The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (35 page)

JOE DIMAGGIO, CF

Fielding
— He can’t stop quickly and throw hard. You can take the extra base on him if he is in motion away from the line of throw. He won’t throw on questionable plays and I would challenge him even though he threw a man or so out.

Speed
— He can’t run and won’t bunt. [Actually High is talking about two things here, speed and attitude. Reluctance to lay down a sacrifice bunt is attitude, not speed.]

Hitting vs. Right-hand Pitcher
— His reflexes are very slow and he can’t pull a good fastball at all. The fastball is better thrown high but that is not too important as long as it is fast. Throw him nothing but good fastballs and fast curve balls.
Don’t slow up on him
.

Hitting vs. Left-hand Pitcher
— Will pull left-hand pitcher a little more than right-hand pitcher. Pitch him the same.
Don’t slow up on him
. He will swing at a bad pitch once in a while with two strikes.

* * *

After going hitless in twelve times at bat, DiMaggio hit his homer. Over the last three games he cracked out six hits in twelve turns, .500 hitting. Even
Life
conceded: “DiMaggio was a better player than the scouting report made him out to be.”

Life
hired Clay Felker, who next made a splash by reporting on Stengel’s drinking. James subsequently was appointed the first managing editor of
Sports Illustrated
. “I am still waiting,” Bavasi said in 1992, “for one of those guys to return the scouting report I lent them in 1951.”

DiMaggio flew to Japan to barnstorm but quit after a few days. He knew, better than the people at
Life
, that High’s scouting report was broadly accurate. He felt humiliated that his shortcomings had been pointed out in public. The Yankees wanted him to keep playing; DiMaggio still drew fans. Dan Topping offered him $100,000 for 1952.

This ballplayer turned that down. On December 11, 1951, two weeks after his thirty-seventh birthday, DiMaggio announced his retirement at a crowded press conference in the Yankee offices. Reading from a prepared statement, he said, “I can no longer produce for my ballclub, my manager, my teammates, and my fans the sort of baseball their loyalty to me deserves.” Jolting Joe was history. He began weeping.

Stengel, relieved to be rid of a brooding, fallen star, announced with cynical charm: “He’s the greatest player I ever managed. I just give away the Big Guy’s glove and it’s going straight to the Hall of Fame.”

DiMaggio did not make major news again until January 14, 1954, at the San Francisco City Hall when in a civil ceremony he married Marilyn Monroe.

“She’s a plain kid,” he told his friend Jimmy Cannon. “She’d give up show business if I asked her. She’d quit the movies in a minute. Her career means nothing to her.

“Jimmy, this is one marriage that can’t miss.”

*Leonard Koppett and John Thorn, two generally sound observers, also argue that ballplayers are better than ever. In
Clearing the Bases
, a wonderfully reasoned study, the late Bill Starr, former major leaguer, longtime minor league guru, rebuts the arguments of Koppett and Thorn, with icy logic and great good humor. Ralph Kiner calls
Clearing the Bases
“the most penetrating book ever on technical baseball.”

*The playing field at the Polo Grounds was a few feet below the level of the Harlem. Drainage was terrible. A brisk shower at ten in the morning meant no Giant game that afternoon.

On dune and headland sinks the fire . . .
— Kipling

F
RANK GRAHAM, JR.
, feels that the Era was foredoomed to its wrenching end. Graham worked as Dodger publicity director from 1949 until 1954 and saw Walter O’Malley almost daily. “His sense of rivalry with Rickey was ferocious,” Graham says. “He knew, although he didn’t like admitting, that when Rickey signed Jackie Robinson, the old man became baseball’s pioneer.

“O’Malley wanted to match that, to become a pioneer himself. That drove him against the wishes of family and friends to break ground for the Dodgers in California. He
had
to go.”

This being reality, rather than plotted drama,
Exodus O
’
Malley
did not proceed in a particularly ordered way. First O’Malley decided simply he would build the most wonderful baseball park in human history. Dos Passos reminds us that “man is a creature that builds.” O’Malley, venal and mendacious though he may have been, was a master builder.

