Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (33 page)

The win gave the Red Sox their first lead of the season. Of the five games left for the Red Sox, three were against Washington in Washington and two were in the Stadium. If they were nearly invincible at home, then going on the road was another story; they might be 61-16 in Fenway, but as they set out for Washington, their record on the road was 33-39. Still, Boston had a chance to lock the pennant up in Washington, for the Senators were not just a bad team, they were practically patsies for the Red Sox, having won only three of the previous nineteen matchups. Boston won the first game 6-4. Then came what many of the Red Sox would remember for years to come—the one they called the Scarborough game.

Ray Scarborough was a very good Washington pitcher, perhaps their best, and also Boston’s nemesis. He had beaten Boston three times in the 1948 season, including a critical game at the end of the season. Scarborough was a right-handed pitcher, and he was nothing if not smart and crafty. Not only did he give the Boston right-handers a difficult time, but he was poison to their best left-handed hitter, Ted Williams. Scarborough could decoy Williams better than any other pitcher in the league. It was not just a matter of his selection of pitches, it was his motion as well. He would show fastball and then at the last minute go to his curve. Forty years later Williams paid Scarborough the ultimate accolade: He said that he probably chased more balls out of the strike zone with Ray Scarborough than with any other pitcher in the American League.

On this day Scarborough was going for his thirteenth victory against only eleven defeats, a considerable achievement on so weak a team. He was at his best that day,
holding the Red Sox to only four hits. But Chuck Stobbs was equally sharp, and he took a one-run Boston lead into the ninth. McCarthy had both Parnell and Kinder throwing in the bullpen. In the bottom of the ninth, with Boston leading 1-0, Roberto Ortiz led off for the Senators with a short single to left. Gil Coan, an exceptional base runner, ran for him. Ed Stewart sacrificed Coan to second. Ed Robinson hit a slow roller to Doerr, which Doerr fielded cleanly, but which Robinson beat out. Now there were runners on first and third with one out. Al Kozar then singled between third and short to score Coan and tie the game. Robinson went to second base. In came Kinder to pitch to Sam Dente. Dente singled cleanly to right field. In right Al Zarilla charged the ball, holding Robinson at third. That loaded the bases. Buddy Lewis was sent up to pinch-hit. McCarthy waved Parnell in from the bullpen. Some of the Boston players were ready for a squeeze attempt. On Parnell’s third pitch Robinson broke for the plate. But Tebbetts picked up the play, moved over to make the tag, and Parnell threw a perfect pitch for him to handle. Robinson was easily out. Two outs. But Kozar moved to third. Parnell had Lewis l-and-2, and on his next pitch he simply put too much on it. It might have been a great pitch, but it broke too much. It was low and bounced wide of the plate. Tebbetts stabbed at it, but it was past him. Washington won 2-1. Ted Williams had gone hitless. A year later, largely at the urging of Ted Williams, it was said, the Red Sox traded for Ray Scarborough, by then thirty-five. But it was too late for him, and too late for them. He lasted a little more than one season before moving on.

CHAPTER 14

W
HILE THE RED SOX
played with the Senators, the Yankees took on the Athletics, winning two of three. The Red Sox came into the Stadium with a one-game lead, with two games left to play. All they had to do was to win one of two against the Yankees. Had the Red Sox won the Scarborough game, they would have had a virtual lock on the pennant, a two-game lead. The Yankees would have been forced to win both games, and then there would have been a one-game playoff—meaning the Yankees would have had to win three in a row. Most of the Yankee players had waited in the Yankee locker room to listen to Mel Allen’s re-creation of that key Boston-Washington game, and the tension had been enormous. Jerry Coleman was too nervous to listen with the others, so he had gone to his apartment a few blocks away on Gerard Avenue. The moment the game was over, his friend Charlie Silvera called him. “Did you hear?” Silvera asked. “Yes,” Coleman said. “We’re still alive, Jerry,” Silvera said.

Now the door was open just a little again. The Yankee veterans were confident that they would win. Fred Sanford, new to the team, new to the idea of winning, asked a few of his teammates whether, if the Yankees won the pennant, they got any money even if they lost in the World Series. The moment the words were out of his mouth, he realized
he had made a terrible mistake. No one said anything to him, but the looks he got were very cold. These were the Yankees, he realized, and if you were a Yankee you never thought of losing, and you certainly did not talk about it. You expected to win and you won.

