by Roger Kahn
I reserved Sunday tickets for my father and, with this grinding Series tied, telephoned to offer suggestions for his viewing. “I don’t know your exact location, but it’s somewhere behind the plate. Erskine’s going. Watch his change-up, but mostly watch that overhand curve.”
“I doubt if that will stop the big Yankee hitters.”
“When Carl is right, nobody hits him.”
“He’s small. Small pitchers tire.”
“We’ll see about that,” I said, without confidence.
Sunshine lit the concrete mass of Yankee Stadium on Sunday. Sunshine splashed across the infield and warmed the outfield grass. The crowd, which would number 70,536, arrived early. At first World Series audiences are weighted with people who have come to be seen by columnists, or to sell a client something between innings, or to make a deal while men lead from first and third. But the 1952 World Series, played entirely in New York City, had lost its novelty by Sunday. As Erskine snapped overhand hooks during warm-up, his stuff drew cries of admiration from the stands. It looked, someone remarked, as if the hucksters and the actresses had all gone off together. Today we had baseball fans. The noise they made, like sunshine, lit the scene.
The Dodgers peppered the Yankee starting pitcher, Ewell Blackwell, who had long since lost the edge of his sidearm fast ball. Snider lined a 420-foot home run. By the fifth, Erskine led, 4 to 0.
So quickly that there was no time to consider what had gone wrong, the Yankees scored five times. Erskine allowed a single, walked a man and gave up two other hits. Then Johnny Mize, a 220-pound man from Georgia, with astonishing wrists and cat eyes, lifted a home run into the lower stands in right. The Yankees led by 5 to 4.
Dressen walked to the mound, one hand in a hip pocket, scratching. He shook his head and took the ball from Erskine. He shook his head again and gave it back. Erskine ended the inning, and the Dodgers tied the score in the seventh when Snider slammed a long double to right center field off Johnny Sain.
Pitching very hard, playing very bravely, Erskine and the team held off the Yankees at the Stadium. In the second inning, Andy Pafko, a thick-legged, earnest man who never seemed entirely comfortable as a Dodger, had sprung beside the low right-field barrier and caught Gene Woodling’s drive in the glove webbing. Pafko’s timing prevented a home run. Now when Yogi Berra drove a long fly to right center, Snider sprinted across the sheep meadow of an outfield, leaped, hung in the air and caught the ball. “I made it harder than it was,” Snider said years afterward, “by losing track of the damn wall. Actually, I was shyin’ as I jumped.” But that nuance went unobserved amid the excitement of the time.
In the eleventh inning, Snider singled home a run. The Dodgers led. Erskine retired Mantle on an easy grounder. Now seventeen Yankees had gone out consecutively. Mize was the hitter. He cocked his bat and squinted. Erskine threw two pitches. Mize lined the third to right, where Carl Furillo had replaced Pafko. Furillo placed his right hand on the barrier and hurled his heavy body into the air. Furillo’s glove was nine feet high when he caught the ball and saved this remarkable game.
Afterward I greeted my father at the entrance to the press box, pumping his hand. “I said watch the pitching, but I guess the great thing today was the outfielding. Did you ever see three better catches in your life?”
“The pitching was fine, too. He does have an excellent curve, except once in a while he didn’t keep it low.”
“That’s what set up the great catches.”
Gordon nodded, curiously restrained. Leaving Yankee Stadium, we passed Row T, in Section 2, where he had sat. It was fairly high, and one had to look down row upon row. The press box, hanging from the mezzanine, cut off the view from the top. One could see no more than the fringes of the outfield. One could not see sky, nor could one possibly have seen a fly ball and an outfielder in pursuit and the thrilling confluence of vectors—ball and running, leaping outfielder. My father was not commenting on the catches because he hadn’t seen them.
“Sorry,” I said. “That’s how the Yankees are.”
“Nonsense. Enjoyed the game very much. I really found your friend Erskine an excellent little pitcher.”
