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

by David Halberstam

  Gradually he created a signature language. If there was a play that excited him, he would intone, “How about that?” A home run was not just a home run, it was a ball that he virtually rode—“Going, going ... it is gone.” Tommy Bryne was not just a pitcher who hit well, he was “one of those gooood hittin’ pitchers.” “How often is it,” he would say when a player led off the inning, “that when a player makes a spectacular play in the field he leads off the next inning.” If a pitcher had very little on a given day, Allen did not say that he was pitching poorly, he said instead that the pitcher had plenty of moxie. And he was always selling beer. No one did the transition from the game to commercial better: “Little Phil made a great play on that last ball, and you’ll make a great play for yourself if you open up a Ballantine beer.” Between innings would come the full commercial: “If you’re listening in at your favorite tavern, don’t just say ‘one up,’ but be sure to ask the man for Ballantine. Enjoy the two B’s, baseball and Ballantine. As you linger over that sparkling glass of Ballantine beer, as you feel it trickle down your throat, you’ll say, ‘Ah, man, this is the life!’ Baseball and Ballantine beer. And while we linger on this pleasant subject, folks, I’d like to remind you that it’s a smart idea to keep plenty of Ballantine on ice at home, to serve at mealtimes, to enjoy during leisure hours, so at your dealer’s be sure to look for the three rings. Ask him for Ballantine beer.” Listening, one could always sense his pleasure in every aspect of what he did.

  When Allen switched to television he did not like it nearly as well. His words became extraneous. Such writers as Jack Gould of the Times often criticized him for talking too much during a telecast. There was no small measure of truth there, Allen thought. Television, he soon decided, was a medium in which both the broadcaster and the fan became lazy—the broadcaster because he had to let the camera do so much of the work and the fan because he did not have to use his imagination. Allen felt he had a less-intimate relationship with his viewers.

  CHAPTER 9

  AFTER JOE DIMAGGIO LEFT Boston’s pennant hopes a shambles, the Red Sox lost three in a row to the Athletics, and then went to New York for a July 4 doubleheader. There, in the first game, they played what Bobby Doerr thought was their toughest game of the year.

  The Stadium was a hard park for the Red Sox. Among the hitters, only Williams had no problem with its vast spaces. Yankee pitchers traditionally honored him by keeping the ball away, and, more often than not in late innings, by walking him. On this day the Red Sox were hitting Raschi relatively hard (they were to outhit the Yankees 10 to 5, but they went into the ninth inning of the first game trailing 3-2). Dominic DiMaggio, who had homered for one of the Boston runs, struck out to lead off the inning. Then Pesky singled to center, and Williams followed with a single to right. Raschi worked Junior Stephens so carefully that Stephens walked.

  That loaded the bases and brought up Al Zarilla, the right-fielder. There was still only one out. Doerr, standing in the on-deck circle, knew that all Zarilla had to do was get the ball in the air, and they had a tie score. Raschi seemed to be tiring. Just then the ball park turned dark: A sudden, violent wind storm blew into the Stadium. Score-cards and debris swirled out of the stands. The game was halted for a moment while the worst blew over. Doerr remembered thinking that wind was a problem in Yankee Stadium because much of it was three-tiered—thus it held in the wind. The storm diminished somewhat, and play resumed, though it was still dark. Forty years later Doerr could still see the events that followed, moment by moment, unfolding as if in slow motion. Zarilla lined a ball sharply to right field, a clean hit for a guaranteed tie score. Cliff Mapes charged the ball, ready to throw. The play was, of course, not about Pesky, who was on third; it was about Williams, at second, and whether two runs rather than one would score. Mapes cut loose with the throw, certain even as he let go that he had made an almost perfect play.

  Then Doerr looked from right field to third and saw Pesky just beginning to race for the plate. He was shocked. Pesky should have been virtually upon the plate by that time. What had happened was this: Pesky had taken a normal lead—he had broken for the plate when Zarilla hit the ball. But when he was about twenty feet down the line, he had stopped. For in the darkness he could not see clearly enough to tell whether Mapes would catch the ball. As he started for home, he heard the third-base coach, Kiki Cuyler, yelling at him to tag up. So he went back to third. (Both the Yankee shortstop Rizzuto and the third baseman Billy Johnson said that they thought Pesky had played it right. From that angle, it was hard to be sure the ball would fall in.) As Pesky got back to third, he saw Williams roaring toward him, almost on top of him. Williams was screaming at him to go for home. Pesky stumbled momentarily and then raced for home.

