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

by David Halberstam

  Charlie Keller knew that his career was coming to an end. He had never really recovered from a back injury suffered in 1947, and his resilience was diminishing as a new generation of Yankee stars, primed by the farm system, was arriving. There was no doubt in his mind that Bauer and Woodling and perhaps Mapes were the stars of the future. The last few months of the 1949 season had been particularly hard. It was as if Stengel was avoiding all eye contact in the dugout. I am becoming a man who does not exist, Keller realized. That was hard after so many years of being a key player on a team that was always in a pennant race, always in the World Series.

  Keller had absolutely no regrets. Well, there was one regret: that they had changed him into a pull hitter to go with the Stadium confines—he and his Yankee teammates were sure that had cost him thirty points on his batting average. But aside from that he felt that he was lucky to have come so far and played for so long. When the 1949 season was over, George Weiss called Charlie Keller to give him his release. Keller, who had played for Weiss at Newark and who had been a great star for him, was actually fond of Weiss. In the last two years, though Keller’s performance had deteriorated significantly, Weiss had tried not to cut his salary. Theirs was clearly a special relationship; now, as Weiss handed over Keller’s release, he burst into tears.

  “George,” Keller said, “I know what it’s all about. Just write your name on that ticket and hand it over to me. I had some marvelous years and I’ve got no regrets, none at all.” He took the release and was glad it was all over.

  As much as any player, Tommy Henrich had carried the Yankees that year. Often playing in great pain, he came back from his serious back injury early, despite the warnings of doctors that it might hurt his career. In addition, his knees had always been vulnerable. So he constantly lived with the possibility that his career might be over at any minute.

  In 1950 the Yankees played an early-season series against Boston and a young sportswriter named Leonard Koppett talked with Henrich before the first game. He asked about the condition of his knee. “I think I’m all right,” Henrich said. “I think I can play the whole season just as long as I don’t hit too many triples. They’re just too hard on my knees.” That day he hit two triples, which seemed to set the tone for the season. He would injure himself, rest, come back, and then his knees would betray him again. Henrich had no illusions. This season, he knew, was his last. He played in only 73 games and came to bat only 151 times, but he managed to hit 8 triples and 6 home runs, and knock in 34 runs. This showed that even if he could not play regularly, he could help the team, pinch-hit, and play some first base.

  But just before the 1950 World Series, George Weiss told Henrich that the Yankees were not going to place him on their World Series eligible list. He was stunned and wounded. The coldness and ruthlessness had been directed toward others in the past. Now it was his turn. To have come this far and not be eligible for the World Series was shocking. He knew that he could help the team. Instead, the Yankees planned to list Johnny Hopp, a late-season pickup from Pittsburgh. After the season Weiss suggested that Henrich have another knee operation. But he had suffered through enough knee operations—there was precious little left to operate on. He refused and asked for his voluntary retirement.

  In the ensuing years, Tommy Henrich, a man of old-fashioned values, watched as the balance of power between management and players shifted dramatically. There were many things about the new relationships with which he was not comfortable, but he never doubted for a moment that the owners had brought it all on themselves.

  Joe DiMaggio too knew that his time as an athlete was limited. In 1950 he returned for a full season and hit well, knocking in 122 runs and 32 home runs. Astonishingly enough, he led the league in slugging average that year with .585. But he could feel the decline of his skills. He was beginning to struggle. Pitchers whom he had once hit with ease could now get him out. He could not get around on the ball as he once had. Sometimes he would see a ball, the kind he had once jumped on and been able to pull, and could still connect, but the ball would go to right field. He was still strong enough to drive some of these over the fence for home runs. “Piss homers,” he called them. Once, with first base open, Bob Feller walked Berra to pitch to DiMaggio. The Yankee slugger responded with a triple, but Feller’s decision was one more sign of decline. In 1950 Stengel moved DiMaggio to first base for one game and occasionally batted him fifth in the order behind Johnny Mize.

  In 1950 DiMaggio told Gene Woodling, who played left field alongside him, that Woodling was a good outfielder, a damn good one, and that he should take more responsibility on balls hit to left center, balls that in the past had been his. Now he could manage only one strong throw a game. In addition, he was having problems with the slider, and the opposing pitchers knew it, and he knew they knew it. He sustained a series of irritating minor injuries. He was unhappy with himself and often sulked, turning angrily on old friends in the press when they wrote even gently of his decline. He accused them of being in a rush to bury him.

  Occasionally he would talk to his teammates of those moments when he had first come up and he had hit balls down the third baseline so hard that he had handcuffed the third baseman—meaning the third baseman did not have time to move his hands and make the play. At times he would turn to one of his teammates and ask if he was swinging all right. The teammate would reassure him that he was. Such conversations merely served to emphasize that here was a new and more mortal DiMaggio.

  At the same time, the Yankees were grooming their new superstar, Mickey Mantle, to replace him. In 1951, Mantle’s first year, DiMaggio decided to call it quits. The Yankees wanted him to stay on, and offered him another year at $100,000, but he was proud to the end. He told Ernie Sisto, a friend of his who was a photographer for The New York Times, of the offer and that he was going to retire. Sisto asked why. “Because I don’t want them [the fans] to remember me struggling,” he said.

