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

by David Halberstam

  But the Red Sox won the game 6-3, and Ellis Kinder’s record was now 13-5. The defeat was Raschi’s fourth in a row, and made his record 15-7. Then Parnell beat Reynolds for his seventeenth win that season. Williams had seven hits in three games. He felt exhilarated. The Red Sox had won two out of three; they were closing the gap.

  The Yankees were worried about Raschi. On July 21 his record had been 15-3, the best in the American League, but he was struggling now. The heat was wearing him out. He had lost his last four starts in a row. It was a long season. Yogi Berra hated catching doubleheaders, particularly in the heat. He complained so often that finally Eddie Lopat asked him, “Hey, Yogi, what do you think Birdie Tebbetts is going to do today? Catch one game or two?” It had no effect. In mid-July Berra came to the park one Sunday and turned to Charlie Silvera. “Silvera, you’re catching the second game today.” “No, I’m not,” Silvera answered. “The only way I catch is if you’re home sick.” Silvera suspected he might have planted an idea because a few weeks later Berra called and said that he was staying home because he had a bad cold. “You call Mr. Berra right back,” Stengel told the trainer, Gus Mauch, “and tell him to come to the ball park anyway—I might want him as a pinch hitter.”

  The strain of the heat on the pitchers was even more obvious. They kept a jug of orange juice mixed with honey to drink as a pick-me-up and also a bucket filled with ice and ammonia. Gus Mauch would dip a towel in the bucket and drape it over the pitcher’s neck between innings. “Florida water,” they called it. It was believed that water, any amount of it, would bloat you up, make you heavy, and slow you down. So none of the pitchers took even the smallest drink of water during the game. Allie Reynolds, as a special reward to himself if he made it to the seventh inning in the hot weather, would go over to the cooler, take a mouthful, wash it around in his mouth for a moment or two, then spit it out.

  Two years later, when Johnny Sain, a masterful veteran pitcher, joined them, he brought an even more remarkable secret. In the late innings on hot days Johnny Sain would go to the bucket of ice, grab a handful, and stuff it into his jock. The others were appalled—here was the worst kind of cold shower imaginable. But Sain swore that it helped him fight off fatigue and dizziness. Soon some of the others tried it and came to swear by it.

  There were days when a pitcher simply didn’t have it, and the opposing players would virtually take batting practice. The manager was loath to go to the bullpen and sacrifice a good relief pitcher in a game already hopelessly lost. When this happened it was the duty of the starting pitcher to stay out there and let the hitters club him and his earned-run average to death. The Yankee pitchers had a phrase for it: “Your turn in the barrel,” for it was like being the target in an arcade.

  During a season, Vic Raschi thought, a pitcher won some games that he shouldn’t win, but then during that long July-August stretch, he would lose some he should have won. Raschi would lose thirteen or fourteen pounds a game and change uniforms as many as three times—wearing a heavy wool uniform with five or six pounds of sweat in it made things worse. Unlike Raschi and Reynolds, Lopat was not a power pitcher and he lost less weight. Sometimes he would pitch the first game of a doubleheader on an oppressive day, then come into the dugout at the end of the seventh inning and show that he had no stains under his armpits. “It’s not that hot,” he would say.

  Raschi used his full power on every pitch, and had to drive off the mound as hard as he could. The heavier he was, the more powerfully he could drive off the mound. But in August 1949 he was slumping, and he was sure that it was from loss of weight. He had started the season at 224 pounds, which was a good weight for him; he was tall and big-boned. Gradually, as June and July passed, his weight began to slip, below 220 and then down to 215. An additional problem, Raschi thought, was that the weight loss put more pressure on him mentally. He had to think more, and concentrate more; lacking optimum physical power, his placement of pitches had to be more precise. He became more of a finesse pitcher.

  The day after Kinder beat Raschi, Eddie Lopat beat Joe Dobson. Before the game Ted Williams and Walt Masterson had been talking about Lopat. “I think he’s the best pitcher in the American League,” Masterson said. “No way,” said Williams, “no way.” “Come on, Ted, think about it. What other pitcher gets by throwing with so little.” There was a long silence.

