Opening Day

by Jonathan Eig

  DiMaggio was thirty-two years old. Even with his bad heel and his bad season in 1946, he remained baseball personified: calm and elegant, perhaps a little dull at times, and yet capable of moments of surpassing beauty. He was not only the game’s greatest hero, but also one of America’s biggest celebrities, bigger than many a movie star. The man had more hit songs written in his honor than some big-leaguers had hits. “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio” memorialized his fifty-six-game hitting streak (“Who started baseball’s famous streak/That’s got us all aglow?/He’s just a man and not a freak/Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio”). Soon to come was another tribute, this one by Woody Guthrie (“Joe Deemaggyoe done it again!/Joe Deemaggyoe done it again!/Clackin’ that bat, Gone with the wind!/Joe Deemaggyoe done it again!”).

  Just now the great DiMaggio felt compelled to prove his greatness once again. It wasn’t enough for him to play, or even to play well. He had to display the grace that had made him a legend and re-establish the Yankees as champions before his aura would be restored. Before the war, he had been baseball’s finest center-fielder, capable of covering more ground more gracefully than anyone. Yet the heel injury jolted Joe in the worst way, shaking his confidence as it had seldom been shaken. At the same time, Ted Williams had staked his own claim to the title of baseball’s top player, a circumstance that irked his pinstriped majesty. DiMaggio seldom boasted, yet he made clear that he had no love for Williams. When a sportswriter asked him once what he thought of Boston’s slugging outfielder, DiMaggio replied, “Greatest left-handed hitter I’ve ever seen.” When the writer pressed him, asking what he thought of Williams as an all-around player, DiMaggio repeated, “Greatest left-handed hitter I’ve ever seen.”

  The Yankees in ’47, with a gimpy DiMaggio, looked like they might fare even more poorly than they had in ’46. Tommy Henrich and Charlie Keller struggled at times with injuries. Larry Berra, referred to sometimes as Yogi, proved such a great liability as a catcher that the Yankees tried him in right field. Branch Rickey had once declared Berra too clumsy and slow to make it in the majors, despite his booming bat, and the rookie had not yet done much to prove that assessment wrong. Then there was George McQuinn, an aging refugee from the St. Louis Browns at first base; Snuffy Stirnweiss, a weak hitter, at second; Billy Johnson, shaky at bat and in the field, at third; and little Phil Rizzuto, a slick fielder but light on the lumber, at short. Looking over the team’s marginal roster made DiMaggio all the more eager to get back to work. Five days into the season, defying doctors’ orders, he told manager Bucky Harris he was ready to go.

  In his first game, DiMaggio was steamrolled by Berra while chasing a fly ball in right-center. Yankee fans held their breath as the golden child slowly picked himself up from the grass. The Yanks started sluggishly, playing .500 ball, more or less, through April and May, as DiMaggio worked his way back into shape.

  Harris was in his first year as manager of the team. He was a good man—calm, relaxed, and eternally patient. He’d started managing at the age of twenty-seven, leading the Washington Senators to their only world championship in 1924, followed by a pennant in 1925, but he had hopped from team to team ever since, with limited success. Harris had no trouble with his players—they loved him—but he had his hands full dealing with Larry MacPhail, the team’s president, referred to in the newspapers as the red-headed wildman. MacPhail liked to have his hands on everything and his name in all the papers. He’d been making trouble all season, mostly for his former team, the Dodgers. First, he’d hired away two of Brooklyn’s coaches. Then, by some accounts, he had gone after Durocher. When his attempt to lure the Dodger manager failed, MacPhail raised the stakes, filing complaints with the commissioner that eventually led to Durocher’s suspension. MacPhail had once been Rickey’s protégé. Now, the men were bitter rivals. MacPhail was everything Rickey wasn’t—a drinker, a showboat, and, most notably, an opponent of baseball’s integration.

  Back in the summer of 1946, when Robinson had been playing in Montreal and Rickey plotting his strategy for introducing the majors’ first black man, MacPhail had done his part to postpone the arrival. As chairman of baseball’s new joint steering committee, he had been assigned to present a report to owners on the key issues facing the game. Tom Yawkey of the Red Sox, Sam Breadon of the Cards, and Phil Wrigley of the Cubs joined him on the committee. The “Race Question,” as MacPhail put it, was one of their top concerns.

