The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (37 page)

The Dodgers ran off from everyone else and on September 6, eleven games out front, they played their last game of the season against the Giants. The Dodgers had beaten the Giants nine times in a row.

The Giants went ahead in the first inning when Al Dark hit a home run, but the Dodgers took the lead in the second on Roy Campanella’s two-run homer.

Gil Hodges bounced out. Ruben Gomez threw an inside fastball that hit Furillo on the left wrist. Furillo walked toward the mound. He pushed aside two umpires who tried to stop him. He pushed into Charlie Dressen, who threw both arms around him. Gomez, a willowly six-footer, stood his ground. To reach him, Furillo would have to trample his own manager. Gomez now circled back toward second base. Dressen talked urgently, “Come on. Come on. Get hold of yourself.” At length Dressen led Furillo to first base.

Order returned. Gomez threw two strikes and two balls to Billy Cox. Furillo stared into the Giant dugout. He saw Durocher glaring at him, lips moving. He could not hear what Durocher was saying. Durocher made a beckoning gesture with one finger. Furillo bolted from first base toward the Giant dugout.

Durocher, flanked by ten players, rose to meet Furillo. They grappled and fell to the ground. Furillo clamped a headlock on Durocher, who lost his cap. Durocher’s bald pate went pink, then red, then purple. Two powerful Giants, Monte Irvin and Jim Hearn, moved to rescue their manager. Clawing and stomping they worked Durocher’s bald head free. Someone stamped on Furillo’s left hand. The umpires threw both Furillo and Durocher out of the game. (The Dodgers defeated the Giants, 6 to 3.)

Furillo’s hand puffed. In the clubhouse, he seemed oblivious to pain but his breath came in snorts. “I told you I’d get him,” he said. “He made them throw at me one time too many.”

I said that taking on Durocher at the Giant dugout stacked the odds.

“I wasn’t worried about the other players ganging up on me,” Furillo said. “A lot of the Giants hate him too.”

Furillo played no more that season. He suffered broken bones in his left hand. He was batting .344 and his average froze. While on the bench, Furillo won the batting championship, beating out Red Schoendienst of the Cardinals (.342) and Stan Musial, who hit his customary .337.

More than one baseball writer fell to temptation and wrote that Furillo’s fractures were a lucky break.

Primed, rested, the Dodgers played a dreadful World Series. The Yankees, performing brilliantly and methodically, defeated them in six games. The highlight was a moment in game five when Mickey Mantle took one mighty, dramatic, and defining swing.

The teams had split the first four games. Stengel then started a forgotten right-hander, Jim “Hot Rod” McDonald, who would win only twenty-four games in nine big league seasons. Charlie Dressen started his sleek young left-hander Johnny Podres, who turned twenty-one on September 30. Dressen wasn’t quite sure about using the youngster, so he also warmed up Russ Meyer, a thirty-year-old right-hander whose furious temper earned him the nickname “Mad Monk.”

For an hour and five minutes, while Podres warmed up and worked his way into the third inning, Monk Meyer threw baseballs to Rube Walker in the Dodger bullpen. The Yankees scored a run in the first inning. The Dodgers scored a run in the second. Meyer continued throwing — this was not exactly a show of confidence in young Podres.

Starting the third, Podres walked Rizzuto. McDonald sacrificed. Podres seized Woodling’s hard drive up the middle and threw him out, as Rizzuto went to third. Joe Collins grounded to Hodges and the ball kicked off the heel of the first baseman’s glove. Rizzuto scored on the error. Pressure again asserted itself. In 145 earlier games that season, Hodges had made only nine errors, none critical.

Trailing now, Podres got ahead of rugged Hank Bauer with two strikes then hit him on the forearm. He walked Berra, and Dressen had seen enough of his boy starter. Russ Meyer came in to pitch to Mickey Mantle.

Mantle would be batting left-handed against the right-handed Meyer, whose best pitch was a screwball. “I want ya to set him up for the scroogie,” Dressen said. “Give him good breaking stuff. Don’t give him a fastball he can hit. Keep the breaking stuff at his knees.”

Meyer had thrown perhaps a hundred pitches to Rube Walker in the bullpen. Now, as the game resumed, he threw one to Roy Campanella behind home plate. It never got there.

Mantle swung — at a hip-high curve — and crashed a monstrous fly ball to left center field. The ball sailed and sailed, carried and carried high into the upper deck, landing with such force that some said they heard the sound of furniture splintering.

