Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (35 page)

Vic Raschi heard none of it. He thought only about the Red Sox. Keep Dominic DiMaggio off the bases. That was important because Pesky was a much better hitter when Dominic was on base. Pitch carefully to Williams and walk him if necessary. Williams could kill a right-handed fastball pitcher in the Stadium. No curveballs to Junior Stephens, who murdered Raschi’s curve. Nothing but high fastballs slightly outside. Let Stevie do battle with Death Valley in left center. To Bobby Doerr, as good a hitter as they had, with no real weakness, just pitch carefully and around the edges.

Raschi saw Joe DiMaggio in the locker room. DiMaggio looked gray and wan and was moving poorly. Raschi knew he was sick and exhausted. He wondered if DiMaggio was really well enough to play that day. Probably not, he decided, but nobody on this team was going to tell Joe DiMaggio that he should not be playing.

At last Raschi went out to the mound, and started to pitch. Within minutes he was pleased. Everything was working that day; he had speed, placement, and his little curve. This was not the day to go out and find that one of his pitches was missing, or that he could not put the ball where he wanted. And he was pleased to be pitching against Ellis Kinder. Kinder was tough too, a man who, in the phrase that Raschi liked to apply to himself and his friend Allie Reynolds, liked to make hitters smell the leather. Kinder would almost surely pitch well and make the game close. Raschi wanted that; he wanted a close game where the pressure was on the pitcher.

Dom DiMaggio and Pesky went out quickly. After he got a man out Raschi would always observe a certain ritual: He would straighten his cap, pull his sweat shirt down toward his wrist, and fix the mound. Then he would plant his
right foot on the rubber. All the while the infielders would throw the ball around. Then Raschi was ready to receive the ball from the third baseman, either Bobby Brown or Billy Johnson. He wanted the ball thrown right at his glove so that he wouldn’t have to move. Sometimes, when the Yankees had a big lead, Johnson or Brown would throw the ball slightly behind him, forcing him to leave the rubber. He hated it. There would be none of that today. With two out, Ted Williams came to the plate. Raschi kept everything close to the plate, but he also walked Williams on four pitches. Then he got Junior Stephens out.

Rizzuto was the lead-off man in the bottom of the first. By then he had come to share the Yankees’ admiration for Kinder, who had so completely mastered them that season. Four victories. If there was one advantage Rizzuto had over his teammates when it came to hitting against Kinder, it was that he was not a power hitter. Instead he went with the ball. With a pitcher as smart as Kinder, Rizzuto never tried to guess. The pitch came in, somewhat on the inside, and Rizzuto swung. It was a slider, not a fastball, he realized immediately, because a fastball that much inside would have broken his bat. Because it was slightly off-speed, Rizzuto got out ahead of it. He slapped it down the line, past Pesky at third base, and he knew immediately it was extra bases. The ball hugged the left-field line and went into the corner, and as Rizzuto raced for second, he watched Ted Williams go into the corner. Williams played back slightly, waiting for the ball to come back to him the way it would at Fenway. Rizzuto knew the fence better, and he raced for third. The ball stayed along the contours of the park, more like a hockey puck than a baseball, and went past Williams. Rizzuto had an easy triple. He watched with relief as McCarthy played the infield back.

Henrich was up now, the perfect batter for this situation. Kinder pitched and Henrich choked up on the bat. With the softest swing imaginable, he hit a grounder toward Bobby
Doerr. Classic Henrich, Rizzuto thought, giving himself up and getting the run. No ego in the way. The Yankees had a one-run lead.

Inning after inning passed. The lead held up. Raschi was on top of his game, and the Yankees could do nothing with Kinder. If anything, he was even more in control than Raschi. His placement was almost perfect. When he missed the corner with a pitch, it was because he wanted to miss the corner. He was varying his speed nicely. And he showed no signs of getting tired.

In the eighth, the first batter was Tebbetts, and he went out; then it was Kinder’s turn up. Kinder badly wanted to bat; he was sure he was as good a hitter as anyone on the bench, but McCarthy played the percentages. He sent up Tom Wright, a player just called up from the minors, to bat for Kinder. On the Yankee bench the players had been watching McCarthy closely. When he made his signal, there was among the Yankee players a collective sigh of relief and gratitude. Kinder was out and the Red Sox had a notoriously weak bullpen. On the Red Sox bench, Matt Batts, the catcher, who liked McCarthy more than most of the bench players (McCarthy had given him his chance at the majors), thought, God, don’t do it; that’s a mistake. We’re down only one run, they can’t touch Ellis, and we are weak, I mean
weak
in the bullpen. Kinder was furious. Wright walked, but Dominic DiMaggio grounded to Rizzuto, who turned it into a double play. The inning was over and Kinder, to the relief of the Yankees, was out of the game.

