Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game

by John Sexton

  No less than five Hall of Fame broadcasters announced that game on stations across the country, but the most famous call belonged to Russ Hodges on WMCA-AM, the local Giants station. Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld opens with a fifty-page description of the moments just before and after Thomson’s at-bat, wonderfully capturing the excitement heard in Hodges’s voice.

  Russ feels the crowd around him, a shudder passing through the stands, and then he is shouting into the mike and there is a surge of color and motion, a crash that occurs upward, stadium-wide, hands and faces and shirts, bands of rippling men, and he is outright shouting, his voice has a power he’d thought long gone—it may lift the top of his head like a cartoon rocket.

  He says, “The Giants win the pennant.”

  A topspin line drive. He tomahawked the pitch and the ball had topspin and dipped into the lower deck and there is Pafko at the 315 sign looking straight up with his right arm braced at the wall and a spate of paper coming down.

  He says, “The Giants win the pennant.”

  Yes, the voice is excessive with a little tickle of hysteria in the upper register….

  He says, “The Giants win the pennant.”

  The crew is whooping. They are answering the roof bangers by beating on the walls and ceiling of the booth. People climbing the dugout roofs and the crowd shaking in its own noise…. Russ is shouting himself right out of his sore throat, out of every malady and pathology and complaint and all the pangs of growing up and every memory that is not tender.

  He says, “The Giants win the pennant.”

  Four times.

  My friend Mike Murray, an avid Giants fan, who owing to a mixture of good fortune and better sense eventually (thirty-three years ago) married my sister, was ecstatic—outside himself, as C. S. Lewis or Paul Tillich would put it, with joy—as Hodges made his call. He plays a tape of the call periodically, and he is still ecstatic each time. Occasionally, he needles the old Dodgers fan in me by supplementing the playing of the tape with a verbatim recitation of Red Smith’s recap in the next morning’s New York Herald Tribune:

  “Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”

  But decades later, Mike and the other remaining New York Giants loyalists were confronted with a startling and unsettling fact: The Giants had cheated. Not only in that game but in home games throughout the last ten weeks of the season, a stretch where the Giants won an astonishing 80 percent of the time. Near the fiftieth anniversary of Thomson’s home run, The Wall Street Journal reported in detail that the team had used an elaborate signaling system (with a telescope hidden in the clubhouse beyond deep center field and an electric bell-and-buzzer contraption that rang in the bullpen and dugout), which they used to alert Giant hitters to the coming pitches (a single buzz indicated fastball; two meant an off-speed pitch). It was rather sophisticated for the time.

  Major League Baseball would not formally codify the rule prohibiting such devices until 1961 (ten years after “The Shot”), but mechanically aided sign-stealing was considered a notorious infraction dating back to 1898 (when a scheme put in place by the Philadelphia Phillies was foiled). To the day he died, Bobby Thomson denied receiving any signals. And my friend Mike Murray denies the turpitude of the act and the significance—even the truthfulness—of what most see as overwhelming evidence. For him, the miraculous moment remains utterly undiminished.

  In a provocative little book, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, Mircea Eliade described a scene where a folklorist, Constantin Brailoiu, visits a Romanian village and is regaled with a tragedy of love, a powerful myth in illo tempore, a sacred time long ago: A mountain fairy had cast a spell upon a young suitor days before he was to be married and flung him from a cliff. The next day, his body was discovered and brought into town, where his fiancée arranged a funeral full of mythological allusions and liturgical text.

  But Brailoiu made an astonishing discovery. The events of the revered story had taken place less than forty years earlier and the heroine was still very much alive. He found her, asked some questions, and heard a very different story: Her fiancée slipped and fell off the cliff on his own and passed away later that same day, after being carried to the village in a last-ditch effort to save his life. The funeral was conducted with the same rituals as was customary at the time; no mention was made of the mountain fairy or any mythological events.

