David Halberstam on Sports: Summer of '49, October 1964, The Amateurs, Playing for Keeps
()
About this ebook
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David Halberstam, preeminent chronicler of the American experience, focuses his meticulous narrative gifts on some of Major League Baseball’s most iconic moments, training for the Olympics, and a remarkable profile of hoops legend Michael Jordan.
Summer of ’49: In this #1 New York Times bestseller, Halberstam brings to stirring life the unforgettable season that cemented baseball as America’s pastime. A nation in transition is gripped by a pennant race for the ages: the Boston Red Sox, led by Ted Williams’s unearthly bat skills, versus the New York Yankees and Joe DiMaggio’s legendary heroics. Every hit on and off the field crackles across the page “in such an enjoyable, interesting, and informative manner that a reader needn’t be a baseball fan to appreciate the book” (Library Journal).
October 1964: The 1964 World Series pitted the established Yankees against the upstart St. Louis Cardinals in an epic, seven-game seesaw battle that seemed to reflect the tensions of a nation in turmoil. The barnburner included a cast of legends—Mantle, Maris, Ford, Gibson, Brock—and enough game-changing plays to last a lifetime. Halberstam captures every moment with “a fluidity of writing that make[s] the reading almost effortless. . . . Absorbing” (San Francisco Chronicle).
The Amateurs: This inspirational bestseller focuses Halberstam’s brilliant reportage on the travails and triumphs of Olympic rowing. Introducing us to a cast of highly driven athletes at the 1984 single sculls trials in Princeton, Halberstam delves deep into their struggles, motivations, and failures—but in the end only one will represent the United States at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Informative and compelling, Halberstam “maintains the suspense to the very last stroke” (Sports Illustrated).
Playing for Keeps: A wildly entertaining and revealing portrait of global icon Michael Jordan and the rise of the NBA. With his usual impeccable research and gripping storytelling, Halberstam covers the whole court, from the transformative rivalry of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson to the invention of ESPN to Spike Lee’s Nike commercials to every unforgettable playoff game that built Jordan’s legend. “Filled with salty, informed hoops talk” (Publishers Weekly), this “remarkable book . . . [is] a must-read for basketball fans, admirers of Jordan, and anyone who seeks to understand sports in America today” (Bill Bradley).
David Halberstam
David Halberstam (1934–2007) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author. He is best known for his brazen coverage of the Vietnam War for the New York Times and for his twenty-one nonfiction books, which cover a wide array of topics such as the plight of Detroit and the auto industry, and the incomparable success of Michael Jordan. The recipient of the Mailer Prize for distinguished journalism, Halberstam wrote for numerous publications throughout his career and, according to journalist George Packer, single-handedly set the standard of “the reporter as fearless truth teller.” Halberstam died in 2007.
Read more from David Halberstam
The Reckoning Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summer of '49 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fifties Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Powers That Be Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5October 1964 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Children Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy: A Biography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Next Century Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Best Fishing Stories Ever Told Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Gigantic Book of Fishing Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFinding the Words: The Education of James O. Freedman Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStill Pitching: Musings from the Mound and the Microphone Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to David Halberstam on Sports
Related ebooks
The Rivals: The New York Yankees vs. the Boston Red Sox---An Inside History Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5All Roads Lead to October: Boss Steinbrenner's 25-Year Reign over the New York Yankees Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Era, 1947–1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Roger Maris: Baseball's Reluctant Hero Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gang Green: An Irreverent Look Behind the Scenes Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Boys of Summer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Greatest Game: The Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Playoff of '78 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Last Innocents: The Collision of the Turbulent Sixties and the Los Angeles Dodgers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ten Innings at Wrigley: The Wildest Ballgame Ever, with Baseball on the Brink Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of ‘76 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Babe Ruth and the 1918 Red Sox: Babe Ruth and the World Champion Boston Red Sox Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWillie Mays: The Life, The Legend Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tom Seaver: A Terrific Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Good Enough to Dream Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stealing Games: How John McGraw Transformed Baseball with the 1911 New York Giants Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Billy Martin: Baseball's Flawed Genius Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jim Kaat: Good As Gold: My Eight Decades in Baseball Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Runnin' Rebel: Shark Tales of "Extra Benefits," Frank Sinatra, and Winning It All Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Thurm: Memoirs of a Forever Yankee Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsI Was There!: Joe Buck, Bob Costas, Jim Nantz, and Others Relive the Most Exciting Sporting Events of Their Lives Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings3 Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5After the Miracle: The Lasting Brotherhood of the '69 Mets Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Roy White: From Compton to the Bronx Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBigger Than the Game: Restitching a Major League Life Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Rising Above the Madness: Profiles of the Greatest NCAA Basketball Coaches of All Time Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Bronx Zoo Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Sports Biographies For You
Mother of God: An Extraordinary Journey into the Uncharted Tributaries of the Western Amazon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Baseball 100 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Things That Make White People Uncomfortable Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Coach Wooden's Pyramid of Success Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Endure: How to Work Hard, Outlast, and Keep Hammering Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Straight Shooter: A Memoir of Second Chances and First Takes Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Longest Race: Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike's Elite Running Team Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Slash Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Off Balance: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Birth of The Endless Summer: A Surf Odyssey Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Summary of Kobe Bryant's The Mamba Mentality Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMOX Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ball Four Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Uncommon: Finding Your Path to Significance Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Winning Ugly: Mental Warfare in Tennis--Lessons from a Master Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In My Skin: My Life On and Off the Basketball Court Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Man-Eater in History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dreamseller Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5LeBron Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Far Beyond Gold: Running from Fear to Faith Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Little Thing Called Life: On Loving Elvis Presley, Bruce Jenner, and Songs in Between Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for David Halberstam on Sports
