The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (3 page)

MacPhail came East from Cincinnati, a whirlwind blowing away dust and apathy. Before he arrived in Brooklyn, in January 1938, he had been promised a “free untrammeled hand” in running the club (and an unlimited expense account). Quickly, he broke New York’s long-standing radio blackout. In collective ignorance, the ballclubs believed that radio broadcasts would reduce attendance. “Hell,” said whirlwind, tradition-breaking Leland Stanford MacPhail. “There’s nothing to reduce. What was our attendance in Brooklyn last year?”

Precisely 482,481 for seventy-six home games.

“Then what have we got to lose, goddammit? We’re broadcasting.” And MacPhail brought Red Barber into Brooklyn. In person, Walter Lanier Barber was rather stiff. Small talk made him impatient or uncomfortable.* But turn on a microphone and the Ol’ Redhead became the loving, witty, quietly learned uncle you always wished had sprouted on the southern side of the family. No better baseball broadcaster (or baseball ticket salesman) ever lived.

Next MacPhail ordered lights installed at Ebbets Field. On June 15, 1938, at the first major league night game in the history of New York City, Johnny Vander Meer of the Cincinnati Reds pitched a no-hit game. It was Vander Meer’s second consecutive no-hitter. No other pitcher has accomplished that, to this moment. And the day after
that
, MacPhail hired a new first base coach, George Herman Ruth. From time to time at Ebbets Field the Great Man stepped up during batting practice and showed some earnest, geriatric, belly-jiggling swings.

Baseball the sport and baseball the business proceed ultimately from those columns of numbers headed Won and Lost. What MacPhail could do as well as anyone who ever lived was assemble a winning ballclub in a hurry. He brought Durocher in from St. Louis to play shortstop and later to manage. (Babe Ruth, who wanted to manage the Dodgers, was released, dismissed like aged Falstaff.) MacPhail spent and dealt for such splendid players as Dolph Camilli, a strong, graceful first baseman; Dixie Walker, a good right fielder and a superb batsman; and Billy Herman, the best second baseman extant. MacPhail stole Pee Wee Reese from a Boston Red Sox farm and bought fine pitchers Whit Wyatt and Kirby Higbe. Quite suddenly the Dodgers rose out of the lower depths and won the 1941 pennant.

They attracted 1,214,910 fans to their small ballpark, a quarter million more than the champion Yankees drew in the cavernous Bronx stadium. (The Giants, slumping to fifth place, fell yet another quarter million back.) In the brevity of four seasons Larry MacPhail had won a pennant and almost tripled home attendance. When someone said of the Dodgers, “It looks at last as though the worms have turned,” even my father smiled.

War came. MacPhail enlisted in the army and that prince of parsons, Wesley Branch Rickey, came in from St. Louis as the new Dodger president. He meant to stay.

On MacPhail’s military discharge in 1945, his old Brooklyn job was taken. No matter. MacPhail decided to buy the New York Giants, who had collapsed into last place in 1943. Larry MacPhail was a great seafarer. His passion was salvaging wrecks.

But the Giants were not for sale, even to a certified redheaded genius.

That left only one team in New York City, the Yankees, owned in 1945 by the estate of Colonel Jacob Ruppert, a beer baron and a bachelor. According to Larry MacPhail’s son Lee, later president of the American League, “My father offered a flat three million dollars and the Ruppert lawyers were de-lighted. But of course my father didn’t have three million dollars. He never was able to hold on to money. He did have a backer. But then that fell through. The backer was too close to racetrack people, too close to gambling. So Dad had this great deal with Colonel Ruppert’s estate. All he was lacking was the cash.”

MacPhail took his grief to the bar of “21,” at 21 West 52nd Street, a long way from the raucous beer bars along Flatbush Avenue. There he encountered Dan Topping, a sports buff and an heir to Anaconda Copper, a great American fortune. The swizzle-stick financing was magic. Topping instantly was interested “for a third.” He had a friend, a contractor in Arizona, who would surely take another third. That turned out to be Del Webb, a cold-eyed man who boasted of the efficiency with which his firm erected concentration camps imprisoning Japanese Americans during World War II.

MacPhail put the package together with his two new partners and commandeered the Yankees for a final price of $2.8 million. For $2.8 million, MacPhail and his rich associates obtained the New York American League team — a monarch of franchises — plus Yankee Stadium (which was later sold), plus the land under Yankee Stadium (later sold in a separate deal), plus signed contracts from people named Rizzuto, Henrich, Keller, and DiMaggio.