  As Eliade wrote,

  Thus, despite the presence of the principal witness, a few years had sufficed to strip the event of all historical authenticity, to transform it into a legendary tale: the jealous fairy, the murder of the young man, the discovery of the dead body, the lament, rich in mythological themes, chanted by the fiancée. Almost all the people of the village had been contemporaries of the authentic historical fact; but this fact, as such, could not satisfy them: the tragic death of a young man on the eve of his marriage was something different from a simple death by accident; it had an occult meaning that could only be revealed by its identification with the category of myth. The mythicization of the accident had not stopped at the creation of a ballad; people told the story of the jealous fairy even when they were talking freely, “prosaically,” of the young man’s death.

  When the folklorist drew the villagers’ attention to the authentic version, they replied that the old woman had forgotten; that her great grief had almost destroyed her mind. It was the myth that told the truth: the real story was already only a falsification. Besides, was not the myth truer by the fact that it made the real story yield a deeper and richer meaning, revealing a tragic destiny?

  It is a compelling narration. Viewed this way, Mike and his fellow Giants fans, as they ignore the recent discoveries of Giants treachery, are seeking the underlying deeper reality of the matter, in the manner of religious traditions dating back centuries. They focus on the story that actually matters to them. The facts behind the 1951 Giants comeback simply obscure its meaning. For them, Bobby Thomson’s home run is miraculous, no matter how it happened.

  Every fiber of my Brooklyn Dodger–being screams the same word, Cheaters! Four times. You make your own call.

  By contrast, there are some baseball miracles about which there is no argument. Each is a tale—be it an individual feat or team performance—of such wonder and consequence that it marks those who behold it, uplifting them. These moments are beyond spectacular. There are background facts and explanations, of course, helpful analyses and crucial contexts, but after all is said and done, the details do not capture the moment.

  Miracles in baseball usually change the course of a game, a series, a season. Thus, the most splendid of miracles often occur in September and October, when the games matter most. And the mid-fifties were a miraculous time for the game.

  At the top of any list of the spectacular would be three stunning moments in three successive World Series (1954, 1955, and 1956). Each helped produce a championship and memories that have never dulled for the three New York teams: the Giants, the Dodgers, and the Yankees. Two of them unfolded in similar ways; the third is unique to this day.

  In 1954, Willie Mays was fresh from two years in the army, but this talented prospect clearly was the Giants’ future. A Giant executive once responded to writer Red Smith’s query, “How good is this kid Mays?” by saying, “This kid’s so good he’ll have us eating strawberries in wintertime.” That season, Mays had led the team to its first National League pennant since he had been on deck for the Shot Heard ’Round the World three years before. It was the first game of what would be the last Series ever played in the Polo Grounds, and the score was tied 2–2 in the eighth inning. The Giants, huge underdogs, were paired against the Cleveland Indians, winner of 111 games in a 154-game season on the strength of one of the finest pitching staffs ever assembled.

  The stage for what is still called “the Cat
ch” was set when the Giant pitcher, Sal Maglie, walked the leadoff batter, center fielder Larry Doby. The next man up, third baseman Al Rosen, singled to deep shortstop; Alvin Dark of the Giants got to the ball but couldn’t field it cleanly to make a play. With runners on first and second and nobody out, Giant manager Leo Durocher yanked Maglie and brought in from the bullpen Don Liddle, a decent left-hander with a wicked curveball that could produce ground balls.

  The third man up for Cleveland was a respected power hitter who had joined the Indians that summer in a trade with Baltimore, Vic Wertz. Wertz was big, strong, and reliable (he would beat polio two years later). On his way to hitting 266 home runs in a seventeen-year career, he had belted fifteen that season. Liddle got ahead of him, one ball and two strikes, whereupon catcher Wes Westrum signaled for an inside fastball, a tactic designed to set up a curve on the pitch after that.