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
David Halberstam on Sports - David Halberstam
David Halberstam on Sports
Summer of ’49, October 1964, The Amateurs, Playing for Keeps
David Halberstam
CONTENTS
SUMMER OF ’49
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
EPILOGUE
AUTHOR'S NOTE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
PHOTO GALLERY
OCTOBER 1964
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
THE AMATEURS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Epilogue
Image Gallery
Acknowledgments
PLAYING FOR KEEPS
1. Paris, October 1997
2. Wilmington; Laney High, 1979-1981
3. Chicago, November 1997
4. Los Angeles, 1997; Williston, North Dakota, 1962
5. Chapel Hill, 1980
6. Chapel Hill, 1981
7. Chapel Hill, 1982-1984
8. Chicago, 1984
9. New York City; Bristol, Connecticut, 1979-1984
10. Chapel Hill; Chicago; Portland, 1984
11. Los Angeles; Chicago, 1984, 1985
12. Boston, April 1986
13. New York City; Portland, 1986
14. Chicago, 1986-1987
15. Albany; Chicago, 1984-1988
16 Chicago; Seattle, 1997
17 Hamburg and Conway, Arkansas; Chicago, 1982-1987
18. Detroit, the 1980s
19. Chicago, 1988-1990; New York City, 1967-1971
20. Chicago, 1990-1991
21. Chicago; Los Angeles, 1991
22. Chicago, 1997-1998
23. Chicago; Portland, 1992
24. La Jolla; Monte Carlo; Barcelona, 1992
25. Chicago; Phoenix, 1992-1993
26. Chicago, 1993
27. Birmingham; Chicago, 1994-1995
28. Chicago; Seattle; Salt Lake City, 1995-1997
29. Chicago, 1998
30. Chicago; Indianapolis, 1998
31. Chicago; Salt Lake City, June 1998
32. Chicago, June 1998
Epilogue
Afterword
Image Gallery
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
List of Interviews
A Biography of David Halberstam
Summer of ’49
For David Fine
Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
EPILOGUE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
—JOSEPH CAMPBELL,
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
THE NEW YORK YANKEES OF 1949
Casey Stengel—Manager
THE BOSTON RED SOX OF 1949
Joe McCarthy—Manager
PROLOGUE
IN BOSTON THE EXCITEMENT over the last two games of the 1948 season was unprecedented, even taking into account that city’s usual baseball madness. The fever was in the streets. On Saturday morning the crowd gathered early, not only inside Fenway Park, to watch the Red Sox and the Yankees in their early workouts but also outside the nearby Kenmore Hotel where the Yankees were staying—the better to get a close look at these mighty and arrogant gladiators who had done so much damage to the local heroes in the past. Such veteran Yankee players as Tommy Henrich and Joe DiMaggio loved big, high-pressure games like these. Henrich particularly enjoyed playing against the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Red Sox because the parks were so small that you could really see and hear the fans. Such intimacy was missing in the cathedrallike Yankee Stadium. It did not matter, Henrich thought, that the fans were rooting against you. What mattered was their passion, which was contagious to both teams. For some of the younger players, it was a bit unsettling. When Charlie Silvera, a young catcher just brought up from the minor leagues, saw the streets outside the hotel jammed with excited Boston fans, he felt like a Christian on his way to the Coliseum. Along with his buddies, Hank Bauer and Yogi Berra, he left the hotel ready to run this relatively good-natured gauntlet. The fans crowded around to tell them that the Sox were going to get them, that Ted (Ted Williams, of course, but in conversations this intimate, he was merely Ted) was going to eat Tommy Byrne alive. It was, thought Silvera, as if nothing else in the world matters except this game.
What a glorious pennant race it was in 1948, with three teams battling almost to the last day. The Red Sox, the beloved Sox, had started slowly. They were eleven and a half games out on the last day of May. But the Boston fans did not lose faith, even if it was mixed in almost equal parts with cynicism. The Sox came back, took first place in late August, and stayed there for almost a month. Then the Cleveland Indians, with their marvelous pitching staff—including Bob Feller, the fastest pitcher in either league; Bob Lemon, judged by many hitters to be Feller’s equal; and a young rookie named Gene Bearden—made their challenge. The possibility of winning the pennant so electrified the Indians that near the end of the season Lou Boudreau, the young playing manager, had to ask the sportswriters not to come into the locker room. The players were so emotional, he said, that he feared a writer might overhear something said in anger, write it up, and an incident would be created. The writers, reflecting something about the journalistic mores of the time, all agreed.
While Boston and Cleveland battled for first, the Yankees stayed just within striking distance. All three teams set attendance records, drawing among them more than 6.5 million fans (the Indians drew 2.6 million, the Yankees 2.37, and the Red Sox, in their much smaller ball park, 1.55 million). Newspapers throughout the country headlined the pennant race every day, and in countless offices everywhere men and women brought portable radios to work—for the games were still played in the afternoon then.
The best player on each of the three teams was having a remarkable year: Joe DiMaggio of the Yankees, although hobbled by painful leg and foot injuries, was in his last great statistical year, and was in the process of driving in 155 runs; Ted Williams of Boston ended up hitting .369 with 127 runs batted in; and Lou Boudreau of the Indians led Williams for part of the summer and ended up hitting .355, 60 points above his career average. Williams, the greatest hitter of his era, hated to be behind anyone in a batting race. While Boudreau was slightly ahead of him, the Red Sox played a doubleheader with Chicago late in the season. That day Birdie Tebbetts, the Boston catcher, needled Williams: Looks like the Frenchman’s got you beat this year, Ted,
he said. The hell he has,
Williams answered. He went seven for eight, with three hits to the opposite field. The last time up, with six hits already under his belt and his average having edged above Boudreau’s, he yelled to Tebbetts, This one’s for Ted,
and hit it out.
With one week, or, more important, seven games, left in the season, the three teams were tied with identical records of 91-56. They wanted a close race. Well, they’ve got it,
said Bucky Harris, the Yankee manager, speaking to reporters as the Yankees prepared to meet the Red Sox for a brief series in New York. It couldn’t be any closer. But somebody has to drop tomorrow. Maybe two of us will be off the roof. But I’m not dropping my switch.
Then the Indians moved ahead; they continued to win while the Red Sox and Yankees faltered. On Thursday the New York Times headline observed: INDIANS NEAR PENNANT AS FELLER WINS. The Indians had a two-game lead, with only three games left.
As the Yankees prepared to take on Boston at Fenway, the Indians played their last three against fifth-place Detroit. On Friday Cleveland took a 3-2 lead into the ninth inning behind Bob Lemon. But Lemon tired, and Detroit rallied to win 5-3. So the door had opened just slightly for either Boston or New York.
Fenway was one of the smallest parks in the majors and every one of its 35,000 seats was taken on Saturday. The Boston management noted sadly that if they had had 100,000 seats they could have sold them all that day. In the first game at Fenway, the Red Sox beat the Yankees when Williams hit a long home run off Tommy Byrne. Rundown by a cold he seemed unable to shake—despite his use of penicillin, then still a miracle drug—Williams had clinched the batting title. There had been a special pleasure for Williams in getting the crucial home run off Byrne because Byrne normally tormented Williams every time he came up: Hey, Ted, how’s the Boston press these days? Still screwing you. That’s a shame. ... I think you deserve better from them. ... By the way, what are you hitting? ... You don’t know? Goddamn, Ted, the last time I looked it up, it was three-sixty or something. Not bad for someone your age. ...