It was as good a business deal as anybody in baseball could remember, and it was recognized as a great deal at the time. Why, then, was Larry MacPhail drinking so much so often?

His partners wondered about that, too. Two millionaires and the Whirlwind Promoter, the Yankee troika, soon were moving unevenly toward a World Series, a memorable collision, and fistfights. Not fistfights among the ballplayers. Ballplayer brawls are common as grass. These fistfights broke out among the owners.

Horace Stoneham, the president of the Giants,
always
drank too much. He had inherited the New York ballclub with the oldest traditions in town, and perhaps the grandest traditions as well. There was no reason in the world for Horace to sell his heirloom.

The Giants had been playing in New York since May 1, 1883, when an early version opened the National League season by defeating Boston, 7 to 5. John McGraw came to manage in 1902 and ran the team for thirty years. He won ten pennants and finished high in the first division twenty-seven times, twenty-seven times out of thirty. Even today the name McGraw speaks banners.

Christy Mathewson, out of Bucknell, was surely the first ballplayer worshiped as a superhero. Tall, fair-haired, handsome as a god, Mathewson affected a cape for his entrance to the playing field on days when he was to pitch at the Polo Grounds. He looked Apollonian and he may have been the best pitcher who ever lived. The one book my father saved from his own early boyhood, and handed down to me, is
Pitching in a Pinch
by Christy Mathewson, in the Every Boy’s Library Boy Scout Edition of 1912. I still have it. I still read it, and with awe.

Charles Stoneham, a freewheeling broker from the old Curb Exchange, bought the Giants in 1918. He was a financial wizard or a shady operator or both. During the stock market crash of 1929, Charley Stoneham lost scores of millions of dollars, a family member recalls. “He had been very wealthy, but the crash wiped him out. Wiped out everything but the Giants. That was his jewel, the one possession above all others, he would not part with, whatever the cost.”

Keep the Giants Charles A. Stoneham did, for his son Horace to inherit in 1935. The team succeeded for a while under McGraw’s successor, the very gifted, very dour Memphis Bill Terry, winning pennants in 1933, ‘36, and ‘37. But Terry got on everybody’s nerves and he antagonized the sporting press, which had loved old John McGraw. When someone criticized a pitching choice, Terry told a half dozen writers, “I don’t know who you guys think you are. No goddamn forty-buck-a-week reporter tells me what to do.”

Harold Ross of
The New Yorker
asked the wonderfully talented John Lardner to compose a profile on Bill Terry. Most would have been flattered. Memphis Bill demanded a fee.

“Where were you born, Mr. Terry?” Lardner asked, innocently enough.

“The answer to that question is worth plenty of money to me,” Terry said.

(Atlanta. Memphis Bill was born in Atlanta. He also batted .401 in 1930. Lardner never wrote the profile.)

Terry stayed on everybody’s nerves and after he finished fifth in 1941, he was fired in favor of the genial, stumpy home run hitter Mel Ott. Since Ott had made the Giant squad when he was seventeen years old, he drew the nickname Master Melvin.

Although he became the greatest five-foot, nine-inch left-hand-hitting slugger on earth, Master Melvin couldn’t manage much. But the residual loyalty of the old Giant fans was so strong that in 1946, when the team finished last, attendance at the Polo Grounds reached 1,219,873
.*

Why in the world would Horace Stoneham
want
to sell the team? He was reaping major profits in the cellar. Horace had a porky face, fleshy and soft. His baseball intelligence seemed reasonably developed when he was sober, but Stoneham’s drinking bouts were legend.

Back of center field at the Polo Grounds rose a stately blockhouse. Within, one found the clubhouses and, one level higher, a dining room for sportswriters and celebrities. At the very top of the blockhouse, which was painted green, four stories above the deepest center field anywhere, 505 feet distant from home plate, Stoneham maintained an apartment. As far as I can learn, no teetotaler ever crossed that threshold.

One night in the spring of 1947, Horace invited Jim McCulley, who covered the Giants for the
Daily News
, to imbibe. “C’mon, pally. A few El Beltos.”

They proceeded from the press dining room to Stoneham’s apartment. Toward two
A.M.
McCulley decided he’d had enough.

“Stay with me, pally,” Stoneham said. “I doan wanna drink alone.”

