Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (16 page)

He was not sure whether baseball had more meaning for him because he was the son of immigrants—the sport could have been seen as a shortcut to the center of American
culture. But he did keep his own all-Italian all-star team: catcher, Berra; first base, Camilli; second base, Lazzeri; shortstop, Rizzuto; third base, Crosetti; outfielders, Dom DiMaggio, Joe DiMaggio, Mele, Zarilla, and Furillo; pitchers, Raschi and Maglie. That he was starting as many as six Yankees did not bother him. There are loyalties, and there are loyalties; sometimes they intersect, sometimes they do not.

Years later, as president of Yale University, and soon to become Commissioner of Baseball, Giamatti would try to analyze why baseball had meant so much to him. Baseball was, he thought, the first comprehensible topic for a young person of that generation. Sex, God, war, and politics were strictly adult topics; but with baseball he could read the newspapers and listen to the radio and know that this was important and that these men were great. Then he could go out and emulate their acts. He could
be
Bobby Doerr.

He had already learned that being a Red Sox fan brought a certain amount of pain with the pleasure. Three years earlier he had sat with his friends in Frankie White’s garage listening to Country Slaughter score ahead of Johnny Pesky’s throw. There would be more to come, but he would endure. In the meantime, he was still worried about Bobby Doerr’s slump. He knew all about the trip to the eye specialist. He feared that the career of his hero might be coming to an end. Then slowly and steadily, starting in late June, Bobby Doerr began to see the ball better and to hit. And then Bartlett Giamatti also began to see the ball better, and they both began to breathe easier.

The Yankees continued to play well. Henrich’s clutch hitting was extraordinary. It was important in understanding the Yankee strength in those days to know that they did not win so much on power, though many people thought they did, nor even on pitching. They won by playing well in tight games, by not beating themselves with mental errors,
and by sheer concentration, both in the field and at bat. One of the first things Joe McCarthy told Mel Allen when the latter began broadcasting Yankee games was, “You’ve heard all that stuff about Murderers’ Row. Don’t believe it. We don’t win on power. We win on defense and good pitching.”

Another strength of the team was turning out to be the rookie second baseman, Jerry Coleman. His play around second base was the best that many of the Yankees had seen since Joe Gordon had been in his prime. At the start of the season Coleman had thought his transition from minor to major league would be gradual, that George Stirnweiss might play the first seven innings or so, and then if the Yankees were way ahead he might come in. But early in the season Stirnweiss bruised a nerve in his hand and the job had become Coleman’s.

To Coleman’s mind there was glory in being a Yankee—you were the best; but there was also a monstrous quality to it, in the need to live up to the almost unbearable expectations of others. He thought of his skills as marginal. He was not a great spray hitter and he certainly lacked power. He was there only for defensive reasons. If he blew a play in the field and cost them a game, then he was a liability. He was playing with less room for failure than almost anyone else on the team. He lived in terror of making the key error that would cost the Yankees not just a game but a pennant. It was not so much the fans he feared as his teammates. He desperately wanted their approval. For Coleman was not just a rookie, he was a
Yankee
rookie. As a result, he felt overwhelming tension from the moment he woke up each day.

He began the season batting at the top of the order. He would wake up every morning thinking of the game they were going to play that day. Should he hit the first pitch or should he wait? That question would hang on him all morning—whether or not to go after the first pitch. Finally Stengel
understood the pressure he had placed on Coleman, and switched the batting order, putting Coleman at the bottom. When the season was over, Coleman realized that he had not enjoyed a decent breakfast all season. All his stomach could handle was boiled eggs and cream of wheat. In a very short time he developed serious ulcers. He was amused when fans and writers told him how cool and confident he looked out on the field. The release from the pressure came only once the game began. Then his own inner doubts receded as instinct took over. Those were the blessed hours of his day. He gradually came to realize that he was doing all right, perhaps even better than anyone expected. But he also knew there would be no real acceptance until he had shown that he could do as well in his second year. Only then would he be a real Yankee.

Coleman finally understood that most of the other Yankees, rookie and veteran, felt the same terrible pressure: DiMaggio smoked cigarettes and drank coffee between innings and developed his own set of ulcers; Tommy Byrne got up at three
A.M.
on the days that he was going to pitch and wrote letters to his wife; Bobby Brown ground his teeth like a machine gun; Vic Raschi behaved like a bear on the mornings he was going to pitch.