The first two Yankee batters in the eighth, Henrich and Berra, were both left-handed, so McCarthy again played the percentages and went to Parnell, his pitcher from yesterday. Sitting by himself in his attic in South Hadley, eleven-year-old Bart Giamatti heard Jim Britt say that Parnell was coming in to relieve Kinder. Giamatti was young, but he knew that Parnell had pitched too often in recent weeks, and that he had pitched the day before and must be exhausted. He
had an immediate sense that this was a gallant but futile gesture. Giamatti was filled with sadness. Something in Jim Britt’s voice over the radio made it clear that he was equally pessimistic.

Giamatti was right to be pessimistic. Parnell’s was to be a short appearance. He was tired, and he had lost his edge. Henrich had hit him hard in the past (“My nemesis,” Parnell later called him), and now was eager to bat against someone other than Ellis Kinder. Lefty or no, he saw the ball better with Parnell than with Kinder. This time Parnell threw him a fastball. Henrich hit it about ten rows back into the right-field seats and the Yankees got their cushion, 2-0. Then Berra singled and McCarthy called to the bullpen for Tex Hughson. Hughson turned to Joe Dobson and said, “Well, Joe, they’ve finally gone to the bottom of the barrel.” It was odd, Hughson thought, that McCarthy had shown nothing but contempt for him all season, and now at this most important moment he had decided to use him.

DiMaggio hit into a double play, and there were two outs and no one on. But Lindell singled and Hank Bauer was sent in as a pinch runner. Then Billy Johnson singled, and when Williams juggled the ball, Bauer went to third. Then Hughson deliberately walked Mapes to get to the rookie, Jerry Coleman.

Coleman had thought in the early part of the season that he liked to hit against Kinder, and then gradually as the season progressed he decided he was wrong. Kinder had seemed to improve as a pitcher in every outing. You just never got a good pitch. There was the change, the sudden fastball, and then, of course, the last-second slider. Like his teammates, he had been relieved when McCarthy had played by the book and pulled Kinder for a pinch-hitter. Now, in the eighth, he was up with the bases loaded. The Yankees were ahead, but even so Coleman did not want to look foolish at this moment. The season might be nearly over,
he might have done everything the Yankees wanted of him and more, but he had never felt more on trial.

Hughson was absolutely sure he could handle the rookie. Tex could still throw hard, and the ball came in letter-high and inside. Hughson was delighted. He had placed it almost perfectly, an impossible pitch for a hitter to do anything with, he thought, and he was right; Coleman did very little with it. He hit it right on the trademark of the bat and sliced the ball, a pop-up, just past second base; Coleman was disgusted with himself.

In right field Al Zarilla was not playing Coleman particularly deep. Bases loaded, he thought, two out, short right-field fence, two runs behind. We cannot let them have any more runs. Coleman was not a power hitter. For Zarilla, the ability to come in on a pop fly or a soft liner was more important than going back on a ball, particularly with two out. Zarilla watched Hughson’s pitch and he thought, That is a lovely pitch. Then he saw the ball leave the bat and he knew at once that it was trouble—too far back for Bobby Doerr, the ball spinning away toward the line, a dying swan if there ever was one. It had to be Zarilla’s ball. He charged it, and kept charging, but the ball kept slicing away from him. At the last second Zarilla was sure he had a play. He dove for it, his fingers and glove outstretched. He was diving at the expense of his body, for he was not positioned to break a fall. He missed it by perhaps two inches. By the time the ball came down, Zarilla realized later, it was almost on the foul line.

When Coleman saw that it was too deep for Doerr and that Zarilla was desperately charging, he knew the ball was going to drop. He turned past second and raced for third. He was out at third, but three runs had scored. The lead was 5-0. When he came into the dugout, everyone patted Coleman on the back as if he were an old veteran and an RBI leader. But he thought of it as a cheap hit, and was more than a little ashamed of himself. A three-run double
in the box score, he thought, and a cheap pop-up on the field.

