The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (31 page)

After inventing the baseball background, O’Malley moved to form alliances with other stockholders, each of whom controlled a quarter of the Brooklyn ballclub shares. (Rickey held the other quarter.) John Smith owned a booming pharmaceutical company, Pfizer Chemical, which was brewing and selling penicillin. A woman called Dearie Mulvey had inherited stock; her husband Jim, the eastern boss of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, often represented her. O’Malley made fast friends of Smith and the Mulveys.

Rickey was the man who signed Jackie Robinson. (“But he couldn’t have done it without my approval,” O’Malley later said.) Rickey was the man who made the trades, hired and fired managers. In essence, Rickey ran the ballclub. But increasingly in the late 1940s, O’Malley ran the ballclub bank accounts. They moved onto a collision course.

O’Malley’s march toward power was subtle, leading Rickey to tell Red Barber, “He is
the
most devious man I’ve ever met.”

For his part, O’Malley conceded Rickey his flare and baseball brilliance. “But,” he told his fellow shareholders Smith and Mulvey, “we are never going to have a profitable franchise as long as that man is in charge.”

He cited Rickey’s own contract, which paid him a straight ten percent commission on all player sales. That, O’Malley said, caused Rickey to sign players who would not be right for Brooklyn but who could later be sold to lesser franchises such as Pittsburgh and the Chicago Cubs. Clearly a conflict of interest. “Besides,” O’Malley said, “he keeps bamboozling the writers by telling them Bob Ramazzotti and Joe Tepsic are great players. He uses the press clippings to make sales. But when the writers find out how bad Ramazzotti and Tepsic really are, they get mad at Rickey and everybody else at our ballclub for bamboozling them.”

Indeed, Dick Young at the
Daily News
and his boss, sports editor and columnist Jimmy Powers, ran frequent attacks on Rickey and the Dodgers. Young said he found Rickey duplicitous and pompous and also — perhaps the worst sin of all — not terribly interested in Dick Young. Like many driven newspapermen, Young had an ego as big as the Ritz. His distaste for Rickey carried over to Rickey’s manager, whom Young dubbed, with heavy tabloid sarcasm, KOBS, for Kindly Old Burt Shotton. The nickname was meant to suggest that Shotton was a mean old man, doddering and vicious. He was neither, by general testimony, although he was only a mediocre manager.

Jimmy Powers, a militant Roman Catholic, despised Rickey for championing Leo Durocher against the Brooklyn Catholic hierarchy. Powers couldn’t attack on the specific point, but he moved on and nicknamed Rickey “El Cheapo.” Rickey was indeed tightfisted but once, in 1946, when he wanted to give his entire team Studebaker cars as a bonus for good effort, the Dodger directors were talked out of authorizing the plan, an expenditure of about $20,000, by, of all people, the newest director, Walter O’Malley.

Powers ignored that episode. Unlike Young, he wasn’t much of a reporter. But Powers was shrill and his column was prominent in the
News
. El Cheapo was ruining the Dodgers. El Cheapo was breaking everybody’s spirit! El Cheapo was a windy fraud! El Cheapo was, well, very cheap!!

In the season of 1950, when these assaults peaked, the
Daily News
sold two million copies a day. It was by far the most popular paper in New York. Coincidentally, Dodger attendance dropped sharply; crowds fell off by more than one-third from the 1.8 million figure reached in 1947.

Was the
Daily News
driving away fans? Were Dick Young and Jimmy Powers, the tabloid twins, that powerful? After all, the Dodgers were televising their complete schedule, 154 games, and more and more fans owned television sets. Surely that was taking a toll on attendence. Regardless, O’Malley told Smith and the Mulveys, it was very bad business for a ballclub to go to war with the biggest newspaper in town.

Rickey regarded Young, whose philandering was well known, as a guttersnipe, and Powers, who hired ghosts to write his columns, as an ignoramus. He refused to salve Young’s ego or to buy Powers dinner. The assaults continued. Finally, after the grinding 1950 season, O’Malley had his way. Led by O’Malley, the directors decided to dismiss Rickey as Dodger president.

As Charlie Dressen, later a Dodger manager, told me, “They wasn’t just gettin’ rid of no Ned-in-the-third-reader [innocent youth]. That Rickey had been around.” Indeed, Rickey’s contract stipulated that if he were not rehired to run the team, others — in this case O’Malley — would have to buy his stock — twenty-five percent of the Brooklyn National League Baseball Club, Inc. In the interests of fairness, the others and O’Malley would have to match the highest outside offer, “I knew that the value had gone up,” O’Malley told me, “since I had bought my own twenty-five percent for two hundred fifty thousand. I guessed the value might have doubled.”

