Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (28 page)

Then there was the movie sequence with Dominic: As he waited for the pitch, his shoulders moved, the trunk of his body moved, and, worst of all, his head moved forward twelve inches. All the things O’Doul had said were true: It was a body unfocused. So Dominic paid attention. For a time his hitting got worse, because he was undoing what he knew and trying something different. But a few weeks later they were playing in a small mining town near Monterey, and Dominic was taking batting practice. Suddenly he was hitting balls over the fence, and he knew it had finally worked for him. Without the help from O’Doul, he would probably not have made the major leagues, he later decided.

Dominic DiMaggio hit .306 in his first season. But very early on the comparisons with Joe began. A sportswriter named Tom Laird, who wrote for the
San Francisco Daily News,
often praised Joe DiMaggio as the greatest player he had ever seen, and wrote that Dominic DiMaggio was a poor player cashing in on Joe’s name. Nothing had ever stung Dominic more, and nothing made him more determined to make the major leagues. (Among those who concurred with Laird was Joe DiMaggio. He told the Boston sportswriters in Dominic’s rookie year that at first he had thought the same thing. Only when he saw his younger brother play was he converted.)

By his third year, 1939, Dominic hit .361 and became the league’s most-valuable hitter. The next year, 1940, he was in the major leagues and hit .301.

For a long time the comparisons with his brother remained difficult. He met every challenge, overcame the problem of his size, showed that glasses were not a problem. Dom was a consistent .300 hitter, yet he was always somehow made to seem lacking in comparison with Joe DiMaggio. For a time, when he was in the minor leagues, it spurred him and made him work harder. Then, when he arrived in the major leagues and still did not get the recognition he felt he deserved, he became bitter. But gradually
he overcame it. The war years helped. In the service he learned that there was a great deal more to life than baseball, and slowly he learned to ignore other people’s expectations. That was his greatest victory—to accept his own talents and limitations and to live happily with them.

In July 1949 his hitting streak did not surprise Dominic DiMaggio. He knew that he was, above all else, consistent. He had two other streaks, both of 27 games, and he knew that his final batting average was usually between .285 and .305. (One reason he lost about ten points a year on his average was that the Red Sox catchers were unusually slow and batted in front of him. When one of them was on base, it cost him an infield hit from time to time.) He knew that he needed his hits earlier in the season because the length of the season and the heat wore him out. He might be hitting .330 in mid-July, but slowly his weight would drop, and then so did his batting average. In those long hot summers, his batting average always came down 20 or 30 points.

That summer he had been hitting about .325 when the streak began. He was on base in every game at a time when many Red Sox players had lost their concentration and come apart. He brought back the excitement that helped bring them alive. When it was over he was hitting .340 and Boston was no longer twelve games out of first place. The Red Sox were playing well; the pitching was improving; and they were sneaking back into the pennant race.

Then in August, Boston became a hot team. Parnell was pitching his best baseball of the year. Kinder was in the midst of a prolonged winning streak. Kramer, virtually useless until then, was beginning to pitch well, and Stobbs pitched regularly and started winning.

Ted Williams was enormously confident. He studied the box scores every day, and he noted that the Yankee pitchers were struggling just a little. Raschi was on a losing streak. Reynolds was not finishing his games. They were worn thin,
Williams thought. He was not surprised. Even when the Red Sox had been ten games out, Williams was sure that they would make a run at the Yankees. There was just too much talent on the Boston team not to. Boston was a hitter’s team, not a pitcher’s team, and July and August belonged to the hitters. Playing constantly in hot, muggy weather became a test of the mind over an unwilling, sluggish body. Sometimes on those suffocating days Williams would feel worn down. After all, he was not relaxing in the dugout—he was on base more than half the time, and that was tiring. Then he would look at the opposing pitcher. It is hard on me, he thought, but he’s the one really paying for it. The heat, he knew, would disappear for him in the sheer pleasure of baseball.

