Imagine ending up in the World Series five times over the course of twelve years. You would take that offer, right? Yet that is exactly what the Brooklyn Dodgers—and their fans—experienced, heading to the World Series in 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952, and 1953 . . . only to lose to the same team each time: the Yankees.
There are so many teams that history has erased, unfairly perhaps, because they couldn’t win the big games, or because when they did, they couldn’t beat the Yankees. The Boston Red Sox of the 1970s were a terrific team, who played in arguably the single greatest World Series ever in 1975 (more on that later in the book), but they played little brother to the Yankees’ big brother for the rest of the decade.
The difference between the Brooklyn Dodgers and every other team frustrated by the mighty Yankees was that the Dodgers actually left town! It was bad enough that the Yankees so thoroughly dominated their crosstown rivals—now Dodgers fans had to watch their hometown heroes move all the way across the country. Talk about adding insult to injury . . .
Yet history shows us that these Dodgers weren’t just an afterthought compared to the Yankees. These were the Dodgers of Jackie Robinson, the team that changed history because it was the first to have a black player, and in those days many Americans were not sure that African Americans and whites could play together, could be friends, or could even trust each other. This fear was held whether the subject was baseball or being in the army or simply being neighbors. Robinson signaled the start of a new, modern America, the roots of how things are today—and it started on the baseball field.
Maybe the players, or at least some of them, knew how important they were. Robinson certainly did, and maybe it was part of the reason for their success. Or maybe the Dodgers were just good, because for nearly a decade the Dodgers destroyed the rest of the National League. Either way, this team touched people who would go on to honor them in turn, in public statements and in books—a quality far more lasting and important than winning and losing. People who lived in Brooklyn or were Dodgers fans at that time surely remember that the Yankees almost always won, but they remember, too, how the Dodgers made them feel. This was the team made famous years later by one book, Roger Kahn’s classic The Boys of Summer.
After a slow start in 1947, Robinson took off and the Dodgers soared. Robinson was the hungriest of players, who did not do any one thing great, but did everything well. He could hit for a high average. He could hit a home run. He could steal bases—which he did daringly—and he could field, and he played with a sense of competition that even his greatest adversaries, both on and off the field, could admire.
The 1947 Dodgers won the pennant over St. Louis by five games. It was a complete team. Pee Wee Reese was the captain and a perennial all-star at shortstop. When the fans in Cincinnati began hurling racial insults at Robinson one day, Reese, who was white, went over and put his arm around Jackie’s shoulder as a symbol of unity. Reese was so respected that the crowd grew silent. He and Robinson led the team in home runs with just 12, but the Dodgers were terrific—until the World Series, where they lost to the Yankees in seven heartbreaking games.
The 1949 team saw Robinson win the league Most Valuable Player Award, and it won the pennant by a single game over St. Louis, only to lose the World Series in five games. To the Yankees, of course.
It was in the 1950s, however, that the Boys of Summer really took off. In addition to Reese and Robinson, Duke Snider was the power-hitting center fielder who joined the Yankees’ Mickey Mantle and the Giants’ Willie Mays in the trio of great center fielders all playing in New York at the same time. Gil Hodges was the beloved and rugged first baseman who could hit home runs and play defense with the best of them. The Dodgers had all-star players at virtually every position, including Roy Campanella, who would become one of the greatest catchers of all time, and like Robinson, one of the first great black players in Major League history.
Even the players who were not famous were still very good. Billy Cox was the best defensive third baseman in the game, and in right field, Carl Furillo boasted a powerful arm. The 1952 team, which lost to the Yankees in seven games, also featured Joe Black, who became the first African American pitcher to win a World Series game.
The 1953 team was one of the very best in history. The Dodgers won 105 games, averaged more than 6 runs per game, won the pennant by 13 games over a rising Milwaukee Braves team, and won 60 of 77 games at Ebbets Field. This was the year the Yankees would finally feel what it felt like to lose, right?