To O’Malley’s horror, Rickey produced an offer, from William Zeckendorf, a Manhattan real estate speculator, of one million dollars for twenty-five percent of the Brooklyn club. Although O’Malley believed until he died in 1979 that the offer was “fraudulent as a four-dollar bill,” he couldn’t prove fraud. O’Malley paid Rickey $1.25 million for a second twenty-five percent of the Dodgers. Rickey had to go to work in Pittsburgh. O’Malley had won control in Brooklyn for what turned out to be a bargain price. But O’Malley, the manipulator, raged at having been manipulated.

Walter O’Malley acceded to the Brooklyn Dodger presidency on October 26, 1950. “From this day forward,” he said, making his point but masking his anger, “anyone in the Brooklyn Dodger offices who mentions the name of Branch Rickey will be fined one dollar on the spot.”

O’Malley quickly fired Burt Shotton and also Milton Stock, the coach who sent Cal Abrams home, and engaged Charlie Dressen to manage. He named Buzzie Bavasi as vice president and de facto general manager. “Buzzie,” he said, “I want you to get these fellows Young and Jimmy Powers off our backs right away. Buy them dinner. Buy them suits. A full wardrobe if you have to. Spend what it takes. Just get them off our backs.”

Suddenly, Dick Young and Jimmy Powers appeared better dressed than they had ever been before. Young and the
Daily
News
consistently came up with inside Dodger stories that somehow eluded the
Tribune
, the
Post
, and the
Times
.

Blessed with news leaks and clothing, Young and Powers underwent an epiphany. They and, with them, the powerful, popular
Daily News
became born-again Brooklyn Dodger fans.

T
HE NATIONAL LEAGUE PENNANT RACE OF
1951 belongs to the ages. There has been nothing like it before or since. Nor will it come again. Summarizing the 1951 race is akin to summarizing
King Lear
. Before anything else, your effort will diminish majesty.

Here is an episode. The Giants are lollygagging, going nowhere with Bobby Thomson playing center field. Thomson is swift and skilled but the team wants fire. Durocher has seen Willie Mays once and has a passion. All right. All right. The front office agrees to bring him up. “I’ll call him myself,” Durocher says.

The twenty-year-old Mays is playing for the Minneapolis Millers and he doesn’t want to leave Minneapolis, for two reasons. He’s afraid to play in the major leagues. He has fallen in love with a Minneapolis girl.

Durocher reaches Mays in a hotel room.

“You don’t want me, Mr. Durocher,” Willie says.

“Now just why is it I don’t want you, son?”

Willie is flustered. What is there to say? Aha. He’s got it. “You don’t want me, Mr. Durocher, cuz I ain’t good enough to play baseball for you.”

“What are you hitting, Willie?”

“Uh, .477.”

“Get your ass on an airplane, Willie, right now.”

The Giants are in fifth place when Mays joins the team on May 25. He makes out twelve straight times, hits a huge home run off Warren Spahn, then slumps again. His batting average slips to .039. He sits in front of his locker in the green blockhouse at the Polo Grounds and begins to cry.

Durocher approaches and puts a hand on Willie’s shoulder. “What the fuck is the matter with you, kid?”

Mays speaks amid sobs. “Send me back down. I knew I couldn’t hit big league pitching. Send me back down, Mr. Leo. I’m begging you.”

“Now look, Willie,” Leo says. “You are my center fielder. Today. Tomorrow. For as long as I’m managing this club. I’m not sending you back down. You are my center fielder. Now stop your fucking crying.”

Willie goes on a tear. “I got nine hits,” he says, “the next twenty-four at bats.” A small tear.

Willie proceeds, of course, to go on a larger tear than that. He becomes the greatest ballplayer in the world.

The Dodgers never really led the Giants by thirteen and a half games at sundown in 1951. On August 11, the Dodgers won the first game of a double-header against the Braves, moving thirteen and a half ahead; but the Dodgers lost the second game. At the end of the day, they led the Giants by an even thirteen games.

From that day forward, the Dodgers played .500 ball. The Giants won thirty-seven and lost seven. When the Giants defeated the Braves, 3 to 2, on September 30, they led the Dodgers by half a game. The Brooklyn club made an extraordinary comeback in Philadelphia and beat the Phils, 9 to 8, when Jackie Robinson hit a home run off Robin Roberts in the fourteenth inning.