  Normally Mapes’s throw would have been cut off by the first baseman, Dick Kryhoski. But Mapes did not intend this and threw over Kryhoski’s head; the ball headed for Yogi Berra on one bounce. On the base paths there was utter confusion. Williams was yelling at Pesky; Stephens had rounded second and was now heading back to it. Zarilla, previously the bearer of a 0 for 14 slump and thrilled with this clutch hit, was watching Mapes as he made his turn past first. When Mapes had gone home with the play, Zarilla started for second, only to see Stephens coming back to the same base. There was only one person who seemed to understand the entire play, Doerr later realized, and that was Yogi Berra. Berra had seen Pesky come down the line and then go back to tag. He waited for Mapes’s throw, not crouched down protecting the plate but in front of it, body extended, like a first baseman, stretching for the ball. He took the ball on the first bounce while keeping his left foot on the plate. A fraction of a second later Pesky slid in. Joe Papparella, the home-plate umpire, seeing no tag, called him safe. Berra got ready to charge Papparella. “He’s out!” Berra screamed. “You never tagged him,” the umpire yelled back. “Look at third base—it’s a force play,” Berra shouted. Then in an instant Papparella understood: It had been a force play at the plate. “No—you’re out!” Papparella yelled at Pesky, reversing himself.

  Doerr stood there in utter disbelief. A sure run, perhaps two, had become the second out. Now he was batting with the bases loaded against a tough right-handed pitcher.

  At least the wind was with him, for it was blowing out to right. Raschi threw him a ball out over the plate, and when Doerr swung, he was sure that he had gotten all of it, that it was a certain home run. He had hit it toward right, where the grandstand rises in three tiers. He watched Mapes go back to the fence. Then in one terrible glance he watched Mapes, his back almost touching the wall, start to come in one step and then another. Then he caught the ball. Doerr had been cheated by a rare combination of the wind and the contours of the ball park: The wind had swept into the right-field wall and then bounced off, reversing its direction to come back toward the field, carrying the ball back with it.

  In the second game the Yankees won again, in part because of DiMaggio’s fifth homer against Boston in a week. For Boston it seemed just another missed opportunity in a season that abounded with them. They were twelve games out of first place, and they were emotionally exhausted. Again the spotlight fell on Williams, and again the question of leadership was raised, fair or not.

  For the Red Sox, pitching was critical. In the years when their pitching was stabilized, the team was very tough. But when the pitching was weak, the team’s other vulnerabilities—its lack of speed, its weakness away from Fenway Park, the inflated statistics of some of its stars—were emphasized. And then Williams was blamed. It was always more fun to write about him than about the team’s real problems.

  With the first 50 games completed, the Red Sox had won 25 and lost 25. They were twelve games out of first place. Their pitching rotation was barely set. They had no bullpen. They were not going to win Harold Kaese’s 124 games. They were going to be lucky to win 85 games. After the July Fourth weekend, Williams’s foremost journalistic nemesis, a Boston columnist named Colonel Dave Egan, said the time had come to
trade him. He wrote, “[Williams] has been the doormat over whom others have walked into the halls of fame.” His hits, Egan added, always came against the St. Louis Browns “and the other bums of the league.”

  That he was now the target did not surprise Williams. Years later, he admitted immaturity as a young player, and an inability to deal with some of the Boston press. But he also noted shrewdly that the Red Sox management had not done a particularly good job of protecting him, either. The reason, he noted, was that he was catching much of the heat that ordinarily would have been directed at the front office, which was far from perfect.

  No matter that Williams was second in the American League in hitting, with a .319 average; tied for the lead in runs batted in with his teammate Junior Stephens at 55; and second to Stephens in home runs with 14. Some writers claimed the very excellence of his statistics proved their point—Williams was not a team player. Worse, there were more comparisons than ever now with DiMaggio; in those comparisons Williams would never be the winner.