Wrong. The Yankees won the first two games of that season’s World Series at Yankee Stadium, lost the next two in Brooklyn, then won a pivotal Game 5, 11–7, in Brooklyn.
The next day, Game 6 in Yankee Stadium, the Yankees were up 3–1 with one out in the ninth, two outs away from a fifth straight championship, when Duke Snider walked. Allie Reynolds, the Yankee pitcher, then gave up a game-tying two-run homer. The Dodgers’ magical season appeared to be saved—that is, until the bottom of the ninth, when Billy Martin hit a one-out single up the middle to win the game. And the championship.
The Dodgers, heartbroken, had lost again.
Whether it isn’t being as tall or as fast as you’d like to be or whether a ground ball rolls up the middle just far enough away to be a hit instead of an out, life isn’t fair, they say. Life certainly doesn’t always make sense, which might explain why the 1955 Dodgers, probably the weakest of all those powerhouse Dodgers teams, happened to be the team that finally beat the Yankees. Jackie Robinson was thirty-six, still fiery, but weakened as a player. Cox was gone, and Robinson played third base. Furillo was thirty-three, Reese thirty-six. This was an aging team at the tail end of its great run.
Still, the Dodgers won 98 games, and crushed the ball as usual. Campanella, Hodges, and Snider all drove in more than 100 runs. Don Newcombe won 20 games, but no one else won more than 11. They won the National League pennant by 13 1/2 games and won 56 games at Ebbets Field. Of course, it was the Yankees who awaited them in the World Series, for the sixth time.
The Yankees won the first two games at Yankee Stadium, then the Dodgers came home and evened the series at 2–2, with Campanella homering in Game 3. Campanella, Hodges, and Snider each hit homers in the Game 4 win.
Duke Snider was on fire, hitting two more home runs in Game 5 and propelling the Dodgers to a 3-games-to-2 lead in the series. The Dodgers headed back to Yankee Stadium needing just one win over the final two games to become champions. In Game 6, the Yankees scored five runs in the very first inning and rolled to a win behind the pitching of Whitey Ford. The World Series would come down to a winner-takes-all seventh game.
Tuesday, October 4, 1955, in front of 62,465 fans, 23-year-old Johnny Podres, who grew up in Witherbee, New York, pitched the game of his life.With the Dodgers up 2–0 in the bottom of the eighth, two on and one out, Podres was in trouble. Yet he coaxed Yogi Berra to fly out to right and then struck out Hank Bauer. Inning over, Dodgers still in front.
In the ninth, the Yankees, the vaunted Bronx Bombers, went quietly, and when Elston Howard grounded out to Reese at short, it was over. The Dodgers, the Brooklyn Dodgers, founded in 1884, who had lost the World Series in 1916, 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952, and 1953, were finally champions! Podres would spend the rest of his life a hero to Dodgers fans.
The 1956 season would feel familiar to fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers. The team played valiant baseball once again during the season, catching and and eventually taking down Milwaukee to win the pennant. It was back to the World Series and back to facing the Yankees. It would be another seven-game thriller, but this time the Yankees were back to their winning ways.
Over the following winter the Dodgers did the unthinkable and traded Robinson, their fiercest competitor, to the New York Giants. Yet Robinson had already decided to retire, so he never played a single game for the Giants. Reese’s best seasons were also behind him and he would retire two years later.
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57 really did spell the end for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Secretly, both the Dodgers and Giants had made a deal to leave town forever, to be the first big-league teams to play in California. After the 1957 season, the Dodgers made their move to Los Angeles, the Giants to San Francisco. The National League would not field a baseball team in New York for four full seasons until the New York Mets were founded in 1962.
