Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (20 page)

Within a week Sam Mele and Mickey Harris were gone, traded to Washington for Walt Masterson. The
Boston Globe
was underwhelmed. Its headline said:
SOX TRADE ENDS SENTIMENT FOR POSSIBLE PENNANT.

CHAPTER 8

I
N MID-JUNE JOE DIMAGGIO
got up one morning and stepped cautiously on the floor, expecting the pain to shoot through his foot once again. Miraculously, the pain was gone. He touched his heel with his hand. Until then it had felt hot to the touch. Now it felt normal. He began to smile. He walked around the apartment and felt no pain.

That day, for the first time in weeks, he went out for both lunch and dinner. On the street when people recognized him he was pleased. He was delighted to sign autographs. Soon, he decided to take batting practice. The team was on a western trip, but Gus Niarhos, a backup catcher who was injured, and Al Schacht, a former pitcher known as The Clown Prince of Baseball, were available. Schacht could still throw reasonably hard. For fielders they got a bunch of neighborhood kids who hung around the Stadium. The workout lasted an hour.

Soon DiMaggio expanded the workouts. He had Niarhos hit fly balls to him, and he would run them down. He was easily winded, and his legs were not in shape, but there was no pain. The Yankees came home from their road trip, and he showed up at the park in uniform. No one asked questions about whether he was ready. One morning he called Curt Gowdy, who lived in the same hotel, and they drove out to the Stadium together so that Gowdy could watch
him take batting practice. When he finished, Gowdy took a look at his hands. They were completely covered with bloody blisters caused by the batting.

“Jesus, Joe, look at that,” Gowdy said.

“Oh, that’s nothing, forget about that,” DiMaggio answered. “I took too much batting practice, but that doesn’t matter. There’s no pain in my foot. That matters.”

Cleveland was in town for the first series of the home stand and Lou Boudreau, the Cleveland manager, was also the manager of the American League in the All-Star Game. It was still two weeks away and Boudreau told DiMaggio he hoped he would be able to play. “I’m not even in the running,” DiMaggio said, for the fans voted then.

“I think it could be arranged,” Boudreau said.

After the first game with Cleveland, when everyone else had left the park, DiMaggio asked Niarhos to hit fly balls to him in the outfield for half an hour. Then he ran around the outfield a few times. Again there was no pain. After the Cleveland series, the Yankees had an exhibition game with the Giants at home before going up to Boston for three games. Stengel told DiMaggio simply to let him know when he was ready, and DiMaggio decided to try the exhibition game.

Before the game there was a home-run-hitting contest, and by far the biggest cheers were for DiMaggio. He hit only one out, but it drew even wilder cheers from the crowd. He went hitless in four trips during the game, but the Giants had used Kirby Higbe, who was throwing a knuckle ball at the time. It was not the optimum pitch to return against. The next day the team left for Boston, and until the last minute DiMaggio did not know if he would make the trip. He was torn between the desire to play and the fear that he wasn’t ready for real pitching. He did not want to embarrass himself and hurt the team. The other players went up by train in the morning. He waited and then finally jumped on a 3:15 plane. On the plane he saw a friend who
asked if he was going to play. “I don’t know,” he answered. At 5:15 he arrived at the clubhouse. Stengel was surrounded by writers who were asking for the lineup. He was still waiting to hear from DiMaggio. DiMaggio was dressing slowly, pondering what to do, and Stengel was stalling the writers. Finally DiMaggio said yes, he could play, so Stengel put him in the lineup.

In their dugout the Red Sox watched DiMaggio come out to warm up. One of the younger Boston players predicted that DiMaggio would have a hard time running out an infield hit. McCarthy, a great DiMaggio fan, immediately interrupted him. “You don’t know him. You watch him the first time there’s a chance for an infield hit. Watch how he runs,” he said. There was an ominous note to the way McCarthy said it, one of the Boston pitchers thought, as if he were saying, “
They
are the real professionals.”

