On the previous weekend, the Red Sox had been in town, and there had been a lot of betting, particularly on the four best Red Sox hitters: Dom DiMaggio, Pesky, Williams, and Stephens. Maury Allen had a little spiral notebook and he had dutifully written down the bets: Goldberg—Pesky, D. DiMaggio, Williams. The Yankees had won the Friday game behind Vic Raschi, and while Dom DiMaggio had gotten three hits, Raschi had closed off the middle of the batting order. There was heavy betting for Saturday and Sunday as well, but Allen was not worried—on Saturday Eddie Lopat was pitching. Lopat was a bookie’s delight, and a good hitter’s nightmare. On Sunday Allie Reynolds was pitching. The odds could not have looked better. The Yankees did indeed win on Saturday. But on Sunday everything came apart for Maury Allen. Dom DiMaggio opened the game with a single and then Pesky hit a home run into the right-field seats. That was a bad omen. Dominic went on to have three hits that day, Pesky also had three, Williams two, and Bobby Doerr and Junior Stephens one apiece.
Allen was cooked. Almost everyone who bet with him had beaten him. He owed fifteen dollars, far more than he had in reserve. He could not afford to go to school that Monday, and had to spend the day borrowing from every member of his family, particularly his brother. That Red Sox victory, 11-2, did not derail the Yankees from first place, and it left Boston still in sixth place. But it ended Maury Allen’s career as a bookmaker.
CHAPTER 6
THE RED SOX HAD gone on a hitting rampage in New York—all of them, it seemed, except Bobby Doerr, their All-Star second baseman. He had ended up with two hits in twelve at-bats for the three games. It was typical of the way the season had been going for him so far. As April passed, he thought it was merely a slow start. By May it was a slump. In June, he was still hitting only .207. It was especially humiliating because in the spring he had predicted not only a good start for himself but also for the entire team. Now the team was dragging, and he was one of the main reasons. Doerr found himself confronting the secret fear that haunted all ballplayers: that this was something serious, the first signs of the end of his career. He was thirty-one. Previously he could count on hitting about .290, with between 90 and 110 runs batted in each year, and he could field well. He was so steady that his career was exceptional for that reason. By the time his career was over he ended up playing fourteen years of major-league ball, all with one team, Boston—1,865 games in all. He had never played any position other than second base. Now, at the peak of his career, he was slumping and he had no idea what was wrong. He was not seeing the ball well against ordinary pitchers, against whom he normally hit well. It got so bad that Birdie Tebbetts, the catcher, suggested that Doerr have his eyes examined. Doerr went to an ophthalmologist in Malden, Massachusetts, who assured him that whatever it was that was going bad, it was not his eyes.
Doerr was easily the most popular member of the Red Sox, and possibly the most popular baseball player of his era. He was so modest and his disposition so gentle that his colleagues often described him as “sweet.” He was the kind of man other men might have envied had they not liked him so much. In 1929, when Doerr was an eleven-year-old growing up in Los Angeles, someone had told him that baseball players made $10,000 a year. The sum had been beyond his comprehension. He thought to himself, Wouldn’t that be something, to make big money like that doing what I love best.
Doerr was a child star in baseball, so good in high school and with the American Legion that when he was only sixteen he was offered a contract to play with the Hollywood Stars of the Pacific Coast League. (By the time he showed up, they were the San Diego Padres.) Doerr was so excited that he could barely think of anything else. His older brother was already playing with the Portland team in the same league. Because he was being asked to give up high school, his father, who worked for the telephone company, had to grant permission. The Hollywood Star people offered a two-year guaranteed contract at $200 a month. His father thought about it a great deal, and finally said yes, he would give his approval, if Bobby agreed to come back in the winter to continue studying for his high school degree. “I want you to save all the money you can,” the elder Doerr said, “and buy stock in the telephone company,” a suggestion that the young Doerr heeded for his entire career. Then Bobby Doerr and his father, in what was the most exciting moment of Doerr’s life, went to Sears, Roebuck and bought a suitcase for his new life.
