That afternoon, in the locker room, DiMaggio teased Rizzuto, who had knocked in two runs. “What are you trying to do, steal my RBIs?” he asked. Rizzuto, who had played with him for almost a decade, had never seen him so playful. Spec Shea went over to him and asked if he was in any pain. “Nothing hurts when you play like this,” he answered.
There was one game left. Raschi against Parnell—ace against ace that year: Raschi was 11-2 going in, Parnell was 10-3. If any Boston pitcher could stop DiMaggio in Fenway, it was Mel Parnell.
If there is such a thing as a natural in baseball, it was Parnell. He threw, both teammates and opponents thought, so effortlessly that it was almost unbelievable. He had fully intended to be a first baseman, not a pitcher. As a boy all he had wanted to do was hit. He played on a strong New Orleans high school team, where on occasion he would pitch batting practice to his teammates. “Stop throwing breaking stuff,” they would yell, and he would explain that he was throwing fastballs.
One day a Red Sox scout was in town to scout a teammate. Parnell’s team was short of pitchers, and his coach had asked him to pitch for the first time in his life. He struck out seventeen. The Boston scout, Ed Montague, reported back that they should go after Parnell. The Cardinals had already begun to make overtures to him and some of his high school teammates. In the thirties, the Cardinals under Branch Rickey had the best farm system in the country, and New Orleans was considered a Cardinal town. The local team, the New Orleans Pelicans, was a Cardinal farm team. Seven players from Parnell’s high school team signed professional contracts, six of them with the Cards. A couple of times Parnell pitched batting practice against the Pelicans and that heightened Cardinal interest. Soon Branch Rickey himself began to appear at the Parnell home. He was a dapper figure, very much the gent in derby hat and spats. Patrick Parnell, an engineer on the Illinois Central, loved to talk baseball, and here was one of the most famous men in baseball dropping in on him.
No one ever accused Branch Rickey of not being a wonderful salesman—whether he was selling God or major-league baseball or himself. He mesmerized the senior Parnell with stories of big-league baseball. Patrick Parnell thought Mr. Rickey a wonderful man and a religious man, but Mel Parnell took a harder look. Even though he was desperate to be a big-league ballplayer, he wanted no part of Branch Rickey or the Cardinals. They had a simple philosophy behind their system: Sign every talented kid they could for very little money, put them in a giant farm system, let them fight their way to the top, keep a handful of the best for themselves, and trade or sell a few others. (The penurious quality of the St. Louis organization was well known even within the largely penurious world of baseball. In 1948, the Cardinals had signed their great outfielder, Stan Musial, to a new contract of $28,000, the largest amount of money ever paid to a St. Louis ballplayer.) As their best players became slightly advanced, not so much in years as in salary, they would replace them with younger, less-expensive players. In one period, between 1938 and 1942, the Cardinals sold off a number of their best players for a total of $625,000 while steadily improving their team. “How can I sell so many players and still come up with a winning team?” Rickey said in an interview. “I’ll tell you. It’s mass production! And by that I mean mass production primarily in try-out camps and mass production primarily of pitchers.”
The Cardinals had three AAA teams, two AA teams, and a host of lesser ones. The Cardinal Chain Gang it was called by players caught within it and unable to get out. Mel Parnell at seventeen was smart enough to know he wanted something different. He had heard about Rickey’s sales pitch—golden-tongued, yet homey, and was wary of succumbing to it. Therefore, on the frequent occasions that Branch Rickey showed up at the Parnell house, Mel Parnell did not come home until he was sure that their guest had gone.
He signed with Boston, and entered the Boston farm system at the age of twenty. Parnell moved up quickly, and might have made the majors by the time he was twenty-five except for World War II, which took three years out of his career. By 1948 he was ready to pitch in Fenway. That part did not come naturally. He had been purely a power pitcher until then. But power pitchers, he knew, particularly left-handed ones, died young in Fenway. Howie Pollet, a talented young Cardinal pitcher who was a friend in New Orleans and who had pitched in Fenway in 1946, warned Parnell, “Mel, you can’t do it with the fastball. You’ll go up in big games against the best hitters in baseball and they’ll just sit on it and kill you.” So Parnell developed a slider by holding the ball differently, off the seams. Also, Joe Dobson, who had the best curve on the team, taught him something about throwing the curve. It was not a lesson that began well. “Dobson,” Parnell told Dobson, “why don’t you get the hell out of here—I know more about pitching than you’ll ever know.” Parnell and his friend Mickey Harris, who was also young and talented and left-handed, specialized in being cocky and fresh. They drove Joe Cronin crazy. “The two wise asses,” he would call them. Cronin would see them near the bench and he would say, “Out of here, you two wise asses, get out. Get down to the bullpen. Anywhere, but get out of here.”