  Williams’s years in Boston, particularly the early ones, were tempestuous. He was often at war with the Boston writers, and thus, inevitably, the fans. Here the contrast with DiMaggio was most striking. DiMaggio, energized by burning immigrant pride, was always aware of how much he meant to so many people. He could control his anxieties and managed to make them work for him. The New York writers both respected him and feared that he would cut them off. They generously described his aloofness, born of uncertainty and suspicion, as elegance. After all, the Yankees almost always won, and this played no small part in sustaining this unusual covenant.

  No such protection was offered Williams. He was arguably the greatest hitter of his era—a skilled, dedicated, and highly intelligent student of the game. He could do many exceptional things as a young man, but he could not conceal his hunger to be the best or his hurt and anger when he fell short—or when others accused him of falling short.

  “It is probably my misfortune that I have been and will inevitably be compared with Joe DiMaggio,” he wrote in his memoir, My Turn at Bat. “We were of the same era. We were the two top players of our league. In my heart I have always felt that I was a better hitter than Joe, which was always my first consideration, but I have to say that he was the greatest baseball player of our time.” That was his dilemma. He could never do enough.

  If anything, Williams’s insecurities were greater than DiMaggio’s. DiMaggio, after all, had come from the home of first-generation Americans, but it was a strong home, with an unyielding sense that the future was to be built around a better life for the children. By contrast, Williams’s home life in San Diego was a shambles. His mother worked for the Salvation Army, and cared more, he believed, for her constituents there than for her own two children. She was called “The Angel of Tijuana,” Williams would note mordantly. His father worked in a photographic shop. The more his wife manifested her religiosity, the less likely he was to come home; and the less often he came home, the more religious she became. As a child, Williams often waited on the steps of his house, hoping for one parent to come home. The house was filthy, and Williams was always ashamed of it; his mother’s activities on behalf of her cause did not allow time for housecleaning. When Eddie Collins arrived at Williams’s home in 1936 to sign the seventeen-year-old boy, he was bothered by only one thing: The young man never got up to say hello or shake hands. The reason, which Collins couldn’t know, was that Williams was sitting in a chair that had a huge hole in the fabric, covered inadequately by a towel. He was too embarrassed to stand up. For his high school graduation, he got only one present—a fountain pen from a friend. The humiliation of those days, his friends thought, never left him. Later, when sportswriters wrote critically of him, he reacted as if they were stripping away a hard-won veneer of respectability, reducing him from the star he had become to the neglected boy he had been.

  Upon graduation from high school Williams was brought out to practice with the old minor-league San Diego Padres. The other players simply stopped and watched; for here was this tall, thin young boy, easily six feet three—could he weigh even 140 pounds?—and yet he could whip the bat. In fact, he weighed 148 pounds, which he remembered because a story in the local paper said he weighed 155, and he recalled wishing that he weighed that much. The veterans were saying he would be signed before the week was out.

  Even then, Williams had time only for baseball. A restaurant was a pit stop. He would slap the counter with his hands and tell the waitress to hurry, he was in a rush, he had to catch a train. Ossie Vitt, who had been the manager in Doerr’s rookie year, before Williams joined the team, was a former big-leaguer, so he taught Doerr, who in turn taught Williams, how to order and how to tip. They had $2.50 a day meal money. Vitt told Doerr it was important to act like a big-leaguer and leave a fifteen-cent tip. Of that year Williams remembered being constantly hungry, and desperately wanting to put on more weight so that he would become stronger. On the Padres’ first road trip, they pulled into Oakland on their third stop. Williams walked into the hotel lobby and saw Bill Lane, the team owner, sitting in a big armchair. “Kid,” Lane said in a gravelly tough voice, “you’re leading the list.” “What list?” the surprised and nervous young Williams answered. “The overeaters’ list,” Lane said. Williams was constantly signing for more than the daily allowance. “You’ll have to take it out of my pay,” he said.

  Williams was a perfect target for the veteran players, who were not above hassling him when he tried to go to bed. On occasion he simply gathered up his blankets, went to the ladies’ room on the train, locked himself in, and slept there. When the team was at home in San Diego, he would go to Frank Shellenback, the manager, and ask for any used baseballs. Then, loaded down with scuffed-up balls, he would go back to the neighborhood park where he had grown up and get the local kids to pitch to him until it was too dark to see.