In San Diego he looked too young to be a professional baseball player and on occasion was barred from a clubhouse or two. Once he took batting practice using Fred Haney’s bat, a mistake he would not make again because Haney was so angry. His time with the Padres was remarkably happy. He met a player almost as young as he, but in some ways even less grown up. His name was Ted Williams. As the two youngest members of the team, they hung out together, and when the 1936 season was over, Doerr, who loved the outdoors, introduced Williams to fishing (which, of course, Williams denies; as he remembers it, he introduced Doerr to fishing). That began a fifty-year friendship.
Doerr was as comfortable with himself as Williams was not. He knew he was talented (he was to enter the Hall of Fame in his sixties, driving across the country in a van with his family, including his ninety-three-year-old mother, to attend the ceremonies), but he did not push himself obsessively, as did Williams. The difference on occasion drove Williams crazy. For Doerr often could not pass the Williams Test—the oral exam Williams administered after any hit, and with particular urgency after a home run. Williams would want to know exactly what kind of pitch Doerr had hit. Sometimes Doerr did not know. Instinct had won out: He had swung, the ball had left the park, it had worked. Williams would start cursing him, “Jesus, Bush, how can you not know? You’re too goddamn dumb to play in this league.” Doerr never minded—that was just Ted being Ted. Indeed, even when he did know he would tell Williams that he didn’t, in order to infuriate him. “I can’t understand it,” Williams would tell Doerr. “You could be a three-hundred hitter—it’s all there for you.” “Ted, damn it,” Doerr would reply, “I take as much extra hitting as you, I love to hit as much as you do, but I’m a middle infielder, and I’m in the game on every pitch, and it drains you terribly—and affects your concentration on hitting.” There would be a grunt from Williams, neither of assent nor dissent, and the subject would be closed, for the moment at least.
In South Hadley, Massachusetts, in that summer of 1949, Bartlett Giamatti was taking Bobby Doerr’s slump almost as hard as Doerr was. Bart, son of Valentine and Mary Giamatti, was eleven years old, and Bobby Doerr was his favorite player. The son of a professor of Italian at Mount Holyoke, and one day to be a professor himself, he identified powerfully with Doerr.
He had chosen Doerr carefully. Ted Williams was beyond his reach as a role model; it was all right for a devoted Red Sox fan to admire him, but it would have been immodest, indeed improper, to emulate him. That was left to those boys who were the best hitters in their towns. Bart Giamatti was not that good a hitter. So Williams was out. Since he had not been blessed with a great arm, Bart liked to play second base, which was the shortest throw in the field. That was Bobby Doerr’s position. From careful reading of the newspapers and listening to Jim Britt, the Red Sox broadcaster, Bart knew that Bobby Doerr was extremely popular with his teammates and not a carouser. Everyone on the team was said to look up to him. That made him a perfect role model, especially for a professor’s son.
Life in South Hadley was very quiet: There were no movie theaters, no television yet. Home video games were still forty years away. Even though Giamatti had visited Fenway Park only once, he saw it in his mind every day as he listened to the games on the radio—they were as immediate as if he were actually there. He had converted his room into a baseball museum, with pictures of players that he had drawn himself. In that sanctuary, he had become expert at turning the radio in different directions in order to pick up the signal, which was especially weak when the weather was stormy.
He was not sure whether baseball had more meaning for him because he was th
e son of immigrants—the sport could have been seen as a shortcut to the center of American culture. But he did keep his own all-Italian all-star team: catcher, Berra; first base, Camilli; second base, Lazzeri; shortstop, Rizzuto; third base, Crosetti; outfielders, Dom DiMaggio, Joe DiMaggio, Mele, Zarilla, and Furillo; pitchers, Raschi and Maglie. That he was starting as many as six Yankees did not bother him. There are loyalties, and there are loyalties; sometimes they intersect, sometimes they do not.
