Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (13 page)

Fred Sanford started for the Yankees against Chuck Stobbs, the young Boston bonus baby, in the second game of the series. It was one of those typical Fenway Park games, which are murder on the earned-run averages of pitchers. At one point in the fourth inning the Yankees were ahead 6-2. In the bottom of the fourth, it was 7-6 Red Sox. In the top of the fifth it was 8-7 Yankees. In the bottom of the fifth it was tied 8-8. In the sixth inning McCarthy summoned Ellis Kinder in relief. McCarthy had his doubts about Kinder, particularly about his heavy drinking and his failure to observe even the most basic curfew rules during spring training. There had been one bitter showdown between
the two of them in 1948 during spring training, in which McCarthy had threatened to send Kinder home to Tennessee unless he reformed.

Also in 1948, there had been a memorable scene in the second game of a twi-night doubleheader. Kinder was supposed to pitch the second game. His teammates were accustomed to seeing him arrive at the ball park in varying stages of disarray, but they had never before seen him like this—just gone. He smelled, thought Matt Batts, like a distillery. Kinder threw the first pitch over the backstop, the second over Birdie Tebbetts’s head. He couldn’t catch the ball when it was thrown back to him. After walking two men, he was relieved. Over the public-address system it was announced that he was leaving because his arm hurt. Kinder, who was right-handed, walked off the mound holding his left arm.

Ellis Kinder was an old-fashioned, unreconstructed carouser, cavalier in the extreme about training rules and curfews. “To the degree that Ellis trained at all,” one of his oldest friends in Jackson, Tennessee, once said, “he trained on the hard stuff.” He did not like lectures from friends, wives, or managers on what he could and could not do in his off hours. That was his business. He believed that baseball and alcohol mixed. At least
he
had always mixed them. He could drink hard all night and pitch hard the next day without any signs of deterioration or fatigue. In fact, carousing was an essential part of his pregame preparation. It was, his friend Matt Batts thought, almost a ritual. “Sooner or later, my friend, it’s going to get you,” Batts would say. “Matt,” Kinder would answer, “I don’t figure I have a chance of winning unless I do it—it’s my way of getting loose.” Normally, he explained, he might have a few beers at night. But the night before a game he needed to stay out all night, drink hard, find a woman. “When I first started pitching I would be a good boy, you know,” he said. “And
I took good care of myself, and I went to bed early. But I’d stay awake half the night worrying and I pitched like crap. So I changed. And it worked.” It was hard, Batts thought, to argue with the man.

Several years later he was on the Red Sox train from Chicago to Cleveland, and Lou Boudreau, by then the Red Sox manager, tried to get him to go to bed. Boudreau was drinking Coke, and Kinder was drinking bourbon. Kinder was resolute in his determination to keep drinking. “I’ll have another,” he told the bartender. “Same as him?” asked the bartender, indicating Boudreau’s Coke. “No, goddammit, same as before,” Kinder said. He felt it was time for
Boudreau
to go to bed. “Good-night, Skip,” he kept telling Boudreau. Eventually Boudreau decided that this was not one battle he was going to win and went to bed. Kinder stayed up, drinking through the night. When the train arrived in Cleveland he was so drunk they had to call for a wheelchair. Curt Gowdy, who had witnessed the scene the night before, looked at Kinder, who was unconscious, his head rolling back and forth like a rag doll’s. “I don’t think we’ll see Ellis for three or four days,” Gowdy said to his assistant.

That afternoon Boston played a doubleheader in near 100-degree heat. In the seventh inning of the first game Gowdy looked down and to his surprise saw Kinder amble in from the bullpen. He looked as if he had slept like a log the night before. He retired nine men in a row. Boudreau thanked him and told him he could take the rest of the day off. “I’ll stick around, Skip,” he said. “I’ve got nothing else to do.” Stick around he did, coming in to pitch several innings of shutout baseball in the second game on this brutally hot day.

He was, thought his teammates, a physiological miracle. They teased him that when he retired they should ship his glove to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and his body to Harvard Medical School. “Old Folks,” based on his late
entry into the big leagues, was his official nickname; “Old Grandad” was his unofficial one. There were periodic attempts to make him go on the wagon. When Kinder was sober, he was very polite about these efforts. He did not argue; he simply walked away. On the occasion of his posthumous election to the Madison County Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame in Jackson, his widow and childhood sweetheart, Hazel, recalled, “Bless his heart. Ellis
did
love a good time.”

