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

by David Halberstam

  It is doubtful that the Yankees would have moved so slowly on a white player of comparable ability. Their failure to sign blacks brought with it a penalty so severe that not only would the Yankees’ dominance end but the American League by the late fifties and early sixties would become a lesser league. The National League teams, needing to compete with the Dodgers, worked much harder at signing black talent; it became stocked with the first generation of black superstars—“the black Babe Ruths,” to use Johnny Bench’s description: Mays, Aaron, Banks, Williams, McCovey, Gibson, and Robinson.

  Joe DiMaggio, with his remarkable ability, his strength, his speed, and his grace had stood as the preeminent athlete of his era. But now a new generation was arriving, bringing with it new definitions of speed and power.

  EPILOGUE

  THE 1949 BASEBALL SEASON did not end for Ellis Kinder the day the Red Sox lost the pennant. A few days later he was back in Jackson, Tennessee, where his buddies still played semipro ball, usually on Sundays, against teams from other little towns in West Tennessee. There would be a small country store and across from it a ball park with three rows of stands; late in the week word would go out that there was to be a ball game. Hundreds of people would show up to see it, and to bet. The betting was important. The players got only twenty-five or fifty dollars for their efforts, but they could also bet a little on the side.

  Kinder’s old buddies had followed the pennant race and taken great pride in his exploits. In the past when he came back from St. Louis or Boston, he had always been willing to play with them. But now he was a big-time star, so who knew?

  A few days after Kinder returned to Jackson, Fred Baker, a close friend, called him up. Fred had once been a bat boy with the old Jackson Generals, and no one had been nicer to him in those days than Ellis Kinder, then a star pitcher for the Generals. He had seen talent in the young man and had hit fly balls to him by the hour. Baker had become a good all-around athlete and had gone on to Union College, where he played several sports. He was now the catcher for the Jackson semi-pro team. Baker explained to Kinder that they had a tough game coming up on Sunday at Alamo, against Dyersburg. Ed Wright, who had pitched for the Phillies, was a Dyersburg boy, and he was going to pitch. The Dyersburg boys were doing a lot of bragging, he said, because they had Ed Wright.

  “Can you pitch for us on Sunday, Ellis?” Baker asked.

  Kinder paused. “Can you get me anything?” he asked.

  “How about a hundred dollars?” Baker answered.

  “Let’s go,” Ellis Kinder said.

  So off the team went to Alamo, rather cocky now because Ellis Kinder of the Boston Red Sox was pitching for them. That cut down on the betting a little, though. What struck his old friends about Ellis that day was how easy it seemed for him. He barely warmed up. “Just three or four pitches,” he said, “that’s all I need.” Then he was out on the mound, and the motion seemed so fluid and easy, as if he were not really throwing hard. But the ball would zoom into the plate.

  Kinder seemed just as serious as if he were in a big-league game. Dyersburg could not do much with him that day, and late in the game Kinder hit a grand-slam home run to win it. He could not have been more pleased had he done it at Yankee Stadium. “Country boy,” his friend Billy Schrivner thought as he watched him cross the plate and grin, “You’ve never really been away—have you?”

  Ellis Kinder became a genuine star with the Red Sox, and soon became the best relief pitcher in the American League. The next year at spring training, when Johnny Pesky batted against him for the first time, Kinder deliberately plunked him on the butt. The pitch was hard enough just to sting a little. His control was pinpoint perfect, and every spring from then on Kinder would hit Pesky in the exact spot. It was all good fun, but there was a small reminder here that hitters were the enemy.

  Kinder also became something of a sage among the Boston pitchers. In 1951 the Yankees sold a young bonus pitcher named Paul Hinrichs to the Red Sox, and Chuck Stobbs took him over to meet Kinder. Hinrichs, bright and eager, told Kinder that he was anxious to learn how to become a major-league pitcher and wondered if Kinder had any tips for him

  “Do you smoke?” Kinder asked Hinrichs.

  “No,” said Hinrichs.

  “Do you chase women?” asked Kinder.

  Again, Hinrichs answered that he did not.

  “Well, son, do you drink?” asked Kinder.

  Again, Hinrichs answered that he did not.

  “I’m afraid you’ll never make it,” said Kinder and walked away. Paul Hinrichs pitched a total of three innings in the major leagues.