On the field there can be only one winner. The Dodgers were great, but the Yankees were and would always be the greatest winners in the history of the game. Baseball and sports in general, however, are about so much more than winning, and the Brooklyn Dodgers, even though they would be no more, even though they would move to Los Angeles, would endure in the national imagination. Perhaps it’s because they left. Perhaps it’s because America loves a good underdog story, and when faced with the dominance of the mighty Yankees, the Brooklyn Dodgers were a team everyone else could root for. Perhaps it’s because of what they represented as people and what they meant to their time. The late 1940s and 1950s were an extremely important time in America, when World War II had ended and courageous people demanded that everyone be treated more fairly at home. It was on the baseball field, of all places, where changes in American society could first be seen, and that, far more than winning or losing to the Yankees, is why the Brooklyn Dodgers of Jackie and Pee Wee, and Duke and Campy, are still important to this very day.
The 1947–55 Brooklyn Dodgers
TOP TEN LIST
The Brooklyn Dodgers are no more, having moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. It was a shock then and it’s history now, but many of today’s teams started out somewhere else. Some of the nicknames may be the same, but the cities have changed. Here are ten moves worth following.
Athletics (Philadelphia 1901–1954. Kansas City 1955–1967. Oakland 1968–present)
Braves (Boston 1883–1952. Milwaukee 1953–1965. Atlanta 1966–present)
Orioles (St. Louis Browns 1901–1953. Baltimore Orioles 1954–present)
Twins (Washington Senators 1901–1960. Minnesota Twins 1961–present)
Rangers (Washington Senators 1961–1971. Texas Rangers 1972–present)
Nationals (Montreal Expos 1969–2004. Washington Nationals 2005–present)
Giants (New York Giants 1883–1957. San Francisco Giants 1958–present)
Yankees (Baltimore Orioles 1901–1902. New York Highlanders 1903–1912. New York Yankees 1913–present)
Brewers (Seattle Pilots 1969. Milwaukee Brewers (AL) 1970–1996. Milwaukee Brewers (NL) 1997–present)
Angels (Los Angeles Angels 1961. Also played as the Anaheim Angels, California Angels, and presently, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim)
The Outlaws
THE 1972–74 OAKLAND A’S
The 1960s were one of the most tumultuous decades in American history. So many areas of society changed. Thanks to the civil rights movement, people of all colors were finally, after nearly two hundred years, protected under the law. America endured a long, bitter war in Vietnam that changed the way citizens viewed their government and the place of war in society. A growing movement to guarantee the rights of women would soon give women opportunities in America that did not exist before. In many ways, change was taking place in America so fast, people had difficulty keeping up.
Baseball was no different. Players and owners had never really gotten along, mostly because the players were underpaid and worse, for more than a hundred years, they were not allowed to change teams when their contracts expired. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the players began to organize as a group and fight the owners for their rights. If a guy who worked at a coffee shop or as a teacher or a lawyer was allowed to change whom he worked for, why couldn’t a baseball player?
The changes in the culture from the 1960s created a different kind of baseball player as the 1970s began. The 1970s players wore their hair longer, wore sideburns and mustaches. They spoke out more. In 1972, the players even went on strike for nine days, refusing to play until the owners improved their pension benefits.
The best team of the early 1970s, the Oakland A’s, also best represented this change. This was a different type of team for a different type of game. Baseball had always been considered one of the most traditional institutions in America, but the A’s weren’t interested in following tradition. For one hundred years, baseball players wore black baseball spikes. The A’s wore white baseball shoes. Players were often expected to be clean-cut and clean-shaven, as if they were in the military. The A’s wore mustaches and beards and long hair. Most baseball teams had two uniforms: home and away. The A’s owned five different uniform combinations. Some were all green. Some were all yellow. Some were green-and-yellow. Some were white.
The purists, the ones who felt baseball should never change, were outraged that the A’s dressed like a softball team and looked like a motorcycle gang. They were outraged at the owner of the team, Charlie Finley, who, in their eyes, showed no respect for baseball traditions, making his team look like circus clowns.
And the players, well, the Oakland A’s were a group of big personalities who did not always (or sometimes at all) like each other, but for three straight years, when they stepped on the field there was no better team. From 1972 until 1974 they won three straight World Series championships.