In the first game Mickey McDermott was pitching for the Red Sox. He was young, skinny, and wild. In the second inning DiMaggio led off. McDermott was very fast, one of the three or four fastest pitchers in the league. DiMaggio found it hard to adjust his batting eye to McDermott’s speed and he fouled off six or seven pitches. Each one went off to the right, which meant that he was swinging late. Finally McDermott came in with a fastball, belt-high, and DiMaggio slapped it over Junior Stephens’s head for a single. That was a hit well earned. Then Lindell walked and Hank Bauer hit a home run. The Yankees were up, 3-0. In the third Rizzuto singled to start the inning, then DiMaggio came up again. That man, McDermott thought, does not seem to me like a player who has missed two months of play, that looks to me like the real Joe DiMaggio. On the mound he said a prayer: “Please, dear God, help me get this man out. I won’t ask anything else from you today.” Then, he remembers, “I heard this deep voice answering me: ‘I’ll help you get him out, Maurice, if you’ve got a really good fastball today. Other than that, son, you’re on
your own.’ ” He was, it appeared, on his own. This time DiMaggio put his body into a pitch and hit it over the wall. How sweet the feeling was. Rizzuto jumped up and down like a little kid as DiMaggio crossed home plate. The Yankees won 5-4 behind Reynolds and Page.

Ellis Kinder pitched the second game against Tommy Byrne. Byrne, a lefty, was intimidated by Fenway. He never made it past the first inning. He walked three and gave up three doubles in a row to Williams, Stephens, and Doerr. In the second, with the Yankees playing deep, Williams bunted for a hit and then Stephens hit a home run. The Red Sox took a 7-1 lead into the fifth. Even in Fenway, that was a huge lead against a tough pitcher. But in the fifth, Kinder seemed to lose his control. He walked Rizzuto and Henrich, which brought up DiMaggio. Kinder was a hard pitcher for DiMaggio, who preferred a fastball pitcher; Kinder usually relied on subtlety instead of power. This time, though, DiMaggio got the pitch he wanted and drove the ball over the fence in left center. The score was now 7-4.

In the seventh Gene Woodling doubled off Earl Johnson with the bases loaded. In the eighth, with the score tied 7-7, and with two out and no one on, DiMaggio came up again against Johnson. The Boston fans, aware that something remarkable was going on, had started cheering for DiMaggio as well as for their own team. Johnson, the top Boston relief pitcher, was determined not to give DiMaggio anything good to hit. He was aware that Williams and DiMaggio were in a dead heat for the title of best hitter in baseball. A few years earlier, with a game on the line, Johnson had pitched to DiMaggio with two out and men on second and third. Joe Cronin had come out to the mound. “Whatever you do, Earl,” he had said, “don’t throw him a strike. Don’t let him beat us.” Johnson had placed the ball exactly where he wanted it, about six inches on the outside, but DiMaggio had pounced on it and, even more remarkably, pulled the ball past third for the game-winning hit. A
few months later Johnson ran into DiMaggio at a postseason banquet. “Joe, how in the hell did you pull that ball?” Johnson asked. “I figured that when Cronin came out he told you not to give me anything good to hit. I was sure he told you to pitch on the outside. So I waited, and I was ready,” he answered.

Johnson decided to give DiMaggio a low inside curve, a hard pitch for a hitter to get in the air. He put the ball exactly where he wanted it. To his amazement DiMaggio reached down and golfed the ball way over the wall and onto the screen. It was the hardest kind of swing for a good hitter, particularly one who was out of tune. As DiMaggio neared the dugout, Stengel, never one to miss an opportunity for theater, came out and starting bowing toward him like a Muslim to Mecca.

Even before the Boston game, DiMaggio’s return had become, day-by-day, an occasion of national drama. Now it was a national sensation, so much so that he later sold his account of it to
Life
magazine for $6,000, a very large figure of the period. DiMaggio’s own memory was of the noise and cheering, which grew and grew, inning by inning, until it was deafening.

That afternoon, in the locker room, DiMaggio teased Rizzuto, who had knocked in two runs. “What are you trying to do, steal my RBIs?” he asked. Rizzuto, who had played with him for almost a decade, had never seen him so playful. Spec Shea went over to him and asked if he was in any pain. “Nothing hurts when you play like this,” he answered.

There was one game left. Raschi against Parnell—ace against ace that year: Raschi was 11-2 going in, Parnell was 10-3. If any Boston pitcher could stop DiMaggio in Fenway, it was Mel Parnell.

If there is such a thing as a natural in baseball, it was Parnell. He threw, both teammates and opponents thought,
so effortlessly that it was almost unbelievable. He had fully intended to be a first baseman, not a pitcher. As a boy all he had wanted to do was hit. He played on a strong New Orleans high school team, where on occasion he would pitch batting practice to his teammates. “Stop throwing breaking stuff,” they would yell, and he would explain that he was throwing fastballs.