  Stengel did not like to pitch Lopat in Fenway, but on this day he had no choice, and Lopat was brilliant. The 101-degree heat did not bother him. He walked four men in seven innings and gave up only four hits. After the seventh, before Lopat could tire, Stengel went to Page, and Page also dominated the Red Sox, giving up only one hit. Afterward Williams wanted only to talk about Page. He was, claimed the Boston hitter, the difference in the teams. “I wish we had someone like him who could just go out there and fire the ball. If we had someone like that we’d be ten games ahead. Pitching is the reason the Yankees are ahead, make no mistake about that.”

  The next day Parnell beat Reynolds, who did not last past the third inning. It was Parnell’s seventeenth victory. Boston, with a third of August gone, was five and a half games out. It had become a pennant race after all.

  Williams felt particularly good. He was seeing more and better pitches than he normally did. The reason, he was sure, was Junior Stephens hitting right behind him. Later, after his career was over, he decided that Junior had offered him more protection than anyone else in his career. He was aware of Junior’s weaknesses: He was not a supple hitter. Good pitchers working in big ball parks could almost always handle him with the right pitches. He knew that Junior’s strike zone was far too big. “That man,” Hal Newhouser once said, “goes after pitches way out of the strike zone, and hits home runs with them.” Junior was a good hitter, Williams decided, but an imperfect one. When Williams had first come up, others had hit behind him—Jimmie Foxx, and Joe Cronin at times. But their skills were beginning to decline. Junior was at the top of his game in 1948, 1949, and 1950.

  Junior Stephens was an amazing physical specimen. He played hard all day, and he played just as hard all night. He was not so much a drinker as a carouser. William Mead, in his book Even the Browns, described him as a young man “with a baby face and an insatiable appetite for female companionship.” “I roomed mostly with his suitcase,” Don Gutteridge, his teammate, once said. In 1944, Charley DeWitt, one of the Browns owners, asked Junior to quit running around at night and get some rest—because the Browns had a chance at the pennant. Stephens agreed. Thereupon he went for three weeks without a hit. DeWitt then told him, “Go out [at night] and stay out.” How did he do it, Gutteridge once asked rhetorically—stay out all night and then play so well? “He was a superman,” Gutteridge said. On the Red Sox he continued his demanding schedule. But during the 1948 season he was completely worn out in the last month. In 1949 he was somewhat better, but his teammates thought they could sense fatigue coming on toward the end. No one on the Red Sox, however, was going to tell Junior what time to go to bed, and certainly not Ted Williams. By August, as the team continued to win, everyone seemed more relaxed. Bobby Doerr, who was playing in considerable pain and whose legs were being carefully wrapped every day, was now called Johnson and Johnson. There was more teasing and clowning around. Once before a night game on an evening when he was not going to pitch, Jack Kramer asked Matt Batts to warm him up. He did it along the first baseline bench as the fans were pouring into the box seats. There was no doubt in Batts’s mind from Kramer’s exaggerated motions that, he was preening for the crowd just a little. Kramer was good-looking and was generally thought incapable of passing a mirror without admiring himself. As Kramer delivered the next pitch, Batts dropped his catcher’s mitt and caught the ball bare-handed. Kramer turned immediately and walked to the outfield. He never asked Batts to warm him up before a game again.

  Birdie Tebbetts, the prime needler on the Red Sox, took pleasure in provoking Williams. Tebbetts was the leading bench jockey on the team, and no one was immun
e from his sharp tongue. He picked his spots, of course. He knew when to do it to Williams—when Williams was hitting and feeling good. Then Tebbetts would carefully scan the Boston papers and pick out something that Egan or one of the other writers had written that day. “God, Ted, did you see what they wrote about you today? About your being jealous of Junior over here? I wouldn’t put up with that crap if I were you.” Sometimes he needled Williams about his power: “You know, Ted, when you were a rookie I was sure you would get the Ruth record of sixty home runs, but now all you hit are thirty or forty.” Sometimes it was about his hitting in general: “Ted, you know I’ve been thinking and I think you’ve slipped a bit as a hitter from when you first came up. I think you were a better hitter then than you are now.”