Coleman did not feel that he had the natural skills to be a second baseman. In addition, he was learning in front of the largest audience imaginable—40,000 people every day. It was the Crow who probably saved him, he thought. The Crow was Frank Crosetti, the veteran Yankee infielder who had retired after the 1948 season. With seventeen seasons behind him, he dated back to the era of Ruth and Gehrig. Not many outsiders understood Crosetti, a reserved man who carefully removed himself from anything outside of the game itself. Other players did not necessarily like reporters, but they understood the uses of publicity. Crosetti was different. He made no bones about his dislike of them. They, in turn, quickly grew to resent him. Why bother interviewing
him, they decided, since he had nothing to say. Crosetti did not mind at all: They were not ballplayers; what they did was, in his mind, absolutely extraneous.

The Yankees were not just a family to Crosetti, they were a religion. Within that religion, arrogance was a sin. He was always on guard against it. If the Yankees won three in a row and the players started celebrating in the locker room, the Crow would look at them coldly and say, “Don’t be so gay when you’re all full of shit.” He did not congratulate batters who hit home runs except, it was said, Maris on the occasion of his sixty-first and Mantle on the occasion of his five-hundredth. He did not congratulate them because they had merely done what they were supposed to do. Coleman understood that Crosetti was probably the last of a generation to whom the idea of the Yankees would mean so much; Coleman’s own generation of Yankees, serious though the players might be, had enjoyed greater advantages in childhood, and their loyalties were more complicated.

Crosetti knew everything about Yankee baseball, and almost nothing about anything else. He had no time for the ancillary pleasures of the season. He did not attend the victory parties that celebrated World Series wins. His car was already packed as the Series wound down, and the moment the last game was over, he left as quickly as he could and drove back to California. In 1949 one of the rookies asked Crosetti if he had
ever
attended a victory celebration? Yes, he answered, once—in 1932, his rookie year. Why not since then, Crow? the player wondered. “No need to,” Crosetti answered.

That spring and summer of 1949 Crosetti was assigned to work with Bobby Brown and Jerry Coleman every day in infield practice. He was like a drill instructor, thought Coleman, who had already served one tour of duty in the marines. Their habits had to be perfect, he would tell them, because if their habits were perfect then they would become instincts: They would do things right during the game without
even having to think. There might be 20,000 fans already in the stands waiting for a big game while Brown and Coleman took infield practice, but Crosetti would yell at them nonetheless:
“Set yourself! Set yourself!
How many times do I have to tell you to set yourself!”

Do it the right way, he would insist. That meant catching a ball with two hands. He hated one-handing the ball—that was for showboats, not Yankees. Sometimes near the end of a workout, with the stands already filling and the last round of batting practice almost finished, Brown and Coleman would needle him by taking throws one-handed. He would yell,
“That’s it! That’s enough!
You guys are screwing around! You’re nothing but screw-offs!” And he would stomp off the field, leaving them giggling yet embarrassed in front of the huge crowd.

The hardest part for Coleman was the pivot—learning how to take the ball from the shortstop and then move toward first on the throw. It had not seemed natural at first. But Crosetti understood this and advised, “Just catch it and throw it. Do it by instinct. Don’t think about it. Just do it, do it, do it! Catch it and throw it.”

Coleman slowly realized that Crosetti approved of him. But privately Crosetti worried about Coleman. He told Coleman’s friends on the team to make sure that he had a beer before dinner to help him relax. He told them to keep him from eating just bread and butter (out of sheer nervousness Coleman would devour the bread and then not eat dinner).

That season Coleman had another mentor as well. Tommy Henrich had emerged as the team leader. He was very helpful to the younger ballplayers, and equally hard on them if they failed to live up to his expectations. Once in an early season game, Coleman took a pop fly. He had been quite pleased with himself, but later, when they were in the dugout between innings, Henrich came over to him. “Jerry,”
he said, “this is the Yankees. We’re a family. We don’t have any secrets among us. If you want the ball,
yell
for it.”