Parnell was determined to figure out Fenway. Most pitchers, particularly left-handers, fearing the Wall, pitched defensively—outside to the right-handers. Parnell refused to buckle under. He would pitch inside and tight, especially to such big, powerful hitters as Lindell, DiMaggio, Keller, and Billy Johnson. He would pin their arms in against them so that they could not gain true leverage. It was later said that Hank Bauer and Mickey Mantle broke so many of their bats against him on sliders coming in to the narrow part of the bat that they felt he should buy them new ones. The hard part of pitching in Fenway, Parnell believed, was not the wall. Rather it was the lack of foul territory. The stands were right on top of the field. It was a fan’s delight but a pitcher’s nightmare, because a good many foul balls that were caught in other parks went into the stands at Fenway. A nine-inning game at Fenway would have been a ten-inning game anywhere else.
Statistics are not always the best gauge of players, but in Parnell’s case they are unusually revealing. In 1949 his earned-run average at home was 2.59, and on the road it was 3.02; for his career, his Fenway earned-run average was just slightly under his road one.
The Yankees were leading 3-2 in the seventh, a narrow margin in Fenway on a day when Raschi was in the process of giving up 12 hits. Again it came down to DiMaggio against the Red Sox pitcher. Stirnweiss had singled. Rizzuto had made the second out of the inning. Then Henrich had singled. Parnell stepped off the mound to think for a minute. He essentially called his own pitches. He did not trust catchers to do it because he did not think they had a feel for pitching; they could not, for example, feel the ball and know that the stitches on each ball are different, and as the stitches are different, the pitcher’s finger control is different. Parnell liked to take each ball, feel the stitches, and then make his own decision.
On this day his best pitch was his fastball, and he decided to go with it. The one thing he was not going to throw Joe DiMaggio was a change-up. As a rookie he had been in the bullpen during a series in the Stadium, and DiMaggio had come to the plate. Bill Zuber, a veteran pitcher, called Parnell over. “Kid,” he said, “whatever you do, don’t throw this guy a change. If you do, he’ll hit it into the third deck.” A few innings later, the Red Sox were in trouble. Zuber went into the game with DiMaggio up and men on base. To Parnell’s amazement, Zuber threw a change. DiMaggio hit it into the third tier. It hooked foul at the last moment. Zuber pitched again. Another change. Again DiMaggio jumped on it, and this time it carried into the third tier, fair. That was the game. Afterward, Parnell saw Zuber in the locker room hitting his head against the wall, saying, “Dumb Dutchman! Dumb goddamn Dutchman! I tell the kid not to throw the change and then I do it myself! Dumb goddamn Dutchman!”
DiMaggio was a great hitter on a tear, and if Parnell was going to win, he wanted to win with his best pitch, and if he was going to be beaten, it might as well also be with his best pitch. His firs
t pitch was a fastball just where he wanted it; DiMaggio lifted a high foul to the right side of the infield. Parnell breathed a sigh of relief. Billy Goodman was playing first, and the ball hit the heel of his glove and dropped out. Strike one. Parnell came back with the same pitch. Again DiMaggio fouled it off, this time with a squiggly little ball near the plate. Parnell began to feel very confident because he had DiMaggio 0-and-2. This time he decided to make him go fishing, and threw just off the outside corner. Another batter behind in the count might have gone for it. DiMaggio did not. Ball one. Parnell decided to waste another one, this time on the inside. Again DiMaggio did not bite. Parnell did not want to come in to DiMaggio on a 3-and-2 count and so he threw his best fastball. With a great hitter like DiMaggio, finally you challenged him. DiMaggio, who had been waiting for a fastball, killed it. The ball hit the steel towers in left field. For the next five minutes Parnell was sure that all Joe DiMaggio could hear was the cheers of the crowd, while the only thing he could hear was the steel ringing from the impact of the ball. Over Fenway flew a small biplane trailing a banner that said: THE GREAT DIMAGGIO.