  But the fastball wasn’t inside; it was over the plate and Wertz simply crushed it. From the film (and my memory), Wertz did not simply hit a long fly ball, he scorched a line drive directly at Mays, only way over his head (Mays, as usual, was playing relatively shallow in center field). But at the crack of Wertz’s bat, Mays turned and took off toward the deepest part of the deepest center field in the major leagues (with a marked distance of nearly five hundred feet). It was a race between Wertz’s line drive and one of the fastest players in baseball, with the first game of the Series on the line.

  Running at full speed with his back to home plate, Mays sprinted at least fifty yards straight back, running directly at an unpadded wall. In baseball, an over-the-shoulder catch is the most difficult of them all. But as Mays neared the cinder warning track just in front of the wall, he decelerated and stuck out his glove, with his right hand cradling the mitt to form his patented “basket,” catching the ball at full extension. The “Say Hey Kid” made the spectacular look routine.

  But what he did next was beyond spectacular. Taking no more than three very short steps to balance himself as his hat flew off, he whirled counterclockwise and launched a throw that is remembered today as much as the long run and catch. It traveled more than three hundred feet to Davey Williams of the Giants, who was standing at second base. In the Polo Grounds, runners often tried to advance two bases on long fly balls to center field, but the swift Doby, who had to go back to second to tag up, had no choice but to stop at third as Mays’s magnificent throw reached Williams on the fly. With one out, the Giants had a chance to get out of the inning, which they did—after a walk, a critical strikeout, and a routine fly ball.

  As with many great baseball moments, this one has a postscript that most people have forgotten: Mays made another magnificent play two innings later at the expense of the same hitter—preventing yet another go-ahead run.

  In the tenth inning of the still-tied game, Wertz led off the Cleveland half of the inning against Giant relief pitcher Marv Grissom with another vicious line drive, this time to deep left-center field. Mays took off on another sprint from his position in right-center, this time facing a dilemma, the horns of which were three very difficult choices. He could dive for the fast-moving ball; if he missed, it would roll all the way to the wall some 450 feet away from home plate, in which case Wertz would have an easy triple and possibly an inside-the-park home run. Or he could pass on trying to catch the ball, let it drop, and chase after it as it bounced toward the wall, in which case a triple would be a certainty and the Indians would have the go-ahead run on third base with nobody out. Or he could accelerate his already furious sprint and, stretching his glove hand out as far as he could, attempt to snare the ball as it bounced. He chose the third option, and just barely reached the ball, stopped, and threw a bullet to Hank Thompson at third base while a frustrated Wertz chugged into second base with a four-hundred-foot double. Once again, the Giants had a chance to get out of the inning, and they did.

  This set the stage for still another special moment in the bottom of the inning. With one out, Mays and Hank Thompson walked and Durocher decided to pinch-hit for his aging future–Hall of Fame left fielder, Monte Irvin. The substitute batter was anything but a Hall of Famer, a player from Alabama named James Lamar Rhodes, known as Dusty to the baseball world—a decent pinch hitter in the third of his seven major league seasons. Dusty Rhodes hit the first pitch from Cleveland ace Bob Lemon on the fly toward the shortest right field fence in baseball, a mere 258 feet away, and it just barely made the seats, for the three-run home run that won the game. In the ensuing four-game Giants sweep of the stunned Indians, Rhodes hit another home run and batted in fully a third of the twenty-one runs the Giants scored before retreating into obscurity.

  One year later, it was the Dodgers who were blessed with a miracle. After having never won a World Series, they led this deciding Game Seven in the sixth inning at Yankee Stadium by the fragile score of 2–0. Dougie and I were not yet at our late-inning post by the radio, crucifix held between us; indeed, we might never have gotten to our post if the Yankee sixth had played out differently.

