Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (15 page)

But the job also had its drawbacks. The endless travel separated the writer from his family. (Effrat was away so much that his children called him Uncle Lou.) And he was loath to take vacations for fear that some younger member of the staff might come in and prove to be a better writer. Of Dan Parker, sports editor of the
Mirror,
it was said that he deliberately hired mediocre writers so that none would outshine him.

The writers did not make a lot of money, but their salaries went surprisingly far because of the perks. In the late forties the base annual salary for a writer was perhaps $5,000 or $7,000. But thanks to the clubs, they stayed at the best hotels and ordered from room service. At spring training they went to Florida for two months. In truth, it was two months of sitting in the sun doing what they liked best—talking baseball—and then deciding among each other
what the day’s story was. If their families were coming down, the club found them small houses and picked up the tab.

They were catered to by the fans as good friends of the ballplayers. Once, Harold Rosenthal, a swing reporter for the
Herald Tribune,
wanted to wire his apartment so that his neighbors could hear his children if he and his wife went out for the evening. That way they wouldn’t have to hire a baby-sitter. This required a relatively complicated electrical procedure at that time. Rosenthal was given the name of someone at New York Bell, and he made the call. Harold Rosenthal? The baseball writer? Of course it could be done. By the way, how did the Yankee pitching look?

Joe Trimble frequently experienced the same phenomenon. If he took his car to be repaired, the garage owner would look at the name. Trimble ... not the same one who covers the Yankees? We’ll have your car ready in an hour, Mr. Trimble.

In any city with a halfway decent baseball team, nothing was more important than the box scores. The
Daily News
had a circulation of more than 2 million, and though its predominantly blue-collar readers did not thrill to its editorials bashing Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, they lived and died by its sports reporting. Its editors knew this. The great years of the
News’s
growth had coincided with the ascendance of Babe Ruth. The paper had made him its personal property, and that had set a tradition. Whenever there was a star athlete in the city, the
News
would assign a reporter to him full-time. And the
Mirror,
of course, would take up the challenge.

In the early evening, the
News
and
Mirror
delivery trucks raced through the city to make their drops. During the baseball season men and boys would eat their dinners early and leave home to line up at the candy stands, which were near the drops: Fifty-seventh and Eighth Avenue, Seventy-second and Broadway, etc. As they waited they argued the merits
of the best players on the three local teams. At around seven-thirty
P.M.
stacks of paper would be thrown off the trucks and quickly unbundled. The fans would pick up their papers, argue a bit more, and head home, usually before eight-thirty. The papers recounted what they had often already heard, and, even more important, gave the box scores.

Among the people who waited faithfully by the candy store in Flatbush at Avenue M and East Seventeenth Street with his two cents for the
Daily News
was a boy named Maury Allen, who was sixteen and a half in 1949. Maury Allen was a passionate baseball fan, which was not unusual, although as a Yankee fan in Brooklyn he was unusual. Allen, who later became a prominent sportswriter, would recall those days with wonder. His boyhood was about baseball. He and his friends played ball all day, listened to radios on the front steps, and argued endlessly about which team was better, or which player was better—DiMaggio or Williams. But the arguments did not end there: They ranged beyond the question of the ballplayers themselves to the question of who was the best broadcaster, Mel Allen or Red Barber, or the best reporter, Dick Young or Joe Trimble or Milton Gross. If you rooted for the Dodgers you rooted for Young, who was the liveliest and most irreverent sportswriter of his day, and Barber, whose voice was Southern and crisp and whose use of language was elegant. If you liked the Yankees you spoke of Mel Allen, Trimble, or Ben Epstein, a former wrestler who wrote for the
Mirror.

In retrospect, the singularity of the baseball connection in those days struck Allen. No one on his block had a television set. His friends were baseball fans. Football fans, with the exception of those who rooted, with some help from the arch-diocese, for Notre Dame, were rich people who had been to college, and who rooted for their college teams. They did not live in his neighborhood. Nor were Allen and his buddies interested in singers. They did not argue the relative abilities of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby.
A generation later, young people were more hip and more affluent. They were linked by their feelings about rock and roll stars, about the television shows they watched, and about the cars or motorcycles they drove. But in these simpler times it was only baseball. Probably, he thought, it meant that boys were more separated from girls in that era.