  Williams, of course, would always bite. “What the hell do you mean?” he would ask, dead serious now.

  “Well, when you first came up back when I was in Detroit you would come up to the plate and stand there and say, ‘Throw the goddamn ball—I’m going to knock it out whatever it is.’ You didn’t give a damn about who was pitching or what he was throwing. Now it’s always, ‘Dommy, what’s he throwing today? ... Is he sharp, is he off? ... Is he sneaky?’ ”

  Williams would go on the offensive: “Do you know what our fleet-footed catcher used to do when he was at Detroit?” he would say to the others. “He would ask me when I came to the plate what kind of pitch I wanted. ‘How about a fastball, Ted? Would you like one on the inside corner?’ So of course it threw me off, I didn’t know what to expect—was he setting me up?—and so I didn’t say anything and he kept on it, and one time he asked me if I wanted a slow curve and I said yes, and I waited and he got me a slow curve, Mr. Tebbetts did, just like I asked, and I hit it out and he never let me order a pitch again.”

  The sportswriters always gathered around Birdie’s locker after the game for a daily debriefing—Birdie was a voluble and articulate source. Williams, if he was not too angry at the writers at the moment, would say, “Well, guys, there’s no need to buy the papers tomorrow. We know what’s going to be written. Just what this man says. There might as well be a byline on all those stories. By Mr. George Tebbetts.” The others loved the sound of such give-and-take: It was the sound of baseball players who were winning.

  CHAPTER 12

  AS THE PENNANT RACE became tighter, the writers and the players began to notice something fascinating: For the first time there was a sense of importance of television. Red Smith, who was the first to write about it, observed it, oddly enough, not in the behavior of the players but in the behavior of the umpires and the fans.

  “Today, conscious of the great unseen audience, they [the umpires] play every decision out like the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. On a strike they gesticulate, they brandish a fist aloft, they spin almost as shot through the heart, they bellow all four parts of the quartette from Rigoletto. On a pitch that misses the plate, they stiffen with loathing, ostentatiously avert the gaze, and render a bit from Götterdämmerung. In parlor and pub you see the umpire today. And hear him.” Then Smith added, prophetically, “The virus is infecting the fans, too. When a foul is hit in the stands, the camera usually is trained on the fan who recovers the ball. Used to be that a guy catching a foul would pocket his loot almost furtively and go on watching the game. Today he wheels towards the camera, holds his prize aloft, shouts, and makes faces. Television is making us a nation of hams.”

  Television was still very primitive. In 1947 the World Series had been broadcast for the first time, on the old DuMont network to five cities. Gillette sponsored the game, and an estimated 3 million people watched. The company intended to introduce a new Gillette razor, which came in a flashy plastic package. The selling point of the new razor was how easy it was to feed the blades into it. There was to be a live demonstration on TV, but the Gillette people had forgotten to bring an associate to do the feed, so Otis Freeman, the DuMont engineer, had to wash his hands quickly and double as the blade feeder. Freeman loved being in on something as novel as television. Like many in the industry at that time, he was young, had been in World War II as an engineer, and was eager to experiment with this marvelous new toy.

  There had been, he thought, looking back years later, three stages to modern television. In the beginning it was engineer-driven, for the questions that hung over every broadcast were: Could this actually be accomplished?; Are the technical facilities good enough? Then, in the late fifties, after a decade of remarkable technological achievements, it became director-driven. The technological skills were a given; now it took creative skills to complement what the engineers had wrought. After that it became, like so many other successful enterprises in America, accountant-driven. In this final stage, the new generation of well-educated accountants limited the freedom of the directors and minimized the risk in order to maximize the profits.

