, with the number 35 emblazoned on the back of his jersey, emerges more slowly and walks toward the pitcher’s mound with a purposeful gait. He is thirty-nine years old—a senior citizen among baseball players of his generation—but there is nothing to indicate that he has a retiring personality. Quite the contrary. There is something ominous about him. He stands about six feet, two inches and weighs around 185 pounds and has the blue baseball cap with the white B pulled low over his forehead. You can see the whites of his deep-set eyes, which have a penetrating glare, and his mouth is turned downward in seeming disgust. He has not shaved, and the dark beard contributes to the aura that he is tough, perhaps mean. Indeed, in a
Sports Illustrated
article the year before, Robert Creamer had referred to him as “the angel of darkness.”

Players familiar with Sal Maglie understand Creamer’s reference. Maglie, they know, will use his considerable talent to intimidate batters. He might not succeed as well as he would like on every occasion, but the other team’s players know that he will be in control when he steps on the mound. “When I’m pitching,” he once explained, “I own the plate.” And there is nothing he will not do to protect his turf. “When I was on the mound,” he later said, “I was in business. I didn’t give a damn if my grandmother was in there.”

It is a perspective that inspires respect from other pitchers. Dodger hurler Carl Erskine is among them. He later told me that Maglie was one of the two pitchers he admired most (the other being the Yankees’ Allie Reynolds) because, “when he pitched, there was no question who was in charge of the game.” The Yankees certainly know that. Maglie has already pitched the Dodgers to a 6-3 victory in the first game of the series at Ebbets Field, striking out ten men in the process.

There is a certain irony in Maglie’s presence in a Brooklyn uniform. He had disliked the Dodgers from the first days when he broke into the major leagues as a New York Giant in 1945, and that emotion did not leave him until the day he joined the team in May 1956. “When I pitched against the Dodgers,” he later told Jim Bouton when they were both on the Seattle Pilots, “I didn’t care if it was the last game I ever pitched. I really hated that club.”

There is another irony that makes Maglie’s appearance in a World Series game even more remarkable, and he no doubt appreciates that irony more than anyone. Because, the truth be known, he was not a very good ballplayer when he was growing up in Niagara Falls, New York.

It was a neighborhood of mixed religious, ethnic and national groups—Jews, Irish, Poles, and, of course, Italians. In the early years, his father, an immigrant from Foggia, Italy, ran a small grocery store to support his wife and three children. Sal was the middle child with a younger and an older sister. As he got older, his father proposed that his son learn a trade and arranged for him to work in a barbershop. The experiment was short-lived. “I went there once,” Maglie later recalled, “went out the back and through the alley and never came back.” In retrospect, the escape from the barbershop was no surprise. Even as a young boy, Sal was not interested in a trade. He was interested only in basketball and baseball.

His success as a basketball player was easy to understand. “I’ve always loved basketball,” he once said. He played for his high school team and set a municipal record by scoring sixty-one points in a game. But his accomplishments in basketball were not solely attributable to his enthusiasm or his skills in dribbling and shooting. His attitude made the difference. “I’ve always played sports rough,” he later explained. “I scored because I used every inch of my body under the backboards. I pushed a little and elbowed a little and, finally, I scored. If the other team played rough, I played rougher.”

By the time he graduated from high school in 1937 at the age of twenty (apparently because of a course he had failed and had to repeat), Sal had an offer for a basketball scholarship at Niagara University. In another time and place, it might have been worth pursuing. But the young athlete could not accept it. The Depression had enveloped the nation, money was tight, and his family needed help. So Sal took a job in the shipping department at Union Carbide in Niagara Falls. The pay was good, but he lived for the weekends when he could play semipro baseball—because as much as he enjoyed basketball, baseball was his first love. The problem was that he could not achieve the same level of success on the diamond as he could on the court. There was the time, for example, when he was pitching for a semipro team while he was still in high school and was approached by a Dodger scout after the game. “Kid, are you going to school?” the scout inquired. “Yes,” said Maglie. “Keep going,” the scout replied.

Sal was not discouraged. He continued to explore opportunities for playing professional baseball after he left high school. But it was not easy. Almost everyone who watched him pitch in the semipro leagues told him that he had an awkward motion that would ruin his arm. Few were willing to give him any encouragement about a career in professional baseball. The obstacles were hard to ignore. When he went to the tryout for the Rochester Red Wings in 1937, he threw only three pitches before he heard the coach yell, “Next.”