To Coleman, with DiMaggio out and Keller still limited physically, Henrich was the symbol of the Yankees. He desperately wanted to please him. But Henrich was not easily pleased. When they talked, Coleman always had the sense that Henrich was peering inside him. Perhaps, Coleman thought later, that ability to withhold his approval was how Henrich made others live up to his standards.

More than anyone else, Phil Rizzuto, Coleman’s second-base partner, knew how tense Coleman was. He saw that he was constantly popping some kind of antacid pill. Several times that summer Coleman spiked Rizzuto at second base, not during plays but afterward, when they were talking to each other near the bag. When Coleman drove, he would constantly fiddle with the rearview mirror, adjust it, readjust it. The man, Rizzuto thought, could not be wound tighter. “Jerry,” Rizzuto would say, “relax. You and I don’t have to hit. We’re here for our fielding, not our hitting. You’re a good fielder. Be yourself. The rest will come.”

Although the addition of Coleman immediately solidified the Yankee defense, the Red Sox, on paper, remained a far better hitting team. That meant that the Yankees’ edge was slim indeed and that a great deal depended on relief pitcher Joe Page. In the major leagues most of the pitching records are held by pitchers who played early in the century; yet the top fourteen relief pitchers, in terms of saves, all played after 1970. In the late forties, the art of relief pitching was relatively undeveloped. If a pitcher was good he was a starter. If he was not very good he might be a relief pitcher. Teams did not have bullpens in the modern sense of the word—rather they had several pitchers who were viewed by the manager as dubious starters. A star relief pitcher was someone who got 10 saves a year. Johnny Murphy, a reliever
with the Yankees, got the nickname “Fireman” based on 8 or 9 saves a year.

Joe Page was a left-hander with an exceptional fastball—it was not only fast but lively. When Page had first come up with the Yankees, he had been considered a pitcher of great promise. But given a choice between the pursuit of pleasure late at night and serious training, he always chose the former. Clarence Marshall, who roomed with Page in 1949, noted that Page slept in his room twice during the entire spring. Often there was a late-hour phone call from Page to Marshall: He had discovered a wonderful party in another hotel. Would Marshall like to join him? There was a lot of action going on.

When Marshall declined, Page would put a young woman on. In the most seductive way possible she would repeat the invitation: “Clarence ... Joe ... says ...
you’re ...
even cuter ... than ... he ... is ...” Then Page would come back on. “Joe,” Marshall would tell him, “somehow you’re the kind of guy who can go through the hotel lobby at three
A.M.
and not get caught, and even if they catch you, your fastball is so good that they won’t do anything. But me, if I try it just once they’ll catch me and I’ll be on my way to Kansas City.”

When Whitey Ford joined the Yankees in 1950, the first person to take him out on the town was Joe Page. The team was in Chicago. They went to a fight and then to dinner, and then, at about midnight, to a nightclub, and then, at one-thirty, to another nightclub. People complain about Page’s stamina on the field, Ford thought, but he’s showing me plenty of stamina tonight. At three-thirty Page took him to yet another club, this one called the Airline Club. There, to Page’s astonishment, a voice from inside announced that the club was closed. “But I’m Joe Page,” Page shouted, as if it were inconceivable that a nightclub could close with him on the outside.

The next day Eddie Lopat asked Ford, “What’d you do
last night, Whitey?” “Oh, I went to the fights with Joe and then had dinner with him,” Ford answered. “Get back early?” Lopat pushed. “Sure, about one o’clock,” Ford lied. “Then what the hell were you doing at the Airline Club at three-thirty?” said Lopat. “And don’t bullshit me—we were there.”

Such lack of discipline was bound to infuriate Joe McCarthy. In 1946, early in the season, McCarthy exploded at Page after a series in Detroit. They were on a team plane and McCarthy sat next to him. He asked Page when he was going to shape up. He told him he was on the brink of failure, and wasting exceptional talent. As McCarthy lectured, Page seemed not to care. McCarthy grew angrier. “You know what I’m going to do with you?” he told Page. “I’m going to send you back to Newark—you can make your four hundred dollars a month there if you want.” But even that didn’t work. “You want to send me to Newark, send me to Newark,” Page answered. “Maybe I’ll be happier there, anyway.” But the next year McCarthy quit as manager.