  After retirement DiMaggio tried a postgame sports show, for which he was paid handsomely—$50,000 a year—but it proved painful; he was stiff and awkward and read his lines badly, coming to a halt after each line on the prompter, whether or not there was a period there. Hating to do anything he could not do well, he soon gave it up.

  The rest of his life, as one friend said, has been devoted to being Joe DiMaggio. He puts himself on exhibit, carefully rationing the number of exposures. He guards his special status carefully, wary of doing anything that might tarnish his special reputation. He tends to avoid all those who might define him in a way other than as he defined himself on the field. He appears at sports banquets, celebrity golf matches, and old-timers’ games, and is usually well compensated for such appearances. Late in life he became a television salesman for the Bowery Savings Bank and Mr. Coffee.

  In the process Joe DiMaggio became something of an American icon. His fame transcended sports and endured in the 1980s. When later in his presidency Ronald Reagan hosted an elegant dinner for Mikhail Gorbachev, the guest list included, among others, Joe DiMaggio.

  DiMaggio seemed somewhat amused by the giant salaries now paid ordinary ballplayers, let alone the handful of superstars. There was constant speculation in the press about how much he would be making if he played today. At an old-timers’ game at the Stadium in the early eighties a reporter asked him how much he thought he would make under contemporary salary schedules. He thought for a moment. “Oh, I’d probably be part owner,” he answered. He has a handful of people who are devoted to him and protect him from the outside world and run errands for him. One former teammate joked that Joe DiMaggio was the only successful man in America who never made a plane reservation, or a restaurant reservation in his life. Things like that were always done for him.

  He has aged gracefully, his hair turning silver, as if on cue from some casting director. Wherever he goes fans rush up to him to pay homage, to ask who is going to win that season’s pennant, to tell him that they had seen one of his most memorable home runs, an
d, above all, to tell him that he looks great. His friend Toots Shor once joked that when DiMaggio dies the funeral will be one of the largest ever. It will be held in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York with thousands of New Yorkers trooping up to the open casket to pay their final respects: “You look great, Joe.”

  But he never managed to balance the scales between fame and privacy. He seems eternally wary. When a friend or a former teammate calls him at home or at a hotel, he picks up the phone and pretends that he is not Joe DiMaggio (“Who wants to talk to him?”). Since his voice is distinctive, oddly sharp, almost strident, it is not a very successful ploy. A friend who was once at a banquet with him remembered years later the almost desperate quality with which DiMaggio held on to him: Could they go to the airport together? Could the friend sit with him at the coffee shop and help fend off strangers? Was the friend free to fly on to Los Angeles with him?

  But he has mellowed somewhat, and when he goes back for old-timers’ games and sees his old teammates with their wives, he embraces the wives with real affection—something he never would have done thirty or forty years ago. He likes to go to these games, but he is too proud to play. There was a vote among players, and he was chosen not just to the all-star team but as the greatest living player as well. When he comes to such functions, two of his conditions are that he be introduced last and as the greatest living ballplayer. On one occasion Mickey Mantle was introduced after him and he was not pleased. As the years passed, many of his baseball records fell, but his deeds and his legend do not shrink.

  He quite naturally cared about his connection with immortality; his career, after all, had been special, but much of what distinguished it had to be seen—the sheer beauty of his play, the systematic ability to play well under pressure and lift a team in big games. His individual statistics were not by themselves that exceptional: His career had been interrupted by the war and he had never as a player paid much attention to statistics. Now, however, as he grew older, he would be judged increasingly by those who never saw him play, and therefore statistics and records meant more. Not surprisingly he came to revere his fifty-six-game hitting streak more than in the past. At the time the streak had not seemed to mean that much to him. It was merely one of many exceptional things he had accomplished. When Pete Rose made his assault upon the record in 1978, DiMaggio was careful to praise Rose to reporters, and never, as many of his contemporaries did, offered any churlish criticism of modern-day baseball players. But friends thought they noticed a certain anxiety in the way he talked about Rose in private. It was, they decided, the most human of emotions.

  Paul Simon had been seven years old in 1949, and he had become a Yankee fan while sitting in his father’s lap listening to Mel Allen’s broadcasts. DiMaggio was his father’s hero, and the senior Simon spoke often of him and his great deeds in the years before the war. When he was only five years old, Paul Simon himself had almost witnessed a DiMaggio home run, but everyone in the Stadium had jumped up and blocked his view at the moment the Yankee star hit the ball. So, in truth, Simon was so young that DiMaggio was a fairly fuzzy figure to him at the time.

  In 1966 Simon, writing the lyrics for the score of the movie The Graduate, had sought for one song an image of purity in a simpler America. His mind flashed to the great Yankee player. He wrote down, completely by instinct, the words, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you ...” He knew immediately that it was right—a lament for another time—and he wondered whether he had the right to use it. After all, in the traditional sense the words had nothing to do with the rest of the song. But because he loved the feel of it (the words were to become among the most memorable he ever wrote), he kept it. The irony was that the real hero of his youth was Mickey Mantle. Once in the late sixties he found himself on a talk show with Mantle. “Hey, why didn’t you write that song about me?” Mantle asked during a break in the show. Simon thought for a minute and decided that the real explanation was too complicated. “It was syllables, Mickey,” he answered, “the syllables were all wrong.”