  Kinder’s last years were not easy ones. He continued to drink hard. He was not successful in work and there was a succession of jobs—as a house painter, a taxi-cab driver, a repairman. His health steadily declined. In 1967 he underwent open-heart surgery. After the operation he sat in his hospital room talking with Hazel. The World Series was on television, St. Louis versus Boston. “You know what, Mama,” he said to her. “They’re playing for real money now. Some of those old boys”—he motioned toward the television set—“are making one hundred thousand dollars a year.” “Ellis!” she said, as if catching him once again in some terrible exaggeration. “No, it’s true, Mama,” he said. “And what’s more, in just a few years they’ll all be making a million dollars.” “Ellis!” she said, as if afraid some higher authority would strike him down for such a blasphemous idea. “A million dollars,” he said. “All we played for, Mama, was love.” Two days later he was dead at age fifty-four.

  Piper Davis, the player-manager of the Birmingham Black Barons, whom the Red Sox had signed instead of Willie Mays, was a skilled athlete, over six feet three, who had once played with the Harlem Globetrotters. The price of signing him was $7,500, paid to Tom Hayes, the Memphis undertaker who owned the Black Barons. The agreement was that if Davis was with a Boston club of any sort, major or minor, on May 15, Boston would pay Hayes an additional $7,500, half of which he would split with Davis. Davis went off to spring training in the spring of 1950, but it was not an easy time. He was very much alone. He ate with the black waiters in the service section of the hotel, and he roomed with one of the waiters from the hotel. Davis realized from the start that he was not going to make the big team, but he hoped to play at Louisville. Instead, he was sent down to Scranton, where he played well for the first month, hitting around .330 and leading the team in home runs and runs batted in. Soon there was talk that he might be promoted to Louisville. Just before the May 15 deadline he was called in by manager Jack Burns. “I’m sorry, I’m going to have to let you go,” Burns said. “Why, man?” Davis answered. “I’m leading the team in hitting.” “For economic reasons,” Burns said. Then he shook his head. “It isn’t my doing,” he said. “It’s orders.” He pulled out the lineup card for that night’s game. “Here, take a look,” he said. “I already had you penciled in.” Economic reasons, Davis thought, that can’t be true—everyone knows how rich Mr. Yawkey is. But his career in the Boston organization was over, though he went on to play one year in the Mexican League and five with Oakland in the Pacific Coast League.

  Mickey McDermott’s career was a disappointment. In 1953, his best season, he won eighteen games. His arm was a great God-given gift, but his talent, he said later, had come to him so easily that he had never learned how to master and exploit it. Besides, there was always fun to be had—an evening with friends, songs to be sung in nightclubs. “Nightclub pallor,” Dave Egan wrote of his coloring. Though he resented Egan’s attack (it had come after he had done a charity benefit for Egan, who paid McDermott back by saying that he couldn’t pitch, couldn’t hit, couldn’t sing, and had nightclub pallor), there was some truth in it. Soon he was traded. He went first to Washington and then to the Yankees. When he was assigned to Hank Bauer as a roommate, Bauer, who had always hit him well, screamed at him and slammed the door. “What’s the matter, Henry?” McDermott asked. “That means I don’t get to hit against you anymore—I just lo
st sixty points on my batting average,” Bauer said.

  On the Yankees McDermott continued his undisciplined ways. He never let his work interfere with his pleasure, which was something Casey Stengel understood. One night McDermott came back to the hotel about four A.M. and, to his consternation, ran into the manager. “Are you drunk again, McDermott?” Stengel asked. McDermott, fearing that this was the end, nodded that indeed he was. “Me too,” said Stengel. “Good-night, Maurice.”

  From the Yankees, his third team, McDermott went to Kansas City and then Detroit. There, Freddie Hutchinson, his manager, did not appreciate his work habits. In one game McDermott loaded up the bases, and from the bench heard Hutchinson’s voice: “Okay, McDermott, let’s see you sing your way out of this one.” He soon slipped into the minor leagues.