It made the score 6-2. Raschi finished the game, and the Yankees swept the series. DiMaggio, in three games, had absolutely demolished the Red Sox: four home runs and nine runs batted in. It was the sweetest of all returns, and after that game, in the madness of the Yankee locker room, DiMaggio walked past Jerry Coleman and grinned, which was unusual; it was as close as he ever came to boasting or gloating. “You can’t beat this life, kid,” he said.
In the broadcast booth Mel Allen was ecstatic. As he had for more than a decade, he was relaying over the airwaves that day his affection—reverence, even—for DiMaggio. “His fourth home run!” he shouted when DiMaggio hit the last one off Parnell. “What a comeback for Joe!” It was, he noted years later, one of the greatest performances he had ever witnessed, and it was achieved by a player he admired more than any other.
Once when Allen’s parents came to New York to visit him, he gave them tickets to a game. Afterward his mother said to him, “Son, I think today I finally understood why I’ve heard so much about DiMaggio and why he means so much to you.” “Why is that?” he asked her. “Well, I just watched the way he trotted onto the field, and he was different from the others—he did it so regally,” she answered.
Allen’s and DiMaggio’s careers were twined; radio as a prime instrument of sports communication, and Mel Allen as one of its foremost practitioners, ascended at the very moment that Joe DiMaggio did. And both were in New York, the city from which much of America’s broadcasting originated and where its great advertising firms and communications companies were headquartered. The Yankees were the dominant team, and Mel Allen amplified that dominance. With a soft, almost silky voice, and a natural feel for the microphone, he not only brought the fan into the Stadium but also projected a sense of intimacy with the players; Allen made the fan feel as if he were a part of the greater Yankee family. He would begin by painting a word portrait of the crowd that day, or of the way the players looked. He used the crowd noise with great dexterity, letting it infect the listener at home with excitement. “The big crowd,” he would say, “is roaring on every pitch.” He used the crowd noise, in his own words, as a chorus. You could not, he warned, ever beat it, so you tried to anticipate it, get the essential call in just ahead of it.
Television would be different in many ways, not least of all for the athletes. In the beginning it seemed to bring them greater fame, but in time it became clear that the fame was not so much greater as quicker. More often than not, it also evaporated sooner. For soon, of course, television would produce overkill: too many seasons of too many sports overlapping, too many athletes whose deeds were played and replayed endlessly on videotape. As radio was an instrument that could heighten the mystique of a player, television eventually demythologized the famous. It is no coincidence that DiMaggio’s fame was so lasting, and that he was the last great hero of the radio era.
DiMaggio became something of a television huckster much later in his life. But his fans, looking at this gray-haired figure selling a bank or coffee, did not resent him for doing this. Because when DiMaggio had played, his fans were left with nothing but the deeds. Back then they listened to the deeds and created in their minds a man as heroic off the field as on. Radio, after all, demanded the use of the fan’s imagination as television did not.
It was DiMaggio’s good fortune to play in an era when his better qualities, both athletic and personal, were amplified, and his lesser qualities simply did not exist. If he did something magnificent on the field, he was not on Johnny Carson the next night, awkward and unsure of himself, mumbling his answers as a modern athlete might. Rather, he had Mel Allen to speak for him. It was the almost perfect combination: his deeds amplified by Mel Allen’s voice.
He was raised Melvin Israel in small towns in Alabama, where his parents, with marginal success, ran the local dry-goods stores. Mel Israel’s mother wanted him to be a concert violinist, but somewhere along the way he got sidetracked. He was bright and precocious and went to the University of Alabama, where he picked up both an undergraduate degree and a law degree. He also wrote for the school newspaper, and made the public address for the Alabama football team as well as broadcast their games for a Birmingham radio station (the station had asked Frank Thomas, the football coach, for someone who could announce the games, and Thomas, not knowing there was a difference between being the PA announcer and a broadcaster, had suggested Mel Israel).
