Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (39 page)

Seated in the box seats with the wives and other family members of the Dodger players, Joan Hodges could hear the “roaring” of thousands of fans when her husband stepped into the batter’s box in the seventh inning. They too understood the opportunity that Gil had. But it was not to be—at least not in this at bat. The Dodger first baseman hit a line drive down the third-base line for a hit. In other circumstances, it might have meant something. But not now. Not with history in the making. And so there was disappointment in the stands. “We all thought,” said Joan, “it was Gil’s last chance.”

But the Dodgers could not be restrained. They scored three more runs in the seventh inning, and Hodges came to bat once again in the bottom of the eighth. The crowd was on its feet in anticipation, cheering and stomping. Most of the crowd, that is. Joan was too nervous. So she stayed in her seat, her hands covering her eyes. “I just couldn’t look,” she remembered. And then she heard the crack of the bat. Almost simultaneous with the familiar sound, Don Newcombe’s father, who was standing next to her, began screaming. “Joanie, Joanie,” he yelled, “get up and see! It’s another one.” Indeed it was. The three previous home runs had been hit into the lower left-field stands. This one sailed into the upper deck in left center field—the longest home run of the night.

The game concluded with a lopsided 19-3 Dodger victory, and Hodges was besieged in the clubhouse by the news media, each journalist pushing a microphone in his face or asking questions with a pen and pad at the ready. One television reporter had a personal question. “Did you know you were going to hit those home runs before the game today, Gil?” he asked. “Were you feeling particularly good before game time?” Gil—no doubt remembering the quarrel with his wife only hours earlier—looked over to Joan, who was watching the interview, and the two of them laughed. (In addition to tying a major-league record, the home runs had an unexpected personal benefit for Gil and Joan.
New York Daily News
sportswriter Dick Young asked Joan whether she and Gil, with an infant son and awaiting the birth of another child, had any objection to living with her parents. Joan’s wrinkled nose told it all. “There isn’t enough room,” she told Young. “We’ve tried everything to get a decent home to rent.” Young’s headline the next day did not hurt: “Hodges Hits 4 in 1 Tilt. Asks 1 Apartment for 4.” As the press later reported, “The Brooklyn ball club’s switchboard was swamped, and the office help got writer’s cramp signing receipts for telegrams.” Within weeks, Gil and Joan had moved their family into a two-story house in Flatbush.)

There are no smiles or laughs as Hodges walks out to the on-deck circle at the start of the eighth inning of the fifth game of the 1956 World Series. Only the growing buzz of the crowd. “There’s a hum of expectancy here,” Bob Wolff tells his listening audience, “as this eighth inning gets under way as the crowd keeps a careful eye on the playing field and the scoreboard.”

Don Larsen is in no rush to proceed as Jackie Robinson moves into the batter’s box. The Yankee hurler steps off the mound, takes off his glove, and rubs up the ball. After a few moments, Larsen returns the glove to his left hand, positions himself on the pitching mound rubber, and glares past Robinson for the sign from Berra. After taking a strike and hitting a foul ball to give Larsen a two-strike count, Robinson calls time and walks over to Hodges, who is watching with obvious interest from the on-deck circle. Robinson appears to be rubbing his eye, and then someone from the Dodger dugout throws out a rosin bag (which would probably be the last thing to use if there was indeed a particle in Jackie’s eye). The crowd boos, no doubt believing that the ever-competitive Robinson is trying to distract Larsen and avoid another out that will bring the Yankee pitcher that much closer to his ultimate goal. The delay only invigorates Larsen (who later said that the crowd’s booing gave him a “comforting feeling” to know that they were on his side). Robinson steps back into the batter’s box and taps the next pitch back to Larsen, who makes an easy toss to Joe Collins at first base for the first out of the inning.

Berra has already talked with Larsen about strategy in pitching to Hodges, who is now settled into the batter’s box. “Concentrate on throwing good fastballs,” Yogi said, “either high or low outside.” It was the only way, said the Yankee catcher, to keep Hodges from using his considerable power to pull the ball to the left side of the field.

Larsen understands the merits of his catcher’s advice. He had already made the mistake in the fifth inning of letting Hodges pull a long drive to left center field that would have been a hit if someone other than Mickey Mantle had been playing center field. He does not want to give the Dodger first baseman another chance like that.