  The question, as MacPhail defined it, wasn’t how to get black players into the game; it was how to defend the game against charges of discrimination coming from “political and social-minded drum beaters” who singled out baseball “because it offers a good publicity medium.” He wrote that the supply of black talent was thin, in part because Negro-league players didn’t receive proper training in the game’s fundamentals. Integration of the major leagues, he continued, would harm Negro-league owners, put hundreds of black ballplayers out of work, and take money from the white team owners who rented their ballparks to the Negro-league teams. He saw a lot of problems and few benefits. And he threw in a subtle shot at Rickey. “Your Committee does not desire to question the motives of any organization or individual who is sincerely opposed to segregation or who believes that such a policy is detrimental in the best interest of Professional Baseball,” he wrote. But, “The individual action of any one club may exert tremendous pressures on the whole structure of Professional Baseball, and could conceivably result in lessening the value of several Major League franchises.”

  With Kenesaw Mountain Landis out of the way, dead since 1944, some expected the path to integration to open up in a hurry. Jackie Robinson had already been signed to a minor-league deal, and at least a few owners had expressed interest in following Rickey’s lead. In the end, MacPhail couldn’t stop the Dodgers from taking on a black player, but he nevertheless had no intention of integrating the Yankees. To MacPhail, the Yankees were baseball’s elite. They were morally as well as athletically superior. They didn’t need black players, and they didn’t want any more black fans than they already had. For years to come, the Yankee front office had a standard answer when asked when the team would sign its first black player: Not until they found a black man worthy of wearing pinstripes.

  • • •

  Branch Rickey wasn’t the only one with reason to be angry at MacPhail. The Yankee players weren’t all that keen on the boss, who had fired or forced the resignation of three managers in 1946, including the legendary Joe McCarthy. But the players’ biggest gripe concerned what the newsmen referred to as MacPhail’s Flying Circus. MacPhail loved planes, and he loved flying his players around anywhere they might help the team earn money. To make it possible for the Yankees to fly off in unplanned directions as the need arose, he tried to eliminate train travel as much as possible. But in baseball, traditions die hard, and many in the clubhouse began to complain that they missed the clackety old trains and the leisurely card games and bull sessions they allowed. Some of the men were scared of spending so much time in the air. Others didn’t care for the hours wasted in airports waiting for bad weather to clear. Some began skipping the flights and arranging their own train travel. They also began skipping some of the charity events and dinners MacPhail asked them to attend. A dark mood, unusual for the mighty, first-class-all-the-way Yanks, descended on the team. MacPhail eventually gave in and allowed the players to go back to the rails, but he reminded them that they were still contractually bound to participate in promotions for the team.

  One day in May, MacPhail sent a newsreel crew on the field before a game to take pictures of the Yankees as they posed with a group of soldiers. But the crew arrived late, after DiMaggio had begun his batting practice, and he and the other Yankees told the cameramen to get lost. MacPhail flipped. He issued a memo reminding his players of their obligations. He fined two players fifty bucks each and slapped DiMaggio for a hundred.

  It proved a critical moment for the team. Fans all over the country backed DiMaggio in the dispute. In Buffalo, the But
ler-Mitchell Boys Club collected $1.03 in pennies and mailed them to MacPhail to help pay the star’s fine. It was just a first installment, they said. The Yankee clubhouse could have turned into a snake pit. Everyone on the team looked to DiMaggio to see how he would respond. The sportswriters waited, too, knowing the story would get bigger and juicier if DiMaggio squawked. But he didn’t say a word. It was about that time he went on his first real tear of the season, hitting four game-winning homers in two weeks, and the Yankees started climbing toward first place.