When he graduated from Alabama in 1936, he went to New York, more on a lark than anything else. But radio was in the back of his mind. He stopped by a new network called CBS for an audition. He had heard stories of these auditions—they were said to be held in a small, dark room without windows. There he would be told to improvise and describe some imaginary scene. (This turned out not to be true.) He was supposed to go back to Alabama and teach speech for $1,800 a year. But the people at CBS were impressed, and they offered him a job at $45 a week—some $500 more a year than Alabama was offering. They also requested he change his name because a Jewish name might become a hindrance to his career.
He accepted the CBS job, much to the annoyance of his father. Julius Allen Israel felt that he had sacrificed for this young man’s education, and that a career as a lawyer was more proper. “All you’re going to do on radio is talk,” his father warned. What was worse was the imminent change of name: “What’s so bad with Mel Israel?” To appease him, he took his father’s middle name. Thus did he become Mel Allen. He promised his father he was going to do this only for a short time. “You’ll never come back,” Julius Israel said prophetically.
Allen’s first job was doing organ selections on the mighty Wurlitzer on a morning show. There was precious little baseball on radio at the time. In 1937 radio did the Opening Day game and the World Series, but not the regular-season games. Other cities might broadcast their baseball games, but not New York—because there were three teams, and because the owners were all traditionalists who feared that radio would draw fans away from the park. They made a three-way agreement to ban virtually all broadcasting of games.
But by 1939, when the agreement was finished, Larry MacPhail had arrived in Brooklyn, the new owner of what was traditionally the weakest and poorest of the three teams. MacPhail enraged the purists—he put lights in the stadiums and broadcast his games. One of his first acts was to hire the immensely gifted Red Barber as his broadcaster and to do all his home games live. That opened up the broadcasting of baseball in New York.
Mel Allen had always hoped that it would happen. In 1937 and 1938 he had gone regularly to Yankee Stadium, where, seated in the back row, behind first base, as far from other fans as he could get, he transformed himself into Mel Allen, Secret Announcer. He would call the pitches, describe the crowd, talk about the players: “Well, folks, that brings up Lou Gehrig and Lou has one hit today, and his average is right at three-fifty and I know he’d like to push that avera
ge up just a little ...” If someone sat nearby, Allen would stop. But that was not really a problem. One of the first things an outsider realizes about New York, he soon decided, was that there are hundreds and hundreds of people who go around all day long talking to themselves. Sometimes he would watch the game and the crowd and think to himself, God, I would give anything to broadcast from here.
In 1939, the local CBS station secured a contract to do the Yankee and Giant home games, and Mel Allen became the assistant sportscaster for Arch McDonald. The job was open because McDonald’s previous assistant had referred to Ivory Soap as Ovary Soap. A year later, McDonald, judged too bucolic for New York, was back in Washington and Mel Allen was the principal broadcaster. The Yankees were in the final phase of their transition from the Ruth-Gehrig era to the DiMaggio era. Ruth had last played in 1934, and 1939 was to be Gehrig’s last year. In 1938 he seemed to be slowing down, but no one could believe at first that it was illness. Allen remembered being in the dugout the day that Gehrig asked to be taken out. Gehrig sat and cried. Lefty Gomez went over and put his arm around him and said, “Don’t feel badly, Lou. It took twenty-one hundred thirty games to get you out, and sometimes it only takes fifteen minutes to get me out of a game.”
Sometimes during that season Gehrig would visit the team. On one occasion he came over to Mel Allen and told him how much he liked what Allen was doing. “You know, Mel,” he had said, “I never understood the importance of your broadcasts because I never got to listen, but now I’ve got to tell you that the one thing that keeps me going is hearing your broadcasts.” Allen excused himself, walked up the runway, and burst into tears.
The reward for what he was doing was never the money—in the early days he did not make very much, perhaps $15,000 a year. The real reward was in living a dream. This was the best of all possible substitute lives. He was wedded to the mike. That was his love. He never married. His family moved to suburban New York and he lived at home. His mother, a powerful personality, made clear to the young women who went out with him that if they were serious about her son, there was a hard road ahead. He was often seen in the company of stunning young women, but Tom Meany, the sportswriter, would always say, “Here comes Mel Allen with the future Miss Jones.”
Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America Page 16
