Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (42 page)

Still, minor-league baseball in western Pennsylvania was a trying experience. The team traveled to each away game by bus, sometimes as much as ninety miles, and then returned home the same night. The money allotted for lunch or dinner was only fifty cents, just enough to buy a hamburger or a hot dog. Playing conditions were less than ideal and helped account for young Joe’s first injury—one he never repeated in almost twenty years of professional baseball. “Would you believe,” he later said with amusement, “I ran into a light pole?” Unlike major-league parks, the light poles in Butler were located on the field between the stands and the baselines. An opposing batter hit a pop-up in foul territory. Joe wandered over for the play with his eyes focused on the descending ball and never saw the metal structure that suddenly came into his path.

When the season ended, Joe returned to high school, got his degree, and then returned to Butler for the 1940 season and the long but steady climb toward the big leagues. “I played on so many clubs,” he said after he joined the Yankees, “that I can’t even remember them all.” At some point along the way, he also told people that his name was not Joe Kollonige but Joe Collins (and would have his name legally changed in 1954). It was easier to pronounce and perhaps, by eliminating any vestige of foreign extraction, made him feel more comfortable. Whatever the underlying reasons, it was the name by which he was always known in baseball.

The seventeen-year-old prospect hit .320 in that 1940 season and, after another successful year in 1941, was promoted to the Yankees’ farm team in Amsterdam, New York, for the 1942 season. It could have been a turning point for the Scranton native. The difference was Shaky Kain, the team’s manager. “He was a good manager,” said Collins, “but the meanest man I’ve ever met in my life, barring none.” Collins soon learned that his manager had no tolerance for players who failed to be aggressive on the base paths and umpires who made bad calls. “He’d get close to you,” Collins remembered, “and just automatically pop you right in the nose. And if the umpire made a bad decision, he’d charge home plate and say, ‘Take that mask off.’ The umpire would pull that mask off and he’d hit him.”

There was one saving grace in Kain’s antics: he took an interest in this nineteen-year-old prospect from Scranton, and Collins flourished under the older man’s guidance. “He instilled confidence in me,” Collins later explained. “I batted .341 that year and might have come up more quickly if it hadn’t been for the war.” Although he had enlisted many months earlier, Joe did not join the navy until September 1943. Within months he was stationed on an aircraft carrier as a pilot for the P-3 fighter plane. Joe was prepared to fight for his country, but the war ended before he could be shipped to the Pacific.

In the meantime, he married Peg Reilley, a vivacious brunette who lived near him in Scranton and became the first—and only—girlfriend Joe Collins ever had. “We were high school sweethearts,” Joe later recounted for a sportswriter. “Used to hold hands while sipping sodas at the soda fountain at the drug store.” In time, they would have five children over the course of forty-four years of marriage—but those milestones would arrive after Joe made his entry into the big leagues.

The diversion to military service did not help Joe’s career. Major-league teams were flooded with returning veterans in 1946, and, however much he may have excelled before joining the navy, Collins was relegated to the Yankees’ farm team in Newark. Shortly thereafter he was dispatched to Birmingham when the club decided that Nick Etten, who had been the Yankees’ first baseman, needed some minor-league experience in Newark. The change in venue did not hurt Collins. He batted .360 with the Birmingham club (his best mark in the minor leagues) and was selected for the Southern League All-Star team.

It was enough to get him an invitation to spring training with the parent club in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1948. Unfortunately, it did not start out well. In his very first game in a Yankee uniform, Collins was playing first base in an exhibition game against the St. Louis Cardinals. After the Cardinals got a runner on first base, Yogi Berra flashed a sign to Collins that he was going to throw a ball to him on the next pitch to try to pick off the runner. “I’d say,” Collins later recalled, “we had the runner picked off by at least five feet.” The umpire did not agree and called the runner safe. Perplexed by the call, Collins approached the umpire for an explanation. “Joe,” the umpire said casually, “where’s the ball?” Collins looked in his glove and, to his dismay, saw that it was not there. “I turned around,” he remembered, “and the runner that I supposedly picked off is holding the ball up in the air.”