One day a Red Sox scout was in town to scout a teammate. Parnell’s team was short of pitchers, and his coach had asked him to pitch for the first time in his life. He struck out seventeen. The Boston scout, Ed Montague, reported back that they should go after Parnell. The Cardinals had already begun to make overtures to him and some of his high school teammates. In the thirties, the Cardinals under Branch Rickey had the best farm system in the country, and New Orleans was considered a Cardinal town. The local team, the New Orleans Pelicans, was a Cardinal farm team. Seven players from Parnell’s high school team signed professional contracts, six of them with the Cards. A couple of times Parnell pitched batting practice against the Pelicans and that heightened Cardinal interest. Soon Branch Rickey himself began to appear at the Parnell home. He was a dapper figure, very much the gent in derby hat and spats. Patrick Parnell, an engineer on the Illinois Central, loved to talk baseball, and here was one of the most famous men in baseball dropping in on him.

No one ever accused Branch Rickey of not being a wonderful salesman—whether he was selling God or major-league baseball or himself. He mesmerized the senior Parnell with stories of big-league baseball. Patrick Parnell thought Mr. Rickey a wonderful man and a religious man, but Mel Parnell took a harder look. Even though he was desperate to be a big-league ballplayer, he wanted no part of Branch Rickey or the Cardinals. They had a simple philosophy behind their system: Sign every talented kid they could for very little money, put them in a giant farm system, let them
fight their way to the top, keep a handful of the best for themselves, and trade or sell a few others. (The penurious quality of the St. Louis organization was well known even within the largely penurious world of baseball. In 1948, the Cardinals had signed their great outfielder, Stan Musial, to a new contract of $28,000, the largest amount of money ever paid to a St. Louis ballplayer.) As their best players became slightly advanced, not so much in years as in salary, they would replace them with younger, less-expensive players. In one period, between 1938 and 1942, the Cardinals sold off a number of their best players for a total of $625,000 while steadily improving their team. “How can I sell so many players and still come up with a winning team?” Rickey said in an interview. “I’ll tell you. It’s mass production! And by that I mean mass production primarily in try-out camps and mass production primarily of pitchers.”

The Cardinals had three AAA teams, two AA teams, and a host of lesser ones. The Cardinal Chain Gang it was called by players caught within it and unable to get out. Mel Parnell at seventeen was smart enough to know he wanted something different. He had heard about Rickey’s sales pitch—golden-tongued, yet homey, and was wary of succumbing to it. Therefore, on the frequent occasions that Branch Rickey showed up at the Parnell house, Mel Parnell did not come home until he was sure that their guest had gone.

He signed with Boston, and entered the Boston farm system at the age of twenty. Parnell moved up quickly, and might have made the majors by the time he was twenty-five except for World War II, which took three years out of his career. By 1948 he was ready to pitch in Fenway. That part did not come naturally. He had been purely a power pitcher until then. But power pitchers, he knew, particularly left-handed ones, died young in Fenway. Howie Pollet, a talented young Cardinal pitcher who was a friend in New Orleans and who had pitched in Fenway in 1946, warned
Parnell, “Mel, you can’t do it with the fastball. You’ll go up in big games against the best hitters in baseball and they’ll just sit on it and kill you.” So Parnell developed a slider by holding the ball differently, off the seams. Also, Joe Dobson, who had the best curve on the team, taught him something about throwing the curve. It was not a lesson that began well. “Dobson,” Parnell told Dobson, “why don’t you get the hell out of here—I know more about pitching than you’ll ever know.” Parnell and his friend Mickey Harris, who was also young and talented and left-handed, specialized in being cocky and fresh. They drove Joe Cronin crazy. “The two wise asses,” he would call them. Cronin would see them near the bench and he would say, “Out of here, you two wise asses, get out. Get down to the bullpen. Anywhere, but get out of here.”

Parnell was determined to figure out Fenway. Most pitchers, particularly left-handers, fearing the Wall, pitched defensively—outside to the right-handers. Parnell refused to buckle under. He would pitch inside and tight, especially to such big, powerful hitters as Lindell, DiMaggio, Keller, and Billy Johnson. He would pin their arms in against them so that they could not gain true leverage. It was later said that Hank Bauer and Mickey Mantle broke so many of their bats against him on sliders coming in to the narrow part of the bat that they felt he should buy them new ones. The hard part of pitching in Fenway, Parnell believed, was not the wall. Rather it was the lack of foul territory. The stands were right on top of the field. It was a fan’s delight but a pitcher’s nightmare, because a good many foul balls that were caught in other parks went into the stands at Fenway. A nine-inning game at Fenway would have been a ten-inning game anywhere else.