Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (20 page)

Whatever discomfort he felt on the bus, it had no impact on Duke’s performance on the field. The seventeen-year-old prospect dominated the league, hitting .293 with a league-leading nine home runs (which was unusually low because the league relied on re-covered balls that had little bounce). He returned to California that September with heightened expectations about his professional baseball career but soon learned that any advancement would have to be deferred as long as the war continued. He received the draft notice shortly after his eighteenth birthday. Instead of making plans for the next baseball season, he found himself on a navy tender that serviced submarines in the Pacific.

To his good fortune, he never saw combat, spending most of his time making repairs to submarines, stocking them up for the next tour of duty, and washing dishes in the mess hall. But he was not complaining. As he later said, “My number one priority during the war was to survive it.”

His discharge from the navy finally came in June 1946, and the Dodgers invited him to another tryout camp in Long Beach that was being supervised by the general manager’s son, Branch Rickey Jr. Duke had been able to play some baseball when stationed in Guam and other distant points, and his skills had not diminished during his nineteen-month tour of duty. The younger Rickey therefore recommended that Duke play with the Dodgers’ Fort Worth team in the Texas league, an assignment that would be a promotion and bring him that much closer to playing in the big leagues.

Although now six feet tall and weighing almost two hundred pounds (with short dark hair that would soon turn prematurely gray), Duke found the early days difficult, and the manager was forced to keep him on the bench for many games. As Duke later said of that time with the Fort Worth team, “Success did not come quickly for me.” But the manager finally agreed to give the young player a chance to play in a series in Houston, and Duke responded with two home runs and a new hitting streak. By the end of July, Branch Rickey decided to travel to Fort Worth to check out Duke’s progress, and Snider responded by hitting a 430-foot home run into the wind and over a twenty-foot fence. (“Judas Priest!” Rickey exclaimed when he saw the blast.) Duke’s hitting remained steady through the play-offs (with seven home runs), and, by the winter of 1947, he received an invitation to join the Dodgers’ spring training camp in Havana.

Even before the season began, the twenty-year-old rookie was being touted as a possible replacement for Reiser—who had an incurable (and injury-causing) propensity to run into fences while chasing fly balls. Rickey himself had earlier reported that Snider had “steel springs in his legs and dynamite in his bat.” That comment was echoed in the press, with one sportswriter saying that Snider is “a straightaway left-handed hitter who would be a valuable asset if he could learn to pull a ball and hit the right-field fence at Ebbets Field.” Another sportswriter suggested that the California prospect could “be the player who will win the pennant for the Dodgers.” It was all pretty heady stuff for someone who had never played a single major-league game.

Duke Snider was not the only rookie attracting the attention of sportswriters in that spring training camp. Snider, for one, was not surprised by the Dodgers’ decision to bring Jackie Robinson up to the parent club. He had seen Robinson in action at Pasadena Junior College and UCLA, and, as Snider later recalled, “I marveled at the way he could play baseball.” And so he had no difficulty rebuffing Dodger right fielder Dixie Walker’s request to sign a petition protesting the inclusion of Robinson on the club. “This guy is an idol of mine,” Duke told his new teammate. “I’m not gonna sign that thing.”

The discord over Robinson’s presence was a momentary distraction for the twenty-year-old rookie from Boyle Heights. Duke found that first postwar spring training to be exhilarating—attending Branch Rickey’s lectures on the “Dodger way” to play the game, taking drills on sliding, bunting and other fundamentals, and, realizing, when he put on that white uniform with the blue lettering, that it had a special meaning for him—especially after he became the club’s regular center fielder in 1949. “I think the happiest moment in my baseball career,” he later told one interviewer, “was when I put the Brooklyn Dodger uniform on and knew that I belonged in that uniform.” When clubhouse manager John Griffin asked him at the beginning of the 1947 season which number he wanted, Duke did not have to think about a response. He wanted number 4—the same number that Lou Gehrig had worn. Griffin was reluctant at first, saying that no one had worn that number since the departure of Dolph Camilli, a popular first baseman who had been traded to the Giants in 1943. But Duke was not to be turned aside, and Griffin finally yielded, saying only, “Don’t embarrass that number.”