Although Collins later recalled it as his “most embarrassing” moment in baseball, the incident had no impact on the Yankees’ decision to send the Scranton native back to Newark for further seasoning (where he had twenty-three home runs). He did, however, return to the parent club for the last month of the season and made five pinch-hitting appearances. And he received another invitation to the next spring training camp. But when the 1949 exhibition season ended, Collins was sent to the Yankees’ Triple-A farm team in Kansas City. He had a good season with the Kansas City club (a .319 batting average with twenty home runs and a league-leading eighteen triples) and was again brought back to the Yankees in September—this time playing a few games in addition to having a few pinch-hitting appearances.

Collins had now seen enough to know that the Yankees were a tightly knit club that approached the game with a detached professionalism. The impression was reinforced in the last two games of the 1949 season. The team was one game behind the Boston Red Sox in the standings and had to play those final two games against the Boston club at Yankee Stadium. Sportswriters and fans speculated on which team would prevail, but not the Yankees. “It may sound a little odd,” Collins later recalled, “but everybody had the feeling on the ball club that we had gotten this far and it’s only a question of playing two games and winning them.” And win them they did.

Having proven himself with the Yankees’ top farm teams, Collins earned the right to remain with the parent club for the 1950 season. But he was not the Yankees’ only first baseman. Several others were available to fill that role, and Collins found himself sharing first-base duties with Johnny Mize, the former National League All-Star had who led that league in home runs on four separate occasions (with a high mark of fifty-one in 1947).

Although he had already been in professional baseball for almost ten years, Collins was constantly experimenting with his batting stance (and inspired a 1952 article in
Baseball Digest
entitled “Joe Collins and the 97 Stances”). The initial inspiration for the experimentation was frustration. Collins hit only .234 in 1950 (with eight home runs and twenty-eight runs driven in), and the Scranton native no doubt wanted to do better. But no matter how well he did in any particular year, he was always in search of a batting form that would improve his performance. At one point he developed a stance that consisted of a crouch that, in the players’ minds, looked like someone sitting on the toilet (thus inspiring his teammates to call it the “shit stance”). “I used to kid Joe about his stances,” remembered broadcaster Bob Wolff. “Every year I did my hourly camera interview with Joe, and I said, ‘Joe, how about this year?’ And he kept saying, ‘I’m still looking for that perfect stance.’”

When the Yankees met for spring training in Phoenix in 1951, Stengel was hopeful that the twenty-eight-year-old Collins—using whatever stance he chose—could prove to be the Yankees’ regular first baseman. “If I’m going to build up punch around first,” the manager told one sportswriter in March, “it may come from Collins. This boy Collins is an improved ball player. This may be his year.”

Those words of confidence did not hurt. Collins raised his batting average to .286 in 125 games. Part of that success was an uncanny ability to produce hitting streaks that were critical to the team’s success. “When he was hot,” said Bobby Brown, “he could carry a team for about ten or twelve days.” Still, Collins could never know when Stengel would bench him or play him. (There was the time in 1951 when Collins broke out into a hitting streak during a road trip but, when the team arrived in Detroit for a series against the Tigers, Johnny Mize was playing first instead of him. “Nobody could figure this one out,” said Collins. “Nobody.” But then Mize proceeded to hit three home runs in the game and missed a fourth by inches, which caused Collins to later say of Stengel, “He was a magician.”)

Collins reinforced his value to the team in the 1951 World Series against the Giants, hitting a home run in the second game at Yankee Stadium to lead the Yanks to a 3-1 victory. Still, the Yankees had an abundance of first basemen for the 1952 season (including Mize), and, not surprisingly, rumors swirled during spring training that Collins might be traded to the Philadelphia Athletics. The rumors assumed credibility as the June 15 deadline approached because Collins was batting only .180. But, to his good fortune, Joe then embarked on a hitting streak that included eleven hits (with two home runs) in twenty-two trips to the plate. The streak raised his batting average to .274 and enabled him to evade a trade. “He now may settle down,” said Louis Effrat in
The New York Times
on June 16, “and concentrate on playing first base regularly for Casey Stengel.”

The release from the trade pressures may have made the difference in Collins’ performance. He finished the 1952 season with a .280 batting average in 122 games (along with eighteen home runs—third-highest on the club).