Years later, as president of Yale University, and soon to become Commissioner of Baseball, Giamatti would try to analyze why baseball had meant so much to him. Baseball was, he thought, the first comprehensible topic for a young person of that generation. Sex, God, war, and politics were strictly adult topics; but with baseball he could read the newspapers and listen to the radio and know that this was important and that these men were great. Then he could go out and emulate their acts. He could be Bobby Doerr.
He had already learned that being a Red Sox fan brought a certain amount of pain with the pleasure. Three years earlier he had sat with his friends in Frankie White’s garage listening to Country Slaughter score ahead of Johnny Pesky’s throw. There would be more to come, but he would endure. In the meantime, he was still worried about Bobby Doerr’s slump. He knew all about the trip to the eye specialist. He feared that the career of his hero might be coming to an end. Then slowly and steadily, starting in late June, Bobby Doerr began to see the ball better and to hit. And then Bartlett Giamatti also began to see the ball better, and they both began to breathe easier.
The Yankees continued to play well. Henrich’s clutch hitting was extraordinary. It was important in understanding the Yankee strength in those days to know that they did not win so much on power, though many people thought they did, nor even on pitching. They won by playing well in tight games, by not beating themselves with mental errors, and by sheer concentration, both in the field and at bat. One of the first things Joe McCarthy told Mel Allen when the latter began broadcasting Yankee games was, “You’ve heard all that stuff about Murderers’ Row. Don’t believe it. We don’t win on power. We win on defense and good pitching.”
Another strength of the team was turning out to be the rookie second baseman, Jerry Coleman. His play around second base was the best that many of the Yankees had seen since Joe Gordon had been in his prime. At the start of the season Coleman had thought his transition from minor to major league would be gradual, that George Stirnweiss might play the first seven innings or so, and then if the Yankees were way ahead he might come in. But early in the season Stirnweiss bruised a nerve in his hand and the job had become Coleman’s.
To Coleman’s mind there was glory in being a Yankee—you were the best; but there was also a monstrous quality to it, in the need to live up to the almost unbearable expectations of others. He thought of his skills as marginal. He was not a great spray hitter and he certainly lacked power. He was there only for defensive reasons. If he blew a play in the field and cost them a game, then he was a liability. He was playing with less room for failure than almost anyone else on the team. He lived in terror of making the key error that would cost the Yankees not just a game but a pennant. It was not so much the fans he feared as his teammates. He desperately wanted their approval. For Coleman was not just a rookie, he was a Yankee rookie. As a result, he felt overwhelming tension from the moment he woke up each day.
He began the season batting at the top of the order. He would wake up every morning thinking of the game they were going to play that day. Should he hit the first pitch or should he wait? That question would hang on him all morning—whether or not to go after the first pitch. Finally Stengel understood the pressure he had placed on Coleman, and switched the batting order, putting Coleman at the bottom. When the season was over, Coleman realized that he had not enjoyed a decent breakfast all season. All his stomach could handle was boiled eggs and cream of wheat. In a very short time he developed serious ulcers. He was amused when fans and writers told him how cool and confident he looked out on the field. The release from the pressure came only once the game began. Then his own inner doubts receded as instinct took over. Those were the blessed hours of his day. He gradually came to realize that he was doing all right, perhaps even better than anyone expected. But he also knew there would be no real acceptance until he had shown that he could do as well in his second year. Only then would he be a real Yankee.
Coleman finally understood that most of the other Yankees, rookie and veteran, felt the same terrible pressure: DiMaggio smoked cigarettes and drank coffee between innings and developed his own set of ulcers; Tommy Byrne got up at three A.M. on the days that he was going to pitch and wrote letters to his wife; Bobby Brown ground his teeth like a machine gun; Vic Raschi behaved like a bear on the mornings he was going to pitch.
