Womans Murder Club 2 - Second Chance

by Patterson, James

  On the game in question, Kinder got so drunk that it slipped his mind he was supposed to be pitching until Clif Keane, who knew both his habits and his habitats, hurried down to the Kenmore Hotel, interrupted his liaison with a young lady, and broke the not necessarily welcome news to him. Then Keane helped him get dressed and lugged him to the ballpark. In those days, starling pitchers still warmed up in front of their respective dugouts. Drunk as he was, Kinder was throwing the ball all over the place, something everybody in the ballpark except Joe McCarthy could see, possibly because Joe McCarthy was kind of sleeping it off himself.

  Kinder, well aware that he needed a stiffener, cut his warm-up short

  and went into the clubhouse for “a cup of coffee.” Or something. Slick-haired Jack Kramer, who had the locker next to his, was always complaining that Kinder was drinking his hair tonic.

  Clif Keane: “Nellie Fox was the first hitter. The first pitch went up on the backstop. The second one came in on a couple of bounces. Dave Philley was the second batter. The first pitch came bouncing up to the plate, and the second one went up against the backstop.” Birdie Tebbetts, his catcher, was yelling, “Get him out of here. He's drunk.” Eight straight pitches Kinder threw without coming anywhere near the plate, and somewhere along the way Joe McCarthy woke up enough to sense that something was amiss. “I'll never forget this scene,” says Keane. “Here comes McCarthy. Kinder sees McCarthy coming and, thinking quickly, he begins to work his left arm. He's a right-handed pitcher. McCarthy says, 'That costs you five hundred dollars.' He brings in Maurie McDermott. McDermott pitches a four-hit shutout, and McCarthy never takes the money from Kinder.”

  The way the story went out over the news wires, it read: “After issuing passes to the first two batters, the right-hander left the game with a kink in his left shoulder.” A not-so-cryptic message to the rest of the baseball world.

  McCarthy was indisposed again in Chicago two weeks later, at a time when the Red Sox were losing steadily. It was said that he resigned because of his health. If so, Tom Yawkey was suitably grateful.

  McCarthy was replaced by Steve O'Neill, who was Joe Cronin's drinking buddy.

  By the time Ted returned from Korea, the manager was Lou Boudreau, who got the job by playing pepper with Yawkey at Fenway Park every morning. The “country club,” otherwise known as the Yawkey follies, was in full flower over the rest of Ted's career.

  It all came to a climax, during Ted's last two years, with the hiring and firing of Billy Jurges. Or, if you prefer, the firing and hiring of Mike Higgins.

  It began in the spring of 1959 when Joe Cronin was named president of the American League. He was hired because (I) he had always

  wanted the job, and (2) Yawkey had confided to his fellow owners that he wanted to get rid of him and (3) it was a job with such limited responsibilities that it didn't matter who held it. What followed with the Red Sox was not so much musical comedy as pure slapstick.

  To replace Cronin as general manager, Yawkey hired Bucky Harris-the man Cronin had replaced as manager twenty-three years ear tier. A neat symmetry there. Yawkey had always felt guilty about letting Bucky go.

  He was, alas, doing Bucky no favor. Bucky had a gorgeous young wife, and until Yawkey felt the need to go rummaging around in his conscience he had been living a perfectly happy life. Bucky wasn't an administrator. Bucky wasn't an executive. Bucky was a falling-down drunk. By 1959, he was so far gone that the office help had to guide his hand through his signature on official papers. Dick O'Connell, the business manager, was running the club. “Dick,” Bucky would tell him, “I don't want this job. I don't want it.”

  Mike Higgins was in his fifth year as the field manager. He was another of Yawkey's drinking buddies, but he was also a very strong and solid man, with a lot of personal problems which he drowned, as he liked to say, with “cherry bombs.” To say he was a player's manager was to understate it. “I love playing for Higgins,” one of the players was quoted as saying. “He never gets mad at us when we lose.” By June of 1959, the Red Sox had fallen into last place, the anti-Higgins faction of the press was howling for his head, and Yawkey dispatched Bucky Harris to Washington with orders to fire him.