Williams, in desperation, would turn to Yogi Berra, the Yankee catcher, and say, Yogi, can you get that crazy left-handed son of a bitch to shut up and throw the ball?
With the victory over the Yankees, the Red Sox still were a game out of first; to win a share of the pennant they needed to beat the Yankees in the final game. That night, the DiMaggio brothers—Joe, the center fielder of the Yankees, and Dominic, the center fielder of the Red Sox—drove together to Dominic’s house in suburban Wellesley. There was to be a family dinner that night for Dominic, who was scheduled to be married on October 7. Their parents had left San Francisco for a rare trip east to attend the wedding and to see the final games of the season as well. If the Red Sox made the World Series, then the wedding would be postponed to October 17.
For a long time it was quiet in the car—Joe could be reserved even with his family and closest friends and even in the best of times. If he said hello to you,
his contemporary Hank Greenberg once said, that was a long conversation.
This day, when his team had been eliminated from the pennant race, was not the best of times. Finally he turned to his younger brother and said, You knocked us out today, but we’ll get back at you tomorrow—we’ll knock you out. I’ll take care of it personally.
Dominic pondered that for a moment. The role of being Joe DiMaggio’s younger brother had never been easy. Dominic chose his words carefully.
You’re forgetting I may have something to do with that tomorrow,
he said. I’ll be there too.
They continued the rest of the way in silence. The next day Joe tore the park apart; he got four hits including two doubles. One ball hit the short fence so hard that Dominic thought for a moment it would go right through. In the stands their mother turned to their father and said, What’s our Joe trying to do? Beat our Dominic out of the World Series?
The Red Sox took an early 5-0 lead, but the Yankees, with DiMaggio leading the way, chipped away, and in the sixth inning, when Dominic led off, it was 5-4. Dominic caught hold of a fastball and hit it into the screen for a home run. Before the inning was over the Red Sox had increased their lead to 9-4.
In the bottom of the eighth inning, with the Red Sox ahead by five runs, Bucky Harris, the Yankee manager, waited until DiMaggio took his position in center field. Then he sent in a replacement. As DiMaggio limped off the field, something very rare happened, particularly for a ball park where the fans were as partisan as those at Fenway. The crowd of 35,000 rose as one to give the star outfielder of the hated Yankees a standing ovation. The cheering thundered on and on. Joe DiMaggio, a man who worked hard to conceal his emotions, was so touched by the ovation that he later referred to it as the single greatest thrill of his career. In the dugout, Dominic watched the scene with quiet pride. The Red Sox went on to win the game 10-5.
In Cleveland the gods were kind to the Red Sox. The mighty Newhouser of Detroit beat the mighty Feller 7-1. So the long season, 154 games, was over, but the outcome was not decided. The Red Sox would meet the Indians in a special one-game playoff.
Many of the Red Sox players assumed that Mel Parnell, the talented young rookie pitcher, would start for them in the playoff game. Parnell had had three days of rest; he was young, only twenty-six that summer; and he had enjoyed a wonderful rookie year, winning 15 and losing 8. Fifteen games for a rookie left-hander in Boston was remarkable enough, but the truth was, he might easily have won twenty. Parnell had been beaten so often in close games in which he had pitched well that the wives of some of the Boston players had given him some stockings with runs in them—the idea being that he needed those runs.
In the spring of 1948, Red Sox manager Joe McCarthy, who was wary of rookies, had planned to send Parnell back to the minors. But near the end of spring he asked Birdie Tebbetts to catch Parnell in an exhibition game against the Yankees. Tebbetts called for a fastball, and Parnell threw a pitch that surprised him. Not only did it have speed but also exceptional action: Just as it reached the plate it seemed to slide sharply away from the right-handed hitter. Tebbetts called for the same pitch again, and again it seemed to jump away at the last moment. Parnell got through the inning easily, and the next two innings as well. Later, when the Red Sox were up, Tebbetts turned to McCarthy: Joe, you said you were sending the kid down,
Tebbetts began. Shouldn’t we?
McCarthy asked. No,
said Tebbetts, he’s ready now.
Okay,
McCarthy said. So 1948 became Mel Parnell’s rookie year, and a wildly successful one at that.
Despite the fact that Fenway, with its short left-field fence, was considered something of a coffin for left-handers, Parnell quickly proved he could pitch well and fearlessly in his home ball park. He had a 2.29 earned-run average in Fenway, compared to 4.13 on the road. Three of his victories had come against the Indians, a team loaded with right-handed power hitters—a sure sign that his ball was harder on right-handers. He might well have had four victories against the Indians, if not for a dubious umpire’s call on June 8 in a game in which Parnell had been matched up with Gene Bearden—a brilliant pitching duel in Fenway. With one man on, Lou Boudreau hit a sharp line drive toward the right-field line. In the eyes of almost everyone there the ball hooked foul and into the stands long before it reached the foul pole. A fan who was obviously sitting in foul territory caught the ball and held it up. But in Fenway the stands along the base line jut out, and Charlie Berry, the umpire covering the play, ran out and somehow called it fair, a two-run home run.
There was no instant replay in those days, but this was one of those truly terrible moments when the entire ball park knew that an umpire had blown a crucial call. The fan who was waving the ball, and the fans around him, all in foul territory, started waving handkerchiefs. Parnell raced over to Berry. Charlie,
he said, it can’t be a home run-it didn’t even go past the foul pole.
I made my call and it’s a home run and that’s that,
Berry yelled at him. Parnell then raced over to Ed Hurley, the home-plate umpire, and yelled, Ed, you saw it—it’s obviously a foul ball.
Hurley answered with the words that crush a player: It’s not my call.
Berry must have lost the ball as he ran to right field, Parnell decided. He tried one more protest to Berry. Get out of here and pitch,
the umpire said. Those were the game’s only runs, and Cleveland won 2-0. Since the two teams would end the season with identical records, the memory of that call lasted a long time, with Parnell, his teammates, and their fans.
Parnell himself fully expected to start in the playoff game. His family came up from New Orleans and went out to dinner with him. Afterward Patrick Parnell told his son to get a good night’s sleep because he was about to pitch the biggest game of his life. Mel Parnell went to bed before nine and got to the ball park early the next day. Much to his surprise, he found out he was not pitching against the Indians. Joe McCarthy, a very conservative manager, took him aside and said, Mel, I’ve changed my mind. The wind is blowing out, and I’m going to go with a right-hander.
