The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (10 page)

*Vince was a gifted defensive player, but he led the National League in strikeouts six times. Dom, who wore spectacles, played eleven seasons for the Boston Red Sox. Fenway Park rooters made him the hero of a song Harvard men and others chanted to the tune of “O Tannenbaum”:

Oh, Dominic DiMaggio!

He’s better than his brother Joe.

*Editors and publishers allowed the baseball writers to live in indentured servitude because, bless my M.B.A., it saved money. Only after World War II did several nasty incidents prompt three newspapers to pay their own way. These were the
New York Times
, the
New York Herald Tribune
, and the
Daily News
.

*
Mirabile dictu
, it has come to pass.

*The senior Boston baseball writer on this trip, Hy Hurwitz of the
Globe
, later told me: “I know Williams. We were in the Marines together. He staged that tantrum to get you to knock the Boston press in a national magazine. Whatever you asked him, he was going to end up knocking the Boston press.”

*The season of 1939 was not easy. In the grip of a fatal disease, Lou Gehrig had to stop playing for the Yankees after eight games. Subsequently, pulled muscles and inflamed corneas seemed less than serious. Still, McCarthy could safely have rested DiMaggio in September and protected the .400 average while the eye healed. The Yankees won the pennant by seventeen games.

We weren’t a very subtle team. We didn’t pull a lot of squeeze plays. All we tried to do was hit the ball so hard it broke in half.

—
Robert W. Brown, third baseman and M.D.,

looking back on his days with the Yankees

I
N THE LAST WEEK
of May 1947, the champion Red Sox came to New York to play four games against the Yankees. As the Reliable Jersey House* foretold, Detroit and Boston were leading the league, with the Tigers out front of Boston by half a game. Pat Mullin of Detroit was leading American League batsmen at .355. Ted Williams was leading American League sluggers with ten home runs in thirty games. The Yankees, playing under .500 ball, stuttered in sixth place and L. S. MacPhail suddenly erupted.

He fined Joe DiMaggio $100 for refusing to pose for a special promotional newsreel. “I’ve been with this team since 1936,” DiMaggio said, “and this is the first damn time I was ever fined.” He fined outfielder Johnny Lindell $50 for telling some young Yankees that they didn’t really have to attend banquets arranged by the Yankee publicity department. MacPhail remained obsessed by his image of the high-flying (though sixth- place) Yankees, not all of whom trusted aircraft to retain their wings. “After May 31,” MacPhail announced, “any Yankee who refuses to fly, except Frank Crosetti, who has always refused to fly, will pay his own fare for train transportation.”

At the same time, with no publicity, MacPhail hauled in Phil Rizzuto and second baseman George Stirnweiss. “I know you two bastards met with Jorge Pasquel at the Concourse Plaza [a hotel a block away from Yankee Stadium].” Working outside the frame of organized baseball, Pasquel was scouting talent for his Mexican League and offering generous contracts.

“I thought it was a free country, Mr. MacPhail,” Rizzuto said. “I thought I had a right to hear what the man had to say.”

“Well, listen, you little bastard, and that goes for you too, Stirnweiss, if you guys talk to Pasquel again . . . just talk . . . you’re goddamn suspended. Got that straight?”

Thus within three days MacPhail publicly fined two-thirds of his starting outfield and privately threatened to suspend half of his starting infield. Recollecting, Rizzuto, the greatest shortstop not yet chosen for the Hall of Fame, said, “Whoosh.”

“What does that mean, Phil?” I asked.

“Nothing. Just thinking about MacPhail makes me go ‘Whoosh.’”

Stanley “Bucky” Harris, the Yankee manager, told Rud Rennie that “all this stuff just before the Red Sox series is regrettable. I mean, I got some guys with low spirits who aren’t hitting like they should. I’m afraid this will just depress them further.”

The Yankees seemed in disarray. But it wasn’t mere disarray at all. It was the first stage of labor. The Bronx Bombers were about to be born.

* * *

As far as most knew, it was a comfortable time. Anyone honorably discharged from the military could draw $20 a week in federal funds for one year. Loafing veterans said they were members of the 52–20 club. It wasn’t a fortune, about equal to $125 a week today, but you could buy bottles of Rheingold beer for a dime, play pinball at a nickel a game, or, if your bent was more serious, take your girl to see that surprising smash movie
Gentleman’s Agreement
, the first film in which Hollywood allowed itself a long look at anti-Semitism. (But you went at risk. Women found the male lead, Gregory Peck, irresistible. Peck played a Christian character named Green who changed his name to Greenberg to find out for reasons of journalism if anti-Semitism in America was real. As John Garfield — playing a cardboard serviceman named Captain Goldman with remarkable fire — explained to Mr. Green-Greenberg, anti-Semitism was “as real as perspiration.”)