Kinder was to emerge as one of the league’s very best pitchers, and probably its single best relief pitcher. The change-up was his best pitch. Before 1949 he was known only as a pitcher who had shown flashes of talent, with no consistency. No one knew at that time how smart he was, and how remarkable his physical endurance was. He was the kind of man, one teammate thought, who did not seem unusually big or powerful in the baggy uniforms of that era. But when he was stripped to the waist in the locker room, it was apparent how thick his chest and shoulders were. He was, thought Ted Williams, probably the strongest man on the team, stronger even than Junior Stephens. In addition, there was a toughness to him. He had been a rookie at thirty-two, by which time he had already seen a lot of life. That set him apart from the other rookies.

Kinder was born in the small town of Atkins, in northwest Arkansas. He was one of six children. His father, Ulysses Grant Kinder, was a poor sharecropper who worked at best one hundred acres. It was a region that had always known hard times, and during the Depression those times were even harder. Ellis Kinder made it through the seventh grade, and then dropped out—he could not afford the time away from farming, and there seemed little reason to stay in school. Years later, when he was in Boston, he worked for a time selling cars at a large Chevrolet dealership; the idea behind the promotion was, come meet Ellis Kinder, the famous baseball player, and buy a Chevrolet from him. Nathan
Shulman, the dealership owner, found Kinder easygoing and totally unaffected by his fame. He was eager to hire him. There was only one hitch: When it came time to finalize the contract, Ellis could barely read or write, it turned out.

In every rural small town in America there is a local baseball team, and the strongest boy or the strongest man is always the pitcher. From the time Ellis Kinder was thirteen years old, he was the best pitcher. He could throw the ball harder than anyone else in Atkins. He played in all the local games, although it wasn’t always easy. Ulysses Kinder was a deeply religious man, and he did not believe in playing sports on the Lord’s Day, the one day most other boys had off. Ellis had to sneak away on Sundays to play. He would go to church with his family, and then afterward he would secretly change from his good clothes to ordinary ones. Then he would play ball most of the afternoon, sneak back, take a bath in the nearby creek to get rid of the sweat and dirt of the game, change back to his Sunday clothes, and show up fresh and starched to join the family for Sunday night services.

He dreamed of playing in the major leagues, but his chances were slim. Atkins was buried deep in rural Arkansas, far away from the eyes of potential scouts, and there was almost no way of showcasing his talent. There was no American Legion ball, and he did not go on to high school or college. Over in Scottsville, some twenty miles away, they had heard of him, however, and although Scottsville was technically smaller than Atkins, there was a big sawmill over there called Bigler’s. All the boys in the region wanted to work there because Bigler’s paid well—ten dollars a week—and it was a lot easier than farming. The people who ran the mill came over to see Ellis Kinder. They wanted him to pitch for the Bigler’s Sawmill team, which played against the surrounding teams and also the local Civilian Conservation Corps team from Scottsville. Kinder, now twenty,
took the job. He pitched on Saturday and Sunday, sometimes for both ends of a doubleheader, and sometimes—just in order to make things even—he pitched for both teams.

He seemed destined for a career as the best semipro pitcher in that part of Arkansas—a local legend. But he dreamed of something bigger. He often talked to Hazel about how if he could only save up enough money to go up to St. Louis and get together with Paul and Dizzy Dean, both Arkansas country boys, they’d help him get to play with the Cardinals. “Hazel, I believe I could really get on with those Dean boys, I believe they’d understand me,” he would say.

But the years passed, and no scout showed up on his doorstep. He seemed to have slipped through the net that major-league baseball teams employ to find talent in America’s small towns.

Then one day in the summer of 1938 Preacher Gilliam drove through Scottsville. Preacher Gilliam was the brother of Hartley Gilliam, who was, as everyone in Jackson, Tennessee, knew, the owner of the Lakeview Cabins, the Lakeview Restaurant, the Lakeview baseball field, and, most important of all, the Jackson Generals. Preacher was a conductor on the railroad, and, in his spare time, he was Hartley’s chief scout, working the small towns in the South. He stopped to watch the semipro game in Scottsville. At first, it was said, he did not even get out of his car. But finally he did, and saw a young man with an exceptional curve. After the game he approached him and asked whether he would like to play for money. “Depends on how much,” Ellis Kinder answered. Preacher Gilliam figured out how much it would take to get a boy out of this town. “Seventy-five dollars a month,” said Preacher Gilliam. “Sounds good,” said Ellis. There was one other question Preacher Gilliam wanted to ask. “Boy, how old are you?”

“Twenty-four,” said Kinder.

“That’s too old for a rookie,” said Preacher Gilliam. “From now on you’re twenty-one.”