On August 8, the Yankees went into Fenway for a three-game series. Boston was six and a half out. The Red Sox badly needed to win at least two: That would make it five and a half out, instead of seven and a half out if the Yankees won two. In the first game it was Kinder against Raschi. Dominic DiMaggio, who had hit in 34 games going in, was stopped by Raschi in the first game. He made five trips to the plate and the last time up he was sure he had a hit. He lined a pitch hard, right past Raschi’s ear, and as he broke out of the batter’s box he thought, I’ve got it. But the ball kept carrying until finally it reached his brother in center field. He had hit it too hard. After the game one of the New York writers suggested to Joe DiMaggio that he had made a good catch, but he dissented. “If I hadn’t caught it, the ball would have hit me right between the eyes.” Dominic DiMaggio’s streak was over.

But the Red Sox won the game 6-3, and Ellis Kinder’s record was now 13-5. The defeat was Raschi’s fourth in a row, and made his record 15-7. Then Parnell beat Reynolds for his seventeenth win that season. Williams had seven hits in three games. He felt exhilarated. The Red Sox had won two out of three; they were closing the gap.

The Yankees were worried about Raschi. On July 21 his record had been 15-3, the best in the American League, but he was struggling now. The heat was wearing him out. He had lost his last four starts in a row. It was a long season. Yogi Berra hated catching doubleheaders, particularly in the heat. He complained so often that finally Eddie Lopat asked him, “Hey, Yogi, what do you think Birdie Tebbetts is going to do today? Catch one game or two?” It had no effect. In mid-July Berra came to the park one Sunday and turned to Charlie Silvera. “Silvera, you’re catching the second game today.” “No, I’m not,” Silvera answered. “The only way I catch is if you’re home sick.” Silvera suspected he might have planted an idea because a few weeks later Berra called and said that he was staying home because he had a bad cold. “You call Mr. Berra right back,” Stengel told the trainer, Gus Mauch, “and tell him to come to the ball park anyway—I might want him as a pinch hitter.”

The strain of the heat on the pitchers was even more obvious. They kept a jug of orange juice mixed with honey to drink as a pick-me-up and also a bucket filled with ice and ammonia. Gus Mauch would dip a towel in the bucket and drape it over the pitcher’s neck between innings. “Florida water,” they called it. It was believed that water, any amount of it, would bloat you up, make you heavy, and slow you down. So none of the pitchers took even the smallest drink of water during the game. Allie Reynolds, as a special reward to himself if he made it to the seventh inning in the hot weather, would go over to the cooler, take a mouthful, wash it around in his mouth for a moment or two, then spit it out.

Two years later, when Johnny Sain, a masterful veteran pitcher, joined them, he brought an even more remarkable secret. In the late innings on hot days Johnny Sain would go to the bucket of ice, grab a handful, and stuff it into his jock. The others were appalled—here was the worst kind of cold shower imaginable. But Sain swore that it helped him
fight off fatigue and dizziness. Soon some of the others tried it and came to swear by it.

There were days when a pitcher simply didn’t have it, and the opposing players would virtually take batting practice. The manager was loath to go to the bullpen and sacrifice a good relief pitcher in a game already hopelessly lost. When this happened it was the duty of the starting pitcher to stay out there and let the hitters club him and his earned-run average to death. The Yankee pitchers had a phrase for it: “Your turn in the barrel,” for it was like being the target in an arcade.

During a season, Vic Raschi thought, a pitcher won some games that he shouldn’t win, but then during that long July-August stretch, he would lose some he should have won. Raschi would lose thirteen or fourteen pounds a game and change uniforms as many as three times—wearing a heavy wool uniform with five or six pounds of sweat in it made things worse. Unlike Raschi and Reynolds, Lopat was not a power pitcher and he lost less weight. Sometimes he would pitch the first game of a doubleheader on an oppressive day, then come into the dugout at the end of the seventh inning and show that he had no stains under his armpits. “It’s not that hot,” he would say.

Raschi used his full power on every pitch, and had to drive off the mound as hard as he could. The heavier he was, the more powerfully he could drive off the mound. But in August 1949 he was slumping, and he was sure that it was from loss of weight. He had started the season at 224 pounds, which was a good weight for him; he was tall and big-boned. Gradually, as June and July passed, his weight began to slip, below 220 and then down to 215. An additional problem, Raschi thought, was that the weight loss put more pressure on him mentally. He had to think more, and concentrate more; lacking optimum physical power, his placement of pitches had to be more precise. He became more of a finesse pitcher.