Even more astonishing to Parnell was his choice: a veteran right-hander named Denny Galehouse, who had been used mostly in relief all season. McCarthy’s reasoning was simple: Galehouse was a veteran, Parnell was a rookie; Galehouse was a right-hander, Parnell a lefty. In addition, earlier in the season in a game against the Indians, Parnell had started and gotten only one man out. Galehouse came in and gave up only two hits in the remaining eight and two-thirds innings. Since then, in two other appearances, the Indians had cuffed Galehouse around, but McCarthy’s mind was made up. Parnell was wounded. He knew he was young, but he was confident of his abilities.
Among the other players there was a low rumbling of first disbelief and then discontent when the news made its way through the dugout. Among those who were very surprised was Matt Batts, a young backup catcher who had been in the bullpen the previous day. Not only did Batts think Parnell a better pitcher, but during the difficult 10-5 final victory over the Yankees, Galehouse had been warming up constantly—the equivalent of a six-inning game, Batts thought. Galehouse, he thought, was plain worn-out.
Lou Boudreau, the Cleveland manager, thought that McCarthy was up to some elaborate trick, that perhaps Galehouse would start, throw to one batter, and then Parnell would come in. He suspected that Parnell was warming up in some dark, secret place. But it was not a trick, and Galehouse, who had not had a very good year (forty years later Mel Parnell knew exactly what Denny Gatehouse’s record was that year: 8 and 8), did not pitch particularly well. The Indians won, 8-3, behind the brilliant pitching of young Gene Bearden.
Bearden threw a particularly bewildering knuckle ball that seemed to dance in every direction. The playoff victory was Bearden’s twentieth of the year, and it made him Rookie of the Year, just ahead of Parnell. The next year the Red Sox batters, like others in the American League, learned how to deal with Bearden’s knuckler. They moved up to the very front of the batters box and swung before it began to dance. Gene Bearden never again won more than eight games.
Denny Galehouse never started another game, and he pitched only two more innings in the majors. That playoff game remained a sore point with Red Sox fans. They had always thought that McCarthy, who was a former Yankee manager after all, had never fit in very well in Boston. One sportswriter, Jack Conway of the Boston Evening American, reported that he had received five thousand letters criticizing McCarthy and suggesting that Galehouse be traded. To many Red Sox fans it seemed part of a long, dark history, and years later mention of the 1948 season brought back not memories of Ted Williams’s heroics against the Yankees, but of McCarthy choosing Galehouse over Parnell (the immortal Denny Galehouse
in the words of Martin Nolan, eight years old at the time and today the editor of the editorial page of the Boston Globe).
Boston’s final two victories over the Yankees had ended, for the moment, one of the most intense rivalries in professional baseball. It would have to be continued in the summer of 1949. The Red Sox were a young team. Their fans were disappointed but not heartbroken, and they looked forward with considerable optimism to the coming year. There was no doubt that Cleveland had been lucky and that it would be hard for so many of its players to repeat such exceptional performances. As for the Yankees, they appeared to be aging. The great DiMaggio’s legs were clearly giving out. So, perhaps, 1949 would belong to Boston.
CHAPTER 1
IN THE YEARS IMMEDIATELY following World War II, professional baseball mesmerized the American people as it never had before and never would again. Baseball, more than almost anything else, seemed to symbolize normalcy and a return to life in America as it had been before Pearl Harbor. The nation clearly hungered for that. When Bob Feller returned from the navy to pitch in late August 1945, a Cleveland paper headlined the event: THIS IS WHAT WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR.
All the prewar stars were returning to action—DiMaggio, Williams, Feller, and Stan Musial—and their very names seemed to indicate that America could pick up right where it had left off. They were replacing wartime players of lesser quality. Indeed, a player named George (Cat) Metkovich spoke for many of the wartime players when he told his Boston teammates at the end of the 1945 season, Well, boys, better take a good look around you, because most of us won’t be here next year.
The crowds were extraordinary—large, enthusiastic, and, compared with those that were soon to follow, well behaved. In the prewar years the Yankees, whose teams had included Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio, claimed that they drew 1 million fans at home each season. In fact, they had not drawn that well. The real home attendance was more likely to have been around 800,000. After the war the crowds literally doubled. In 1941, the last year of prewar baseball, the National League drew 4.7 million fans; by 1947 the figure had grown to 10.4 million. In the postwar years the Yankees alone drew more than 2 million fans per season at home.
Nor was it just numbers. There was a special intensity to the crowds in those days. When the Red Sox played the Yankees in the Stadium, they traveled to New York by train, passing through Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Everyone seemed to know the schedule of their train, and as it passed through endless small towns along the route, there would be large crowds gathered at the stations to cheer the players, many of the people holding up signs exhorting their heroes to destroy the hated Yankees. The conductor would deliberately slow the train down and many of the players, on their way to do battle with the sworn enemy, would come out on the observation decks to wave to the crowds.
Near the end of the 1946 season, a young Red Sox pitcher named Dave Ferriss went into Yankee Stadium to pitch and was stunned by the size of the crowd: 63,000 people, according to the newspapers, even though at the time the Red Sox held a sizable lead over the Yankees. Ferriss had only recently left a tiny town in the Mississippi Delta. That day he was so awed by the noise and tumult that in the middle of the game he decided to commit the scene to memory and take it with him for the rest of his life. He stepped off the mound, turned slowly to the stands, and inhaled the crowd. Ferriss thought to himself: How magnificent it all is. This is the Red Sox and this is the Yankees. I am twenty-four, and I am pitching in Yankee Stadium, and every seat is taken.
With the exception of the rare heavyweight fight or college football game that attracted national attention, baseball dominated American sports entertainment. Professional football, soon to become a major sport because its faster action so well suited the television camera, was still a minor-league ticket; golf and tennis were for the few who played those sports.
Rich businessmen, thinking about becoming owners of sports teams, did not yet talk about the entertainment dollar, for America was a Calvinistic nation, not much given to entertaining itself. In the world of baseball, the sport itself was vastly more important than such ancillary commercial sources of revenue as broadcasting, endorsements, concessions, and parking.
There were only sixteen teams in the big leagues, and in an America defined by the railroad instead of the airplane, St. Louis was a far-west team and Washington a Southern one. California might as well have been in another country. The pace of life in America had not yet accelerated as it was soon to do from the combination of endless technological breakthroughs and undreamed-of affluence in ordinary homes. The use of drugs seemed very distant. The prevailing addiction of more than a few players (and managers, coaches, sportswriters, and indeed owners) was alcohol, apparently a more acceptable and less jarring form of self-destruction. It was, thought Curt Gowdy, a young sportscaster who had just joined the Yankees, the last moment of innocence in American life.
