Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America

by David Halberstam

  More than anyone else, Phil Rizzuto, Coleman’s second-base partner, knew how tense Coleman was. He saw that he was constantly popping some kind of antacid pill. Several times that summer Coleman spiked Rizzuto at second base, not during plays but afterward, when they were talking to each other near the bag. When Coleman drove, he would constantly fiddle with the rearview mirror, adjust it, readjust it. The man, Rizzuto thought, could not be wound tighter. “Jerry,” Rizzuto would say, “relax. You and I don’t have to hit. We’re here for our fielding, not our hitting. You’re a good fielder. Be yourself. The rest will come.”

  Although the addition of Coleman immediately solidified the Yankee defense, the Red Sox, on paper, remained a far better hitting team. That meant that the Yankees’ edge was slim indeed and that a great deal depended on relief pitcher Joe Page. In the major leagues most of the pitching records are held by pitchers who played early in the century; yet the top fourteen relief pitchers, in terms of saves, all played after 1970. In the late forties, the art of relief pitching was relatively undeveloped. If a pitcher was good he was a starter. If he was not very good he might be a relief pitcher. Teams did not have bullpens in the modern sense of the word—rather they had several pitchers who were viewed by the manager as dubious starters. A star relief pitcher was someone who got 10 saves a year. Johnny Murphy, a reliever with the Yankees, got the nickname “Fireman” based on 8 or 9 saves a year.

  Joe Page was a left-hander with an exceptional fastball—it was not only fast but lively. When Page had first come up with the Yankees, he had been considered a pitcher of great promise. But given a choice between the pursuit of pleasure late at night and serious training, he always chose the former. Clarence Marshall, who roomed with Page in 1949, noted that Page slept in his room twice during the entire spring. Often there was a late-hour phone call from Page to Marshall: He had discovered a wonderful party in another hotel. Would Marshall like to join him? There was a lot of action going on.

  When Marshall declined, Page would put a young woman on. In the most seductive way possible she would repeat the invitation: “Clarence ... Joe ... says ... you’re ... even cuter ... than ... he ... is ...” Then Page would come back on. “Joe,” Marshall would tell him, “somehow you’re the kind of guy who can go through the hotel lobby at three A.M. and not get caught, and even if they catch you, your fastball is so good that they won’t do anything. But me, if I try it just once they’ll catch me and I’ll be on my way to Kansas City.”

  When Whitey Ford joined the Yankees in 1950, the first person to take him out on the town was Joe Page. The team was in Chicago. They went to a fight and then to dinner, and then, at about midnight, to a nightclub, and then, at one-thirty, to another nightclub. People complain about Page’s stamina on the field, Ford thought, but he’s showing me plenty of stamina tonight. At three-thirty Page took him to yet another club, this one called the Airline Club. There, to Page’s astonishment, a voice from inside announced that the club was closed. “But I’m Joe Page,” Page shouted, as if it were inconceivable that a nightclub could close with him on the outside.

  The next day Eddie Lopat asked Ford, “What’d you do last night, Whitey?” “Oh, I went to the fights with Joe and then had dinner with him,” Ford answered. “Get back early?” Lopat pushed. “Sure, about one o’clock,” Ford lied. “Then what the hell were you doing at the Airline Club at three-thirty?” said Lopat. “And don’t bullshit me—we were there.”

  Such lack of discipline was bound to infuriate Joe McCarthy. In 1946, early in the season, McCarthy exploded at Page after a series in Detroit. They were on a team plane and McCarthy sat next to him. He asked Page when he was going to shape up. He told him he was on the brink of failure, and wasting exceptional talent. As McCarthy lectured, Page seemed not to care. McCarthy grew angrier. “You know what I’m going to do with you?” he told Page. “I’m going to send you back to Newark—you can make your four hundred dollars a month there if you want.” But even that didn’t work. “You want to send me to Newark, send me to Newark,” Page answered. “Maybe I’ll be happier there, anyway.” But the next year McCarthy quit as manager.

  In 1946 Page won 9 and lost 8 despite his obvious talent. Then in 1947 he became a relief pitcher. On one memorable night he was called into a game against Boston in relief, with the sure knowledge that if he failed he would be either sent back to the minors or traded. With the bases loaded and a count of 3-and-0 on Rudy York he was one pitch away from the minors. He struck out York, and Doerr, and got Eddie Pellagrini on a soft pop. He had found his calling.