  Berra, out in right field, learned to let DiMaggio have all the running room he needed. Spec Shea, the rookie pitcher, discovered that if he could make opposing batters hit balls in the air, his center-fielder would always find a way to catch them. “It would be goin’ over the shortstop’s head, I’d say to myself: ‘Get goin’, Joe,’ ” he later told writer Richard Ben Cramer. “And I’d turn around and there’d be that big gazelle. Boy, he took them big strides, you know. And when he’d catch it, he’d catch it just so easy. There was nothin’ to it.” But if Shea crossed his center-fielder, he’d hear about it. If he tried to pitch a man inside and went outside instead, DiMaggio would wind up leaning the wrong way, and then he would look foolish because he wouldn’t get a good jump on the ball. DiMaggio hated being made to look foolish. Shea would catch hell. “And I’d say, ‘Well, the ball got away from me,’ ” he recalled. “ ‘It shouldn’t get away from you!’ ” DiMaggio would snap. “ ‘You’re in the major leagues now. You’re here. And this is where you gotta do these things perfect.’ ”

  DiMaggio expected perfection from those deemed worthy of playing at his side. Perhaps the best and most important example in 1947 was Joe Page. Page was a pitcher with a great arm and a lousy head. He threw hard and hoped for the best, never knowing where the ball would go. If home plate were a moving target, he might have been the best pitcher in the league. He was certain that his teammates distrusted and disliked him, certain that his big-league days were numbered. He was demoted to the bullpen in 1947, but he got a promotion of another kind, becoming the road roommate to DiMaggio. Suddenly, Page found a focus for his frequently flustered mind. He became DiMaggio’s shadow. He even started dressing like his roommate. He still went out to clubs. He still drank. But he wasn’t such an ugly drunk anymore. He began gaining confidence, picked up almost by osmosis, courtesy of the Great DiMag.

  One evening in May against the Red Sox, Bucky Harris called on Page in the third inning. There were 74,747 fans at Yankee Stadium that night, one of the biggest crowds ever to see a game anywhere. Bodies were packed three and four deep in the aisles. The Yankees were already trailing, 3–1, when Page came in. The bases were loaded with nobody out. Page threw three straight balls to Rudy York, then came back to strike him out. He followed with a strikeout of Bobby Doerr and got Eddie Pellagrini on an easy fly ball. He pitched the rest of the game without giving up a run as the Yanks came from behind for a 9–3 win. Had Page failed that day, had he thrown one more ball to York, reported the New York Post, he likely would have been out of a job, put on a bus bound for some minor-league town. Instead, he turned his season around, as did the Yankees.

  Beginning on June 29, the Yanks went on the greatest streak ever seen in the American League, winning nineteen straight, a record that would stand for a quarter-century. Pitching was the key to the run, as Yankee opponents scored little better than two runs per game over that span. When the streak ended in the middle of July, the pennant race was finished. In the middle of September they clinched the American League title.

  Yet looking back, it was not clear how they had done it. Only DiMaggio and McQuinn would finish the season with averages better than .300, and DiMaggio’s twenty homers were tops for the team. Tommy Henrich came through with a lot of big hits, and Berra and Charlie Keller supplied some pop off the bench. Rizzuto bunted well and played wonderful defense, and Billy Johnson enjoyed the best season of his career. Still, there was nothing terribly frightening about this lineup.

  Likewise, the pitching was good, but not great. Allie Reynolds, who would finish the season at 19–8, with a 3.20 earned run average, was the team’s ace. Reynolds, known as “The Chief,” was probably the best athlete on the team, although he wasn’t always in the best shape, and he hadn’t yet learned some of the finer points of pitching. Reynolds was now discovering, as everyone in DiMaggio’s world did, that expectations in the Bronx were higher than elsewhere. Throwing hard—and Reynolds threw very hard—was no longer enough. So he concentrated a little more and pitched a little better. In addition to Reynolds, Shea was having a great season, but he was a rookie, and rookies often tire at season’s end. Spud Chandler, also terrific at times in 1947, turned forty in September and appeared to be winding down.

  It was the newly invigorated Joe Page who carried the Yankees. Page appeared in fifty-six games, and forty-four times he remained in the game until it was finished, piling up 141 innings of work. It was a heavy load for a hard-throwing relief pitcher, but the more he pitched, the more his confidence soared. In 1946, he’d been error-prone and wild. Now, he went an entire season without making an error. He struck out 116 batters, walked only seventy-two, and permitted a mere thirty-nine earned runs.

