A Season in the Sun

by Randy Roberts

  Built in only 284 days, it was properly christened on the day it opened to the fans. More than 67,000 enthusiasts, the largest crowd ever to see a ball game, filed joyously through the turnstiles. In the celebrity box on opening day, wedged close to team owner Colonel Jacob Ruppert, sat baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, New York governor Al Smith, and New York City mayor John Hylan. John Philip Sousa directed as his band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Smith threw out the first ball. Then, almost on cue, Ruth stole the show. Before the game he told reporters, “I’d give a year of my life if I can hit a home run in the first game in this new park.” In the fourth inning he responded to the three tiers of imploring fans by clubbing the ball toward the right-field stands. It was “a savage home run,” commented a New York Times sportswriter, “that was the real baptism of Yankee Stadium.” “It would have been a home run in the Sahara Desert,” added Heywood Broun. As the ball arced toward the fence, spectators exulted. And when it landed, said a New York Daily News scribe, “The revelry became riot [as] people tore up programs, smashed canes, and launched all manner of foodstuffs” into the air. Years later, after the Bambino had retired, he said it was his favorite home run.44

  The Yankees won their first World Series that year, and as other championships followed with metronomic regularity, Yankee Stadium became synonymous with Hall of Fame players and winning. Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio, Murderers’ Row, the Pride of the Yankees, and the Subway Series—the lore of the Yankees and Yankee Stadium were the central characters in the tale of baseball. It was in Yankee Stadium that Ruth crushed his record-breaking sixtieth home run in 1927, that Gehrig delivered his iconic “Luckiest Man on Earth” speech in 1939, and that DiMaggio kicked off his fifty-six-game hitting streak with a single off White Sox pitcher Eddie Smith in 1941.

  Yankee Stadium’s reach even went beyond the Great American Game. In autumn, when the leaves along the Hudson turned red and gold, Yankee Stadium hosted football games. It was the site of Notre Dame’s 1928 12–6 victory over Army, the contest in which Knute Rockne gave his “Win One for the Gipper” halftime exhortation. And in 1946 the cadets from West Point, the Notre Dame subway alumni, and other fans filled the stadium to watch the Irish and Army battle to a 0–0 tie in the “Game of the Century,” a contest that gave rise to the newspaper headline “Much Ado About Nothing-Nothing.”

  Boxing also played an important role in Yankee Stadium’s sporting calendar. In 1927 Jack Dempsey knocked out Jack Sharkey there to win a title rematch with Gene Tunney. Joe Louis fought a dozen matches under the stadium’s lights, including the most famous and important fight in the history of the sport. On June 22, 1938, he squared off with Germany’s Max Schmeling, who had defeated him two years earlier, also in Yankee Stadium. With Europe heading again toward war, the fight assumed enormous cultural and political significance. Right or wrong, Schmeling symbolized Adolf Hitler’s jack-booted, racist, war-mongering thugs. Ironically, Louis, a black man from the Jim Crow South, took on the mantle of freedom, the rule of law, respect for all peoples, and the love of democracy. “One didn’t need to be an anthropologist to know there had never been anything like it, or a soothsayer to know there would never be anything like it again,” wrote David Margolick of the contest. When Louis knocked out Schmeling in the first round, the celebrations stretched south from Yankee Stadium through Harlem all the way down to Battery Park.45

  Joe Louis fought so often in Yankee Stadium that he had an impact on the baseball team. In the years before World War II, New York World-Telegram writer Dan Daniel transformed Louis’s most publicized moniker, “the Brown Bomber,” into the Yankees’ “Bronx Bombers.” It was a confluence of greatness, the golden triangle of sports—Joe Louis, the New York Yankees, and Yankee Stadium linked together in one nickname.

  Yet, for all the punches thrown and touchdowns scored, “the house that Ruth built” was primarily a ballpark—though it was not always to the Babe’s liking. Its dimensions favored controlled hitters who pulled the ball, not free swingers like Ruth and Mantle. Welcoming porches with four-foot fences beckoned balls hit down the lines—301 feet in left and 295 feet in right. But then the fence became more forbidding. It seemed to grow like a giant and stretch toward the horizon. Center field—“Death Valley,” close to where the monuments to Miller Huggins, Ed Barrow, Babe Ruth, and Lou Gehrig were erected—was where home runs went to die. Dead center was a daunting 461 feet from home plate, and left center was even a few feet further. In addition to pull hitters, the park seemed made for players like Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams who slashed at the ball, sending line drives into the wide gaps and turning what would have been singles in smaller parks into doubles or even triples.