His break finally came in the summer of 1938. Steve O’Neill, manager of the Buffalo Bisons minor-league team, decided to take a chance on Sal—not so much because of his pitching skills but because of his notoriety as a local basketball star. Anything to draw crowds. The contract did not promise any substantial financial benefits—a $275 signing bonus and a monthly salary of $250 during the season. Still, it was a chance to be a professional baseball player, and Sal was not going to let it slip away.

His first outing on August 13, 1938, was less than auspicious. The twenty-one-year-old rookie knew little about etiquette in professional baseball, and, when O’Neill called on him to relieve with the bases loaded in the eighth inning of a game against the Newark Bears, Maglie headed straight for the mound without warming up. “That’s how little I knew,” Sal later recalled. Although he ultimately did take his warm-up pitches, the result was not inspiring. His first pitch in the game sailed over the batter’s head, and several others had the catcher “doing hand-springs.” After he had walked three batters and hit one in the rear, O’Neill mercifully took him out.

He saw action in only four more games that season and no doubt hoped that the following year would prove to be more productive. It was a false hope. Sal attributed much of his poor performance in that second season to the infrequency of his playing time. There would often be many days, sometimes weeks, between pitching assignments. You cannot pitch well, he told his manager, if you work only sporadically. However much he understood, O’Neill was not about to give a failing pitcher more work. So Maglie asked to be sent down to the inferior PONY League, where he could play more often. O’Neill warned the young pitcher that he was moving in the wrong direction and that he might never come back. But Maglie stood his ground.

The strategy proved successful. Sal did well enough in the PONY League to earn a promotion in 1941 to the Elmira Pioneers in the Class A league (where he won twenty games). To those who later marveled at the dramatic turnaround in his fortunes, the young pitcher had a simple answer: “In Elmira, they let me play, that was all.”

There was, however, more to the story. Maglie was an intense competitor who focused on all aspects of the game in an effort to capitalize on every possible advantage. There was no relaxing during the game—not even when he sat in the dugout while his team batted. He studied the other pitcher’s motion, the opposing batters’ stances, and the dynamics of the field. As he later explained, “In the dugout I always had my head in the game. There is always something to learn.” Even when he was playing in the major leagues, his teammates knew not to trouble Maglie in the dugout during the game. “You don’t want to bother Sal when the other team’s batting,” said Dale Mitchell, who roomed with Maglie on the road when they were with the Dodgers, “because he’s studying all the time.”

The hard work paid dividends for Sal in 1942. His stellar pitching performance at Elmira caught the eye of New York Giant scout Eddie Ainsmith, who reported that the Niagara Falls native “hasn’t much of a curve, but he could develop.” The Giants drafted Maglie on the basis of that recommendation, and in the spring of 1942—with the nation at war—Maglie was assigned to the Giants’ farm team in Jersey City in the International League, the top rung in the minor-league ladder. He could have been wearing combat fatigues instead, but he had a sinus condition that made him unfit for service. So Maglie spent the 1942 season honing his skills and posting a 9-6 won-lost record.

The opportunities for advancement expanded exponentially at the end of the 1942 season because the major-league teams’ rosters had been depleted by the war effort. Maglie was in a position to exploit that situation but decided that he could not in good conscience play a game while his peers risked their lives in defense of the country. He placed himself on the voluntary retirement list and took a job as a pipe fitter in a Niagara Falls defense plant. But he did not live alone in Niagara Falls. In early 1941 he had married Kay Pileggi, a slim brunette with a bright smile who was two years his junior and his former high school sweetheart. It was an enduring and valuable relationship for Maglie. (She was, he would later say, “a wonderful woman” and “my best friend in baseball.”)

As the war wound down, Maglie—who had preserved his pitching proficiency by playing for a Canadian team on weekends—rejoined the Jersey City Giants in June 1945, hoping, no doubt, that he could continue the progression toward the big leagues. His performance, however, was unremarkable. Still, big-league teams were hurting for players because so many remained in the service, and Mel Ott, the Giants’ manager, put out a call to bring Maglie up to the parent club.

On August 9, 1945, Sal was summoned to the mound at the Polo Grounds to pitch against the St. Louis Cardinals, who had loaded the bases with one out. Maglie may have thought back to his first experience as a professional baseball player in Buffalo in 1938 when he was also asked to relieve with the bases loaded. But unlike that fiasco, Maglie performed well, walking one batter and then retiring the other two and leaving the game unscathed. The short but successful performance earned him a starting opportunity on August 14—the very day on which the Japanese surrendered. Maglie did not disappoint. He pitched the Giants to a 5-2 complete game victory over the Cincinnati Redlegs.