Baseball was rooted not just in the past but in the culture of the country; it was celebrated in the nation’s literature and songs. When a poor American boy dreamed of escaping his grim life, his fantasy probably involved becoming a professional baseball player. It was not so much the national sport as the binding national myth.
It was also the embodiment of the melting-pot theory, or at least the white melting-pot theory, of America. One of its preeminent players, Joe DiMaggio, was the son of a humble immigrant fisherman, and the fact that three of the fisherman’s sons had made the major leagues proved to many the openness and fairness of American society. America cheered the DiMaggio family, and by so doing, proudly cheered itself. When DiMaggio played in his first World Series, his mother traveled by train to watch him play. She was a modest woman, but open and candid, and she became something of a celebrity herself by telling reporters (in Italian) that the trip was hard for her because there was so little to do in New York—she wished there was some cleaning, or at least some dishes to wash and dry.
The great waves of immigration from Europe had taken place in the latter part of the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries. Few of the children of those immigrants had yet succeeded in politics, business, or academe. It was baseball that first offered them a chance for fame and glory. That this chance came in—of all places—a sport did not always thrill their parents.
Giuseppe DiMaggio at first frowned on baseball as too frivolous. Only as Joe became a major star did his opinion change, and he came to enjoy his son’s success. Because he could not read English he would wake his youngest son, Dominic, at four o’clock in the morning when the newspaper arrived so that Dominic could read and interpret the box score for him.
Phil Rizzuto’s parents came from Calabria. In America his father was first a laborer and then a conductor on the BMT subway. He also thought baseball was a foolish choice for a career and argued vehemently against it. Finally his wife softened his opposition—she observed that if it didn’t work out, then their son could take a real job. Still, Fiore Rizzuto was suspicious of this new world, outside New York City, that his son was entering—it might be like the old country, filled with people from the Black Hand. As Phil set off on his first train ride to a town in Virginia, his father pinned twenty dollars (Phil’s only money) into his undershirt so that robbers would not be able to find it. He warned his son not to fall asleep on the train, no matter how tired he was.
Johnny Pesky of the Red Sox was born in Portland, Oregon, to Croatian immigrants named Paveskovich. Pesky picked up his abbreviated surname first as a schoolyard nickname, then it became a means of simplifying box scores, and finally he took it as his legal surname. That bothered his parents—did this mean their son was ashamed of his real name? They worried as well that by choosing sports as a vocation Johnny was becoming a bum.
Tommy Henrich, grandson of German immigrants, knew how hard it was for the members of his family who had come from the old country to understand his career. On the occasion of his first contract, his father told his grandfather, Tommy is going to play professional baseball.
Oh, is that so,
the grandfather replied. What is he, anyway—the striker?
Baseball, then, came to symbolize the idea of America as a land of opportunity and justice for all. And in 1947, finally, with the coming of Jackie Robinson, the sport was going to open up not just for the sons of recent immigrants but to native sons of color as well. The coming of Robinson did not take place without some rumbling, most notably from players who were from the South, or whose talents were so marginal that the coming of blacks represented the most basic kind of a job threat. In spring training, 1947, Leo Durocher, heading off an early protest by some of his white players, warned, He’s just the first. Just the first. They’re all going to come, and they’re going to be hungry, damned hungry, and if you don’t put out, they’ll take your jobs.
He was right: That very sense of continuity, the belief that life would once again be the same, was erroneous. The country was already changing, the pace of life accelerating, due in no small part to the coming of a powerful new communications empire, of which baseball itself would be a prime beneficiary. In 1947, the World Series was telecast to a few Eastern cities. In 1948, there was a crude attempt to televise the Series to the East Coast from so distant a city as Cleveland by having a plane fly above the ball park in a kind of horse-and-buggy version of a satellite. That year there were so few television sets (by one count, 325,000 in all of America, half of them in the New York City area) that the Gillette Company, which was sponsoring the games, placed 100 new sets on the Boston Common so that ordinary fans might gather there and watch.
It was immediately obvious that there was a natural affinity between sports and television, and by the spring of 1949, advertisements in The New York Times pushed baseball as the reason for buying a set: Batter Up! Imperial offers you a Box Set. RCA Victor Television. $375. Installation and home owner policy $55. 52 square inch screen.
That was in contrast to a GE set: So Bright! So Clear! So Easy on the Eyes! $725.
Television’s vast impact on sports was still to come. For the moment, though, radio had greatly increased the size of audiences and put fans in daily contact with their favorite teams. In 1946, a radio broadcaster named Mel Allen traveled with the Yankees to every game and did the first live broadcasts of away games. Previously, those games had been done by local sports announcers using the Western Union ticker and re-creating as best they could the sounds and sights of the ball park.
Radio made the games and the players seem vastly more important, mythic even. It also pioneered in another area: the use of sports as an advertising vehicle. Until the coming of radio, commercial exploitation was limited; a local semi-pro baseball team might bear the name of a neighborhood car dealer on the back of its uniforms, and at a local ball park there might be signs lining the outfield fences to advertise various products. But when advertising executives discovered that sports and athletes could be used to sell products, a new, high-powered marriage was soon arranged. Radio formed the first national commercial network. If a rose was a rose was a rose, then an athlete was a hero was a salesman, although baseball players received, of course, a disproportionate amount of the new endorsement opportunities. In the spring of 1950, an ad for Camel cigarettes portrayed two major-league pitchers—Johnny Vander Meer, a veteran pitcher, and Gene Bearden, Rookie of the Year in the American League—exhorting ordinary Americans to share in the pleasures of Camels. Vander Meer said, I’ve smoked Camels for ten years, Gene! They’re mild and they sure taste great.
Bearden answered, Right, Van! It’s Camels for me too—ever since I made the thirty-day mildness test!
Soon the athletes would become the beneficiaries of the new commercial affluence. In 1988, the players on the starting lineup for the Yankees earned an average salary of $694,000; in 1948 that was more than the entire payroll of even the best teams, which averaged about $450,000. Even accounting for inflation, the figures reflected the coming of the entertainment society and the passing of power from owner to player.
The rivalry of the Red Sox and the Yankees was an important part of the myth of baseball. In 1920 the Red Sox’s principal owner, a Broadway producer named Harry Frazee, was desperate for funds, so he sold a twenty-four-year-old pitcher named Babe Ruth to the Yankees for the unheard-of sum of $125,000. Boston fans never recovered. Ruth was an outstanding young pitcher, but he had won only nine games the year before. What made the sale so bitter for Boston fans was the fact that Ruth had hit 29 home runs that season, an amazing number for the time, 19 more than the runner-up.