Coleman did not feel that he had the natural skills to be a second baseman. In addition, he was learning in front of the largest audience imaginable—40,000 people every day. It was the Crow who probably saved him, he thought. The Crow was Frank Crosetti, the veteran Yankee infielder who had retired after the 1948 season. With seventeen seasons behind him, he dated back to the era of Ruth and Gehrig. Not many outsiders understood Crosetti, a reserved man who carefully removed himself from anything outside of the game itself. Other players did not necessarily like reporters, but they understood the uses of publicity. Crosetti was different. He made no bones about his dislike of them. They, in turn, quickly grew to resent him. Why bother interviewing him, they decided, since he had nothing to say. Crosetti did not mind at all: They were not ballplayers; what they did was, in his mind, absolutely extraneous.
The Yankees were not just a family to Crosetti, they were a religion. Within that religion, arrogance was a sin. He was always on guard against it. If the Yankees won three in a row and the players started celebrating in the locker room, the Crow would look at them coldly and say, “Don’t be so gay when you’re all full of shit.” He did not congratulate batters who hit home runs except, it was said, Maris on the occasion of his sixty-first and Mantle on the occasion of his five-hundredth. He did not congratulate them because they had merely done what they were supposed to do. Coleman understood that Crosetti was probably the last of a generation to whom the idea of the Yankees would mean so much; Coleman’s own generation of Yankees, serious though the players might be, had enjoyed greater advantages in childhood, and their loyalties were more complicated.
Crosetti knew everything about Yankee baseball, and almost nothing about anything else. He had no time for the ancillary pleasures of the season. He did not attend the victory parties that celebrated World Series wins. His car was already packed as the Series wound down, and the moment the last game was over, he left as quickly as he could and drove back to California. In 1949 one of the rookies asked Crosetti if he had ever attended a victory celebration? Yes, he answered, once—in 1932, his rookie year. Why not since then, Crow? the player wondered. “No need to,” Crosetti answered.
That spring and summer of 1949 Crosetti was assigned to work with Bobby Brown and Jerry Coleman every day in infield practice. He was like a drill instructor, thought Coleman, who had already served one tour of duty in the marines. Their habits had to be perfect, he would tell them, because if their habits were perfect then they would become instincts: They would do things right during the game without even having to think. There might be 20,000 fans already in the stands waiting for a big game while Brown and Coleman took infield practice, but Crosetti would yell at them nonetheless: “Set yourself! Set yourself! How many times do I have to tell you to set yourself!”
Do it the right way, he would insist. That meant catching a ball with two hands. He hated one-handing the ball—that was for showboats, not Yankees. Sometimes near the end of a workout, with the stands already filling and the last round of batting practice almost finished, Brown and Coleman would needle him by taking throws one-handed. He would yell, “That’s it! That’s enough! You guys are screwing around! You�
�re nothing but screw-offs!” And he would stomp off the field, leaving them giggling yet embarrassed in front of the huge crowd.
The hardest part for Coleman was the pivot—learning how to take the ball from the shortstop and then move toward first on the throw. It had not seemed natural at first. But Crosetti understood this and advised, “Just catch it and throw it. Do it by instinct. Don’t think about it. Just do it, do it, do it! Catch it and throw it.”
Coleman slowly realized that Crosetti approved of him. But privately Crosetti worried about Coleman. He told Coleman’s friends on the team to make sure that he had a beer before dinner to help him relax. He told them to keep him from eating just bread and butter (out of sheer nervousness Coleman would devour the bread and then not eat dinner).
That season Coleman had another mentor as well. Tommy Henrich had emerged as the team leader. He was very helpful to the younger ballplayers, and equally hard on them if they failed to live up to his expectations. Once in an early season game, Coleman took a pop fly. He had been quite pleased with himself, but later, when they were in the dugout between innings, Henrich came over to him. “Jerry,” he said, “this is the Yankees. We’re a family. We don’t have any secrets among us. If you want the ball, yell for it.”
To Coleman, with DiMaggio out and Keller still limited physically, Henrich was the symbol of the Yankees. He desperately wanted to please him. But Henrich was not easily pleased. When they talked, Coleman always had the sense that Henrich was peering inside him. Perhaps, Coleman thought later, that ability to withhold his approval was how Henrich made others live up to his standards.
Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America Page 12