The Boston writers coming to the Stadium early before the next-to-last game found out the same thing. Joe Cashman of the
Record
stopped to talk to Tommy Henrich. “Tommy, how do you feel—it must be hard to be behind after leading for most of the season?” What struck Cashman was how confident Henrich was. “Well, Joe,” he said, “we would have liked to have wrapped it up earlier, and maybe we should have, but we’re glad to be in this situation,” Henrich said. “We don’t have to depend on anyone winning it for us—we can do it ourselves. All we have to do is win two games. That’s fair enough.” These guys, Cashman thought, have played in so many games like this that they really do have an advantage.

Tom Yawkey was equally confident. Wives had not accompanied the Boston players to New York, but Yawkey sent out word that every wife was to have her things packed. The moment the Red Sox clinched the pennant, a special train would leave for New York for a great celebration.

Ted Williams, though, thought the Yankees had the advantage. It was their ball park, and it tilted away from most of the Red Sox lineup. The Yankee pitchers were not going to give him, the one left-handed power hitter, anything good to hit. He was right. The Yankees were convinced that they could handle Junior Stephens in the Stadium. His Fenway homers would become easy outs. But not so with Williams. Years later Allie Reynolds was at an All-Star Game when he suddenly felt a pair of immensely powerful arms wrap around him. He thought he was in a vise. “When are you going to give me a decent pitch to hit, you Indian SOB?” the voice belonging to the arms of Ted Williams asked. “Not as long as Junior’s hitting behind you,” laughed Reynolds.
Williams normally liked to hit in the Stadium, but he hated it near the end of the season when the shadows were long. That made hitting much tougher. He thought the Yankee management should turn the lights on during day games at this time of the year, but he knew why they didn’t—it was an advantage to the Yankee pitchers, and New York’s strength was its pitchers, not its hitters. The Yankee hitters were accustomed to the shadows. But Williams, purist that he was, thought that anything that diminished a hitter’s ability subtracted from the game.

It was a sports promoter’s dream: the two great rivals playing two games at the very end of the season with the pennant in the balance. The pitching matchups were perfect—Reynolds against Parnell, and Raschi against Kinder. The great question was: Would DiMaggio be able to get back into the lineup? He had been sick with viral pneumonia for almost two weeks, during which time he had lost eighteen pounds. But he was determined to play. The first of those two games in the Stadium was, by chance, Joe DiMaggio Day. The Yankee star, drawn and emaciated, husbanding his energy, had been forced to stand in front of the huge crowd of 69,551 while receiving endless gifts. His mother had come east for the games (his father had died earlier in the year), and she was introduced to the crowd. She came on the field and, much to the amusement of the huge crowd, raced past Joe to greet Dominic in the Red Sox dugout—she had seen Joe the day before but had not yet seen Dom. Dominic came out of the Red Sox dugout to be a part of the ceremonies, and he could feel his brother leaning heavily on him. Dominic was wary of staying too long in Joe’s spotlight, and he quietly asked his brother if he should leave. Joe quickly said, “No, don’t go!” and Dominic understood that Joe needed him to lean on.

Darnell was sure it was going to be a great game; he thought Allie Reynolds was a magnificent competitor. This was a great Yankee team, Parnell thought, far better than
most people realized, with an exceptional blend of the old and the new: DiMaggio, Henrich, Berra, Bauer, and Woodling, and that great pitching staff; also a late-season pickup—Johnny Mize. No one should underrate a team that had Johnny Lindell and Johnny Mize on its bench. Maybe the 1927 Yankees had been as good, but Parnell was by no means sure.

When he got up that morning Allie Reynolds felt strong and ready; it was one of those glorious days when he felt he could throw a ball through a battleship. Then he went out to the mound and his control simply evaporated. It was, he later decided, probably a case of overpitching, of trying too hard. The game started as a disaster for the Yankees. The Red Sox scored one run in the first—Dom DiMaggio singled, Williams singled, Reynolds threw a wild pitch that moved DiMaggio to third. Then Junior Stephens lined to left and Dom DiMaggio scored.