  Toots Shor transferred his allegiance from DiMaggio to Mantle in the 1950s, a move made somewhat easier because DiMaggio began to cut him dead after Shor made an unflattering remark about Marilyn Monroe. But in other ways Shor could not adapt to changes taking place in the world. The flight from the boroughs to the suburbs accelerated. The subway at night became a riskier option. Two of New York’s baseball teams left the city. Perhaps most important of all—in terms of Shor’s decline—night baseball replaced daytime baseball, which had allowed both player and writer to go to the game and then show up at Shor’s in the early evening for a night of relaxing. Now the sportswriters did not finish their stories until well after midnight—too late to go and play at Shor’s. As newspapers died and writers were replaced by television producers, there would have been little interest in mingling with the players at the nightclub anyway.

  In the 1960s, Shor’s decline was accelerated by the fact that the proprietor turned out to have been a horrendous businessman who had not been very careful about paying his taxes. Besides, a new kind of athlete celebrity was appearing on the scene: Someone asked Joe Namath, a football player, if he liked going to Shor’s. No, he said, as a matter of fact, he did not. Why not? “Because the owner spills drinks on you,” Namath answered.

  In 1964 there was an old-timers’ game at the Stadium and many of the 1949 players attended; afterward there was a party, with food and drink, in the Stadium clubhouse. Johnny Pesky had played briefly in the old-timers’ game and had felt the old familiar tension—for this was the Yankees and the Red Sox. He had even felt a surge of anger, for Pesky more than the other Boston players had been at war with the Yankees. He had always played his hardest, for they were the enemy, and perhaps also because when he was a young player in Oregon their scouts had shunned him because he was too small. He had never forgiven them; after all, he was an inch taller than Rizzuto.

  But it had been a pleasant day; old memories had been stirred and they were for the most part happy ones. Afterward Pesky went up to get some food and as he turned to find a seat he saw a table with old friends. He headed back toward it, a friendly island in a seat of potential adversaries. As he moved toward them he passed a Yankee table with three formidable men: Allie Reynolds, Vic Raschi, and Charlie Keller. That is a lot of muscle, he thought. He had a quick memory of Allie Reynolds once, hitting him by mistake in a game—a light nick on the shoulder. Pesky had looked out at the mound and had been stunned to see the rage in Reynolds’s face. That man, he had thought, is not upset that he hit me, he is upset that he did not hit me right in the neck.

  “Sit down, you little shit-ass,” Reynolds said, his face as hard and impassive as it had been when he was on the mound. Pesky, suddenly very nervous, did as he was told. Reynolds gave him another look, and Pesky suddenly realized he was smiling.

  “We only ask guys we like to sit with us,” Reynolds said. “Pesky, you know, you were a pain in the ass back when we played, but you could play. You know that. You were okay, Pesky.”

  “Well it was no goddamn day at the beach against you,” Pesky said. It was a very pleasant moment, Pesky thought. It seemed to cement the best of those old rivalries in his mind; they had played hard and they had made each other better because of their rivalry. They had always respected each other. The old struggles were finally over.

  Tommy Henrich ran into Bobby Doerr about the same time at another old-timers game.

  “Tom,” asked Doerr, “didn’t we have a good ball club?”

  “You had a great ball club,” answered Henrich. “We were always afraid of you.”

  “Then why didn’t we win?” asked Doerr, who had played fourteen seasons and had been in only one World Series (Henrich had played eleven years and had been in four).

  “Because you didn’t have to and we had to,” said Henrich, an answer that would have made George Weiss smile. “We needed the extra money from the World Series check. That w
as our extra salary. You guys were all making more money than us because of Yawkey.”

  Birdie Tebbetts took a different view. When people asked him, as they often did, which team had been better, he said the Red Sox.

  Then why didn’t you win? the people would ask.

  “I’ll give you the answer in two words,” he said. “Joe Page.”

  Bart Giamatti did not grow up to play second base for the Boston Red Sox. He became a professor at Yale, and then president of Yale, and then, in time, exhausted by a bitter strike at Yale and anxious to try greener fields, president of the National League. He never lost his love for the Boston Red Sox. It was as a Red Sox fan, he later realized, that he had first learned that man is fallen, and that life is filled with disappointment. The path to comprehending Calvinism in modern America, he decided, begins at Fenway Park.

  He also retained his love of Bobby Doerr. In 1986, his first year as a baseball executive, he went to Cooperstown for the Hall of Fame induction ceremonies. By chance, Bobby Doerr and his wife were there, and Giamatti was introduced. He was very nervous. “Mr. Doerr, you’re my hero,” he began. The Doerrs were stunned by this display. That the ex-president of Yale knew who he was and wanted to meet him seemed quite beyond them. “Mr. Giamatti,” said Mrs. Doerr, “you’re the former president of Yale—you’re a hero to people like us.”