Monday, May 2, 1949, was the worst day of young Maury Allen’s life. He was the local baseball bookie, and he had to pay out. He had been beaten and beaten big. Small baseball pools were not unusual in that era. The idea was quite simple: Other kids, usually friends, would each put down a dime and pick three hitters. If one’s chosen hitters got six hits among them, Allen would have to pay back sixty cents. Generally such pools were quite profitable: About thirty kids might bet, and it was rare that more than one or two would beat the system. Allen usually made about eight or ten dollars a week, which was a nice sideline. It was easy to figure out how his clients would bet. The Yankee fans would invariably offer up the three best Yankee hitters. The other kids, the Yankee haters, would bet on whichever team was in town playing the Yankees.

On the previous weekend, the Red Sox had been in town, and there had been a lot of betting, particularly on the four best Red Sox hitters: Dom DiMaggio, Pesky, Williams, and Stephens. Maury Allen had a little spiral notebook and he had dutifully written down the bets: Goldberg—Pesky, D. DiMaggio, Williams. The Yankees had won the Friday game behind Vic Raschi, and while Dom DiMaggio had gotten three hits, Raschi had closed off the middle of the batting order. There was heavy betting for Saturday and Sunday as well, but Allen was not worried—on Saturday Eddie Lopat was pitching. Lopat was a bookie’s delight, and a good hitter’s nightmare. On Sunday Allie Reynolds was pitching. The odds could not have looked better. The Yankees did indeed win on Saturday. But on Sunday everything came apart for Maury Allen. Dom DiMaggio opened the
game with a single and then Pesky hit a home run into the right-field seats. That was a bad omen. Dominic went on to have three hits that day, Pesky also had three, Williams two, and Bobby Doerr and Junior Stephens one apiece.

Allen was cooked. Almost everyone who bet with him had beaten him. He owed fifteen dollars, far more than he had in reserve. He could not afford to go to school that Monday, and had to spend the day borrowing from every member of his family, particularly his brother. That Red Sox victory, 11-2, did not derail the Yankees from first place, and it left Boston still in sixth place. But it ended Maury Allen’s career as a bookmaker.

CHAPTER 6

T
HE RED SOX HAD
gone on a hitting rampage in New York—all of them, it seemed, except Bobby Doerr, their All-Star second baseman. He had ended up with two hits in twelve at-bats for the three games. It was typical of the way the season had been going for him so far. As April passed, he thought it was merely a slow start. By May it was a slump. In June, he was still hitting only .207. It was especially humiliating because in the spring he had predicted not only a good start for himself but also for the entire team. Now the team was dragging, and he was one of the main reasons. Doerr found himself confronting the secret fear that haunted all ballplayers: that this was something serious, the first signs of the end of his career. He was thirty-one. Previously he could count on hitting about .290, with between 90 and 110 runs batted in each year, and he could field well. He was so steady that his career was exceptional for that reason. By the time his career was over he ended up playing fourteen years of major-league ball, all with one team, Boston—1,865 games in all. He had never played any position other than second base. Now, at the peak of his career, he was slumping and he had no idea what was wrong. He was not seeing the ball well against ordinary pitchers, against whom he normally hit well. It got so bad that Birdie Tebbetts, the catcher, suggested that Doerr have his eyes examined.
Doerr went to an ophthalmologist in Malden, Massachusetts, who assured him that whatever it was that was going bad, it was not his eyes.

Doerr was easily the most popular member of the Red Sox, and possibly the most popular baseball player of his era. He was so modest and his disposition so gentle that his colleagues often described him as “sweet.” He was the kind of man other men might have envied had they not liked him so much. In 1929, when Doerr was an eleven-year-old growing up in Los Angeles, someone had told him that baseball players made $10,000 a year. The sum had been beyond his comprehension. He thought to himself, Wouldn’t that be something, to make big money like that doing what I love best.