Still, it seemed to be a comfortable time. We loved our radios in 1947. Any typical Tuesday night, we heard on the large boxy Imperial Model Capehart Radio Phonograph (with Flip-o-Matic record changer) the
Bob Hope Show
, with Jerry Colonna and Vera Vague and, as special guest star, dancer-actor-singer Van Johnson. A little later came the
Milton Berle Show
and after that the
Red Skelton Show
, in which Red played the famous country bumpkin Clem Kadiddlehopper. That same Tuesday, live on WJZ New York and on the seventy-one other stations belonging to NBC’s Blue Network, Serge Koussevitzky led the Boston Symphony in a program of works by J. S. Bach and Richard Strauss, who was still alive and busy explaining why he had not been — to put this charitably — more passionately anti-Nazi.

We comfortably read
Kingsblood Royal
, the novel in which Sinclair Lewis attacked phony charities in his increasingly shorthand but still commanding way. Or A. B. Guthrie’s fine Montana novel
The Big Sky
. Nonfiction bestsellers included the always readable John Gunther turning his sights homeward in
Inside U.S.A
., Toynbee’s classic
Study of History
, the
Information
Please Almanac
, and a kind of consolation called
Peace of Mind
, written by a rabbi named Joshua Loth Liebman. Rabbi Liebman wrote of “the shock-proof balance achieved within a soul.” A year later, in 1948, when he reached the age of forty-one, Liebman committed suicide.

Certain aspects of existence were uncomfortable. The mood was materialistic, like the mood of our own present, but at the Stork Club or El Morocco late in the 1940s, women did not look like women of today. Hair was lacquered. Cuts were severe. And women’s bodies seemed to be shaped differently.

The corset salon at Tailored Woman on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street advertised a free-lift contour control corselette for a hefty $29.50. “Your bottom stays pocketed,” said the advertisement in the
Herald Tribune
, “its natural curves sweetly rounded.” Perhaps, but with all the corsetting and girdling, women’s bottoms seemed unitary, so to speak, like the rearmost segment of a honeybee.

And, of course, no one knew that the national sense of comfort was a delusion. For all its silly, ingenuous, manic surface optimism, 1947 deeply was something darker and indeed terrifying.

The year 1947 was the gateway to the cold war.

On the last Friday night in May at Yankee Stadium, Allie Reynolds held the Red Sox to two hits. One was a grounder that took a bad hop off Bobby Brown’s chest. The other, Billy Goodman’s single to center in the sixth inning, was the one clean hit Boston made. Reynolds held Pesky, Dom DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Rudy York, and Bobby Doerr hitless. He started a big Yankee inning with a double. The Yankees won, 9 to 0, and afterward MacPhail told everyone who would listen, “Watching the big Indian [Reynolds] is a helluva lot more fun than watching some fucking seal with an oboe.”*

On Saturday, 42,219 fans paid their way into the Stadium, pushing attendance up over half a million after just seventeen home games. The Yankees started thirty-nine-year-old Spurgeon Ferdinand “Call Me Spud” Chandler, who supposedly had lost his fastball. Ol’ Spud worked the corners, took a little off, and threw a wicked, dipping forkball. Across nine innings, the Red Sox were able to drive only seven pitches beyond the infield. Five were gentle fly balls. Once again, Dom DiMaggio, Doerr, Pesky, and Williams went hitless. Journeyman George McQuinn, a first baseman MacPhail had acquired, played brilliant defense and batted in two runs. The Yankees won this game, 5 to 0. The New York pitching staff had now flung back- to-back two-hitters into the faces and hearts of the Red Sox.

The Sunday punch was memorable. The Yankees assaulted three Boston pitchers for seventeen hits. They scored five runs in the first inning. After three innings, the Yankees led by ten. Joe DiMaggio, Billy Johnson, George Stirnweiss, and catcher Aaron Robinson hit doubles. Phil Rizzuto tripled. Charlie Keller and George McQuinn hit home runs. With two out in the ninth inning and a runner on first base, Ted Williams cracked a home run into the third tier in right field. He caught one of Bill Bevens’s zapping fastballs just right. Just right, but nine innings too late. The Yankees won their third in a row from the champion Red Sox, this one by 17 to 2.

Not only were the Yankees suddenly awesome, the Red Sox were playing nervous baseball. Boston made five errors during the 17 to 2 rout. Bevens held them hitless into the seventh inning by which time the Yankees were ahead by eleven runs.

Williams hadn’t hit in the World Series against the Cardinals. Now he wasn’t hitting against the Yankees. He was taking a lot of bases on balls, but that, some said, was not leading a team as great sluggers, Ruth and Greenberg, had done. They led with their strength; they led with power.

Why all the walks when the Red Sox needed batting punch?

“If I swing at a pitch a half inch off home plate,” Williams said, “then the next time I may swing at one an inch off, then two inches, then six inches. And that’s no way to hit. You have to wait for your pitch.”