The first pitch to Hodges is a fastball that catches the outside corner. The crowd roars as home plate umpire Babe Pinelli signals a called strike, and Wolff intones, “The drama rises as this ball game progresses.” Another ball, a fruitless swing, and another ball quickly bring the count to two balls and two strikes. And so Gil Hodges, with power enough to drive a ball into the distant outfield seats in Yankee Stadium, concentrates—and no doubt hopes—that he can now do what no other Dodger has done.

It is not an idle hope. His entire baseball career—beginning with those early days in rural Indiana—is a chronicle of exceeding expectations.

Gil’s first home was in Princeton, Indiana, located in the southwest corner of the state. Charlie and Irene Hodges were people of modest means when they settled there in the 1920s. Irene would always be there for her family, but Charlie was the one who seemed to have the more dramatic impact on Gil.

The elder Hodges was a man of few words. Rarely was there an overt display of emotion, and, in later years, that would become his second son’s trademark as well. Gil was not one, for example, to openly criticize a teammate’s play. The message would be conveyed in far sub tler ways. “Maybe you realized during a game you made a blunder,” said Dodger pitcher Johnny Podres. “You’d look at him and you’d go think about it.” And never would Gil tout his success or bemoan his failures. “That’s the way Gil is,” one of his Brooklyn neighbors told a sportswriter in 1953. “He never shows anything. Let him come home after hitting a couple of home runs or breaking up the ball game, and you’d never be able to tell it from looking at him. He’s just a quiet guy who leaves his job behind him at the ball park.”

There was the time when Hodges, by now a much-respected member of the Brooklyn Dodgers, had a slump at the end of the 1952 season. Baseball writers had already taken note of Hodges’ proclivity to tail off in productivity at the end of the season. (“The big, handsome ex-Hoosier,” one sportswriter opined at the beginning of September 1952, “awaits the advent of September with something akin to dread. Not since he took over the first base job in ’48 and went on to an All-Star role the following year, has Gil enjoyed a good final 30 days.”) But this slump did not end with the beginning of October. It carried over to the 1952 World Series. Twenty-six times Hodges went to the plate in that series, and all he could show for his effort was five walks—and no hits (tying a World Series record for futility). The slump continued into the 1953 season. By the end of May he was hitting a meager .187.

The fans rallied around their slumping star. “It’s too warm for a sermon,” Father Herbert Redmond told the parishioners at Brooklyn’s St. Francis Xavier church one Sunday morning in May. Redmond did not personally know the Dodger first baseman, but he knew of the widespread frustration in Brooklyn. “Go home,” Redmond advised his parishioners, “keep the Commandments—and say a prayer for Gil Hodges.”

Those parishioners, as well as other Brooklyn fans, took the advice to heart. The Dodger first baseman not only received hundreds of items from Brooklyn fans during that spring of 1953: letters, telegrams, rabbit feet, rosaries, and other good-luck charms. He also encountered good wishes, sympathy, and even batting tips from fans whenever he went to a restaurant, the store, or anywhere else in the neighborhood. It was an overpowering display of affection that was all the more remarkable because it stood in sharp contrast to the treatment fickle fans would usually give to other local players whose performance did not meet expectations. (“The way the Brooklyn fans backed me when I couldn’t buy a base hit,” Hodges later said, “is my biggest baseball thrill.”)

It was, to be sure, a time of great frustration for the Princeton native. But never once during those many months of anguish did anyone see any evidence of the torment he endured. Unlike Mickey Mantle—who was prone to kick the watercooler, throw his helmet, or toss a bat after one bad plate experience—Hodges’ teammates saw the same evenhanded behavior they had witnessed when he was hitting well. “Gil was distraught during his slump,” said Carl Erskine, “but he didn’t talk about it.”

Gil’s mood did not change when he went home to Joan. “We didn’t talk about it,” she later remembered. “We knew it, and it was something he was going through. But not so much that it interfered with our private life.” (The slump was finally cured when a movie requested by manager Charlie Dressen showed that Hodges was “stepping in the bucket” when he swung—meaning that he would invariably move his left foot to the left side of the plate instead of stepping toward the ball. Hodges’ fortunes improved dramatically when he changed his batting stance, and he finished the 1953 season with thirty-one home runs, 122 runs batted in, and a .302 batting average.)