  While Dougie and I played out the final moments of our day in Sister Saint James’s eighth-grade class, the Dodgers and pitcher Johnny Podres stared familiar tragedy in the face. The Yankees were at the plate, nobody out, two on base (Billy Martin, who had walked, and Gil McDougald, who beat out a bunt). The next batter was Yogi Berra, as dangerous a clutch hitter as existed in the game and a notorious left-handed pull hitter.

  The Dodgers shifted their outfielders several steps toward the right, including left fielder Sandy Amoros, a solid ballplayer who had been discovered in prerevolutionary Cuba four years earlier and who often appeared as a late-inning defensive substitute. Amoros was playing well into left-center field, not too many steps from dead center. But Berra confounded the Dodgers’ plans by punching at an outside pitch, sending a towering fly ball down the left field foul line. To some it looked like it was heading foul; to others it looked like a home run; most Dodgers fans simply held their breath. The 2–0 lead was about to evaporate.

  Like Mays, Amoros never hesitated before beginning a furious sprint, only he had even farther to go. He ran and he ran while the ball slowly began descending toward the left field corner (a certain run-scoring double). Perhaps five yards from the foul line after his astonishing sprint, Amoros began to decelerate and stretch out his glove. He caught the ball and, in what seemed like one motion, planted his foot, pivoted, and fired a bullet to his relay man, shortstop Pee Wee Reese, more than 150 feet away. Reese, stationed behind third base, himself pivoted as he caught the ball and sent another bullet across the diamond to Gil Hodges at first base. McDougald, thinking that nobody could catch Berra’s fly ball, had run all the way past second on the play and was an easy out. The double play saved the game and set the stage for Dougie and me to have a prayerful ninth and for the only Series Brooklyn ever won. The run, the catch, and the throw. Miraculous!

  October 8, 1956, also at Yankee Stadium, was and is a unique day in World Series history. A perfect game had not been pitched in any major league game since 1922 and none has been pitched in the Series since that day.

  Unlike the sudden miraculous moments provided by Mays and Amoros, a perfect game builds gradually until—in an instant—it is over, as the last of twenty-seven consecutive batters is retired. It is generally not until at least the sixth inning that its possibility first appears; but from that point on, an excruciating drama unfolds, intensifying with each passing out (indeed, with each passing pitch).

  As Don Larsen arrived at the Stadium that day, the Series, again against Brooklyn, was knotted at two victories apiece. He did not know that he was going to start Game Five, only finding out when he discovered a baseball between his spiked shoes (manager Casey Stengel’s traditional method of letting his starters know it was their day). The Dodgers had hit him hard the previous year and Larsen had helped the Yankee staff blow a six-run lead in Game Two in 1956, walking four batters in less than two innings of hideous work. In the fourth year of a decidedly unspectacular
fourteen-year career, during which he lost more than he won, he had not led the American League in anything, except for his second year, as an Oriole, when he lost twenty-one games.

  Larsen had enjoyed a decent 1956, however, winning a career-high eleven games. He was helped by a change in his pitching motion to what was then a novelty, the no-windup delivery. In making the change, he followed the lead of his Yankee and Oriole teammate, Bob Turley. They had come together in 1954 in one of the weirdest trades ever: Over a two-week period, ten Yankees and seven Orioles exchanged uniforms. Larsen was not a bad pitcher, but he never lived up to his potential, in large part due to hard living and heavy drinking.

  But on this October day, nothing would stop him, not even the veteran transplant from the hated Giants, Sal Maglie, now pitching for the Dodgers. Each pitcher was perfect through the first three innings—not allowing a single batter to reach first base. The first Yankees hit came in the fourth, a home run by Mickey Mantle. Hank Bauer drove in the second run two innings later with a single.

  Larsen, meanwhile, was getting the Dodgers out by locating the ball well and changing speeds more than pitching with power (his seven strikeouts were notable but hardly spectacular). His low pitches produced ground balls, and his high ones became harmless fly balls and pop-ups. Along the way, there were four close calls, but each passed with little notice, because they occurred before the fifth inning had ended and what was possible became apparent.