Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (21 page)

The next season proved to be another exasperating experience when the Dodgers lost the third play-off game to the Giants on Bobby Thomson’s ninth-inning home run. Snider was in center field when he saw the ball soaring toward the Polo Grounds’ short left-field stands and began running toward those stands in the event the ball bounced off the wall and got by Dodger left fielder Andy Pafko. Over in the Giant bullpen near left field, pitcher Jim Hearn heard the roar of the crowd as Thomson’s ball landed in the stands and turned around, only to see “Duke Snider on his knees in center, pounding his glove on the grass.” Snider was indeed gripped by despair. “When I saw that ball go into the stands,” he later said, “I saw dollar signs flying away.”

The money was the least of it. He had enjoyed a respectable year at the plate, with twenty-nine home runs and 101 runs driven in. But in Snider’s view, it was not enough. “I felt I had let the club down,” he later told a sportswriter, because of his failure to get a hit that could have turned the play-off game around. He went to owner Walter O’Malley after the game, saying that “my spirit is down to my ankles” and that he would not blame O’Malley if he decided to trade him. The offer was not one O’Malley wanted to accept. “We plan to have you around for a long time,” he told the frustrated center fielder. (In the meantime, Snider kept a dinner date with his parents after the game but, depressed with the afternoon’s outcome, had difficulty in maintaining a conversation—prompting his mother to finally ask, “What’s the matter?”)

However disappointed he may have been by the 1951 play-off series, Snider was satisfied with the life that he and Bev had created for themselves. The family—which now included a two-year-old boy named Kevin and would soon expand to three more children—lived in a house in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn during the baseball season. The experience was made that much more enjoyable by the presence of several other Dodger families. They would play bridge together, have barbecues together, and even commute together to games at Ebbets Field or the Polo Grounds.

The camaraderie that Snider shared with many of his teammates did not extend to Carl Furillo. The two men played side by side for almost fourteen years, with Snider in center and Furillo in right, and they spent considerable time practicing with each other in the outfield to make sure that they did not collide in pursuit of a fly ball. “We never had any problems with a ball hit between us,” Snider later said. “Never ran into each other.” For his part, Furillo similarly recalled that “Snider and I got along good” and that “we played the outfield beautiful together.” But Snider would rarely see Furillo in social situations outside the park. For his part, Furillo regarded Snider as “a prince” and “a funny duck” who was “always crying” if he had to face a left-handed pitcher (who was usually more difficult to hit than a right-handed pitcher) or if “he wasn’t hitting the ball and was in a slump.”

Furillo was not the only one to notice Snider’s aversion to left-handed pitchers or his propensity to feel sorry for himself in the face of frustration at the plate. Dodger pitcher Rex Barney, for one, agreed that Duke “was a magnificent ballplayer” but that he was also “a pain in the ass and a crybaby” who would come into the clubhouse “pout ing” if he did not do well. “If he had a bad day,” said Reese, who was one of Duke’s closest friends on the team, “he didn’t like it. And he couldn’t take it. And we would say, ‘Okay, Duke. Who took your candy today?’” Snider himself acknowledged that he had difficulty dealing with his frustrations. “My problem was that I had excelled in athletics all my life,” he later explained, “and that I really didn’t know what adversity was until I came to the Dodgers. I had to learn that every day wasn’t a bed of roses, and that took some time. I would sulk. I’d have a pity party for myself. I admit it.”

Snider’s willingness to feel sorry for himself sometimes affected his play. On one occasion he stopped running to first base after hitting a ground ball to the infield because he assumed it would result in his being thrown out. When he returned to the dugout, Jackie Robinson pulled him aside and said, “Duke. Home to first base. That’s ninety feet. Not seventy-five.” Another person who tried to change Snider’s attitude was perhaps the most important—Charlie Dressen.

The relationship between the two men was not a pleasant one when Dressen first became the Brooklyn manager in 1951. Snider resented Dressen’s large ego, and the new manager believed that his star center fielder was too temperamental. Relations did not improve when Dressen called a club meeting before one game to complain about the players’ spending more than their allotment for food on the road and, as one example, cited one player’s additional charge of seventy-five cents for a dish of creamed cauliflower at a Philadelphia hotel the previous night. As Dressen droned on, Snider—anxious to get on the field to warm up for the game—interrupted the manager’s lecture, saying, “Cripes, Charlie, what the hell is the big deal? If it’s so important, take it out of my allowance for last night.”