  Fog and a chilly, light drizzle delayed the first game at Yankee Stadium in 1956. “Football Weather at Stadium,” headlined the New York Herald-Tribune the next day. The hundreds of fat pigeons that dined on popcorn and peanuts and lounged in the rafters and beams during the summer were scrawny and cold on opening day. But even in the inclement conditions the stadium had a festive air. Before the game the Yankees assembled at home plate to receive rings for winning the 1955 American League pennant. One by one, as Mel Allen called them to the plate, they stepped forward, took a ring, and then shook hands with Commissioner Ford Frick, American League president Will Harridge, and Mayor Robert Wagner.46

  Veteran sports columnist Frank Graham, watching the ceremony from the press box in his fedora and coat and tie, thought about how young the players looked. “They reminded me of high school kids getting their diplomas,” he wrote. “I wish I were close enough to them to see them blush and to hear them stammer in the presence of the three celebrities.” Of course, on that day and in that place, the Yankees were the celebrities. Although Mickey had already started his season in spectacular fashion, the 1955 MVP Yogi Berra and revered Phil Rizzuto received the loudest cheers. Yogi was supposed to say a few words over the public address system but at the last second chose to remain silent.47

  If Yogi and “the Scooter” won most of the pregame applause, the fans cheered for Whitey Ford and Mickey once the action against the Boston Red Sox began. Ford showed why Stengel had saved him for the home opener, scattering five hits over nine full innings and allowing only one run. And Mantle provided all the offense the Yankees needed. In the fifth he drove in a run with an unexpected and perfectly executed drag bunt and in the seventh added three more RBIs when he homered into the lower right-field seats.48

  In seven innings Mantle demonstrated his potential for greatness and tendency for self-destruction. He drove in runs with a short ball and long ball, roamed center field like a gazelle, and captivated everyone at the ballpark. Even the Red Sox’s Ted Williams, sitting out of the game because of a foot injury, could not take his eyes off Mickey. A slugger who can beat out bunts, a switch hitter who had mastered the strike zone—that was a player to be reckoned with, Williams thought. “He’s reaching his peak,” Ted told reporters after the game. “There’s no reason why he shouldn’t hit .340. He’s the only guy who has a chance to break Babe Ruth’s homer record.”49

  Mantle’s body seemed his only obstacle. Sprinting toward first after his fifth inning bunt, he felt a twinge in the hamstring behind his right knee, a problem that had plagued him for years. In an age when warming up before a game entailed nothing more than a slow jog to the batting cage and a few on-deck swings, stretching was something to avoid rather than make a habit of. When he felt the pain in his leg, Mickey began to worry. By the seventh he was visibly limping, and Stengel sent him to the training room after his home run. Trainer Gus Mauch gave the time-honored prognosis: “Mantle’s condition is a day-to-day proposition and I can’t predict how long he will be out.” After a hot shower, however, Mickey said his leg felt better, “but I’m afraid it might be worse tomorrow.”50

  His hamstring was stiff and heavily bandaged when he took the field the next day. He moved cautiously, like a man trying to run on ice without falling. But the i
njury didn’t appear to affect his swing. Batting left-handed in the second inning he smashed a home run 415 feet into the far corner of the upper right-field deck. In a twenty-seven-hit game against the Red Sox that ended in a 14–10 Yankee victory, “Limping Mantle” garnered the headlines. A Willard Mullin illustration pictured Mickey in a left-handed batting pose, wrapped in a tape measure and looking toward immortality. “Granted it’s a long, long way from May to September,” read the caption, “but as long as they are putting the tape measure to everything Mickey Mantle hits—if he holds his present pace just throw the record book away.” As of April 24, in 22 at bats, he had 10 hits, 4 homers, and 13 RBIs, on pace for a .454 batting average, 102 home runs, and 333 RBIs.51