  In 1961, after a good season in the Southern Association, McDermott was given a tryout with the St. Louis Cardinals. Johnny Keane, the manager, was determined to set a high moral tone on his team, and hated the idea of having a carouser like McDermott. That season Tim McCarver was a nineteen-year-old rookie catcher, just brought up from the minor leagues. Virtually his first memory was of Keane assembling the team before a game and ripping McDermott in front of his teammates. It was a brutal, scathing rebuke about how the Cardinals had been generous enough to give McDermott a tryout when no one else wanted him and how he had reciprocated with this appalling behavior. McCarver found it an unbearably cruel scene. But McDermott had been oddly graceful. “Well, John, if you feel that way I’ll take my uniform off and leave the team,” he said. “That’s exactly what you’ll do,” Keane said, then reached in his pocket and pulled out a pink slip.

  McDermott continued through life, managing to survive by charm. Jobs came and went. It was impossible not to like him. Even in hard times he could always laugh, and so there was always another job.

  In 1978 he ran into his old teammate Ted Williams. “Bush, how old are you now?” asked Williams. “Fifty,” McDermott said. “Fifty,” Williams said. “That’s terrific. I never thought you’d make it.”

  In the madness of the Yankee locker room after the victory over the Dodgers, Allie Reynolds had noticed that Casey Stengel, while celebrating, was also staring at him with a very cool eye. Reynolds wondered what Stengel was thinking, and why he was giving him so cool a look. He soon found out. Stengel walked over to him. “Congratulations, Allie,” he said, “that was a great year. Now I want to make a relief pitcher out of you for next season.” That struck a bell with Reynolds, for Stengel had always praised him as a relief pitcher. “Why, Allie,” he would say, “they see you walk in from the bullpen and half of them faint right then and there.”

  “The hell you will,” said Reynolds.

  “Why not?” asked Stengel.

  “Because I can’t make the money,” answered Reynolds. “Relief pitchers never make as much as starters.”

  “If I can get you just as good money, would you do it?” asked Stengel.

  “Sure,” answered Reynolds, “that’s all I play for anyway, money.”

  So Stengel called over Dan Topping and Del Webb, the two owners, and asked if Reynolds could have the same amount of money plus an annual raise if he did well relieving. They said he could, and it appeared the deal was done. Reynolds understood Stengel’s thinking: Page was too erratic, a good year followed by a bad year; Reynolds himself was frequently shaky in later innings as a starter, but very tough as a reliever in spot situations.

  But the Yankees remained short one starter. Frank Shea and Bob Porterfield were never to pitch well again, and Reynolds’s switch to the bullpen did not take place for some time. Nonetheless, Reynolds was impressed. There was no other manager in that era who was willing to take an ace from his starting rotation, convert him into a bullpen pitcher, and pay good money to do it. Stengel, he thought, was the first to see the game change as far as the coming of the relief pitcher as an ace in his own right. Reynolds was pleased that the idea had been abandoned, and a year later during spring training a photographer came over to him and asked him to pose for a photograph with Joe Page. Reynolds immediately assumed that this was another attempt to get him in the bullpen, and he refused to be a part of the picture.

  After the 1949 season Reynolds knew that despite his 17-6 record he was going to have trouble with George Weiss. He had finished only four games, and he knew Weiss was going to use that against him in contract negotiations. Sure enough, Weiss said, “Allie, you didn’t finish many games last year, but I’m not going to cut you.”

  “I know you’re not, George,” Reynolds said. “That’s the one thing we both can be sure of.”

  Jerry Coleman had a magnificent rookie year. The Associated Press named him American League Rookie of the Year. At last he felt confident and, for the moment, rich. The World Series share was $5,400, of which he was able to keep almost all. Coleman knew exactly what he wanted to do—he wanted to buy a brand-new car. He had never owned a car before, so he went out and bought a green Pontiac for $1,700. He walked into the showroom and plunked the money down. Forty years later he could still see it: the perfect car, in a glorious shade of green with a light interior.

  Because he felt quite rich, he did not work as hard in the off-season selling men’s clothes, and by the time spring rolled around and it was time to leave for Florida, he was broke again. He was forced to borrow three hundred dollars from his mother-in-law to make the trip.