It now seemed right not only for the Dodgers to win, but for the Yankees to be beaten. Their organization was both aloof and deceptive. Taking my check for $36 a week earlier, the fourth highest Yankee executive had said, “We don’t usually take care of rookie writers with such good tickets. You’re an exception. You’re pretty lucky to get tickets at all.” The third highest executive, after three martinis, said he would never allow a black man to wear a Yankee uniform. “We don’t want that sort of crowd,” he said. “It would offend boxholders from Westchester to have to sit with niggers.” Just as the humanity of the Dodgers burst past the limits of a ball field, so did Yankee arrogance. The most popular sports comment that autumn was: “How can you root for the Yankees? It’s like rooting for U.S. Steel.”
But a day later Berra and Mantle hit home runs in Ebbets Field. Although Snider hit two homers, the Yankees won, 3 to 2. The Series was tied for the third time. October 7 broke clear and brisk in Brooklyn. For the seventh game Joe Black said he felt strong and ready. The Dodger season was ending with the team’s best pitcher at work. That is how any season should end.
From the high Ebbets Field press box, I had seen Black pitch two dozen times. This day I saw him labor. The small, sharp curve, the cobra at the knees, kept biting dirt. It was harmless, a bad pitch. Nothing more. The fast ball wandered. He had to push it. Starting a third game in seven days, after two months of pitching relief three times a week, he was worn down, not strong at all, but weary. Woodling and Mantle hit homers. Black left in the sixth inning, losing 4 to 2. His head hung. His arm ached. He was deaf to an ovation joining thirty thousand throats.
In the seventh, the Dodgers loaded the bases with one out. Casey Stengel, out of first-liners, called on a tall, toothy lefthander named Bob Kuzava, who lost as often as he won. He struck out Snider. Now Kuzava was left to confront Jackie Robinson. It was always coming down to the best men. The count went to three and two. Robinson fouled off four pitches. The flags of Ebbets Field flapped in the wind. Robinson lifted an ordinary pop fly to the right side. The base runners ran. No Yankee moved. It seemed that the pop would bounce and that two runs or more would score and the Dodgers would win their first World Series. Who hits after Robby? Maybe we’ll get six. What will I use for a lead? Billy Martin, the Yankee second baseman, sprinted, reached, lunged and gloved the pop fly when it was no more than two feet from the ground. It had been the first baseman’s ball. No matter. Martin, an Oakland roughneck, had rescued the forces of U.S. Steel. The Dodgers never again threatened. The Yankees had won their fourth consecutive World Series. Next Year, the Messianic Time when the Brooklyn Dodgers become the best baseball team on earth, had not yet arrived. “Every year,” I angrily began the page-one story, “is next year for the New York Yankees.”
In the old apartment, a week later, Leopold Bloom was preparing to gaze in rising lust at the underclothes of Gerty MacDowell, but he was delayed by Olga Kahn, again speaking on the telephone.
“In a sense,” Gordon said, “this was next year for you. I thought you proved a number of things.”
“But damn, it was disappointing.”
“The Dodgers have been disappointing me, in more ways than I can count, for forty-five years. I started rooting at the age of six.”
“I rather suspected that you had.”
A barrier built between us, between boy and man, between pretense and candor, was down. “Now where,” Gordon said, lighting one Pall Mall from another, “could you possibly have gotten an idea like that?”
IV
Wicker furniture, February dankness persisting through March twilights, plasterboard walls and suites like hutches were the Dodgertown barracks at Vero Beach. Here, in the second spring of my Assignment Brooklyn, Buzzy Bavasi poured Grasshoppers from a pewter cocktail shaker, his moon-face intent on filling my p
aper cup to the brim. “Crème de menthe,” Bavasi said, “brandy, cream and ice I ordered from the kitchen. Sip, don’t drink. That’s the way. Like it?”
“It tastes like a mint-flavored malt.”
“Son of a buck. One year with the club and you’re getting like the rest. A wise guy.” Bavasi’s mouth turned down. “Well, I was gonna tell you why we traded Pafko, but I won’t.”
Emil J. Bavasi, de facto general manager of the Dodgers, attended DePauw University with Ford Frick, Jr., whose father, once Babe Ruth’s ghost writer, became Commissioner of Baseball in 1951. Bavasi’s family owned a large newspaper distribution company on Long Island, and by the time he entered college he knew that he was free to choose a field, without total fealty to income. He liked baseball. Given a boost by Ford Frick, Bavasi entered the Dodger organization at Valdosta, Georgia, sixty miles west of the old copyboy’s Valhalla of Waycross. He understood the game and studied the body of extralegal rules that govern it and advanced to Nashua, to Montreal and then to Brooklyn.