  Already the geography was unfortunate. Washington was Bucky Harris's home ground, and instead of going to the team's hotel, to make the announcement to the hastily gathered press, he went roaming off to his old haunts and disappeared for two days--although “Bucky sightings” were posted periodically in the press box. From Washington, the Red Sox traveled up to Baltimore by bus. When they arrived at the Lord Baltimore Hotel they found their missing general manager sitting in the lobby.

  Within thirty seconds, Harris and Higgins were headed out the door

  and across the street to the Gaiety Bar. Right behind them were three members of the Boston press corps, plus Bill Crowley, then a member of the broadcasting team. Harris and Higgins were at one end of the huge oval bar, arguing. The media guys settled down at the other end. Otherwise the place was empty.

  Three scenes are going to be taking place in separate venues. One at the Gaiety Bar, another in Ed Rumill's hotel room, in the hotel, and the third at the rooftop press room at Fenway Park.

  Bill Crowley: “The Gaiety had this fat, ugly bar girl, Audrey, who looked like Tugboat Annie. Jake Liston of the Traveler hands her a sawbuck and says, 'Go down and wash some glasses, and come back and tell us what they're talking about.' She comes back in a couple of minutes. 'The little guy keeps telling the big guy he should resign. The big guy keeps telling the little guy to go luck himself.' ”

  Off that promising beginning, Lyn Raymond of the Quincy Ledger slipped her another ten spot and sent her back to wipe around the bar. Back she came with her new report. “The little one says to the big one he's fired. The big one tells him he's a little shiI, he can't fire him. The little one says, 'I can fire you, and I have to fire you, because Yawkey wants me to fire you.'”

  Meanwhile, back at the hotel, Ed Rumill of the Christian Science Monitor had been taking a phone call from one of his numerous ex wives. The former Mrs. Rumill had been in Duke Zeibert's restaurant in Washington the previous night and had overheard a conversation between George Preston Marshall, the owner of the Washington Redskins, and Bucky Harris in which Marshall, the football man, had been holding forth on the merits of the Senators' third-base coach, Billy Jurges. “I think you're right,” she had heard Bucky say. “He might be just the right man for us at this time.”

  Okay, the Boston writers now had it all. Which was more than could be said for Tom Yawkey, back in Boston. Yawkey had called a press conference to announce the dismissal of Higgins. Unfortunately, nobody at Fenway Park had been able to locate Bucky Harris during those two days, either. With nothing to tell the press, Yawkey was at

  the bar, drinking heavily. He was also doing something he almost never did, he was taking questions. Unaccustomed as he was to being cross examined, he turned hostile. “There are people here who are trying to tell me how to run a seven-million-dollar operation,” he said, “and there's not one of you who could even run a streetcar.” To show how bad things were going for him, one of the writers delivered a stiff protest. He had worked his way through college driving a streetcar, he wanted Yawkey to know. Through Harvard University yet.

  Soon enough, Yawkey retreated to the position that he hadn't called the press conference to announce the name of a new manager but only to inform them that there was going to be a club meeting over the All Star break to decide what direction the Red Sox were going to take.

  Right on cue, the phone rang. The call wasn't for Yawkey, though. It was for Hy Hurwitz. As soon as he put down the phone, Hurwitz

  said, “You haven't decided who your new manager is going to be?” “I haven't decided whether there's going to be a new manager.”

  Hurwitz said, "Down in Baltimore they're announcing that Bucky

  Harris is saying that Billy Jurges is going to be the new manager.“ ”Who? Who?"

&n
bsp; “Mr. Yawkey, the Globe is printing that you hired Billy Jurges today. Two hours ago.”

  “We did?” said Thomas Austin Yawkey, the sole owner of the Boston Red Sox Baseball Club.

  Billy Jurges had been a great shortstop for the Chicago Cubs and the New York Giants. He had played for the Cubs, as a young buckaroo, in the Chicago of AI Capone. In the spirit of the times, he had once taken a bullet through the hand while trying to convince teammate Kiki Cuyler's gun-toting girlfriend that Kiki wasn't being unfaithful to her. Obviously he was the perfect manager for the Boston Red Sox.