Everything that seemed new and different about the A’s wasn’t. When the A’s won their first World Series in 1972, beating Cincinnati in seven games, the club had only been in Oakland for five years, but the Athletics name was one of the oldest in baseball. They were first the Philadelphia Athletics, the team that dominated baseball from 1910 to 1914 and again from 1929 to 1932. In both cases, the owner, Connie Mack, found himself short on money despite having great teams, and he wound up breaking up his winning teams by selling off all of the A’s superstar players to other teams. The A’s fell on hard times and in 1955 they moved to Kansas City, where Finley bought them in 1960. The team played in Kansas City from 1955 to 1967 and never enjoyed a winning season.
In Oakland, the A’s had amassed an impressive group of players, just rising to power. The A’s finished 82–80 in their first year in Oakland.
There was Jim “Catfish” Hunter, a right-hander from North Carolina who did not fish and did not particularly like catfish, either. Instead, Finley had chosen the nickname to give him “personality.”
There was right-handed pitcher John “Blue Moon” Odom, who received his nickname as a child because his head was supposedly as round as the moon. And there was left-handed pitcher Vida Blue, a rookie sensation. Rollie Fingers, whose handlebar mustache made him look like a saloonkeeper from the 1800s, was the best relief pitcher in the game. The shortstop went by the name Campy Campaneris (his first name was actually Bert). There was Reggie Jackson, the young, brash, left-handed power hitter from Wyncote, Pennsylvania, who would become an all-time great.
Each of them did things as colorful as their nicknames. Jackson was the biggest star, a slugger who swung like Babe Ruth. One time, at the 1971 All-Star Game in Detroit, he hit a home run off Pittsburgh’s Dock Ellis that appeared headed to the moon if the floodlights high above Tiger Stadium hadn’t gotten in the way. In a game full of all stars, Reggie found a way to steal the show. Even when he struck out, which was often, he would leave fans in awe because of how hard he swung.
Each of these strong personalities had their reasons for disliking one another. Blue and Odom once got into a fistfight during the 1972 playoffs, as did Fingers and Blue, but the A’s did have one thing that united them as a team: their dislike of Finley, the owner who, they felt, underpaid them. The players believed he cheated them out of money he had promised them.
They were the strangest bunch, playing in green and gold uniforms and white shoes, fighting with themselves and with their owner. Once, when the team arrived in Detroit, a woman seeking an autograph approached Reggie Jackson. “Mr. Jackson, are there a
ny more of your friends on that bus?” Jackson looked at the woman and said, “Ain’t no friends on that bus.”
Finley tried every promotional trick to encourage fans to come see his team and to change the traditions of baseball. He changed the team’s mascot—historically an elephant since 1904—to a mule. Once, he petitioned the commissioner’s office to use fluorescent orange baseballs instead of white, to make them easier for players to see (that one never caught on).
When it came time to concentrate on the field and play championship baseball, however, few teams in history did it like this one.
In their first trip to the playoffs in 1971, the A’s were swept in three straight games by the defending World Series champion Baltimore Orioles. However, the next year, the A’s took off. The A’s faced Detroit and won a tight five-game series. Odom and Blue combined on a five-hitter to win a deciding fifth game and send the A’s to their first World Series since 1931, when the team was based in Philadelphia.
In the series, the A’s faced another budding powerhouse, the Cincinnati Reds, soon to be known as the Big Red Machine. The A’s were without Reggie Jackson, who had injured himself against Detroit. Blue saved the first game; Catfish Hunter won the second. Home in Cincinnati for Game 3, the Reds’ Jack Billingham outdueled Odom, 1–0, but the A’s rallied in Game 4 with two runs in the bottom of the ninth to win 3–2 and bring them within a game for the first Major League Championship in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The A’s, however, lost the next two games, forcing a winner-takes-all showdown. In Game 7, Odom was handed the ball to start, but it was Hunter, who entered the game in relief, who wound up the winning pitcher, 3–2. Fingers closed out the game for the save. The A’s were champions. Little-known catcher Gene Tenace hit .348 and was named the series MVP.
Legends: The Best Players, Games, and Teams in Baseball Page 5