With his quick, questioning mind went a love for the Byzantine. If Bavasi disliked a story, he approached a reporter obliquely. “I didn’t read it myself, but some people in the office are upset with what you wrote about yesterday’s game.” I didn’t write anything unusually rough, Buz. “I didn’t say you did. I just said some people were upset. I don’t know. I told you I haven’t read it myself.”
A quantity of impersonal lying swells dialogue between ball club and press, whenever both sides are playing hard. Reporters invent rumors. “I hear Pee Wee Reese is for sale.” Nonsense. Where did you get that? I hear your newspaper is for sale. At worst the reporter now has a story to shelter him through a rainy day. “DODGERS CALL REESE SALE REPORT FALSE.” At best, he strikes a richer lode. The Cubs offered $200,000, but we said no. “DODGERS SPURN CUB GOLD FOR THEIR PEE WEE.”
On the other side, executives interrupt negotiations for a pitcher to deny that a trade is possible; they proclaim that team harmony is like a melody that’s sweetly played in tune after fining a catcher $250 for threatening to slug the manager, and they swear that their franchise is as fixed as Gibraltar, while investing in new ball-park bonds in another city fifteen hundred miles away. The serious ethics, lightly stated, are: “Lying to get a story is not dishonesty but glorious trickery” (S. Woodward) and “Lying to a newspaperman is blessed by the angels without fear of fall” (A. Doubleday, et al.).
Although some writers resented Bavasi, I found him a pleasant, generally admirable man. If he misled me, why, then I had allowed myself to be misled. There was no more malice to the deed than there was in raising (and getting away with raising) a poker hand on a pair of threes, eight high.
The press room sprawled behind the Dodgertown kitchen, with a small busy bar at one end, chairs and work tables along the walls, a large round table in the center and a screen door leading outside. Two men sat at work tables typing. The bulk of one in a wicker chair and the swelling back reminded me of someone, but I advanced on the bar, where Mike Gaven was telling a story about a team called the Newark Ironbounds, which he said he had managed, many years before.
“We used to play these colored teams, and when they hit a home run with bases loaded, all you’d see around the base paths were legs and eyes. A little brandy, please,” Mike said.
When the bartender handed him a pony, Gaven performed a curious routine. “Mike,” I said, “why dip your cigar in brandy before you light it?”
“Brandy brings out the flavor of the tobacco.”
“Then, why do you throw the pony out?”
“Tobacco ruins the flavor of the brandy. Say,” Gaven said, “you know who reads your Herald Tribune? Stockbrokers who went to Dartmouth and secretaries who want to impress their boss. Why doncha work for a paper somebody reads?”
The flat Newark voice carried, and the bulky man in the chair turned and cried in a tenor growl, “Why don’t you write something somebody can read, Mr. Gaven?”
“Coach!” Stanley Woodward had gone to work as sports editor of the Miami News. “Hiya. How are you, Stanley?”
“Trying to conserve considerate pride.” Woodward was typing a story about the outlook for the Philadelphia Athletics, who trained in West Palm Beach. “I was there yesterday. Can you give me a hand here when I’m done?”
Changes in Woodward shocked me as we talked toward the end of a night. At dinner he was vigorous and amusing. “Living at the heel of the Great American Hookworm Belt is a trial,” he said. “It’s ninety degrees in the summer, all day and every day. Rosy-fingered dawn is ninety degrees. We live in a part of Miami called Coconut Grove, which is a mistake. Miami is a mistake. The mangroves should rise in protest. The gnats already have. Whenever the wind blows from the Everglades, gnats mass in close formation. They have evolved with a genetic understanding of screens. Each biting adult gnat is a micron smaller than the holes in the mesh. We are their feast. I can endure that, but the maid who keeps our house has a bad time. She’s used to the North and she thinks that if she steps outside by herself, the Klan will murder her, which is a possibility. So she stays in the house all the time, and the gnat bites make her cry.”