So Ellis Kinder turned pro, and shed three years from his age. He and Hazel moved to Jackson, where they found an apartment for fourteen dollars a month, and Ellis pitched with great success in the Class D Kitty League. The Kitty League was one of the best Class D leagues in baseball. It fielded teams in Tennessee and Kentucky, well stocked with country boys who were not very different from their fans. In 1939 he won 17 and lost 12, and in 1940 he won 21 and lost 9 and led the league in innings pitched with 276, in strikeouts with 307, and in earned-run average with 2.38. The Jackson team was unaffiliated, so Kinder was not part of a system that had a vested interest in promoting him. Rather, the Gilliam family had a vested interest in holding on to him, or selling him only if there was a considerable offer. Also, while he was a very good minor-league pitcher, he did not have a blazing fastball. Finally, his friends believed, the major-league teams were sure to have heard about his carousing. At one point the Gilliams sent him to the Binghamton, New York, farm team of the Yankees. The deal was simple: $1,000 if he showed up in Binghamton, and $2,000 if he lasted through the season. His record there was 3-3. He was soon back in Jackson, and his Binghamton teammates, including Ralph Houk, later a Yankee catcher and manager, believed that the Yankees had been wary of him because of his reputation. They apparently feared he would corrupt the younger players in their farm system. He ended the year back in Jackson, where his record was 11-6.

In 1943 the Kitty League folded, and Kinder worked as a pipe fitter for the Illinois Central. In 1944 he managed to land a job with the Memphis Chicks in the Southern Association. There he began to blossom, winning 19 and losing 6. His contract was purchased by the St. Louis Browns for $19,000. He went into the service for a year, then joined
the Browns in 1946, and eventually, along with Jack Kramer and Junior Stevens, was sold to Boston in time for the 1948 season.

Kinder was hardly an overnight sensation. By 1949, his second year with the Red Sox, he had won a grand total of 21 games in three previous major-league seasons. But in the second half of the 1948 season he had pitched well. As the Red Sox battled the Indians and the Yankees, Kinder became one of the most dependable pitchers on the team. In the first three of his last five starts of the season he beat the White Sox 6-2, the Athletics 5-3, and the Yankees 9-4. Then he lost to the Yankees, lasting only three innings of a 9-6 game. He pitched one more time, with four games left, and beat the Senators 5-1. But McCarthy still had his doubts about him. Thus the disastrous choice of Denny Galehouse in the one-shot playoff game against the Indians.

Now, in the second game against the Yankees, McCarthy brought in Kinder, and he pitched beautifully. Not perfectly, for he gave up three hits, but beautifully. He did what great pitchers do—kept the hitters off-balance, made them react to him, kept them in doubt. He pitched four innings of shutout baseball and the Red Sox won 11-8. McCarthy, desperately short of pitchers, frustrated by the injuries to Ferriss and Hughson, had found something.

The next day the Yankees decided to use Eddie Lopat. He started poorly and fell behind 4-0 because of some poor Yankee fielding. But a 3-run homer by Gene Woodling pulled the Yankees ahead to win. Two out of three in Fenway without DiMaggio was a lovely way to spend a spring weekend.

CHAPTER 5

F
OR THE YANKEES, THE
train ride out of Boston was sweet. Only later, as airplanes replaced the special trains, did the players realize how wonderful they were. The train waited for them in the station: two sleepers and a dining car. It left on the team’s timetable, not according to any other schedule. Players who spanned both the era of the team train and the era of the team airplane thought that the cohesiveness of the team suffered dramatically when the train was replaced.

Obviously, train travel took a lot longer. When the Yankees got on their train, the players would be together for six hours if it was a trip to Boston, or twenty if it was to St. Louis. They ate together, played cards together, and talked endlessly. If it was an especially long trip, they invented games. There was the game of cows, in which players had to match cows by color as the train swept through the farmland: If your cow was brown on one farm, then you needed a brown cow on the next farm to increase your score. A game that the writers liked was called “L. Peter B.” L. Peter B. stood for the initials and middle name of Lawrence Peter Berra, and in order to play it, one writer would give out a name—H. Benjamin G., for example—and the others would try to guess: H. Benjamin G. being Hank Greenberg. (On the Red Sox, Rudy York, who had been
traded in 1947, had been one of the more inventive game players. York specialized in the game of batting averages, among others. In this game he would position himself in the center of the lobby of his hotel when the team was on the road. Watching the activity of the lobby, he would announce batting averages: “Two-twenty ... two-forty ... three-seventy ... two-ten ... one-eighty ... four-oh-seven.” “Rudy,” a rookie once asked him, “what in hell are you doing—just mumbling to yourself?” “No,” he answered, “I’m rating the women who come through here.”)