Doerr was a child star in baseball, so good in high school and with the American Legion that when he was only sixteen he was offered a contract to play with the Hollywood Stars of the Pacific Coast League. (By the time he showed up, they were the San Diego Padres.) Doerr was so excited that he could barely think of anything else. His older brother was already playing with the Portland team in the same league. Because he was being asked to give up high school, his father, who worked for the telephone company, had to grant permission. The Hollywood Star people offered a two-year guaranteed contract at $200 a month. His father thought about it a great deal, and finally said yes, he would give his approval, if Bobby agreed to come back in the winter to continue studying for his high school degree. “I want you to save all the money you can,” the elder Doerr said, “and buy stock in the telephone company,” a suggestion that the young Doerr heeded for his entire career. Then Bobby Doerr and his father, in what was the most exciting moment of Doerr’s life, went to Sears, Roebuck and bought a suitcase for his new life.

In San Diego he looked too young to be a professional baseball player and on occasion was barred from a clubhouse
or two. Once he took batting practice using Fred Haney’s bat, a mistake he would
not
make again because Haney was so angry. His time with the Padres was remarkably happy. He met a player almost as young as he, but in some ways even less grown up. His name was Ted Williams. As the two youngest members of the team, they hung out together, and when the 1936 season was over, Doerr, who loved the outdoors, introduced Williams to fishing (which, of course, Williams denies; as he remembers it, he introduced Doerr to fishing). That began a fifty-year friendship.

Doerr was as comfortable with himself as Williams was not. He knew he was talented (he was to enter the Hall of Fame in his sixties, driving across the country in a van with his family, including his ninety-three-year-old mother, to attend the ceremonies), but he did not push himself obsessively, as did Williams. The difference on occasion drove Williams crazy. For Doerr often could not pass the Williams Test—the oral exam Williams administered after any hit, and with particular urgency after a home run. Williams would want to know exactly what kind of pitch Doerr had hit. Sometimes Doerr did not know. Instinct had won out: He had swung, the ball had left the park, it had worked. Williams would start cursing him, “Jesus, Bush, how can you not know? You’re too goddamn dumb to play in this league.” Doerr never minded—that was just Ted being Ted. Indeed, even when he
did
know he would tell Williams that he didn’t, in order to infuriate him. “I can’t understand it,” Williams would tell Doerr. “You could be a three-hundred hitter—it’s all there for you.” “Ted, damn it,” Doerr would reply, “I take as much extra hitting as you, I love to hit as much as you do, but I’m a middle infielder, and I’m in the game on every pitch, and it drains you terribly—and affects your concentration on hitting.” There would be a grunt from Williams, neither of assent nor dissent, and the subject would be closed, for the moment at least.

In South Hadley, Massachusetts, in that summer of 1949, Bartlett Giamatti was taking Bobby Doerr’s slump almost as hard as Doerr was. Bart, son of Valentine and Mary Giamatti, was eleven years old, and Bobby Doerr was his favorite player. The son of a professor of Italian at Mount Holyoke, and one day to be a professor himself, he identified powerfully with Doerr.

He had chosen Doerr carefully. Ted Williams was beyond his reach as a role model; it was all right for a devoted Red Sox fan to admire him, but it would have been immodest, indeed improper, to emulate him. That was left to those boys who were the best hitters in their towns. Bart Giamatti was not that good a hitter. So Williams was out. Since he had not been blessed with a great arm, Bart liked to play second base, which was the shortest throw in the field. That was Bobby Doerr’s position. From careful reading of the newspapers and listening to Jim Britt, the Red Sox broadcaster, Bart knew that Bobby Doerr was extremely popular with his teammates and not a carouser. Everyone on the team was said to look up to him. That made him a perfect role model, especially for a professor’s son.

Life in South Hadley was very quiet: There were no movie theaters, no television yet. Home video games were still forty years away. Even though Giamatti had visited Fenway Park only once, he saw it in his mind every day as he listened to the games on the radio—they were as immediate as if he were actually there. He had converted his room into a baseball museum, with pictures of players that he had drawn himself. In that sanctuary, he had become expert at turning the radio in different directions in order to pick up the signal, which was especially weak when the weather was stormy.