Through it all, Joe preserved his reputation as one of the team’s most popular players. Stengel even cited Collins’ standing with his teammates as one of the reasons the Scranton native remained with the Yankees. “Collins is popular in the clubhouse,” said the Yankee manager. “I don’t think that I would have made a good social move if I had traded Joe to Philadelphia.”

Much of that popularity was a function of Collins’ personality. Sportswriters routinely described him as “one of the most affable members of the Yankees.” And for good reason. Nothing seemed to ruffle him. There was always a grin, a quip, or a friendly gesture. (There was the time in early 1955 when rookie Elston Howard hit a game-winning triple in the ninth inning in a game against Detroit. When he returned to the clubhouse, he found a carpet of white towels leading from his locker to the showers—the doings of Collins and Mickey Mantle, who also acted as an “honor guard” for the young player. “When they did that,” Howard later recalled, “I figured I was accepted just like everybody else.”) “He may never have been a great ballplayer,” said one sportswriter of Collins, “but he always was a great guy.”

Collins’ friendly demeanor proved to be a valuable force in defusing tension among his teammates. “He was a terrific influence inside the clubhouse,” said Tony Kubek, who played with Collins in his last few years with the Yankees. All of the Yankees—Collins included—were fierce competitors. But some, like Billy Martin or Gil McDougald, were prone to explode in the face of confrontations with umpires and other players. “Collins was a little laid-back and easygoing,” Kubek recalled, “and that tempers some of the atmosphere in the clubhouse.”

However soothing his nature on most occasions, Collins could not escape some of the tension in the 1952 World Series against the Dodgers. He played six of the seven series games and failed to get a hit in twelve plate appearances. Those failures at the plate were compounded by his play on the field in the seventh and deciding game. Jackie Robinson hit that high pop-up toward first base in the seventh inning with the bases loaded with Dodgers and two outs. Yogi Berra kept calling for Collins to make the catch while the Dodger runners were circling the bases—and bringing in the winning run—but Collins had lost the ball in the sun. “I was looking for it,” he later explained, “but I couldn’t find it.” Second baseman Billy Martin ultimately saved the day with his shoestring catch, but the experience was not one Collins could easily push aside. “I had nightmares for two or three months,” he later said. “I can see that ball dropping and losing the World Series.”

The nightmares were gone by the time Collins reported for spring training in 1953. Although Stengel continued to platoon him at first base, Joe performed well when he did play, hitting seventeen home runs (third-best on the club) in only 387 at bats (although his average did slip to .269). He might have played even more games and reached a higher level of performance if injuries had not forced him to spend almost four weeks in the hospital.

The first injury occurred when he bounced a foul ball off his leg. The incident caused phlebitis, and Collins was sent to the Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. After almost two weeks, the doctors advised the Yankee first baseman that he could return home. Joe decided instead to go to Yankee Stadium for the night game against the Red Sox, thinking that he could catch a ride back to Union, New Jersey—where he had purchased a home for his family—with Phil Rizzuto, who lived nearby.

Collins did not expect to play in the game, but Stengel approached him when Boston called in Ellis Kinder to pitch relief. Kinder was one of the American League’s best relievers in 1953. But he had one glaring weakness—Joe Collins. “He couldn’t get me out no how,” Collins later remembered. Joe was sitting on the bench when the Yankee manager approached him midway through the game. “Your buddy’s on the mound,” said Stengel. “Can you hit?” Collins was not sure. “I’m so weak,” he remembered, “I can hardly walk.” But he could not turn aside a chance to hit against Kinder. So he took a bat, stepped into the batter’s box, and hit the first pitch into the upper deck for a home run. “I was so weak,” he recalled, “I could hardly run around the bases.” When he returned to the dugout, he slipped and jammed his heel on the dugout steps—an injury that required a return to the hospital for another stretch of almost two weeks.

Collins made another recovery of sorts in the first World Series game against the Dodgers. In a seesaw game played before almost seventy thousand screaming fans at Yankee Stadium on a warm and sunny October afternoon, Collins came to the plate in the seventh inning with the score tied 5-5 and blasted a home run into the right-field seats—thus redeeming his poor performance in the 1952 series. (Ironically, Dodger first baseman Gil Hodges, who also failed to get a hit in that 1952 series, hit a home run in that first series game as well.)