The breaking point came in a game against the Giants in July 1952. Snider was on second base when the Dodger batter drove a single into right field—a situation that should have enabled Snider to score easily. Instead, as one sportswriter explained, “he certainly wasn’t getting away to a good start, and after he got started, he circled third base in a wide arc and wound up being thrown out” by the Giant right fielder “by perhaps ten feet.”

Disgusted with Snider’s mental lapse, Dressen benched him in the team’s next game in Cincinnati. News reports speculated that Duke’s salary would be cut by as much as 25 percent—all of which, as one sportswriter later explained, “brought a crisis in the lives of the whole Snider family.” Bev immediately got on the telephone with her husband, and, in a flurry of subsequent calls, Walter O’Malley himself telephoned Mrs. Snider to assure her that there would be no cut in Duke’s salary. The spate of telephone calls also resulted in discussions between Snider and Dressen, and the next day Snider was seen by one sportswriter “grinning and talking animatedly with his manager—something that had not been observed before then.”

The change in attitude had an impact on Snider’s performance, and he was able to finish the 1952 season with a .303 batting average along with twenty-one home runs and ninety-two runs driven in. But, more important, the Dodgers won the pennant, and he was given an opportunity to avenge his poor performance in the 1949 World Series. And avenge it he did. Facing Yankee stalwart Allie Reynolds—who had struck him out three times in the first game of that 1949 series—Snider nailed a home run that helped the team win the first game of the 1952 series. Although he would hit three more home runs in the series (and thus tie a series record held by Ruth and Gehrig), the first one was magical. Delighted to have overcome his initial anxieties of World Series play, Snider was too excited to even “remember going around the bases.” Still, the Dodgers ultimately lost the series to the Yankees, and, once again, the team and its fans had to wait until next year.

The Dodger team of 1953 included outstanding performances by many of the team’s regulars, but few could compare with Snider’s achievements. He batted .336 (fourth in the league), established a new Dodger single-season record of forty-two home runs (second in the league), tied for third in doubles (with thirty-eight), and drove in 126 runs (third in the league). One sportswriter observed that the Dodger center fielder had had “a magnificent season” and that, with his best years yet to come, “it must be wonderful to be only twenty-seven years old and Duke Snider.” But the performances of Snider and other Dodgers during the season were not enough to overcome the Yankees’ dominance in the World Series, and, as Snider remembered, people began to wonder whether the New York rival had a “jinx” on the Brooklyn club.

The disappointment with the Dodgers’ loss of the World Series did not have any impact on Snider’s performance in 1954. He continued to pound the ball with consistency and power, and that productivity inevitably led to comparisons with the other two center fielders who played for New York teams—Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays. The comparison with Mays was a particularly frequent topic among sportswriters because, like Snider, he played in the National League. The debate was featured in midseason articles in
The Sporting News
, with one sportswriter saying that Mays—who had a dramatic running style and could make “basket” catches in the outfield—had a “showman ship” that Snider lacked, but another sportswriter countered that Snider displayed an “excellence” in making catches that compared favorably with his crosstown rival. From a statistical perspective, the two players had season records that were remarkably similar (Snider hitting forty home runs and driving in 130 runs, while Mays hit forty-one home runs and drove in 110 runs). Indeed, on the last day of the season, Snider, Mays, and Giant right fielder Don Mueller were all tied for the league lead in batting with a .342 average—but Snider went hitless on that last day while Mays had three hits, thus enabling the Giant outfielder to ultimately prevail with a .345 average.

Snider regarded the comparison with Mantle and Mays as only so much “media hype.” In his mind, his individual performance was secondary to whether the Dodgers were winning—but he did acknowledge that he “was happy just to be compared with” Mantle and Mays, telling one interviewer, “Heck, if I am compared with those two, I’m a pretty good ballplayer.”