  Suddenly Casey Stengel, the master of malapropism and hyperbole, counseled restraint. The Yankees had won five of their first six games, Ford had looked great in his first start, and the team was hitting like an all-new Murderers’ Row. New York sportswriters jested that Congress might move to break up the Yankees for antitrust violations. But Casey warned that the team could not be that good—no team could be. The same could be said about Mickey Mantle. “There he is, 24 and limping, the greatness disfigured,” wrote Jimmy Cannon. How long could he continue to play hurt? Cannon wondered whether Mantle would be another Pete Reiser, a talented Dodgers player whose career was cruelly cut short by injury, including concussions resulting from running into fences. In a bitter article about “the losers” in sports, “the fools who don’t know enough to chalk their cues,” Cannon advanced Mantle as exhibit number one.52

  CANNON’S DYSPEPTIC COMMENT indicated his growing bitterness toward sports, which he had once watched with “the glad astonishment of a boy following his first parade.” As Joe DiMaggio, Joe Louis, and his heroes of the 1930s retired or fell on hard times, Cannon’s writing turned edgier, and he took a cynical approach to the younger class of sports idols. But his colleagues covering the New York sporting scene did not share his attitude. More often than not, they saw their job as creating, not tearing down, sports heroes.

  In the 1950s such writers as Grantland Rice, Red Smith, Frank Graham, and Dan Daniel were the last of a dying breed. They had worked alongside—attending games and fights and often drinking long into the night with—Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, Westbrook Pegler, Paul Gallico, Heywood Broun, and other giants. If they didn’t launch the golden age of sports in the 1920s and 1930s, they promoted the hell out of it, nurturing the legends of the Great Bambino, the Manassa Mauler, the Galloping Ghost, the Iron Horse, “Big Bill” Tilden, the Brown Bomber, and Joltin’ Joe. They formed the “Gee Whiz” school, using every ounce of their considerable talent to glorify the accomplishments of athletes. On long train trips across the country, they traveled with the players, drank and played cards with them, and knew their strengths and flaws. Yet, when they wrote about them, they underscored their achievements and erased their blemishes. Theirs was a god-creating business. “The Golden Age sportswriters,” observed Robert Lipsyte, “hyped the country’s post–World War I sports boom, rode the gravy train and then, for the good of the game, maintained the myths and legends as the country slid into a bust.”53

  In the 1960s, television would radically change journalists’ approach to sports, but in 1956 the old school still ruled. Red Smith, arguably the best writer of the group, perfectly exemplified the process. In 1945, when he arrived at the New York Herald-Tribune, he was already a seasoned journalist. The paper boasted some of the finest newspapermen in New York and an editor, Stanley Woodward, second to none. Woodward didn’t want Smith to write about games as much as to evoke the mise-en-scène of sports. He once had Smith and a few other sportswriters cover a World Series. Woodward gave everyone but Smith a specific assignment. Confused, Red asked, “What do you want me to write about?” “Write about the smell of cabbage in the hallway,” the editor replied. Smith never forgot the advice and labored in his columns to record the irreducible essence of sports. Woodward also counseled Smith to avoid “Godding up those ball players.”54

  Smith proved less successful in following Woodward’s second recommendation. He admitted that on occasion he transformed athletes into heroes. And why not? he thought. “When you go through Westminster Abbey you’ll find that except for that little Poets’ Corner almost all of the statues and memorials are to killers. To generals and admirals who won battles, whose specialty was human slaughter. I don’t think they’re such glorious heroes.”55

  In the mid-1950s, faced with plummeting attendance caused by demographic change and the rise of competing entertainment opportunities, baseball needed a little “Godding up” to bring spectators back to the ball parks. With DiMaggio retired, Ted Williams claiming he was washed up, and Jackie Robinson graying and overweight, the game sorely needed a young hero, a downy-cheeked, blue-eyed Lancelot. It needed someone who looked and hit like Mickey Mantle. And in April 1956, when Mantle started slugging homers from the first day of the season, the god-makers in the press box sharpened their pencils.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Match That!”

  “Home run hitters drive Cadillacs!”