  The one thing Williams always had was a quick bat. That was the first thing Eddie Collins noticed. Collins had made a scouting trip to San Diego to look at Doerr and another prospect. But he soon began to talk about San Diego’s young left-handed hitting outfielder. At first Lane, the San Diego owner, couldn’t figure out who he was talking about, for Williams was barely playing. “Oh, you mean Williams,” he said. “Hell, he’s just a kid out of high school. He’s only seventeen. Give him a few years.” But Collins took an option on him anyway.

  Like so many other young players, Williams had trouble with breaking pitches. He was never ready for them. Once a pitcher got him out on a curve. Williams, furious with himself, still cursing, trotted back to his position in the outfield. One of the San Diego pitchers, a former major-leaguer, yelled over to him, “Hey kid, what’d he get you out on?” “A goddamn slow curve,” Williams answered. “Can you hit his fastball?” the pitcher continued. “You bet,” Williams answered. “What do you think he’ll be looking to put past you the next time?” the pitcher asked. There was a brief pause. Ted Williams had never thought about pitching to Ted Williams—that was something pitchers did. “A curve,” he answered. “Hey kid,” the pitcher said, “why don’t you go up there and wait on it the next time.” Williams did, and hit the ball out for a home run. Thus began a twenty-five-year study of the mind of the pitcher.

  When he finally came up to his first major-league camp, Doerr traveled east with him. On the train, Williams practiced his swing in the aisles, not with bats but with the only thing available—pillows from the sleeping car. He was a boy living his dreams: All he could talk about on that trip was how exciting this was, arriving at the very precipice of the major leagues, and how he hoped to be not just a major-leaguer but a great hitter. “Bobby,” he kept telling Doerr, “I’m going to be the greatest hitter that ever lived.” To Doerr, there was something touching about his eagerness and his innocence. But to the veterans that spring, he seemed unbearably brash. He did not understand his own lowly position in the pecking order of a major-league team. As a result, veteran outfielders Doc Cramer, Joe V
osmik, and Ben Chapman ragged him hard. A story that made the rounds of the Red Sox camp that spring was that Doerr had told him, “Wait until you see Jimmie Foxx hit,” and Williams had answered, “Wait until Foxx sees me hit.” Williams said later that the story was not true, but given his attitude at the time, it might as well have been. The first thing he said to Joe Cronin, the manager, was, “Hi, sport.” That, thought Doerr, guarantees him a ticket to the farm team in Minneapolis.

  In his letters home that spring there was no brashness, only childlike wonder—he described the beauty of watching Grove pitch, the purity of his motion, and the explosive crack of the bat when Jimmie Foxx hit a ball, a sharper sound than he had ever before heard. He heard something similar later in his career when Mickey Mantle came along, Mantle being built along the same lines as Foxx. But he was not, somewhat to his surprise, destined to stay with the Boston club that season. Williams liked to tell of how he was at last sent back to the minors. Johnny Orlando, the clubhouse boy, escorted him to the bus station. As he prepared to board the bus, Williams turned to Orlando and told him to tell Cramer, Vosmik, and Chapman that he’d be back, and that he’d make more money playing baseball than all three of them put together. Then Orlando lent him five dollars to get to Daytona.

  When he finally arrived in the major leagues a year later, Williams was only twenty years old. He became the first rookie ever to lead the league in runs batted in, with 145; and he hit .327, with 31 home runs. It was a breathtaking debut, and it was overshadowed only by DiMaggio, who, in his fourth year, hit .381. Williams was absolutely fearless. On one of his first trips to St. Louis with the Red Sox, he and Doerr ran into Fred Haney, the new Browns manager, whom they both knew from the Pacific League. Haney said to Williams, “Hey kid, we’ll see how you hit today sitting on your ass.” Williams and Doerr both laughed because they thought of Haney as a friend. But the first time Williams came up, the ball whizzed in right at his head. Williams dropped to the ground. His very career, he knew, was at stake. He picked himself up and very deliberately dug his left foot even deeper into the ground. Then he hit the next pitch against the right center-field fence for a double. The next time up, the pitcher knocked him down once more. Again, very slowly, he got up and planted his back foot deep into the dirt. Focusing fiercely on the pitcher, he hit the next pitch into the right-field seats. With that the knockdowns stopped. It was, thought Doerr, as if some tribal drumbeat went through the entire league: Whatever you do, don’t throw at this kid; if you do, he’ll kill you.