Griffin did not have to worry. The player who wore that number 4 over the next fifteen years would establish a record that warranted induction into baseball’s National Hall of Fame and that helped to bring many pennants and fans to Ebbets Field. Not that Griffin could have known that in 1947. Snider’s first days on the club were hardly the stuff of legend. He did get a pinch-hit single in the first game of the season. But that success was short-lived, and he spent the next few weeks in a struggle to master big-league pitching. “I was a free swinger,” he later said about those first days on the club. “If the ball looked halfway decent, I took a cut at it.” Not surprisingly, he found himself spending more time sitting on the bench than playing in the field.

Snider did not take his lack of success well. “Duke was temperamental when he first came up,” said Spider Jorgensen, the Dodgers’ rookie third baseman in 1947. “He sulked a lot, both when he wasn’t hitting and when he wasn’t playing.” Duke himself was very conscious of his dark moods and attributed much of it to the high praise he had received for so long. “I was always reading and hearing about how great I was destined to be,” he later explained, “how I had the potential to become one of the greatest baseball players of all time. That puts a lot of extra pressure on an athlete, and what pressure wasn’t already on me I managed to add myself.”

Whatever the explanation, Duke was not yet ready for the big leagues. Midway through the season, he and Gil Hodges—another rookie initially selected to be the team’s third-string catcher—were summoned to a meeting with Branch Rickey. “You two young men,” the general manager explained, “are the Dodgers’ power combination of the future. In about three years from now, you two guys are going to be leading the team in home runs.” But, he added, they each needed more work to reach that plateau. Rickey said that they should not be disappointed with the decision to send both of them back to the minor leagues, where they could play with greater regularity and hopefully refine their skills. “I want you two gentlemen to be patient,” Rickey advised them, “and to work hard to improve yourselves, because you both have a bright future ahead of you.”

Duke was sent to the club’s farm team in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he hit a very respectable .316. The Dodgers called him back to the parent club in September, but he saw little action and wound up hitting a meager .241 with only eighty-three plate appearances for the entire season. His prolonged absence made him ineligible to play in the World Series against the Yankees, and so he had to watch the series from the stands. Still, he was happy to be a member of the team—and excited for what awaited him when he returned home.

Her name was Beverly Null, a vivacious brunette whom Duke remembered as “a cute little girl” who “sat near the front of the class” in high school. He was too shy to ask her out for a date himself and decided instead to dispatch a friend to make the initial inquiry. When his friend communicated an affirmative response, Duke and Bev began spending considerable time together until Duke graduated. The fire still burned bright, however, and they stayed in touch after he began his baseball career. They renewed the relationship when Duke was stationed in San Diego shortly before his discharge from the navy. They were married in California a few weeks after the World Series ended in 1947.

Thus began a union that would survive the frequent separations required by Duke’s life in baseball. Many years later—long after he had retired—their devotion to each other was still evident to those who saw them together. “Bev is definitely an influence in his life,” said Nancy Gollnick, the director of the Dodger fantasy camp in Vero Beach, Florida, and someone who had occasion to see the two of them frequently beginning in 1995. “It’s a great love. You can see that in everything.” Duke himself would later tell me that, after fifty-nine years of marriage, Bev is a “super wife. A super mother. A great companion. And just an ideal person for being the wife of a major-league ballplayer.”

That psychological support was no doubt important to Duke during the 1948 spring training camp in the Dominican Republic. The young player was still swinging at bad pitches. Eager to channel Snider’s raw talent into a productive performance, Rickey traveled with Snider back to the Dodger camp at Vero Beach and initiated a program of instruction that would hopefully help the young outfielder identify the strike zone. “Mr. Rickey made me his personal project,” said Snider. Each day Duke would stand at the plate with a bat in his hand and a mechanical device by his side and be asked to say whether a pitched ball was inside or outside the strike zone (without taking a swing). It was a tedious but critical exercise, and years later Snider would say that Branch Rickey “taught me an awful lot about how to hit.”