Under Rickey, the Dodger field at Vero Beach, Florida, was a basic country ballpark: an outfield fenced in with slatted green. Fans sat on open bleacher planks. Along with an engineer named Emil Prager, O’Malley conceived an innovative, organic Florida field. First, he had earthmovers dig a yawning hole. The excavated dirt was bulldozed and shaped into an outfield barrier. The new Vero Beach outfield “fence” was earthen. He replaced the bleachers with comfortable grandstands. The slope of the new outfield barrier was planted with Bermuda grass and topped with long-trunked royal palms. The little field was a beauty.

In his high-style, frugal way, O’Malley had underground streams tapped into the nearby yawning hole, creating a pond. He stocked that with trout. “Everything indigenous,” he said with pride, “except the trout. But I can justify that expense. A lot of my players like to fish. The trout keep ‘em on the base and out of paternity suits.”

O’Malley claimed warm memories of Ebbets Field, a claim many found suspect. He was no more sentimental than a hippopotamus, which his enemies claim he resembled. He saw Ebbets Field not as a shrine but as a relic, with rotten parking and smelly urinals, both of which kept customers away. If a ballpark was a relic, businessman O’Malley reasoned, let it go. “The secret,” he said, “is to eliminate the reasons people have for
not
going to your ballpark. Stated positively, you want your ballpark to be a place where a feller loves to take his girl on Friday night.”

Although he has been dead since 1979, O’Malley still is hated in many quarters. Jack Newfield, a New York newspaperman, told the writer Peter Golenbock, “Once Pete Hamill and I were having dinner and we began to joke about collaborating on an article called ‘The Ten Worst Human Beings.’ “ They agreed to each write on a napkin the names of the three worst. “Each of us,” Newfield said, “wrote down the same three names in the same order: Hitler, Stalin, Walter O’Malley.”

“Listen,” says Harold Rosenthal. “Walter was straight with me on serious things and I was straight with him. Back in the 1950s, I’m trying to do magazine work, the
Herald Tribune
doesn’t pay much, and O’Malley is going off on a safari to shoot polar bears. The first safari to the North Pole.
Sports Illustrated
wants to cover it and O’Malley says your photographer can come with us on one condition. Harold Rosenthal writes the story. They said
they
’
d
pick the writer, so Walter trying to help a friend, me, told this powerful media company to go to hell.

“I have no idea what Newfield is talking about. He wasn’t there. I never saw Newfield at the ballpark or on a field or in a press box. Hamill, either. Haven’t they got better things to do than knock the dead?”

After Thomson’s home run, O’Malley was riding an elevator at the Biltmore Hotel, where the sporting press was gathered. Someone in the elevator, neither baseball man nor journalist, cursed Ralph Branca and O’Malley asked the man why he was angry.

“I lost a bet. Branca’s home run ball cost me a hunnert bucks.”

“I sympathize with you,” O’Malley said. “I lost money, too.” He did not identify himself nor mention his calculation that missing the World Series had cost the Dodgers at least a million dollars.

O’Malley told that story with brio to Red Smith and me during a time of triumph, 1955. When O’Malley moved on, I remarked that it was a pleasure to cover someone that available. “Blarney or no, he’s always offering yarns.”

“I understand why you like him,” Smith said and sipped the Scotch O’Malley had bought us, “but I’m uncomfortable in his presence. He makes me feel as if I were a page sitting before a feudal lord. It may be personal taste, but O’Malley is too much the grand seigneur for me.”

With the Dodgers defeated on the last day in 1951, O’Malley entertained thoughts of firing Charlie Dressen, brought in to replace Rickey’s man, Burt Shotton, after the Dodgers had lost the 1950 pennant on the last day. The new man, Dressen, had now done the same damn thing.

But Dressen was getting along with the writers, including Dick Young of the
Daily News
. O’Malley had flat-out ordered him to get along with all the writers. At least once a week, when the Dodgers were traveling, Dressen threw a party in his hotel suite just for the press. The Dodgers bought food and drink and even paid to have a particular delicacy, crab fingers, flown north from Florida.