  Vic Raschi became one of the great stars of the Yankee pitching staff, a critical ingredient in the team that won five pennants and five World Series in a row. He had a record of 21-10 in 1949, and went on to win 71 and lose only 30 in the next four years. Even more remarkable, in those five years he started 160 games and completed 73 of them. And he did this despite terrible physical pain. He hurt his knee in 1950 when Luke Easter of the Indians lined a ball off his leg, but he did not have an operation for two years because he was afraid it might cost him part of a season. He could barely run and could hardly field his position. That he was virtually a cripple was known among the Yankees, but in the curious code of the day none of those who were traded to other teams told their new teammates of his vulnerability. If they had, he might have been quickly driven out of the league by his opponents bunting on him.

  Raschi’s relations with George Weiss, the general manager, were extremely bitter. Raschi was proud, almost violently so. He gave everything of himself as a player, and expected respect for his accomplishments, particularly from the people he worked for. Besides, he understood that because both he and Reynolds were power pitchers, they had to assume that their time in the majors was limited. They had to maximize their earning capacity in their best years. But he never gained real respect from Weiss.

  Raschi soon came not so much to dislike Weiss as to loathe him. It was as if Weiss were trying to withhold not merely Raschi’s money but his dignity as well. Weiss never looked him in the eye, but instead looked down at the floor, out the window, or off to the side. He would say after an exceptionally successful season, “Prove to me why you deserve a raise.” Raschi, more than anyone else on the team, stood his ground. After all, he was a winning, dependable starting pitcher for a great team, and starting pitchers were always hard to come by. His only leverage was the possibility of retirement.

  At the end of a negotiation in which Weiss magnanimously agreed to a $5,000 raise as a reward for the 19- or 20-game season, he closed the meeting by turning to Raschi and saying, “Don’t have a losing season.” Those words would hang in the air for weeks and months. Raschi knew that because he had fought back so hard, the moment he showed any sign of slipping Weiss would turn the screw on him. The top salary he made after all those great seasons was $40,000.

  In 1953, still bothered by injuries, he won 13, lost 6, and started only 26 games instead of his usual 33 or 34. Raschi, who was thirty-four, had a sense that the end was near. When he received his contract from Weiss, it called for a 25 percent pay cut. He sent it back with a note to Weiss sayi
ng he had made a cripple of himself in the Yankee cause. He knew he was gone. That winter the Yankees sold him to the Cardinals. They did not notify him personally, and he learned of the deal only through newsmen. One of them called Raschi at his home for his reaction. Proud to the end, he said in what was a virtual epitaph for baseball management of that entire era, “Mr. George Weiss has a very short memory.”

  The Cardinals, like the Yankees, trained in St. Petersburg the following spring. Some of Raschi’s old teammates tried to get together with him for dinner, but he wanted no part of the Yankees. He pitched well on a bad St. Louis team, and that year the Yankees lost the pennant to Cleveland, which had an almost perfect season, winning 111 games. Still, his former Yankee teammates believed that if Raschi had not been traded, the Yankees might have won.

  In his last year, 1954, Allie Reynolds saw that the world of baseball as he knew it was changing. He was 13-4, but his back hurt, and he was angry about the way the Yankees had treated Raschi. He had wanted to quit the year before but stayed on only because there had been the chance at a sixth pennant. The constant arguments with George Weiss took some of the fun out of playing, and he had never particularly liked New York. When he had first come to the city, he and a group of other players had gone to Greenwich Village. They had ended up in a gay bar, a rare thing indeed in the late forties. For Allie Reynolds, a Nazarene minister’s son, it was all too much. He felt alien in a world he did not know, and did not want to know. As far as he was concerned, when the Indians had sold Manhattan to the white man for twenty-four dollars, they had gotten a damn good deal.

  By the mid-fifties, Reynolds sensed less discipline on the part of many of the younger players. In his last year in spring training, he encountered a young pitcher whose mechanics were off. Feeling generous, Reynolds went over to talk to him. He started explaining what the flaw was. The player looked at him and said, “Don’t pop off at me, old man.” That had stunned him; the idea that he might have talked to Spud Chandler that way was inconceivable. His generation had been reverential about the great Yankee past, he thought. After he had started winning for the Yankees, he had asked Bill Dickey, the old Yankee catcher, “Bill, do you think I could have made those great Yankee teams of the twenties and thirties?” “Yeah, Allie, you would have been just fine,” Dickey had answered, and Reynolds had felt like a real Yankee. Now the younger players told him to pop off. Old man, he thought to himself, it’s time to get out of here.