McCulley moved toward the door. Stoneham had locked it.

“I got the key, pally,” said the president of the New York Giants. “I’m keeping it, pally. You gotta stay with me.”

McCulley came to on the living room floor, hearing “the damnedest hammering.”

Rap.

Rap.

Rap.

McCulley’s head hurt. He crawled to a window and pulled himself erect.

Rap.

It wasn’t hammering at all.

Rap.

It was one o’clock the next afternoon. It was the damn next day. The Giants were taking batting practice.

Rap.

That was Big Jawn Mize, slashing his mighty swings.

Line drive. Line drive. Line drive.

Rapraprapraprap.

As the Era dawned, all three New York ballclubs looked like problem areas. Branch Rickey, master of the Dodger house, was also a master of tergiversation, as he demonstrated with his comment on the sorrows of Durocher. “Leo,” Rickey said genially, “has an infinite capacity for going into a bad situation and making it worse.” In truth, following the Laraine Day affair, the Durocher and Dodger situations were more grave than Rickey admitted.

The Giants were lost in Harlem. In 1946, Stoneham soberly appointed his nephew Charles (Chub) Feeney executive vice president. Feeney was bright and decisive, a graduate of Dartmouth and Fordham Law School. He told a few, but not many, friends a story which is a paradigm for the perfect New York Giant background. “As a baby,” Feeney said, “I was rocked to sleep by John McGraw.” Feeney was the brightest kid in the family, but still a kid. The Giants finished fifth, fifth and last, going into 1947. The kid was young and John McGraw was dead.

Joe McCarthy had managed the Yankees since 1931. Efficient, sour, arrogant, McCarthy won eight championships (helped by supporting players named Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio). After MacPhail asserted his presidency in 1946, McCarthy managed for just thirty-five games more. Then he quit. That season the Yankees employed three different managers. Suddenly they looked as stable as the kingdom of Freedonia, whose ruler was Groucho Marx.

The season of 1946 ended when a wonderful young St. Louis Cardinal team defeated the Boston Red Sox, 4 to 3, in the seventh game of the World Series. Damnedest Series. Stan Musial hit .222. Ted Williams hit .200. They were a .400 hitter, all right,
between the two of them!
It was tough, as the Era began, to make sense out of what was going on.

Were the Yankees going to collapse into anarchy? Could MacPhail, truly a Dodger, a
daffy
Dodger, turn into a button-down success in limousine country north of the Flatbush subway line called the BMT? The Polo Grounds stood half a mile from Yankee Stadium. You could walk from one to the other in fifteen minutes. But would old Giant fans continue to populate their hallowed horseshoe and watch a squat left-handed pitcher named Dave Koslo, born George Bernard Koslowski, lead the National League in losing ballgames with nineteen? The nearby, chaotic Yankees played better ball. All this was uptown stuff. The major story was developing somewhere else, in Brooklyn. Until that day in May 1947, where we began, the papers mostly missed it.

Long, long afterward, I find myself, in the approximate present, at the village of Fallbrook, California. It isn’t hard to make your way to Fallbrook. You simply drive to Bonsall and turn right. (Actually, Fallbrook lies an hour north and east of San Diego.) Once this was avocado country. Now developments have overrun the avocado fields, but a sense of spaciousness persists and the air is clear and dry.

Duke Snider sits at his ease in a tasteful, conservative living room. A picture window looks down across tee, fairway, and green. Snider says, “The nicest thing about the view is that I don’t have to mow the grass.” He tosses a rubber ball to his puppy. A leaping, rolling snag. “You know,” Snider says, “I’d only have a dog who could catch.”

Snider went to New Zealand with his firstborn, Kevin, a few years ago to spend time together, father and son. Half a world from home, he suffered a heart attack. “No pain. The only symptom was I coughed up a little blood.”

After that Duke, one of the five or six best center fielders since the dawn of man, had to have a coronary bypass. He doesn’t complain, but I suspect the Duke can now spell forwards and backwards the word
cholesterol
.

“A lot of the big writers never wanted to come over to Brooklyn to see us play. They’d only catch us when they had to in the World Series. Then they’d tell us what we were doing wrong.

“We resented it. Pee Wee and Jackie and all the rest of us. We didn’t say it out loud. You don’t want to fight all the New York press. But we resented it. We were pretty good ballplayers, and they wouldn’t come to watch, and when they did they said what we were doin’ wrong.”