“All right,” O’Malley said to his new general manager, Buzzie Bavasi, “Dressen gets along with Jackie Robinson and Dick Young. I give him that. But the son of a bitch lost me the pennant. For this team to make money, we have to win. I’ve studied history. In Brooklyn, your baseball team is either in first place or bankrupt.”

Bavasi, earning $17,000 as general manager, had hoped to bring the conversation around to a pay raise for himself. Now that was impossible.

“Who the hell picked Branca?” O’Malley said.

“The bullpen coach, Clyde Sukeforth.”

“Then that’s the son of a bitch we fire. We’d better stay with Dressen. It doesn’t look good to change your manager every year.”

“I’ll fire Sukey,” Bavasi said. (This removed another Rickey loyalist from the Dodger organization.)

O’Malley puffed a cigar from a cache sent to him by Roberto Maduro, president of the great Cuban ballclub the Havana Sugar Kings. “One more thing, Buzzie,” he growled. “Tell that son of a bitch Dressen that if he doesn’t win the 1952 pennant — win, not second place — he’s unemployed.”

Charles Walter “Chuck” Dressen was the least of three remarkable New York managers during the Era. That is not a denigration any more than it is a denigration of Mantle to point out that he was not as good a center fielder as Duke Snider or Willie Mays. The basal line runs high as a mountaintop.

Dressen, a stocky fellow out of Decatur, Illinois, started as quarterback for the Chicago Staleys, ancestor of the Bears, at a height of five foot five and a weight of 145 pounds. He played eight major league baseball seasons, mostly at third base, and managed for four seasons in Cincinnati without finishing in the first division. By all accounts he was quick and observant. He was a good sign stealer. When Leo Durocher ascended in Brooklyn, he appointed Dressen a coach.

When the
Herald Tribune
assigned me to cover the Dodgers in 1952, manager Dressen, thirty years my senior, said, “Stick with me, kid, I’ll learn ya the ropes.” I had been playing baseball all my days and Dressen was extremely kind in helping me discover that the baseball I’d played and major league baseball were different games. He showed me how to throw a spitball and a wonder of details on everything from tag plays to a particularly favorite sign: clutching his throat. In general baseball lore, a throat clutch suggests your opponent is “choking up.” Dressen used the clutch as his sign for the squeeze play. He might yell at an opposing pitcher, “Choke, ya bastard,” and grab his throat. What appeared to be one more bit of nasty needling was an order for the squeeze. “Believe me, kid,” Dressen told me, over and over and over, “there’s tricks to this game. Believe me. I know ‘em all. I ain’t no Ned-in-the-third-reader.”

Dressen talked — preached may be more accurate — on a variety of topics. Arm trouble was interfering with the career of Clem Labine, a young pitcher of courage and sensitivity. At least, judging by the visible muscle knot on his right forearm, it looked as if Labine had arm trouble. “Kid,” Dressen told me, “it ain’t his arm. I happen to know after Labine got borned in Rhode Island, he was put in a incubator. That’s the problem. Them incubator babies can never last nine innings.”

Dressen not only sounded absurd at times, he tended to extemporize extensively on his own wisdom. Some Dodgers liked to play a parlor game on the Pullman — guess a name from a set of visual clues. Branca once challenged a group by pointing toward his eye.

“Dressen,” shouted relief pitcher Clyde King. The pun on “eye” and “I” was excellent by the standards of ballplayer wit.

Reese remembers a game at St. Louis in 1952 when the Dodgers, losing by three runs, went out to take the field in the eighth inning. “Hold ‘em, fellas,” Dressen said. “I’ll think of something.”

But Jackie Robinson regarded Dressen as the best manager for whom he played. In turn Dressen described Robinson as the best ballplayer he had managed. I was intrigued by the ease with which Dressen accepted black ballplayers and asked if he knew anything about prejudice.

“I know
everything
about prejudice,” Dressen said. “My parents was Catholics, I don’t go to church myself, and where we grew up in Illinois when you wasn’t even born, there was a lot of Klan. One night to let my parents know how they felt about Catholics, the Klan set fire to a cross on our front lawn. Kid, there’s nothing else you have to know about prejudice. See a cross burn on your lawn. I was nine years old.”