  —CASEY STENGEL

  For all the pennants and the World Series championships, the history of the Yankees—in fact, all of baseball in the 1950s—could be reduced to three numbers: 2,130, 56, and 60. Together they conjured the legacy of the franchise, its iconic personalities, and its glorious past, and many baseball experts believed they would stand as long as the game was played. The first, 2,130, belonged to Lou Gehrig, the Iron Horse, whose consecutive game streak matched, for sheer longevity, Franklin Roosevelt’s four straight presidential victories. The streak was a pure expression of Gehrig’s essence—constant, consistent, dedicated, quietly taking the field day after day and year after year.

  Fifty-six belonged to Joe DiMaggio, who exploded onto the game like a supernova, arriving in New York and immediately becoming the centerpiece of the Yankees dynasty. Hitting in twenty consecutive games is an accomplishment worthy of celebration; a fifty-six-game streak boggles the imagination. By all the mathematics of hitting a baseball, where failure is almost a dead certainty at least seven out of ten times, it is a virtually impossible feat. Before the summer of 1941, it had never been done; since then it has never been repeated. Only a player like DiMaggio—steady, magnificent, brilliant—could have pulled off such an accomplishment. At the height of the game’s popularity, he was simply and unarguably the best.

  Even alongside these numbers, however, sixty was special. It stood at the summit of baseball statistics and was held by the most celebrated player in the sport’s history. Babe Ruth single-handedly transformed baseball into a power game, and the 1927 season when he clobbered sixty home runs was his pièce de résistance. During that memorable year Charles Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic, Jack Dempsey fought Gene Tunney in the famous “Long Count” match, and “the Babe” consumed cigars, beers, and women and clouted more and longer home runs than other ball players ever thought possible. And he did it in a way that left even the most casual observer breathless.

  Before the 1920s the notion that any player would blast sixty home runs in a season bordered on lunacy. In December 1919, when Boston Red Sox owner Harrison Herbert “Harry” Frazee sold the rights to Ruth to the hapless New York Yankees, the most home runs hit by any player in a single season was twenty-nine—which Babe Ruth had done the previous season. That was almost double the previous American League standard of sixteen launched by Ralph “Socks” Seybold in 1902. Home runs were mostly magnificent accidents, often the results of poor outfield play or a lucky swing connecting with a fresh ball.1

  Then Ruth arrived in New York and changed everything. His home runs were not accidents but the intended results of a lethal swing. He gripped the bat low, his right hand down to the knob, giving his swing a whiplike motion and generating 8,000 pounds of force, enough to convert an incoming 90-mile-an-hour fastball into an outgoing 110-mile-an-hour ball. And given that
Ruth swung a heavy bat—forty ounces or so—and possessed extraordinary timing, when he connected, he hit high, deep shots, long enough to sail over any fence in the major leagues.2

  Ruth’s stunning home runs caused Americans to reimagine the game. Baseball historian Lee Allen understood Babe’s importance: “Ruth filled the parks by developing the home run into a hit of exciting elegance. For almost two decades he battered fences with such regularity that baseball’s basic structure was eventually pounded into a different shape.” He challenged Ty Cobb’s small-ball notions of scientific baseball, a strategy that emphasized getting on base, sacrificing the runner to second, executing hit-and-run plays, and protecting a one- or two-run lead. But his impact transcended the sport. Ruth’s approach dovetailed with the instant gratification peddled by the nascent advertising industry. Swing for the fences, buy now and pay later, the world is at your fingertips—it all became part of the same consumer-driven culture. In Yankee pinstripes he was more than just a baseball player; he was a prophet whose mighty swings made spectators gasp in wonder at the potentialities of man. He was the Great Gatsby of baseball. It seemed as if nothing was beyond his reach.3

  In 1920 he led the American League with fifty-four homers, miles ahead of Cy Williams’s National League best of fifteen. In 1921 Babe won the AL home run crown with fifty-nine, the same year that George “High Pockets” Kelly took the National League title with twenty-three. He was in a class by himself and seemed likely to set a new record each year. But he didn’t. And after he had hit so many home runs in his first two seasons with the Yankees, any smaller number seemed anticlimactic. In 1922 he hit only thirty-five, losing his home run crown to St. Louis Browns’ outfielder Ken Williams. He seemed almost mortal during the next four seasons, smacking forty-one, forty-six, twenty-five, and forty-seven. Success, some reporters and fans muttered, had gone to his head and was singularly visible around his waist. Where he had once dazzled spectators, now he just impressed, and occasionally disappointed, them.