  Page seemed to blossom in his role as bullpen specialist. He even began to pal around with DiMaggio, though little of DiMaggio’s work ethic rubbed off. DiMaggio, more than anyone else on the team, seemed able to control him. Page absolutely revered DiMaggio; DiMaggio, in turn, was sympathetic. He understood the insecurities that turned off many of Page’s teammates. If they were at a restaurant and Page started boasting, showing his need to let the world know that he was Joe Page of the New York Yankees, DiMaggio would give him a cool look, and more often than not he would settle down. “Joe’s shadow,” the other Yankees called him. For a time they roomed together, and years later Mel Allen liked to tell the story of the day the news arrived that DiMaggio was going to marry Marilyn Monroe. The writers debated whether this was good for DiMaggio, until one of them said, “Well, it’s got to be better than rooming with Joe Page.”

  In 1947, Page proved he was able to pitch for two or three innings as he could not for seven or eight. He came in, took charge, and simply overwhelmed the hitters. That season he started only 2 games but relieved in 54 others. His earned-run average was 2.48, and he led the league in saves with 17, and in wins for a relief pitcher with 14. The Yankees won handily that year, and he had been a key part of the team’s success. In the seventh game of the World Series against the Dodgers, he simply blew the Dodgers away, pitching five innings of one-hit ball. After the game, reporters crowded around his locker and the first thing he said was, “What did the Dago say?” “Forget the Dago, Joe,” said writer Jimmy Cannon, “this is your day.”

  But Page was not a man to handle success well, and in 1948 he relapsed. Something was missing, a certain edge, an instinct to dominate. He appeared in almost as many games, 55, but his earned-run average ballooned up to 4.26, and he won only 7 games. In that season, when three teams had finished in a virtual tie, there was a belief among many Yankees that Page had cost them dearly. George Weiss put private detectives on him that summer and found out what he expected, but it made no difference. On certain matters Page was incorrigible.

  In 1949 they needed him badly and he seemed to be bouncing back. If anything happened to Page, it might mean trouble. Nothing brought that home better than a three-game series with the Athletics in Philadelphia on May 14 and 15. Philadelphia was a weak team, more often than not in the second division by then. The glory days of Connie Mack were long past. Going into Philly, the Yankees wanted nothing less than a sweep. They were playing well, three games ahead of Detroit and four ahead of Cleveland. Boston was still stumbling. But instead of a pleasant rest stop, Philadelphia turned into a nightmare. In the first game, on Saturday, Vic Raschi was a little wild, but the score was 5-2 Yankees when Page relieved in the bottom of the sixth. He made it through the sixth, although his control was obviously a problem. In the seventh he gave up three runs, and the score was tied. The As went on to win 8-5. To lose to a weak team would have been bad enough. To do it by blowing a big lead was worse, particularly when the game had been given to Raschi, the ace of the staff, and neither he nor Page, the team’s best reliever, could hold it.

  Sunday was even worse. It was a doubleheader. The first was started by Tommy Byrne, the talented left-hander whose only problem was chronic wildness. He was pulled and replaced by Frank Shea, who had a 7-3 lead in the seventh. Then it all began to unwind. Shea was hit hard, Page was brought in again, followed by Frank Hiller, and then Fred Sanford. Nothing worked. P
hiladelphia tied the score with 2 home runs in the ninth, the second coming with two out. Another lead had been squandered, and in the bottom of the eleventh the Athletics won it. It had been a hard game to lose: The Yankees had outhit the A’s 12-7, had left 11 men on base, and their pitchers had walked 11 men.

  In the second half of the doubleheader Allie Reynolds started. That was reassuring because he was a great money player and they needed a win badly. At the end of four innings the Yankees led 5-0. Reynolds was being hit, and had given up five walks, but nonetheless it appeared that the Yankees’ main problem was fighting the clock. There was a curfew on Sunday baseball in Philadelphia in those days and an inning could not be started after six P.M. With their fat lead the Yankees were desperate to make it legal and then get out of town. They got to the fifth but it was not yet six P.M. The sixth would be the final inning. The Yankees led 6-0 in the bottom of the sixth. Then it all disintegrated. It began with a single to Elmer Valo. Then a walk, then a hit. Then Reynolds walked in a run. A single brought in another run, and the Yankee relief pitchers started a procession to the mound—Bob Porterfield, Fred Sanford, and, finally, Joe Page. But the Athletics continued to walk and hit. Suddenly Valo was up again, singling off Page for a 7-6 Philadelphia victory. The game was over; the Yankees had lost.