“Just goes ta show ya,” announced Irving Rudd, a peppery little publicity man O’Malley had hired for twenty-five dollars a week. “If a ballgame lasts long enough, Jackie Robinson will win it for ya.”

A playoff, best two out of three, began at Ebbets Field October 1. Jim Hearn, a rangy and deliberate right-hander from Atlanta, won the first game for the Giants, 3 to 1. Monte Irvin and Bobby Thomson hit home runs. Once again Ralph Branca lost an important contest.

The Dodgers won the next day at the Polo Grounds, 10 to 0, behind crewcut Clem Labine, a poised twenty-five-year-old rookie right-hander out of Lincoln, Rhode Island. The game turned in the third inning, when the Dodgers led by two runs and the Giants loaded the bases with two out. The count went to three balls and two strikes. Labine threw his curve, a courageous choice for a rookie pitcher in that spot, and Bobby Thomson, guessing fastball, missed it by a wide margin. The pitch was outside. Thomson struck out, swinging at what would have been ball four. After that the Giants rolled over.

On October 3, the Dodgers and Giants played the last game of the playoff. Some years ago, when all the principals were still alive, I reconstructed that encounter. Although I have learned some things since then about this famous baseball game, I want to set down here an account that is as close as I can offer to contemporaneous. The nearer we remain to a primary source the better.

The night before, nearly everyone slept well. Bobby Thomson was troubled because he had struck out with the bases full, but after a steak dinner and a few beers, he relaxed. Ralph Branca fell asleep quickly. He had pitched on Sunday, the last day of the regular season, and on Monday in the first game of the playoff. Tomorrow, October 3, 1951, would be Wednesday, and Branca did not expect that he would have to pitch again so soon.

Sal Maglie, who knew he was to start for the New York Giants, spent a comfortable night in his room at the Concourse Plaza Hotel. For all his intensity, Maglie had learned to control his nerves. So, to a degree, had Don Newcombe, who would start for the Brooklyn Dodgers. “I can always sleep,” Newcombe said, a little proudly. “I don’t need to take pills like some guys do the night before they pitch.”

Charlie Dressen, who managed the Dodgers, went to an Italian restaurant called Rocco’s and ate a dinner of clams, mussels, lobster, and spaghetti with hot sauce. A few people asked how he felt about tomorrow’s game, and Dressen told them he wasn’t worried. “Our ballclub is ready,” he said.

One man who did feel restless was Andy Pafko, the new left fielder. The Dodgers had traded for Pafko at midseason, in a move the newspapers called “pennant insurance,” and Pafko, reading the papers, was impressed. Now he felt that the pennant was his personal responsibility. Lying in his room at the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn, he thought of his wife, Ellen, in Chicago. He had sent her a Pullman ticket to New York so she could watch him play with the Dodgers in the World Series. Next year there would be time to find an apartment together in Brooklyn, but for the moment Andy Pafko was alone. Perhaps it was loneliness as much as pressure that depressed him.

Although New York City was bright with the quickening pace of autumn, none of the ballplayers went out on the town. Everywhere, harboring their energies, they went to bed at about eleven o’clock, and soon, everywhere, they slept.

These were two tough and gifted baseball teams. The Dodgers had been built around such sluggers as Duke Snider and Gil Hodges, and in Jackie Robinson they had the finest competitor in baseball.

Under Leo Durocher the Giants were combative, strong in pitching and opportunism. Bobby Thomson, like the other Giants, knew none of the Dodgers socially; the teams did not fraternize. He thought that Gil Hodges was a pleasant man but that the rest of the Dodgers were unpleasant. This was a sermon Durocher preached ceaselessly throughout the last months of the season until finally the ballplayers came unquestioningly to believe their manager.

No one expected the deciding game of the playoff to be easy, but no one, not Thomson or Branca or Durocher or Dressen, felt any dramatic foreshadowing of what was ahead. The game would be tense, but they’d all been tense lately. It was against this background of tension, which the players accepted as a part of life, that everyone slept the night before.

Robert Brown Thomson, tall, swift, and brown-haired, said good-bye to his mother at 9:50 A.M. and drove his blue Mercury to the Staten Island Ferry. The Thomsons lived on Flagg Place in New Dorp, once an independent village, now a community within the borough of Richmond. As he drove, Thomson thought about the game. “If I can just get three for four,” he mused, “then the old Jints will be all right.” The thought comforted him. He’d been hitting well, and three for four seemed a reasonable goal.