Any doubts on Snider’s comparison with Mantle and Mays were removed by the California native’s performance in 1955. “There,” Phillies’ manager Mayo Smith told one sportswriter while pointing to Snider during a game in May, “is a helluva player. You can have Willie Mays. I’ll take Snider.” Dodger manager Walter Alston, who was rarely effusive in discussing his players’ accomplishments, echoed that perspective, saying, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen an outfielder who can go so high to catch a ball while running at full speed.” The comments of Smith and Alston were echoed in
Sports Illustrated
, which concluded that Snider was the preferred player among Mays and Mantle not only because of his fielding skills but also because he was “the most dangerous hitter in the National League.”

Ironically, both Snider and Mays were keeping pace through much of the 1955 season with Babe Ruth’s record of hitting sixty home runs—although Ruth hit a remarkable seventeen home runs in September, which often made such comparisons deceiving. Duke’s home run productivity collapsed in August after he was hit in the knee by a pitch, leaving him with forty-two home runs (while Mays finished with a league-leading fifty-one). Still, Snider lead the league with 136 runs driven in, was chosen by
The Sporting News
as the Major League Player of the Year, and finished only two votes behind teammate Roy Campanella in the voting by the sportswriters (who were not terribly fond of Snider) for the league’s Most Valuable Player award.

Despite his considerable contribution to the Dodgers’ success in winning the pennant (and, with four home runs, winning the World Series), Snider jeopardized his standing with the fans with a temperamental outburst in August. The outburst reflected habits that could not be so easily changed. He continued to worry if he did not succeed at the plate. (“No player agonized more,” said Carl Erskine, “when he didn’t perform well.”) And he was quick to anger if sportswriters made critical comments—although Reese told him to shrug them off, saying that “there’s nothing older than yesterday’s newspaper.”

Snider certainly understood that the sportswriters’ criticism came with the territory and that he should not fall apart emotionally if his performance did not always satisfy everyone’s standards. Still, he became enraged when the fans began booing him unmercifully during one late-season doubleheader at Ebbets Field in which he went hitless in nine times at bat. When reporters gathered around his locker after the second game, the California native did not restrain himself. “You guys want something to write about?” he rhetorically asked. “The Brooklyn fans are the worst in the league. They don’t deserve a pennant.” Reese overheard the ill-chosen comments and gave his teammate the opportunity to reconsider, saying, “Wait, guys. Duke doesn’t really mean that. Do you, Duke?” But Snider insisted that he did mean it and that the reporters should print it.

Duke had second thoughts about his comments when he saw the newspaper headlines the next morning. When Bev said that she would attend the game that evening, Duke tried to dissuade her. “No, you’re not,” he told his wife. “Those fans are going to tar and feather me.” Bev pushed aside his caution and was sitting in the stands when Snider encountered a round of loud boos in his first plate appearance. But he got a hit, and the booing became less pronounced on his second time at bat. When he got another hit, there was some scattered applause. And when he got a hit on his third plate appearance, the jeers gave way to a standing ovation. The Duke was back in the fans’ good graces.

It proved to be a temporary reprieve. Roger Kahn, who had covered the Dodgers in 1952 and 1953 for
The New York Herald Tribune
(and later wrote the best-selling memoir
The Boys of Summer
), asked Snider if he would be interested in cooperating on an article that would appear in
Collier’s
magazine. The article, Kahn explained, would provide Duke with a platform to convey the frustrations that Snider had expressed to the New York writer during one of their many conversations in 1953. Snider agreed, and the article appeared in the issue of May 25, 1956.

The article ran under the headline, “I Play Baseball for Money— Not Fun.” Although Kahn wrote the article, it was portrayed as Snider’s firsthand complaint that professional baseball did not provide the joys it appeared to have and that, during one World Series game, he was dreaming about the day when he could “settle down to raising avocados in the California sunshine.”

To Snider, the disillusionment with baseball reflected a variety of factors. Youngsters who “throw skate keys and marbles” at his head while he is standing in center field. Older fans who “bounce beer cans” off his legs “during dull moments in the games.” Sportswriters who write critical stories even though they know “just as much baseball as my four-year-old daughter.” And a travel schedule that forced him to “spend half my life in strange towns, a thousand miles away from Beverly and the kids.” He acknowledged that he was making about $50,000 a year through his salary, World Series checks, and endorsements. It was not, however, enough to justify the “headaches.” Baseball “is no fun,” he concluded, “but it’s better than suffering the heartaches of a sour press and hooting fans.”