  For the veterans, the train ride out was pure misery. Worst of all, Joe Page had failed in every appearance. Some of the younger players did not know how much that could mean, and they were playing a game of Twenty Questions. Suddenly Stengel walked through the dining car. Angry at Page, angry at himself for somehow not picking the right pitcher, and angry at the Athletics, Stengel said, his voice full of scorn, “I’ll give you the perfect question for it. Which one of you clowns won’t be here tomorrow?” That ended the game of Twenty Questions.

  Near the back of the dining car Tommy Henrich was having dinner with Mel Allen. If anything, Allen, the broadcaster, was more of a Yankee than the Yankees. He took losing very hard.

  “Three games to Philly,” Mel Allen was saying.

  “Can you believe Valo? Two hits in one inning? Criminy,” Henrich added, for he was a rare ballplayer who did not swear. They were both thinking that at the end of a season you can sometimes look back, remember a series like this, and see where it all slipped away. Just then Gus Mauch, the trainer, joined them.

  “It’s not so bad,” he said. “It’s just a ball game.”

  “No,” said Henrich, “it’s not just another ball game. It’s three games to a lousy club and we could have won all three. We blew those three games—we gave them away. It’s the way to lose a pennant.”

  “I don’t agree with you,” Mauch said. He was having a steak and cut into it. He had ordered it rare, but it was well done. He called the waiter over and sent it back.

  “Oh,” said Henrich, getting angrier by the minute, “you’ve got troubles. Your steak isn’t rare enough. That’s hard. That’s a bad day. I’m glad you sent it back. I’m sure they’ll cook you a better one.” Mauch saw how angry he was and let it pass. He had clearly joined the wrong table. It was the kind of night, Henrich decided later, when people could get in fights if they weren’t careful.

  Joe DiMaggio did not hang around with the team, for he could not bear to feel utterly useless. The pain in his foot had not gone away. He had been told by the doctors that nothing could be done for it except to rest. Patience was easy for a doctor with a forty-year career.

  DiMaggio lived in a hotel apartment in Manhattan. When he went out on crutches, he was immediately set upon by well-wishers. In the days before television, baseball players were not as recognizable as they are today, but DiMaggio was always distinctive—tall, powerfully built, with wide shoulders and a slim waist. He had a long, oddly handsome face with a prominent overbite.

  He took refuge at his favorite restaurant: Toots Shor’s. It was the great sports-celebrity hangout of its day. Bernard Shor (it was said by his patrons that only his mother had briefly called him Bernard before calling him Toots—short for Tootsie, the name derived from his long curls) was huge, boisterous, and aggressive, and seemed to come straight out of Damon Runyon. He had run Billy LaHiffs, a speakeasy in the day of Prohibition and a favorite hangout of Runyon’s. In the tamer age of legalized drinking, this gave him a certain raffish reputation. In the forties New York was famous for cab drivers and waiters who had hearts of gold under rude and insulting exteriors. Certainly no one mastered the style better than Toots Shor, who was, by nature, both sensitive and abrasive, and who raised it to an art form. He charmed by insulting. Shor loved to boast of a letter he had received from a patron from the Midwest who had praised the food and service but added, “however, if you hope to make it [the restaurant] a success, you’d better get rid of that fat slob of a headwaiter who spent most of his time insulting patrons.”

  If he insulted someone, that person was welcome. He was particularly skillful at using the technique with some of his more serious celebrities. It allowed them to shed some of the burden of their fame and relax—while being treated as VIPs. Shor was surprisingly nimble, indeed almost delicate in knowing how far to go, and when to stop.

  No one had ever been known to praise the food excessively, and if truth were known, the writers often spent several hours drinking there and then went on to eat elsewhere. That did not bother the proprietor, who made fun of fancy cuisine, anything that had sauces. Shor would sit down at select tables with his favorites and have a drink or two, sometimes quite a few more. The only night of the year he did not drink, Shor liked to boast, was New Year’s Eve. “That’s amateur night,” he would say. The draw was the crowd and the proprietor himself, who would introduce athlete to politician to Broadway or Hollywood star. It was at Shor’s, after all, that someone introduced Yogi Berra to Ernest Hemingway, “an important writer.” Berra, in one of his Hall of Fame Yogiisms, said, “Good to meet you. A writer, huh. What paper you with, Ernie?”