The day after Kinder beat Raschi, Eddie Lopat beat Joe Dobson. Before the game Ted Williams and Walt Masterson had been talking about Lopat. “I think he’s the best pitcher in the American League,” Masterson said. “No way,” said Williams, “no way.” “Come on, Ted, think about it. What other pitcher gets by throwing with so little.” There was a long silence.

Stengel did not like to pitch Lopat in Fenway, but on this day he had no choice, and Lopat was brilliant. The 101-degree heat did not bother him. He walked four men in seven innings and gave up only four hits. After the seventh, before Lopat could tire, Stengel went to Page, and Page also dominated the Red Sox, giving up only one hit. Afterward Williams wanted only to talk about Page. He was, claimed the Boston hitter, the difference in the teams. “I wish we had someone like him who could just go out there and fire the ball. If we had someone like that we’d be ten games ahead. Pitching is the reason the Yankees are ahead, make no mistake about that.”

The next day Parnell beat Reynolds, who did not last past the third inning. It was Parnell’s seventeenth victory. Boston, with a third of August gone, was five and a half games out. It had become a pennant race after all.

Williams felt particularly good. He was seeing more and better pitches than he normally did. The reason, he was sure, was Junior Stephens hitting right behind him. Later, after his career was over, he decided that Junior had offered him more protection than anyone else in his career. He was aware of Junior’s weaknesses: He was not a supple hitter. Good pitchers working in big ball parks could almost always handle him with the right pitches. He knew that Junior’s strike zone was far too big. “That man,” Hal Newhouser once said, “goes after pitches way out of the strike zone, and hits home runs with them.” Junior was a good hitter, Williams decided, but an imperfect one. When Williams
had first come up, others had hit behind him—Jimmie Foxx, and Joe Cronin at times. But their skills were beginning to decline. Junior was at the top of his game in 1948, 1949, and 1950.

Junior Stephens was an amazing physical specimen. He played hard all day, and he played just as hard all night. He was not so much a drinker as a carouser. William Mead, in his book
Even the Browns,
described him as a young man “with a baby face and an insatiable appetite for female companionship.” “I roomed mostly with his suitcase,” Don Gutteridge, his teammate, once said. In 1944, Charley DeWitt, one of the Browns owners, asked Junior to quit running around at night and get some rest—because the Browns had a chance at the pennant. Stephens agreed. Thereupon he went for three weeks without a hit. DeWitt then told him, “Go out [at night] and stay out.” How did he do it, Gutteridge once asked rhetorically—stay out all night and then play so well? “He was a superman,” Gutteridge said. On the Red Sox he continued his demanding schedule. But during the 1948 season he was completely worn out in the last month. In 1949 he was somewhat better, but his teammates thought they could sense fatigue coming on toward the end. No one on the Red Sox, however, was going to tell Junior what time to go to bed, and certainly not Ted Williams. By August, as the team continued to win, everyone seemed more relaxed. Bobby Doerr, who was playing in considerable pain and whose legs were being carefully wrapped every day, was now called Johnson and Johnson. There was more teasing and clowning around. Once before a night game on an evening when he was not going to pitch, Jack Kramer asked Matt Batts to warm him up. He did it along the first baseline bench as the fans were pouring into the box seats. There was no doubt in Batts’s mind from Kramer’s exaggerated motions that, he was preening for the crowd just a little. Kramer was good-looking and was generally thought incapable of passing a mirror without
admiring himself. As Kramer delivered the next pitch, Batts dropped his catcher’s mitt and caught the ball bare-handed. Kramer turned immediately and walked to the outfield. He never asked Batts to warm him up before a game again.

Birdie Tebbetts, the prime needler on the Red Sox, took pleasure in provoking Williams. Tebbetts was the leading bench jockey on the team, and no one was immune from his sharp tongue. He picked his spots, of course. He knew when to do it to Williams—when Williams was hitting and feeling good. Then Tebbetts would carefully scan the Boston papers and pick out something that Egan or one of the other writers had written that day. “God, Ted, did you see what they wrote about you today? About your being jealous of Junior over here? I wouldn’t put up with that crap if I were you.” Sometimes he needled Williams about his power: “You know, Ted, when you were a rookie I was sure you would get the Ruth record of sixty home runs, but now all you hit are thirty or forty.” Sometimes it was about his hitting in general: “Ted, you know I’ve been thinking and I think you’ve slipped a bit as a hitter from when you first came up. I think you were a better hitter then than you are now.”