That sort of thing just didn’t happen, a left-handed batter reaching the upper deck in left center at Ebbets Field. Not many right-handed batters could clout a ball that far. I remember sitting in the press box in disbelief. Mickey Mantle’s batting power was a thing apart.

Red Smith wrote: “Collins, Bauer and Berra trotted around to the plate and waited there for Mantle, the fourth man in Series history to hit a home run with bases loaded. Berra straddling home plate flapped his fins like a circus seal applauding his own cornet solo. They leaped upon Mantle as he arrived and struck him repeated blows. Jubilantly they convoyed him to the dugout where the whole Yankee squad had come boiling out onto the lawn to pummel the young man.”

Mickey had arrived. In the press box I glanced toward the forlorn figure on the mound. “Meyer didn’t warm up long enough,” Rud Rennie said.

The Yankees won the game, 11 to 7, and won the sixth game, 4 to 3, on Billy Martin’s twelfth hit. This was Stengel’s fifth consecutive World Series victory, an unmatched accomplishment. On this occasion the Yankees defeated the very best of all the wonderful Brooklyn teams.

In the dressing room several Dodger players broke down and cried. “Not me,” Pee Wee Reese says. “I didn’t cry till I got home.”

O’Malley was tiring of Dressen. The manager got along with the reporters, as ordered; better than ordered, in fact. The papers brimmed with stories of the guile and wisdom of Charlie Dressen. Walter O’Malley had difficulty with egos other than his own.

Dressen had finished second, then won two pennants and lost two World Series. He was working on annual contracts, which troubled Dressen’s wife, Ruth, a slight woman and a great fancier of toy poodles. “Durocher has a long-term contract,” Ruth reminded her husband. “So does Stengel. You deserve a long-term contract, too.”

She prodded and nagged, and Dressen, one week after losing the World Series, presented himself at O’Malley’s office. “I need a three-year contract.”

“Chuck, as we are both aware, the policy of the Brooklyn ballclub is one-year contracts and only one-year contracts. It’s clear to me you’d be happier managing somewhere else.”

“Course, I would settle for just two years, not three, Mr. O’Malley.”

“Somewhere else, as I was saying, and we’ll call a press conference quickly to make clear that I won’t stand in the way of your getting a multiyear contract somewhere else.”

“The thing is, my wife says . . .”

“Buzzie!” O’Malley shouted. “Get in here and get Frankie Graham.”

The next morning, October 16, O’Malley and Dressen jointly announced that Brooklyn would have a new manager next year. Reese was the popular choice, the logical choice. He was intelligent, respected, gentle, and a wonderful competitor. But Reese, as manager, could overshadow Walter O’Malley.

“With Dressen gone,” Reese says, “I knew that people were saying I should manage. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to.

“Bavasi came to me. I don’t remember his exact words. The sense was, ‘Pee Wee. You don’t want to manage this club, do you?’ I knew I didn’t want to manage after a proposal like that.

“So you can’t say they didn’t offer me the job, but you can’t say they did offer it to me, either.”

Reese sighs slightly and says one word with affection and perplexity.

“Brooklyn!”

The Dodgers hired a drab organization man, Walter Emmons Alston, to manage in 1954. (Eventually Alston managed for twenty-three seasons, always on a one-year contract.) In his first year as Dodger manager Alston took the team out of the race. He quarreled with Jackie Robinson. He bickered with the press. His racial attitude was suspect. He provided no leadership. Few experienced players warmed to him. “He was used to managing in the minors,” Dick Young remembered, “where you had a roster of seventeen players. He didn’t know how to function with a twenty-five-man squad. In head-to-head contests, Durocher, who used everybody, ate Alston alive.” The Giants won the pennant by five games.

While Alston was losing the pennant in Brooklyn, Willie Mays was winning it in New York. After two years in the army, Willie was discharged in March and flew to join the Giants in spring training at Phoenix. In his first appearance, Mays made two outstanding catches and hit a home run, bubbling and giggling and laughing exuberantly, passionately in love with playing ball.

Willie says that Jackie Robinson was the smartest ballplayer he ever saw and that Stan Musial was the best hitter. In the spring of 1954, Willie was the most
joyous
ballplayer ever.

We struck up an acquaintanceship. “You got to love the game,” Willie said, “else how you gonna play good? How you gonna be good at something you don’t love?”

“Some seem to be good, even when they complain all the time.”

“Complainin’ don’t mean you don’t love the game. You don’t know how they feel. You goin’ on your own.”