  Toots Shor’s was actually a men’s club, one that reflected the age, a time when New York still had three baseball teams. It was white, male, and boozy—hard-liquor boozy. Its patrons ate red meat. No one, in the proprietor’s view, was ever drunk; they were half loaded or three-quarters loaded. It was about baseball first and foremost—the players, the writers, and the executives, in that order. If a few professional football players happened to be hanging around, Shor would ask them if they would like to be introduced to DiMaggio—protocol demanded it.

  Shor placed great emphasis on having customers who, in his words, had class and behaved with class. DiMaggio had class. Joe Louis had class. Red Smith and Jimmy Cannon had class. Hemingway had it. Some of his customers, usually those who had been exiled for some transgression, took a somewhat more jaundiced view. In a long profile in The New Yorker, John Bainbridge quoted one dissident as saying of Shor, “He’s exactly the kind of guy who he would throw out of his own place.” Tourists, those who had read about this legendary New York spot in the newspapers, waited in line. The wait itself was something of a floor show. The masses could ogle while Shor bustled around the room, dropping in at tables and insulting new arrivals. “Whitey, Yogi, you bums, you guys are playing lousy but I’ll feed you anyway.”

  The local writers loved going there, for Shor had a good ear and an instinct for talent. He could sense when a journalist was on the rise. When Shor welcomed—or insulted—a writer, it meant that he had made it into the big time. It was virtually a rite of initiation; now he was a member of the city’s best sporting club. Drinks were somehow almost always free. Shor was almost as good to sportswriters who accompanied the visiting teams as he was to the New York writers. “What are you guys doing here?” he would ask. “It’s amazing you still got your jobs when you can’t even write a sentence in English.” Raymond J. Kelly, the New York Times sports editor, was not pleased by the skill with which Shor seemed to be able to maneuver himself and his restaurant into the Times’s columns. He once upbraided Effrat, a Shor’s regular, about it. “You are not
supposed to use our columns to publicize your personal friends,” he said. “I just used his name, I didn’t say it was his restaurant,” Effrat answered in what was not one of his strongest defenses.

  When there was a Yankee-Red Sox game or a World Series in town, the first place to be was the game and the second was Shor’s—at a good table afterward. Everyone seemed to be there. Earl Warren was there. Sinatra—Sinat to the owner—went there, although one time Shor must have gone too far. There was a moment that regulars remember of the proprietor running into the street after a furious Sinatra and shouting, “Sinat, Sinat, I didn’t mean it, Sinat, I didn’t mean it.” Jackie Gleason was always there early in his career, mostly on the tab, although when he tried to borrow two hundred dollars from Shor, the owner was outraged. Why, he yelled, did Gleason need to borrow money when he was already eating free? “To tip your waiters,” Gleason answered. “You don’t want them to think I’m a cheapskate.” When Shor died almost penniless in 1977, Gleason was among those who spoke. “Save me a table, pal,” he said, presumably turning to that big saloon in the sky.

  There was always action. Once Shor was sitting at a table with Hemingway, Cannon, and Leonard Lyons, the gossip columnist. Suddenly he broke into laughter. “What’s so funny, Toots?” Cannon asked. “I just realized I’m the only guy at this table who doesn’t think he’s the greatest writer in the English language.” No wonder writers loved it. For men like Red Smith and Jimmy Cannon, it was confirmation of one’s fame: Either man could walk in and be seated at Table One, which was the first table hard to the left after the giant circular bar. There they’d receive compliments on a column just printed and, while the sports world passed in review, pick up material for two or three more columns. “The mother lodge,” Smith called it.

  Women were most decidedly not welcome. A regular could bring, on rare occasion, his wife—the Missus, as wives were called. But if he brought her too often, he lost status. For women were not considered good customers. If they were ladies, they did not drink enough and they inhibited the men; if they drank, then they might be “lushes,” and that was worse. This misogyny was evident at the door. “You know I hate going there, Tommy,” Eileen Henrich once told her husband. “That maître d’ looks at you if you’re a woman and looks right through you. Can’t we please go to Sardi’s. They treat me as well as they treat you there.”