Five years later Frazee opened a show called No, No, Nanette which became his greatest hit. However, the show’s success, considerable though it was, brought little consolation to New England, since in the previous season Ruth, already well established as the premier power hitter in the game, batted .378, with 46 home runs (16 more than the entire Boston team) and 121 runs batted in.
The Yankees, with Ruth, went on to dominate the American League in the twenties and thirties, although in the years just before World War II the Red Sox were an ascending team. A wealthy young man named Tom Yawkey bought them in 1933, and proved to be the most loving of owners. In fact, some thought him too loving and referred to the team as a country club. Be that as it may, he dramatically upgraded the Red Sox and improved their scouting system as well. They finished second in 1938, 1939, 1941, and 1942, always, of course, to the Yankees. On the eve of World War II, Boston finally appeared ready to challenge the Yankees.
In 1949 the Red Sox were, to all intents and purposes, a mighty team. There was Ted Williams, only twenty-six years old at the time of V-J. To many the best hitter in baseball, he was nicknamed God
by Johnny Pesky, the shortstop (who, in turn, because of his rather large nose, was called either Needle
or Needlenose
by Williams). There was Dominic DiMaggio, the third of the DiMaggio brothers to play in the major leagues, an all-star in his own right. According to his teammates, Dom had the hardest job in baseball since he led off for Boston. That meant he underwent a fierce interrogation by Williams about the opposing pitcher every time he came back to the dugout: What was he throwing, Dommy, was he fast, was he tricky, was he getting the corners? Come on, Dommy, you saw him. In addition there was Bobby Doerr at second base. Smooth and steady, a future Hall of Fame player, he was extremely popular with his teammates.
The basic lineup of the Red Sox seemed set. It was filled with hitters, and, especially in Fenway, pitchers hated to go against them. The feel of the team was good. It had the right mix of veterans and young players, the right balance between country boys and city boys—as exemplified by the baiting of Boo Ferriss, the quintessential country boy, whose harshest expletive was Shuck-uns,
by Mickey Harris, who was from New York City. Harris’s mouth, even in this profession of unexpurgated language, was considered uniquely foul. He devoted great energy to trying to get Boo Ferriss to say a dirty word. He would needle Ferriss constantly about what was wrong with him as an athlete and what was wrong with Mississippi, Ferriss’s home state. Finally, Ferriss would explode. You said it! You said it,
Harris would joyously proclaim. Mickey,
Ferriss would answer, I did not say what you thought I said—I merely said ‘John Brownit.’
Pitching was a perennial problem with the Red Sox, however. Fenway’s short fence encouraged better-than-average hitters to think they were very good hitters, but it worked psychic damage on the team’s pitchers. In spring training, 1946, Red Sox veterans paid particular attention to the young pitchers—namely, Ferriss and Tex Hughson—who had been pitching well, albeit during the war years. Ferriss, for example had won 21 games and lost only 10 in 1945.
But in spring 1946 Ferriss had to face Williams in batting practice. Williams was the most passionate hitter in baseball, and the philosopher king of hitting as well. He was always discoursing on the science of it; pitchers, he thought, were dumb by breed.
When Williams stepped up to bat, suddenly, Ferriss realized it was as if spring training had stopped altogether and something different and tougher had started. Most of the other players stopped whatever they were doing to watch. Much depended on this. World Series checks might ride on how good this young pitcher was.
Williams, it was well known, liked batting-practice pitching to approximate the real thing. He liked to be challenged. Ferriss was in a delicate position: He had to throw well but also be careful not to be a hot dog. So he tried to put as much movement on the ball as he could while not throwing too hard. Williams took the requisite swings, getting some hits and hitting some balls into the ground. When he left the cage, the Boston writers immediately gathered around to find out what he thought of this young right-hander. Was he the real thing or was he, in a phrase appropriated from the Germans during the war, ersatz? He’ll win,
Williams said, he can pitch.
That was immediately relayed to Ferriss, who felt that God had spoken on his behalf. Later Williams went over to Ferriss and said: Kid, I told those writers that all you have to do is throw it like you threw before and you’ll be all right.
Ferriss now felt he could count on those 21 victories of 1945 as real; it was as if an asterisk had been removed from beside them.
That had signaled the emergence of a new Red Sox team, one with young pitchers who could match the powerful, if slow, regular lineup. In 1946 the Red Sox veterans regained their skills more quickly than did the returning Yankees and ran away with the pennant. Ferriss won 25 games and lost only 6 that season; Tex Hughson won 20, and Mickey Harris, another young pitcher seemingly on the edge of stardom, won 17. Some people were talking of a dynasty.
But the dynasty did not take place. Ferriss developed serious arm trouble in the middle of 1947; Hughson had two thirds of a good season in 1947, and then he developed arm trouble; and Harris, also plagued by a sore arm, never again won more than 7 games. That so many strong and talented young arms could go bad so quickly seemed to indicate what fans had long suspected: that the Red Sox were dogged by the fates.
Another team watching three of its best pitchers come up with sore arms might have been finished. That was almost too much to ask even of such teams as the Yankees or the Dodgers, with their formidable farm systems. But this misfortune did not stop the Red Sox. In those days, weak teams with owners perched on the brink of bankruptcy could always be counted on to part with a good player for a number of lesser players and a considerable amount of cash. St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Washington were such teams. Late in the 1947 season, Joe Cronin, who was then still managing Boston, took aside Birdie Tebbetts, his catcher. I don’t have the pitching, do I, Birdie?
Cronin asked. No, it’s not there, we’re coming up short,
Tebbetts answered. That’s what I was afraid of,
Cronin said. When the season was over, Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey engineered a massive trade with the St. Louis Browns, a trade so complicated that it had to be accomplished over two days. Boston traded away nine marginal players for Jack Kramer, a star pitcher, Vern Stephens, a slow but powerful shortstop, and then, almost as a throw-in, a veteran pitcher named Ellis Kinder. In addition, the Red Sox gave the Browns nearly $400,000 in cash, an immense sum in those days, more than enough to save a bad franchise’s existence for yet another year, while, of course, destroying any remaining shred of credibility it had with its fans. When the deal was consummated there was a feeling that the Red Sox had virtually bought themselves another pennant.