But the Yankees were not giving him his pitch. Williams had been neutralized. Some baseball men suggested that the chatter about inches was mostly a diversion. DiMaggio and Henrich swung at bad pitches when the Yankees needed a big hit. Williams was less than the perfect team player.

“It’s worse than that,” said Moe Berg, a major league catcher for fifteen years, and after that a noted linguist. “The truth is Williams is a choker.”

Berg’s listener (myself) expressed shock. The Splendid Splinter, John Updike’s Great WASP God, light on competitive fire, possessed of a heart of Jell-O?

“It’s plain enough if you look,” Moe Berg said. “For Christ’s sake, the Red Sox don’t win big ones, do they?”*

By Monday night nobody was talking about trained seals or circuses. New York and much of the country was galvanized by the hammer job the Yankees were beating on the team some writers called “the Crimson Hose.” The sporting press, fickle as an April day, or a May night, began writing with great enthusiasm about the “rejuvenated Yankees.” MacPhail himself was transmogrifying with incredible speed from clown to genius.

What turned out to be the largest crowd to see a single game in baseball annals up to the Era jammed subway and elevator lines to the Stadium. That Monday night, the twenty-sixth of May, 74,747 people paid their way into the Bronx ballyard (and 1,140 people who had bought standing room tickets demanded and got their money back when it turned out there was no place left to stand). The seating capacity of the old triple-tiered Yankee Stadium was officially 67,000, a round number because the bleachers consisted of benches rather than individual seats. Something like 7,000 people stood through all nine innings on that long ago Monday night.

The Yankees started Frank “Spec” Shea, a strong right-handed rookie from John Brown’s hometown in Connecticut, whom the Yankee publicist called “the Naugatuck Nugget.”

The Nugget was dull. By the third inning, the Red Sox led, 3 to 1 — the first time they led any game in the series — and had runners on first and second with nobody out. The next three Red Sox batters were Ted Williams, Rudy York, and Bobby Doerr — a Hall of Famer, a home run champion, and another Hall of Famer. Not exactly a pitcher’s dream of peace.

Bucky Harris lifted Shea for Joe Page, a strapping free spirit, of whom John Lardner said, “Joe had a lot of stuff. He drank a lot of stuff so he had a lot of stuff. He was a lefthanded pitcher, but a switch drinker. He could raise a glass with either hand.”

Page roomed with DiMaggio for a time but when he came back to the hotel too late too loud too often, DiMaggio insisted that the Yankees room Page somewhere else. That Page’s habits disturbed DiMaggio, himself a passionate night owl, powerfully testifies to the pitcher’s dislike for rest in bed.

But he could throw. Hard, low sinking stuff and, some alleged, a dipping spitball. Trying to balance talent and discipline, Bucky Harris decided that if the Red Sox pounded Page that Monday night, he was going to send the pitcher to Newark, forever.

So here came genial Joe Page jumping over the bullpen railing. The three-tiered stands were packed. The night rang with ballpark noise. Page’s career swung in the balance. Williams, York, and Doerr were coming to bat.

Williams bounced to first. George McQuinn fumbled the ball and the bases were loaded.

Page threw three wide fastballs to Rudy York. Bases loaded, nobody out, and the count on a strong slugger three and nothing. “If he throws ball four,” Harris said, “he goes to Newark. Now!”

York swung on three and nothing and missed a fastball. He swung and missed two more. Mighty Rudy had struck out.*

When the cheers died down, Page fell behind to Doerr, three balls and one strike. Then he struck out Doerr, on two low, tailing fastballs. Eddie Pellagrini, playing short ahead of Johnny Pesky, flied to right. Given a chance, the Red Sox had not been able to break open the ballgame. This night, like so many others, belonged to Joe Page.

Across his seven innings, Page held the Red Sox to two singles. He struck out eight. His buddy, but no longer roommate, Joe DiMaggio, played a big game with three hits, including a decisive three-run home run. The Yankees won their fourth straight game from Boston, 9 to 3.

In four games against the strongest team in the league, the Yankees scored forty runs. Forty Yankee runs. Five for the Red Sox. I cannot think of one contending team so trampling another and so humiliating them in clutch situations. It may be hyperbolic, but only mildly, to point out that after this incredible May series at Yankee Stadium, the Red Sox could not win an important ballgame for a generation.

On June 20 the Yankees took over first place and never relinquished it. In 1946, they had finished seventeen games behind the Red Sox and five behind Detroit. Now in 1947, enacting an astounding reversal, they would win the pennant by twelve games over the Tigers. Boston in third place finished fourteen games behind. The Yankees made up no fewer than thirty-one games on the Red Sox from 1946 to 1947.

Early in the summer the Yankees won nineteen in a row. Over a slightly longer span, they won thirty-one games out of thirty-four. Sportswriters began referring to the team as a juggernaut, after the Hindi
juggannath
, which Eastern religion describes as “a massive, inexorable force that crushes whatever is in its path.”