  Wrong. It wasn't Capone's Chicago, and Billy wasn't twenty-three years old. Billy Jurges tried to instill some discipline into the ball club, SOme rules even. A curfew, for crissake. The players hated him. They also ignored him. Let him fine away to his heart's content; they knew

  nothing would ever be taken out of their paychecks. Frank Sullivan, the ringleader of the not-so-jolly band of hell-raisers, summed it up perfectly at the end of one road trip. “If a bomb had hit the hotel in Detroit at two in the morning,” he said, “we'd have still been able to put a team on the field.”

  In the spring of 1960, as Ted was getting ready for his final year, the former Higgins supporters in the press corps began to print that there was dissension in the Red Sox clubhouse over the way Jurges was running the club. Ted Williams jumped to Jurges's defense and was quoted by Joe Reichler of the AP as saying, “It's all a bunch of horsefeathers. It's those damn Boston writers again. They're always starting trouble.”

  But that was almost a reflex action. “I was for every manager I ever played for,” he says, “every one of them.” What he really means is that all he ever wanted from the manager was to be left alone. “My game was right there to play, to hit the best I could, and I tried to do that every time I got to the plate. The manager wasn't going to affect me. I think if I had hated a manager, I'd have hit better because I'd have been mad at him when I got to the plate. You can get too damn happy with it all, and too self-satisfied, and barn, you go down the tubes.”

  In June the Red Sox were back in last place, and on their way to Minneapolis to play an exhibition game against their farm club (which had a new kid, just out of Notre Dame, named Carl Yastrzemski). A mediocre sore-armed minor-league pitcher who hadn't won a game all year pitched a no-hitter against them, and by the time they boarded the plane for Kansas City there was a story on the wire quoting an unidentified player as saying that Jurges had lost control of the team.

  Everybody knew that the source was Tom Brewer, the team's best pitcher. As they arrived in the hotel lobby in Kansas City, Jurges announced that there would be a clubhouse meeting and he wanted all the players and all the newspapermen to be there.

  The newspapermen at a clubhouse meeting? Already disaster was in the air. The players were sitting or standing at their lockers. The writers were scattered around the walls.

  Ted Williams, still being protective of Jurges, was glowering at any writer who dared to come near him. Pumpsie Green, who had just been called up from the minors to become the Red Sox's first black player, had just sat down at the end of the table in the middle of the room and been handed an ice-cream bar when Jurges came clomping out of his office.

  Bill Crowley was there again: "The great lesson I learned that day was that if you want to make a dramatic entrance do not wear shower clogs. ' '

  Standing there in his shower clogs, Jurgcs demanded that the player quoted in the wire story step forward and identify himself.

  Nobody moved. (Talking about it later, the Boston writers decided that if Brewer had stepped forward, Jurgcs would have had a hcan attack. And that if, God forbid, Ted Williams had stepped forward, he'd have gone into cardiac arrest.)

  The identity of the culprit having gone undisclosed, the press now discovered why they were there. “We're all in this together,” Jurges iformed them, “We're all working for the city of Boston and the Boston Red Sox.”

  Not one of the writers who had been hammering at him so mercilessly said a word. It was left to Roger Birtwell of the Globe, an aging and shall we say over-genteel member of the press corps, to arise from his crouch, and in his broad prissy Harvard accent deliver a lecture to Mr. Jurges on the duties and responsibilities of the press.

  The ballplayers were chortling, Ted Williams was still glowering, and Pumpsie Green was so astonished at this introduction to the major leagues that he just sat there while the ice-cream bar melted and dripped down his hand. You could almost hear him thinking, "This is the big leagues... ?,,

  And then it got worse. After the meeting was over, the distraught Jurges gave an exclusive interview to Larry Claflin of the American to the effect that he felt he wasn't being supported by the front office. He was so far gone that he even criticized Mr. Yawkey for not backing him properly, an all-time first in Boston. By the time the team reached Washington, the word had come back from Fenway Park so forcefully

  that he called another press conference to mend his fences. Nobody came. “We don't have any story to clarify” was the message that was sent back to him. “Give it to your private correspondent, Claflin, and let him do your apologizing for you.”