With the trade completed, Williams and Dom DiMaggio argued with each other over which of the two new pitchers was more valuable. Williams, a great authority on pitching, insisted that Kramer was; but DiMaggio, whose intelligence William greatly admired, said that Kramer was a finesse pitcher, which was not ideal for a small ball park like Fenway. Kinder, DiMaggio added, was interesting, much better than his reputation. Kinder was already thirty-four years old at the time of the trade, had been in the major leagues for only two years, and had won a grand total of 11 big-league games. Some thought that his best pitch was his change-up: that is, a pitch thrown seemingly with the full force of the fastball, in which the pitcher deliberately masks the fact that he is taking off some of the speed. The object, of course, is to throw off the hitter’s timing. A pitcher who depends on a change can’t win,
Williams said. It was valuable, he argued, only if supported by another major pitch: A good hitter sees a change, and he can step out of the batter’s box, count the crowd, and still hit it out.
Certainly the deal helped the Red Sox immediately: In that first year Kramer won 18 games while losing only 5; and Kinder, showing that DiMaggio was at least partially right, won 10 games and lost 7. Stephens hit 29 home runs and drove in 137 runs. The three of them played a critical role in bringing the Red Sox to the playoff game with Cleveland, and the very brink of the pennant, in 1948.
That year saw another important addition to the Red Sox: Joe McCarthy came to manage them. He was sixty-two, a blunt old-fashioned man who had been a dominant figure on the Yankees in the thirties and forties. He was largely credited for making the Yankees the elite organization of baseball. They traveled first-class; they always wore jackets and ties. He wanted them, whenever they were in public, to look like professionals. Before they came to the ball park, they were to shave at home, or, if they were on the road, at the hotel. You’re a Yankee,
McCarthy would tell his players. Act like one.
In 1946 during spring training a rookie pitcher named Frank Shea was trying to lose some extra weight, so he created an extra-heavy sweat suit in which to run extra laps. He was proud of how hard he was working to get in shape. One day he came back to the dugout soaked with sweat and pleased with himself for staying with so ambitious a program. But his cap was turned sideways. McCarthy took one look at him and said, Young fellow, if you can’t wear that uniform right, don’t wear it at all.
McCarthy even extended his idea of class to lectures about the use of hard liquor. He did not want his players to drink, he would tell them, but he knew that on occasion they needed to relax, and that liquor helped. Therefore, if they had to drink, they should drink what he drank: White Horse Scotch—because it was the best, and the real danger in drinking came from using cheap, off-brand stuff. It was said that while managing Chicago in the twenties, McCarthy had once lectured Hack Wilson about the seriousness of his drinking. He illustrated his lecture by pouring a shot of whiskey into a glass filled with worms. The worms quickly died. What did you learn from that?
he asked Wilson. That if I drink I won’t have worms,
the slugger answered. Unfortunately, McCarthy’s own drinking increased significantly in his later years as a manager. His players had a code name for it. When he was on one of his benders, he was, they said, riding the white horse.
When McCarthy first became the Red Sox manager there was a great deal of speculation about how he would handle Ted Williams. Williams was famous for his love of hitting, his impetuous relationships with fans and the press, and his hatred of wearing ties. It was said that he owned two ties, a blue one and a brown one, and that once a year, on the occasion of some special charity fund raiser, he would actually wear one. McCarthy showed up for his first meeting with Williams without a tie himself and later explained to reporters that a manager who could not get on with a .400 hitter did not deserve to manage in the big leagues.
McCarthy had strong opinions about almost everything. He was an inveterate smoker of cigars, which he could move nimbly around and through his fingers in various positions. He did not like pipe smokers on his team because he thought they were too contented. (Red Rolfe, the Yankee third baseman, had been a pipe smoker and had tried to hide it from the manager; the other players were sure that McCarthy knew and tolerated it only because Rolfe was so good a player.) McCarthy even had his own peculiar views of history. For example, he liked what he called the dark-haired Poles
because, he claimed, they came from the south of Poland and had fought fiercely whenever Poland was attacked. But he wanted no part of blond-haired Poles, who he said had not resisted their enemies at moments of crisis.
He liked to tell his players that he knew all their tricks because he had tried them himself. I know your games,
he would say. I was the one who had the phones taken out of the clubhouse in Chicago. I knew what the players were doing—using them all the time to call their bookies.
He hated card games and barred them from his clubhouse. To him they were a waste of time. When he saw his players with cards—the one thing a baseball player had, once the season began, was plenty of time—he would push them to do something else. Why, that man who invented the little wrapper for the sugar cube, he would say, would never have done that if he had been playing with cards. Once the players entered the clubhouse they were there to play baseball. Frank Shea once brought a newspaper into the clubhouse during spring training in 1946. What’s this?
McCarthy asked, picking up the paper. It’s a newspaper,
Shea said. Shea, you just throw it in the garbage pail over there. You’re here to play baseball, and if you want to read about yourself, you do it in your hotel room,
McCarthy said.
Temptation was everywhere. When Clarence Marshall was a rookie, McCarthy called him over just after the club had reached New York. Hey, kid, where do you live?
he asked, while his eyes looked at a spot of grass about twenty yards in front of him. He is most decidedly not looking at me, Marshall thought. He is talking to me, but it is as if I don’t exist. The Edison Hotel, sir,
Marshall said, naming a hotel in midtown. Don’t let the bright lights and the stinking perfume get you,
McCarthy said. That was all. His eyes never moved. Rookie dismissed.
He most emphatically did not like the new bonus-baby rules, which allowed teams to sign young players for huge sums of money, but demanded that they skip the minor leagues and start with the big-league clubs. When Bobby Brown had arrived as the Yankees’ first bonus baby in 1947, McCarthy had watched him carefully and skeptically. Finally he took Brown aside and told him, in words that sounded strangely archaic to Brown, Bobby, we don’t have any rats on the Yankees.
He was even more resentful when he came to the Red Sox, which had a weaker farm system. In 1948 the Red Sox had an eighteen-year-old bonus baby named Chuck Stobbs’s on the roster. Stobbs had signed for $35,000—the equivalent of five years’ salary for most rookies—before he had even thrown his first strike. During spring training McCarthy made him feel as if he didn’t exist. Finally, toward the end of spring training, McCarthy signaled Stobbs to come over. Stobbs felt a rush of excitement. Perhaps, this was going to be his big chance. The manager began to talk about how to play second base. The footwork was critical, McCarthy said. Second base? Was he going to be transformed into a second baseman? Bewilderment showed on Stobbs’s face. You’re not Goodman, are you?
McCarthy said, referring to Billy Goodman, a young infielder. No, sir,
said Stobbs, I’m Stobbs.
Get the hell out of here,
McCarthy roared, and Stobbs gratefully did. He stayed with the team for the entire 1948 season and pitched a total of nine innings.