Primitive, intuitive, Dressen also was capable of cruelty. He didn’t care for Cal Abrams and Duke Snider remembers that on June 6, 1952, at Cincinnati he issued a hard order. “Abrams, you ain’t hitting. The only thing that can keep you with this club is your mouth.”

The Dodgers broke nicely in 1952. By June 9, the team was in first place.

“The guy managing the Reds is Rogers Hornsby,” Dressen said.

“I know that,” Abrams said. “I know who Rogers Hornsby is.”

“If you want to stay with my club, get on him,” Dressen said. “Call him every goddamn name you can think of. I want you to get him so mad he can’t think straight.”

Abrams spent the first game of a double-header bellowing and screaming taunts at Hornsby.

The Dodgers won the first game, 6 to 1. Hornsby was raging. In the clubhouse, Dressen said to Abrams, “Don’t bother to dress here. You’ve been traded. You’re playing for the Cincinnati Reds. Abrams, your new manager is Rogers Hornsby.”

* * *

Dressen spotted the Dodgers’ key deficiency. There was no big, rough, volcanic pitcher, no Allie Reynolds, no Vic Raschi, no Sal Maglie. In his second spring as Dodger manager, Dressen noticed Joe Black, a six-foot, two-inch right-hander out of Plainfield, New Jersey, who had graduated from Morgan State, majoring in psychology, and then gone to work in the Negro leagues. The Dodgers signed Black in 1950, but his minor league record during 1951 was undistinguished. Watching him in the spring of ‘52, Dressen liked the way this big and polysyllabic right-hander carried himself.

“You throw great, Joe. Just throw where I tell ya. When we want it high, throw it high — and tight. When we want that hard curve low, throw it down — and away. When I want you to brush a hitter, I want you to go right at his head. I want to see his bat go one way, his cap go another and his ass go somewhere else. Do what I tell ya, Joe, and you’re gonna be a big leaguer, and the hitter will be whoops, Good-bye Dolly Gray!”

“Okay, Number Seven,” Joe Black said. By June of his rookie season, Black was the best relief pitcher in baseball.

Race hatred lingered like a plague. To rattle Black in Cincinnati, some bench player began singing “Ol’ Black Joe.”

The hitter was a rangy outfielder, Wally Post. Black threw a fastball toward Post’s skull. The rangy outfielder hit the dirt. The singing stopped.

Increasingly, people wondered why the Yankees had no blacks. Increasingly people thought and feared that they knew. On one popular television show,
Youth Wants to Know
, a panel of young people guided by bright, blonde Faye Emerson, directed questions at a celebrity guest.

Jackie Robinson appeared on
Youth Wants to Know
and a young person asked if the Yankees were prejudiced.

“I’m not volunteering anything,” Robinson said, “but you asked me a question and my job here is to answer questions.” Robinson drew a breath. “Yes, in my opinion. The Yankees are prejudiced.” Among Robinson’s viewers that day was Casey Stengel.

The Dodgers rolled to the 1952 pennant and, with great help from Black, fought off another late Giant onrush. The Yankees also rolled. For the third time in six years, the Dodgers and Yankees met in the World Series.

Politics continued its ominous way. Stalin said war between capitalist nations was inevitable once “governments rise up against the imperialist slavery imposed on them by the United States.” Speaking for the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, Harry Truman told a Montana audience that Dwight Eisenhower had misread Soviet intentions in 1945. “Liberal” Democrat Truman maintained that the Republican Eisenhower had been “soft and misguided” when he asserted the Russians wanted to be our friends.

Six New York City teachers were dismissed for declining to answer questions “about Communist party membership.” On September 30, the day before the 1952 World Series began, the Office of Civilian Defense staged a “mock nuclear attack” on Manhattan. Flights of “hostile” bombers flew north over Times Square, where soldiers with searchlights tried to pick them out. The city’s 572 air raid sirens sounded a red alert at 7:45 P.M. Ten minutes later a “simulated atom bomb” was dropped on the Upper West Side. More than fifty thousand civilian defense volunteers responded and Arthur Wallander, the civil defense director for New York City, announced that the imitation atomic holocaust was “a great success.”