In the Boston third Reynolds did himself in. It was clear to his infielders that he was unable to find his true rhythm. He got Dom DiMaggio out on a well-hit ball to right. But then he walked Pesky, Williams, and Stephens. Doerr sliced a ball just past Coleman, and Pesky scored. The Red Sox led 2-0 with the bases filled and only one out. Stengel immediately brought in Joe Page. It might be only the third inning, but there was no time to waste. If Stengel needed a relief pitcher the next day, he could always use Reynolds. But Page started disastrously. He walked Zarilla, forcing in a run. Then he walked Billy Goodman on four pitches. That made it 4-0. The Yankee bench was completely silent. Two runs walked in, and Birdie Tebbetts was at bat. On the bench, Gus Niarhos kept thinking to himself, The one hope we have with Page is his rising fastball. Probably no pitcher in the league, he thought, forced hitters to chase as many bad balls as Page. The ball left Page’s hand looking like it was going to be in the zone, but it kept rising, and the hitter could not control himself. Now, with one out and the bases
loaded, Niarhos sensed that Page, wild though he was, might work himself out of it. Tebbetts seemed to want to end the game right then and there. Birdie swung away, trying to kill the ball; He jumped on three pitches, all of them, Niarhos thought, well out of the strike zone. Then Page struck out Parnell, a good hitter, again with pitches outside the strike zone. Maybe now Joe will settle down, Niarhos thought. But Boston had a 4-0 lead.

That looked like a very big lead for a team as good as Boston. Some of the Yankees thought a critical moment had taken place in the third inning. In the bottom of the third, when Rizzuto came up, Tebbetts began to needle him. With Rizzuto, Tebbetts usually concentrated on his Italian origins, his size, and his hitting ability: “You goddamn little Dago, you know you can’t hit the ball out of the infield. You know you should be out behind the Stadium playing in some kids’ game,” he would say. This time he went further. With Boston’s big lead, he couldn’t resist. Rizzuto fouled off a pitch, and while they were waiting to get a new ball, Tebbetts started in. “Hey Rizzuto,” he said, “tomorrow at this time we’ll be drinking champagne, and we’ll pitch the Yale kid against you guys. Think you can hit a kid from Yale, Rizzuto?” He was referring to Frank Quinn, the bonus-baby pitcher out of Yale who had pitched a total of twenty-two innings and had never started a game. (Tebbetts denies saying this, but the memory of it and Rizzuto’s reaction remain fresh with almost all the Yankees.)

Rizzuto was stunned and then angered. He grounded out, and on the way back to the dugout he hurled his bat. Then he kicked the water cooler. “Do you know what that goddamn Tebbetts just said,” he shouted. “They’re going to pitch the kid from Yale against us tomorrow!” Rizzuto was normally mild-mannered and slow to anger. No one on the team had ever seen him like this before. The Yankee dugout, which had been silenced by Reynolds’s failure and the four-run Boston lead, began to come alive. Henrich remembered
it as if the entire team had been slapped in the face. But Vic Raschi had a terrible feeling that the season was slipping away from them. He sat in the dugout squeezing a baseball with his right hand to control his nervous tension.

By the fourth it was obvious to everyone in the Yankee dugout that Page was overpowering on this day. His ball was fast, and he had great movement on it. Vic Raschi, watching from the bench, decided that the Red Sox were not going to add to their lead, that now it was a matter of trying to chip away at it. On the Red Sox bench, Johnny Pesky, watching Page, was awed. This was a great pitcher at his best. This was pure power. Page was pitching without deception on this day. There were no curves, no change-ups. Every pitch was a challenge. It was as if he were taunting the Red Sox hitters: Hit me if you can. God, what a pitcher, Pesky thought. This game was not over.

In the fourth Joe DiMaggio came up. He had told Stengel earlier that he would try and play three innings, but at the end of the third he held up five fingers, meaning he would go at least five innings. He had struck out in the first inning, but now in the fourth he lined a double to right field. Billy Johnson struck out, but Bauer singled DiMaggio home with a hard shot to left. Lindell hit another hard single to left, sending Bauer to third. Then Coleman hit a fly to Dom DiMaggio and Bauer scored. It was 4-2.

As the Yankees began to come back, Raschi squeezed the ball harder and harder. In the fifth, Rizzuto singled. Henrich hit a ball past first base, sending Rizzuto to third. Then Berra singled and Rizzuto scored, with Henrich stopping at second. With DiMaggio up, McCarthy pulled Parnell and brought in Joe Dobson. DiMaggio hit a vicious line drive low and to the right of the pitcher. With perfect fielding it might have been a double play. But Dobson did not get around on it quickly; the ball bounced off his glove and rolled fifteen feet behind the mound. By the time Dobson
recovered it the bases were loaded. Billy Johnson hit into a double play, but Henrich scored. It was 4-4 now.