The instruction produced immediate benefits at the beginning of the season—including two home runs in a game against the Philadelphia Phillies. But Duke soon fell into a hitting slump, flailing away at bad pitches, and the decision was made to send him to the Montreal Royals farm team. “All you need, kid,” said manager Leo Durocher, “is a little more experience.” Rickey was more specific. “Show me some big numbers up there, son,” the general manager told the departing player. “Make me bring you back.”

Snider took Rickey’s message to heart, and by the middle of the season he had blasted seventeen home runs and driven in seventy-seven runs. And so, when Rickey made a personal visit to Montreal in July, Snider could not help but ask the obvious question. “Mr. Rickey,” he said, “don’t you think seventy-seven RBIs in seventy-seven games is enough to bring me back?” The general manager did not have any trouble answering that question—especially because Pete Reiser’s injuries precluded him from playing with any regularity. “Pack your bags and catch the next plane to New York,” Rickey told a relieved Duke Snider. “Tomorrow you’re going to play center field for the Brooklyn Dodgers.”

Snider displayed a new confidence at the plate in the Brooklyn uniform. He had fewer strikeouts and—given the limited time he was with the club—a relatively high number of extra-base hits (including six triples and five home runs). That performance was enough to keep Duke in the lineup for 1949, and he responded by batting .292, hitting twenty-three home runs, and driving in ninety-two runs—which included the winning run in the final game of the season against the Phillies to enable the Dodgers to clinch the pennant. His contribution to the Dodgers’ success did not go unnoticed in the press, with one sportswriter saying that Snider “can run like an antelope, throw with the best of them, and hit with real power.”

Snider’s satisfaction with his performance that last day of the season evaporated after the World Series began. Instead of plaudits for more winning hits, he felt only the frustration of dramatic failure. As Rickey had predicted, he and Hodges (who was now playing first base) had led the team in home runs, but the boy from Boyle Heights could not hit a single one during the five-game series. And more than that, he tied a series record (initially established by the great Rogers Hornsby) with eight strikeouts. “I was very disappointed with myself because I was trying too hard and wasn’t myself,” he later explained. “I hadn’t learned to relax in a real pressure situation like that.”

The folks back home in Compton saw it differently, and they gave the returning player a parade and a dinner replete with testimonials. The young athlete was embarrassed by the attention—especially in light of his poor showing—and, when given the chance to say a few words, he apologized. “I tried to be somebody that I wasn’t,” he told the crowd. “If I ever get in the World Series again, I’m going to make it up to you.”

And try he did to get the Dodgers into the World Series in 1950. He batted .321, led the league in hits with 199 (which included thirty-one home runs), and drove in 107 runs. The high point of the season was the second game of a Memorial Day doubleheader against the Philadelphia Phillies at Ebbets Field. Duke connected for three home runs in his first three at bats and then missed getting a fourth home run—and thus tying the modern-day record set by Lou Gehrig—when he hit the top of the wall on his next at bat. (It was, he later recalled, “the hardest ball I hit all day.”)

The joy of that accomplishment was almost—but not quite—eclipsed by another hit that Snider got on the last day of the season in another game against the Phillies at Ebbets Field. With both teams tied for first, a victory meant the pennant. Utility outfielder Cal Abrams was on second base when Snider stepped into the batter’s box to face Robin Roberts—the Phillies’ premier pitcher—with the score tied 1-1. Stan Lopata, the Phillies catcher, gave the sign for Roberts to try to pick Abrams off second, but Roberts missed the sign and threw the pitch to home plate. Snider then hit a single past second base that, under other circumstances, should have been enough to bring Abrams home with the winning run—and a Dodger pennant. But Phillies’ center fielder Richie Ashburn had seen the pickoff sign and had moved in closer to second in the event the pickoff throw went in the outfield. It was a fortuitous move for the Phillies—Ashburn fielded Snider’s hit cleanly and, because of his proximity to home plate, was able to get the ball to Lopata in plenty of time to nail Abrams, who had made the mistake of rounding third and racing toward home.