“Couple a guys tell me you love baseball so much, you’d play for the Giants for free.”

“Hey,” Willie said. “They’re going on
their
own.”

That springtime forty years ago comes back in a whispering rush and I see Arizona again, the wide pellucid sky, and the baked hills wanting grass, and the desert winds blowing whorls of sand. Strange country to one used to Berkshire hills, strange and lonely. But not when Willie was playing ball on scruffy, alkaline soil.

He played pepper games with Durocher and Monte Irvin, the men standing close. Leo hit smashes at Willie’s toes and knees, wherever. Mays’s reflexes were such that he could field a hard line drive at ten feet. Once in a while Willie bobbled a ball. Then he owed Durocher a Coke. Durocher made great shows of cheating Willie. One morning Leo hit a hard smash on one hop, well to Willie’s right. Willie knocked down the ball with a prodigious lunge but failed to glove it.

“Coke,” Durocher roared. “That’s six you owe.”

“Ain’ no Coke for that,” Willie said. His voice piped high. “That’s a base hit.”

“Six Cokes you owe,” Durocher said.

“Monte,” Willie pleaded at Irvin. “What say, roomie?”

“Six Cokes,” Irvin said solemnly. Willie’s seamless face slumped into a pout. “I’m getting the short end,” his expression said, “but I’ll fix you guys anyway.”

People started coming to the Phoenix ballpark early just to watch Willie and Leo and Monte play pepper. The skills were awesome. The clowning would have done honor to Chaplin.

We had conversations most days and Willie always became very solemn and gave me serious answers. “Who suggested,” I asked, “that you catch fly balls that way?” The technique became famous: glove up, near the belt buckle.

“Nobody,” Willie said. “I just start it one day. I get my throw away quicker.”

“Nobody taught you?”

Willie’s eyes, which sometimes danced, grew grave. “Nobody can teach you nothing,” he said. “You got to learn for yourself.”

Day by day the Giants grew more cheerful and more confident. Willie so illumined the spring that even long-faced Sal Maglie began to smile. “It’s different pitching with the kid in center field,” he said. “All I gotta do with Willie there is keep the baseball in the park.”

A few hours’ distant from the Giants base a wonderful Cleveland team was training, with great pitchers like Early Wynn and great competitors like Al Rosen. The teams met frequently.

My enthusiasm for Mays irritated a Cleveland coach named Ralph “Red” Kress, who said that Willie was flat-out overrated.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“What the hell do you know about baseball?” Kress said.

Franklin “Whitey” Lewis, a Cleveland columnist, said, “Willie won’t bat .300.”

“Twenty dollars, Whitey,” I said. “I’ll let your friend Kress, here, hold the money.”

“Nobody has to hold anything,” Lewis said. “We’ll see each other down the road.”

Willie wouldn’t hit. 300? We made it, Willie and I, by 45 percentage points. Willie led the National League at .345 (with 41 home runs), and Whitey Lewis, an honorable man, mailed me a twenty-dollar check on September 1.

A lovely concession speech.

After a while the Giants and the Indians traveled East playing game after game in Wichita Falls and Beaumont and Shreveport and New Orleans. The teams had separate Pullman cars but a common diner, and I noticed that the Indian squad drank seriously before and after dinner. As Early Wynn remembers, “Martinis before dinner, stingers afterwards.”

When I returned to New York, Red Smith asked if I thought the Indians might finally beat the Yankees.

“No chance,” I said, “the way these fellers drink. Athletes can’t drink that much and win.”

Months later, when the season ended, the hard-drinking Indians had won 111 games and beaten the Yankees out of the 1954 pennant by eight games. Then the Giants, with Willie, swept the World Series from the Indians in four straight.

New York got good hitting from Al Dark (.412) and Don Mueller (.389) and Dusty Rhodes, who helped decide two games with home runs and a third with a pinch-hit single. This Series turned in the eighth inning of the first game, when the score was tied at two.

Bob Lemon was pitching against Maglie, who walked Larry Doby in the eighth. Al Rosen singled to deep short. The Indians had two runners on with no one out, and a tough left-handed batter named Vic Wertz came to the plate. Wertz had hit Maglie hard, two singles and a triple. Durocher replaced Maglie with left-hander Don Liddle, who threw a shoulder-high fastball. Wertz walloped a high line drive to center field. The green blockhouse in dead center at the Polo Grounds was 505 feet distant from home plate.