  With the club continuing to lose, the Red Sox sent the club physician down to give Jurges what was called a “physical examination.” The next day he was told to go to his home in nearby Silver Spring, Maryland, for a rest, and not to worry, because when he was ready to come back the job would still be his.

  Tom Yawkey, who never held press conferences, held his second press conference in two years. This one ended with him threatening to take the Red Sox out of Boston because the Boston press had exceeded the bounds of decency. The purpose of the press conference was to issue a statement, over the signatures of Tom Yawkey and Bucky Harris, saying that Jurges was the manager and no changes were contemplated. Ted Williams had already issued a statement reiterating his support of Jurges through his personal columnist, Joe Reichler.

  While Jurges was resting in his home in Silver Spring, he received a registered letter from Yawkey and Harris granting him his unconditional release.

  When the Red Sox arrived back in Boston, they found that Mike Higgins was their manager again. Yawkey had located Higgins at a convention of postmasters in New Orleans and had told him to fly to Cleveland. He had then sent Dick O'Connell to Cleveland with instructions to bring Higgins to Boston, sober.

  “Rehiring Higgins raises a question,” wrote Jerry Nason, the sports editor of the Boston Globe. “Do the Red Sox know what they are doing?”

  That was the Red Sox in 1960, as the career of Ted Williams was coming to an end.

  Forever, and forever, farewell, Cassius? if we do meet again, why, we shall smile; if not, why then, this parting was well made,

  -- SHAKESPEARE Harold Kaese's lead in

  the Boston Globe, September 27, 1960

  after the two change-of-life batting championships, Tom Yawkey was more anxious than ever for Williams to retire. Despite that oft-expressed desire to leave the spotlight, imposed upon him by the world of baseball, Ted could not bring himself to depart.

  He had after all, committed himself from the beginning to leave his mark upon the record books. He already had 482 home runs as the 1958 season came to an end and he wanted, he said, to pass Lou Gehrig's mark of 493 before he retired--and, if possible, to become the fourth man in history to achieve a total of 500.

  Ted was almost was ready to quit, though, when he learned that the Red Sox would be moving their spring-training headquarters to Scotts dale, Arizona. He had heard, in his travels, that it was almost impossible to work up a sweat in the thin Arizona air, and he was afraid he would never be able to get in shape. He discovered very quickly that his information could not have been more incorrect. He thrived so wonderfully on the dry Arizona air that after a couple of weeks he was in the best shape he had been in for years.

  In mid-March, the Red Sox and the Indians were to play a three game exhibition series in San Diego, Ted's home
town. Since he had not played in San Diego since a barnstorming tour in 1941, he put aside his plans to eschew exhibition games so that he could play once more before a hometown crowd. He arrived in San Diego a day before either of the clubs did to do some advance publicity work. The city opened its arms to greet the man who had become its most famous son. Ted had a great time renewing acquaintances with old friends and schoolmates.

  The first two games were played at night. The first night turned out

  cool and damp, the kind of weather he should never have played in. He stayed in the game for five innings, though, to satisfy the people who had turned out to see him. The next night was even cooler and damper. This time Ted played seven innings. In the final game, played on a warm Sunday afternoon, he played through another seven innings.

  With the teams returning to Arizona, Ted was given permission to remain in San Diego for a few more days. Before the Indians left, Frank Lane, their general manager, asked Ted, as a special favor, to try to make one of the upcoming games at Cleveland's own training camp, in Tucson. Ted, who was always fond of Lane, promised that he would.

  Although his neck had begun to stiffen up on him, Williams, true to his promise, hopped into his car and drove 150 miles across the desert. He suited up, came to the back of the batting cage, and attempted a couple of warm-up swings. The neck hurt so badly that he didn't even try to step into the cage. “I'm going to have to back out on you, Frank,” he told Lane. “I just can't swing at all.” “I know you didn't drive 150 miles to back out of anything,” Lane told him. “I'm grateful to you for making the try.”

  At first, his problem was diagnosed as a cold in the neck. It was actually a pinched nerve. Because it was widely believed that Ted had used slight or imaginary injuries to get out of exhibition games for years, the first stories about the pinched nerve were taken, it may be said, with a pinch of salt.