He was ashamed of it for a long time afterward. Then three years later he ran into Joe McCarthy at a banquet. He started to mumble something about it being a bloop hit, but McCarthy interrupted him. “You swung at it, didn’t you?” he asked, and Coleman nodded. Coleman understood McCarthy’s meaning immediately—you didn’t strike out and they didn’t put anything past you. So don’t apologize, you did your job.

The Red Sox gave it one more shot. In the top of the ninth, they rallied for three runs. Pesky fouled out, and then Williams walked. Stephens singled to center. Then Bobby Doerr hit a long drive to center field. It was a well-hit ball, but the kind that Joe DiMaggio normally handled readily. This time, his legs cramping up, it went over his head and Doerr had a triple. DiMaggio signaled for time and took himself out of the game. His long regular season was over. Two runs were in. Zarilla flied out to Mapes. Two outs. But Goodman singled through center, and Doerr scored. The score was 5-3.

The next batter was Birdie Tebbetts. Since they had fattened their lead, the Yankee bench jockies had been needling the needler mercilessly: “Hey, Birdie, get the kid [Quinn] to lend you some of his money for your World Series share.” “Hey, Birdie, we’ll send you over a bottle of our champagne.” Tommy Henrich was playing first, and he walked over to Raschi to give him a small pep talk, to remind him that he needed only one more out. “Give me the goddamn ball and get the hell out of here!” Raschi snarled. Henrich turned, and grinned to himself. We’ve got it, it’s a lock, he thought, there is no way Birdie Tebbetts is going to get a hit off this man right now. Tebbetts popped up in foul territory. Coleman started calling for it, but Henrich yelled him off. “It’s my ball,” he shouted, and he thought to himself,
It’s the one I’ve been looking for all year. The regular season was over.

The Red Sox locker room was silent. No one was able to talk. This ending had been even worse than 1948’s. For two years in a row they had come so close, and had ended up with nothing. They had played 309 regular-season games over the two seasons, and had ended up a total of one game behind the two pennant winners in that period.

But at least 1948 had ended with a sense of optimism. This season was ending with the taste of ashes. They had come into the Stadium needing to win only one game, they had a four-run lead in the first game, and they had blown it and the two-game series. They had no one to blame except themselves. Boo Ferriss, looking at his teammates Pesky and Williams, thought they looked like men who had died in some way. Williams sat immobilized in front of his locker, his head down. He was unreachable. If any reporters approached him, he just waved them away. He later said it was the worst moment in his baseball career, worse than the 1946 World Series defeat, worse than the 1948 playoff defeat.

Clif Keane thought there was only one exception to the gloom and that was predictable: Junior Stephens. “Tough game, wasn’t it, Clif?” Junior said. There was, Keane understood, still fun ahead for someone like Stephens.

Dominic DiMaggio immediately went to the Commodore Hotel, where his young wife, Emily, was waiting. Grossinger’s, the Catskills resort, had offered them a free vacation when the season was over. Emily DiMaggio, who had not the slightest interest in baseball, was thrilled because now they could go to Grossinger’s right away and not have to wait the extra week or ten days that a World Series would take. “Isn’t it wonderful, Dominic,” she said, “now we can go on vacation right away.” Dominic DiMaggio’s
eyes were filled with tears. “Emily,” said her husband, “don’t you realize what’s just happened?”

For the team members, the train ride back to Boston was like a funeral procession. It seemed endless. There was almost no desire, as there sometimes was on occasions like this, to replay the game. No one wanted to talk about the next season. No one wanted to take solace in the clichés about how close they had come, and how they had made up eleven games on the Yankees. No one wanted to talk about what if—what if they had beaten Ray Scarborough; what if Hughson’s arm had been a little better. In 1948 there had been some consolation that they had been cheated by Charlie Berry’s bad call on the Boudreau foul/home run.

No one was more bitter than Ellis Kinder, who, as the evening passed and more alcohol flowed, became angrier and angrier about being pulled for a pinch hitter. In his mind, it became ever more clear that had McCarthy left him in, he would have held the Yankees, the Red Sox would have scored the same number of runs, and he would have won. Near the end of the ride he finally accosted McCarthy and exploded. As far as he was concerned, McCarthy had blown it. He was a screw-up, a drunk, and a manager who treated his star players one way and his other ballplayers another. Ellis Kinder got it all off his chest, and he never forgave Joe McCarthy.