  But in those early years, something new could be tried every day, it seemed. Otis Freeman had started with an experimental station in New York, W2XWV, which in time became WABD after its owner, Allen B. DuMont. It was then the third station in New York—WNBC and WCBS were first. The early television sets were extremely temperamental and apt to go out of focus for no discernible reason. When that happened the tavern owner (for the sets were invariably in bars) would call the station to complain. Freeman told the DuMont telephone operators to intercept those calls and relay them to him at home. Then, like a doctor on a house call, he would rush out, grab a cab, and repair the afflicted set himself for fifty dollars. The fees added up to almost half his salary, and he gratefully cut the telephone operators in with a five-dollar tip per call. In 1948, when WPIX, owned by the Daily News, went on the air, Freeman became its chief engineer. It was relatively easy for WPIX to get the Yankees—the other fledgling networks did not like baseball, because it did not end exactly on the half hour and was therefore hard to schedule.

  WPIX used Mel Allen and Curt Gowdy as its television team; there was no difference between what they said on radio and what they said on television. Setting up the technical facilities, Freeman found himself in a perpetual struggle with the Stadium groundskeepers and officials, and, of course, George Weiss. Whatever he tried to do, someone would object and tell him no, it had never been done before.

  Nor were Freeman’s responsibilities restricted to the Stadium. He had to serve as the personal television repairman of Yankee owner Don Topping as well. Several times a season Topping would send his seaplane to pick up Freeman and fly him out to his Southampton home. As the plane made its approach, it would buzz the house, and a driver in a Rolls would be sent to meet Freeman. At the house he would work on either the set or the 125-foot antenna—it was so tall, it had to be taken down at the end of the season because of the danger from high winds and ice, which would form on it.

  If the announcers, trained in radio, were somewhat uneasy with television, the early sponsors were not. The commercial possibilities of televised games were immediately obvious. The Gillette people had been stunned by the success of their first TV ad campaign, and for many years after would unveil its new shaving devices on the occasion of the World Series. In 1949 Gillette paid $175,000 for the TV rights; it was also ruthless in keeping costs down, paying such preeminent announcers as Allen and Red Barber, both of whom were eager to get the prestigious assignments, $200 a game. But Gillette was just skimming off the biggest games.

  In the coverage of regular-season games, the beer companies were there first. In 1949 Leonard Faupel was a young salesman for the Ballantine Brewing Company, which sponsored the Yankee games. Faupel understood the pull of the new medium immediately, mainly because of the enthusiasm of the city’s tavern owners. That was where television was having its first, big impact. Fred Allen, then one of the leading comedians on radio, noted, that there were still a few New Yorkers who had not watched television yet—little children, he noted, too young to go into saloons.

  In 1949, there was a belief among American tavern owners that theirs was a
n endangered business. Ordinary Americans were becoming better educated, going from blue-collar jobs to white-collar jobs. No longer, the tavern owners feared, would they automatically stop off at the neighborhood bar on the way home from work for a beer or two. Worst of all, Americans were moving to the suburbs. That was the real threat. There, aided by better refrigeration and new beer packaging—for the first time beer came in cans—potential customers could now drink at home. The old-fashioned tavern might well go the way of the blacksmith shop.

  Therefore, the city’s tavern owners saw a considerable lure in the early television sets, which they displayed prominently over their bars, and tuned almost exclusively to the sports shows: the Friday night fights, the occasional football game, and, above all, the big baseball games. In their windows they displayed huge signs with the Ballantine (or a competing beer’s) logo which announced the games and fights to be televised. Business prospered; for a big baseball game, the crowds in the bars were enormous—regular customers had regular seats, and newcomers had to stand in the back.

  For Ballantine, a relatively small Newark-based company that was trying to gain a more significant share of the New York market, the radio and television sponsorship of the Yankee games was a gift from the gods. The package was unbelievably inexpensive. It gave the Ballantine salesman immediate identity in his area. He did not merely sell beer; he was the man who brought you the Yankees. Faupel, though, had a sense that an entirely new era was beginning, and that television sets were not going to be exclusively in taverns for long. The price of sets, he was sure, would continue to drop, and their technological capacities would increase. What was coming was nothing less than a great new American theater in the home where the best live entertainment would most likely be sports.