  Pitching wins championships, the saying goes. Thanks to Page—and thanks, indirectly, to DiMaggio—the Yanks had pitching. Once again, the Bronx Bombers were brimming with confidence as they marched toward the World Series.

  EIGHTEEN

  DIXIE WALKER’S DILEMMA

  In July, reporter Clif Keane of the Boston Daily overheard a conversation between Dixie Walker and Jackie Robinson in the Dodger clubhouse. Walker was on the training table, having his shoulder rubbed, when Robinson ambled in and sat down nearby. Walker was the first to speak.

  “You’re improving a lot,” the Alabaman said, according to Keane’s transcript. “But there are a couple of things I might suggest to help you.”

  “I’d like to hear them,” Robinson answered.

  “Well, you’re trying to pull the ball to left all the time.”

  On this score, Walker was right. Robinson had not yet mastered the art of hitting to the opposite field. A remarkable number of his batted balls went to the left side. Had it not been for his terrific bunting ability, teams probably would have shifted their infielders from the right side to the left in the same way they shifted in the opposite direction for Ted Williams. Walker asked if Robinson had noticed a certain at-bat a night earlier. Robinson had been on second base after a double hit off Boston’s Si Johnson. Walker, a left-handed batter, wanted to pull the ball to right field. That way, even if he hit a ground ball to second or a long fly to right, Robinson would have a chance to take the extra base. Walker got two good pitches from Johnson, called strikes, but they weren’t where he wanted them. He was waiting for one on the inside part of the plate. He finally got what he was looking for and laced a single into right field. Robinson scored from second.

  “It was the right kind of baseball,” Walker said. “You want to think of that when you bat.”

  “Yes, I was wondering about those pitches when you let them go,” said Robinson, who had a fine view of the strike zone from second base during Walker’s at-bat.

  The men went on talking nuts-and-bolts baseball for ten minutes.

  Later, when Walker had gone, Keane approached Robinson.

  “Then all this talk of bitterness isn’t true?” the writer asked.

  “It certainly is not,” Robinson said. “I get all kinds of help from these fellows. I wouldn’t be anywhere without it.”

  A few days later, a West Coast columnist, picking up on Keane’s story, described Walker as Robinson’s “best friend and chief adviser among the Dodgers.” Rachel Robinson clipped the article and penciled the following comment in the margins: “Some sports writers fall for anything.”

  Years later, Robinson said that Walker was the only man on the team with whom he had no relationship whatsoever in 1947. It’s possible that Keane inven
ted the conversation between the two men, although it seems unlikely given that he reported the interaction immediately after the game and that no one challenged it at the time. What’s more likely is that Robinson had so few encounters with Walker that he forgot about this one (and perhaps others) as the years went by. It was easy—and not just for Robinson, but for many writers—to make Walker the unvarnished villain and to omit evidence to the contrary. The relationship may well have remained frosty all season long, as Robinson suggested years after the fact, yet it’s clear that Walker had accepted his black teammate, at least to an extent. From the start of the season to its finish he never criticized Robinson publicly for mistakes on the field. He never publicly questioned the right of black ballplayers to compete in the major leagues. And as far as anyone could tell, he never again spoke of organized protest. Faced with a dilemma, he decided to set aside his anger and play ball, which is all Robinson had asked in the first place.

  • • •

  Back in the spring, reporters had said Robinson would have a hard time surviving in the big leagues without Leo Durocher to stick up for him. They’d also said the Dodgers would never win without their fiery old manager directing the show. By now, however, the writers and players both were beginning to appreciate the understated charms of Burt Shotton. No one on the team was going to run through a brick wall for the new skipper (unless it was Pete Reiser, who never needed an excuse), but Old Barney was so gentle-natured and caring that it was almost impossible to dislike him. Not that the players didn’t complain at times. There was a faint sense in the clubhouse that Shotton might be missing a few tricks, that he didn’t strategize quite as carefully as Durocher had, that he wasn’t always thinking ahead about how the action on the field might unfold. Some said he was hapless when it came to handling pitchers. Others simply considered the old man a sourpuss who tut-tutted and sighed dismissively when his players behaved immaturely. What was the point of playing baseball for a living, they wondered, if not to behave immaturely? But such concerns were trivial so long as the Dodgers kept winning.