The quiet manner in which Gil approached life extended to personal conflicts. Like his father, he was slow to anger. (“I never had a fight in my life,” he told one sportswriter after he had been with the Dodgers for ten years. “That is,” he added with a grin, “since my brother and I used to battle when we were small. I got the worst of that, and maybe that’s what cured me.”) Still, he was a man of considerable size (six feet, one inch tall and weighing about two hundred pounds), and he was reputed to have the largest hands in baseball—which often inspired sportswriters to engineer photographs with Gil holding boxes or making other demonstrations to show that his hands were much larger than other players. (“I don’t know why he ever wears a first baseman’s glove,” Pee Wee Reese once quipped. “He sure doesn’t need one.”) With those physical attributes, Gil could command attention if he did get angry. (There was the time when Hodges was clowning around in the clubhouse with Dodger third baseman Don Hoak, who stood six feet tall and weighed 175 pounds. Hoak prided himself on being an accomplished boxer. “Don’t fuck with me,” he playfully warned his teammate. “These hands are lethal weapons.” According to Dodger publicity director Irving Rudd, “Hodges just looked at him, picked him up, and dumped him in a garbage can.”)

However infrequent, the anger was invariably aroused by someone else’s misconduct. “He was a nice person,” Carl Furillo said of Hodges, “but anybody says he never got mad is a lot of baloney. He’d get mad when he would see that somebody was out to harm somebody.”

The Dodgers saw evidence of Gil’s protective nature during the exhibition tour in the spring of his rookie year. A fight erupted among the players during a game with the club’s Fort Worth farm team in Texas. Les Burge, the two-hundred-pound manager of the farm team, made a move toward the much smaller Pee Wee Reese—but he never reached the Dodger shortstop. “I don’t know where you’re going, Les,” Hodges said as he grabbed Burge’s shirt and lifted him off the ground, “but it won’t be near Pee Wee.”

By then, of course, Hodges had left the confines of Indiana and the struggle to escape his father’s fate. It was not an easy journey. Charlie Hodges had played baseball in his time, but he did not have the skills to become a professional. So he did what many men in that area did—he worked in the coal mines in nearby Francisco.

It was not a job for the faint of heart. The men would take an elevator hundreds of yards belowground, where they would perform tasks in perilous conditions. Charlie lost an eye in one accident, broke his back in another incident, and then lost four toes in yet another accident. But there was nowhere else to go, especially for a man like Charlie, who wanted to keep food on the table for his growing family—which included two boys and a girl by the time the Depression enveloped the country in 1929. But then disaster struck in 1932. Charlie was changing clothes in the shed around six o’clock one morning to get ready to make his descent into the mines when he heard a loud explosion. “I look out the door,” Charlie later said, “and there are flames shooting a hundred feet in the air.” Thirty-seven men lost their lives in that explosion, the mine was shut down, and Charlie moved his family—including eight-year-old Gil—to the nearby town of Petersburg to take a job with the Ingle Coal Corporation.

However much he needed that job, Charlie Hodges was determined that his sons would never have to do what he did for a living. When they reached working age and talked about joining him in the mines, Bob and Gil learned that their father had other ideas. “Charlie Hodges’ boys,” he told them, “will never work in the shafts.”

The boys fortunately had other options when high school graduation approached. They each played for the Petersburg High School varsity (Bob as a pitcher and Gil as a shortstop), and, as they got older, Charlie allowed himself to believe that his older son might be able to make it to the big leagues. “Bobby was a good left-handed pitcher,” Gil remembered. “He had a live fastball and a good curve. Everybody thought Bobby would be the baseball player in the family.” Bob did sign a contract with the Boston Braves to play for one of their minor-league teams, but he did not perform well and left after the first season to enroll in St. Joseph’s College in Rensselaerville, Indiana.

Gil, only fourteen months younger than Bobby, joined him in 1941. The two of them starred on the St. Joseph’s College varsity team, and Gil’s exploits soon caught the attention of Dodger scout Stan Feezle. He approached the young shortstop after one game in the spring of 1943 and asked if he would be interested in attending a Dodger tryout in Olean, New York. Gil came home to Petersburg “breathless,” as he recalled. “Dad,” he told his father with enthusiasm, “a big-league scout wants me to go east for a tryout.”