As McCarthy saw it, ballplayers were to play hard, and they were not to take defeat lightly. Once in 1937 the Yankees split a doubleheader with one of the weaker teams in the league, losing a game they should not have lost. Afterward, McCarthy came prowling angrily through the locker room. A utility outfielder named Roy Johnson, relatively new to the team, saw McCarthy and complained just loud enough for him to hear that you could not win every game. McCarthy heard him. Later that day he called up his superiors. Get me Henrich,
he said. Tommy Henrich was brought up from the Yankee farm team in Newark, and Roy Johnson was waived out of the league. The point was clear to everyone: Even halfway sassing the manager was a very bad idea. But the Yankee players who had come up while he was managing—such players as Henrich, Charlie Keller, and DiMaggio—had a special affection for him. He played them regularly, did not jerk them around, and tried to protect them from the front office and the press.
McCarthy was particularly suspicious of the press. He regarded it as a hostile force, and was as pithy with the Boston press as he had been with the New York writers. When a Boston writer suggested that if Williams played in Yankee Stadium, with its short fence, he would break Babe Ruth’s record for home runs, McCarthy looked at him coldly and said simply, Gehrig didn’t.
The Boston writers soon learned to deal with him by being provocative. Joe Cashman, a reporter for the Boston Herald, decided that the best way to get information was to make a statement, especially a stupid one, rather than ask questions. That so confirmed McCarthy’s view of writers as people who did not know baseball, he could not refuse the bait.
To the Red Sox, McCarthy brought his old prejudices, with the exception of the tie rule, which was gone courtesy of Williams. Card playing was still out. The first team lecture was, as far as anyone could tell, primarily about pipe smoking. Billy Hitchcock, the utility infielder, was the only pipe smoker on the team, and he spent much of the season trying to smoke it on the team train when McCarthy was not looking. Once, thinking the manager had gone to bed, he tried to smoke in the small antechamber of the men’s room on the train. McCarthy walked in. Hitchcock hid the pipe by cradling the bowl in his hand. Usually McCarthy’s visits were brief and his tone curt. But this time he lingered. He was friendly, almost garrulous. Hitchcock’s hand got hotter and hotter. Still McCarthy lingered. Hitchcock thought he was going to scream. Finally McCarthy left. Hitchcock was sure he had known about the pipe and had enjoyed squeezing him.
How then to please this gruff old man who sat there all day long saying little, chewing his gum endlessly (and sticking the used gum under the bench where he sat—a McCarthy trademark)? Whom did he like? What did he like? The Red Sox regulars spent much of 1948 trying to figure him out.
For one thing, he liked hustle. He liked toughness. He liked Billy Goodman, the versatile infielder and spray hitter who played first base in 1948. Indeed, McCarthy even said that his mistake, which had cost Boston the pennant, was in not seeing that Goodman was his first baseman until a quarter of the season had passed. He liked Matt Batts, the backup catcher. Batts had been a long shot to make the team in 1948, but Charlie Berry, who had been umpiring some Boston games in spring training, came over to Batts and said, Hey you, Batts. You want to make this team?
Batts said yes, indeed he did. Here’s what you do, kid. You’ve got a good arm and you’re throwing hard in infield practice, and I know old Joe McCarthy and he loves it. You keep doing it. You throw even harder. I’m watching McCarthy, and every time you do that his eyes light up and he chews that gum a little faster.
After that, during the drills Johnny Pesky would complain that Batts was throwing so hard that it was hurting his hand. But Batts paid him no attention; he just threw harder.
Some of the veterans felt that McCarthy looked down on them, that he believed he had inherited a team where the players were too soft, and it was his job to be tougher. With the Yankees, he had been careful never to criticize his players in front of each other; now there was a sense that his patience was being strained. One day when Wally Moses, one of the reserve Boston outfielders, was on the trainer’s table being worked on, McCarthy asked what was wrong. I’ve got a stiff neck,
Moses said. Probably got it in some fancy air-conditioned bar,
McCarthy said acidly, for in those days an air-conditioned bar was something for the elite. Skip, with the money they pay me, I can’t afford to go to any of those. I got it in a movie theater,
Moses said.
Some of the pitchers felt that McCarthy was too old-fashioned. According to them he did not understand the changing nature of the game and the importance of relief pitching. He came from a generation, they thought, where if the pitcher was a real man, he would pitch all nine innings. A bullpen in that era was less important, and the men who pitched out of it were not considered specialists who had a particular skill suited to a few innings of late relief work. Rather they were pitchers not quite good enough to be starters. In the spring of 1948 the Boston writers asked McCarthy whether Earl Johnson, who had been at different times in his career a starter and a reliever, would be a starter for him. He doesn’t throw hard enough to be a starter for me,
McCarthy said, and it was a revealing moment. He had admitted a player was consigned to the bullpen because his arm was not that strong. On the Yankees, by contrast, the hardest-throwing pitcher on the team, Joe Page, resided in the bullpen.
There was a careful watch on McCarthy in 1948, and some tense moments resulted. Early in the season the Red Sox went into Sportsman’s Park for a series with the Browns. During one game a St. Louis pitcher was working on Junior Stephens, who was a notorious bad-ball hitter with a special penchant for going after high balls. As Stephens settled in the batter’s box, McCarthy yelled out, Make him come down.
The first pitch came in high and out of the strike zone. Stephens swung and missed. Strike one. Make him come down!
McCarthy yelled again, a little more emphatically. Again the pitch came in, high and out of the strike zone, and again Stephens swung and missed. Make him come down!
McCarthy yelled even more emphatically. Again the scene was repeated: a high fastball, a Stephens’s swing, and a strikeout. Stephens jogged back to the dugout, turned in the general direction of McCarthy, and yelled, Make him come down, my ass!
There was silence in the dugout: It was the first testing of a veteran manager by a veteran player. McCarthy said nothing, but waited while the regulars went back onto the field and took their positions. Then he said, just loud enough for everyone on the bench to hear, Got a little upset, didn’t he?
There was no way to call down to Newark for a Henrich. He would not make an issue of this—Stephens was the best he had. McCarthy was going to have to make do.
As much as anyone on the team, Stephens suffered under McCarthy. As far as he was concerned, McCarthy was always riding him, making snide remarks in the dugout about his fielding and his hitting. If that toothless old son of a bitch gets on me one more time,
he told his friend Billy Hitchcock, the utility infielder, I’m going to kill him. I’m going to stuff his gum down his throat.
That struggle lasted all season to the satisfaction of neither of them.
By contrast, McCarthy continued to cultivate Williams. Early in the season Williams hit a tremendous home run into the bullpen against the Browns. When