After steaks, back in the press room, I tried to provide Woodward with a column. Poker chips clattered at the center table. Billy Herman, Roscoe McGowen, Bavasi and a few others bid and raised. Walter O’Malley’s bull voice was loudest. “I’m afraid I have to raise you again, Mike.”
“Bad thing,” Woodward said, quietly, “for a newspaperman to play poker with a millionaire. Bluff you out of your life. What’s going on with this club?” I tried to describe what I knew. Chuck Dressen had begun spring training on March 1 with a talk on the theme of hate. The team had won a pennant, so everyone hated them, he said.
“You wrote that?”
“Sure.”
“Good boy. But I can’t follow you a week. Is something fresh?”
Reese was an exceptional story. He seemed selfless. John Griffin, the clubhouse manager, said sometimes when he was short of help, Reese, the team captain, helped carry bags of bats.
Woodward yawned.
“Pee Wee says team spirit is ridiculous. What exists is money spirit. You help other players, bunt or hit-and-run and they help you, not for a team, but for themselves. You both want money.”
“I want money,” Woodward said. “Can you get me another martini?”
“Reese’s great hurt is that he has only a daughter. He wants a son. He told me the other morning, ‘I guess I’m shooting blanks.’”
“I don’t have any sons,” Woodward said.
I brought more martinis. Behind thick lenses, Woodward’s eyes were wet. He breathed heavily. “Asthma,” he said. “The swamps make my asthma worse.”
From the center of the room, Walter O’Malley cried, “Three kings haven’t beat a straight yet.”
“Shit,” said Roscoe McGowen.
“Bad,” Woodward said, suddenly very sick and very drunk. “No good here. New England man. Moved out of my place. Not fair.” Tears ran out from under the thick lenses. “Son,” Woodward said, clasping my shoulder in a mighty grip, “shouldn’t they let an old man finish in New York?”
The only limits to the speed of change in his time and in ours, Ernest Hemingway said, is our ability to comprehend speed. I sunned myself in Florida. George Jorgensen became Christine and Clare Boothe Luce became Ambassador to Italy. Dwight Eisenhower declined to commute the death sentence of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and the Zenith Company announced that there were now more TV sets than bathtubs in the city of Chicago. Stalin collapsed. Trygve Lie quit the United Nations. Russian doctors applied leeches to Stalin’s head. Chuck Dressen said the rookie Jim Gilliam was so good, “he ain’t missed one yet. The worst he’s done when he swings so far is ticked it.” From Moscow came a physician’s bulletin. The heart of Stalin had stopped beating. Where would Junior Gilliam fit into the Dodger club?
Dick Young scooped me decisively. After five years at second, Jack
ie Robinson, thirty-four, was going to become a third baseman, Young reported. Gilliam would play second, opening day. And Billy Cox, the best third baseman since the dawn of baseball, was now an extra hand, utility man. Each day’s papers were flown from New York to Vero Beach. “Charlie,” I said, holding a Daily News before the manager, “is this true?”
“What you write yesterday?” Dressen said.
“About the new pitcher, Russ Meyer’s screwball.”
“I think you wrote the wrong story.”
“But how can you bench Cox?”
“We ain’t benchin’ him. We’re makin’ him utility. He don’t like to play every day anyway.”
“But he’ll like it less when you tell him he can’t play.”
“Mebbe. But he won’t mind when I see he gets an extra thousand dollars to make the switch.” Dressen said he wanted to even matters and that he had another scoop. “Kid, I’m gonna make Joe Black into a helluva pitcher.”
“He is a helluva pitcher.”
Dressen made an impatient gesture. “Needs more stuff. I’m gonna show him a change and a screwball and a big curve. There’s your story.”
I found Black in the barracks, writing a letter. “Yeah,” Joe said. “The day I got here, he didn’t even say hello. Right off he said he was going to show me a big curve, but look.” Black extended his right hand. The index and middle fingers angled downward. “Tendons that lift them aren’t right. I was born that way. It does something to my grip. That quick little curve is the only curve I can throw. I tell Number 7 and now he says I got to throw a fork ball. You know. Throw with the ball shoved up between the fingers. It gives you a kind of change.”
