Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (29 page)

Williams, of course, would always bite. “What the hell do you mean?” he would ask, dead serious now.

“Well, when you first came up back when I was in Detroit you would come up to the plate and stand there and say, ‘Throw the goddamn ball—I’m going to knock it out whatever it is.’ You didn’t give a damn about who was pitching or what he was throwing. Now it’s always, ‘Dommy, what’s he throwing today? ... Is he sharp, is he off? ... Is he sneaky?’ ”

Williams would go on the offensive: “Do you know what our fleet-footed catcher used to do when he was at Detroit?” he would say to the others. “He would ask me when I came to the plate what kind of pitch I wanted. ‘How about a fastball, Ted? Would you like one on the inside corner?’ So
of course it threw me off, I didn’t know what to expect—was he setting me up?—and so I didn’t say anything and he kept on it, and one time he asked me if I wanted a slow curve and I said yes, and I waited and he got me a slow curve, Mr. Tebbetts did, just like I asked, and I hit it out and he never let me order a pitch again.”

The sportswriters
always
gathered around Birdie’s locker after the game for a daily debriefing—Birdie was a voluble and articulate source. Williams, if he was not too angry at the writers at the moment, would say, “Well, guys, there’s no need to buy the papers tomorrow. We know what’s going to be written. Just what this man says. There might as well be a byline on all those stories. By Mr. George Tebbetts.” The others loved the sound of such give-and-take: It was the sound of baseball players who were winning.

CHAPTER 12

A
S THE PENNANT RACE
became tighter, the writers and the players began to notice something fascinating: For the first time there was a sense of importance of television. Red Smith, who was the first to write about it, observed it, oddly enough, not in the behavior of the players but in the behavior of the umpires and the fans.

“Today, conscious of the great unseen audience, they [the umpires] play every decision out like the balcony scene from
Romeo and Juliet.
On a strike they gesticulate, they brandish a fist aloft, they spin almost as shot through the heart, they bellow all four parts of the quartette from
Rigoletto.
On a pitch that misses the plate, they stiffen with loathing, ostentatiously avert the gaze, and render a bit from
Götterdämmerung.
In parlor and pub you see the umpire today. And hear him.” Then Smith added, prophetically, “The virus is infecting the fans, too. When a foul is hit in the stands, the camera usually is trained on the fan who recovers the ball. Used to be that a guy catching a foul would pocket his loot almost furtively and go on watching the game. Today he wheels towards the camera, holds his prize aloft, shouts, and makes faces. Television is making us a nation of hams.”

Television was still very primitive. In 1947 the World Series had been broadcast for the first time, on the old DuMont network to five cities. Gillette sponsored the game,
and an estimated 3 million people watched. The company intended to introduce a new Gillette razor, which came in a flashy plastic package. The selling point of the new razor was how easy it was to feed the blades into it. There was to be a live demonstration on TV, but the Gillette people had forgotten to bring an associate to do the feed, so Otis Freeman, the DuMont engineer, had to wash his hands quickly and double as the blade feeder. Freeman loved being in on something as novel as television. Like many in the industry at that time, he was young, had been in World War II as an engineer, and was eager to experiment with this marvelous new toy.

There had been, he thought, looking back years later, three stages to modern television. In the beginning it was engineer-driven, for the questions that hung over every broadcast were: Could this actually be accomplished?; Are the technical facilities good enough? Then, in the late fifties, after a decade of remarkable technological achievements, it became director-driven. The technological skills were a given; now it took creative skills to complement what the engineers had wrought. After that it became, like so many other successful enterprises in America, accountant-driven. In this final stage, the new generation of well-educated accountants limited the freedom of the directors and minimized the risk in order to maximize the profits.

But in those early years, something new could be tried every day, it seemed. Otis Freeman had started with an experimental station in New York, W2XWV, which in time became WABD after its owner, Allen
B.
DuMont. It was then the third station in New York—WNBC and WCBS were first. The early television sets were extremely temperamental and apt to go out of focus for no discernible reason. When that happened the tavern owner (for the sets were invariably in bars) would call the station to complain. Freeman told the DuMont telephone operators to intercept those calls and relay them to him at home. Then, like a doctor
on a house call, he would rush out, grab a cab, and repair the afflicted set himself for fifty dollars. The fees added up to almost half his salary, and he gratefully cut the telephone operators in with a five-dollar tip per call. In 1948, when WPIX, owned by the
Daily News,
went on the air, Freeman became its chief engineer. It was relatively easy for WPIX to get the Yankees—the other fledgling networks did not like baseball, because it did not end exactly on the half hour and was therefore hard to schedule.

WPIX used Mel Allen and Curt Gowdy as its television team; there was no difference between what they said on radio and what they said on television. Setting up the technical facilities, Freeman found himself in a perpetual struggle with the Stadium groundskeepers and officials, and, of course, George Weiss. Whatever he tried to do, someone would object and tell him no, it had never been done before.

Nor were Freeman’s responsibilities restricted to the Stadium. He had to serve as the personal television repairman of Yankee owner Don Topping as well. Several times a season Topping would send his seaplane to pick up Freeman and fly him out to his Southampton home. As the plane made its approach, it would buzz the house, and a driver in a Rolls would be sent to meet Freeman. At the house he would work on either the set or the 125-foot antenna—it was so tall, it had to be taken down at the end of the season because of the danger from high winds and ice, which would form on it.

If the announcers, trained in radio, were somewhat uneasy with television, the early sponsors were not. The commercial possibilities of televised games were immediately obvious. The Gillette people had been stunned by the success of their first TV ad campaign, and for many years after would unveil its new shaving devices on the occasion of the World Series. In 1949 Gillette paid $175,000 for the TV rights; it was also ruthless in keeping costs down, paying
such preeminent announcers as Allen and Red Barber, both of whom were eager to get the prestigious assignments, $200 a game. But Gillette was just skimming off the biggest games.

In the coverage of regular-season games, the beer companies were there first. In 1949 Leonard Faupel was a young salesman for the Ballantine Brewing Company, which sponsored the Yankee games. Faupel understood the pull of the new medium immediately, mainly because of the enthusiasm of the city’s tavern owners. That was where television was having its first, big impact. Fred Allen, then one of the leading comedians on radio, noted, that there were still a few New Yorkers who had not watched television yet—little children, he noted, too young to go into saloons.

In 1949, there was a belief among American tavern owners that theirs was an endangered business. Ordinary Americans were becoming better educated, going from blue-collar jobs to white-collar jobs. No longer, the tavern owners feared, would they automatically stop off at the neighborhood bar on the way home from work for a beer or two. Worst of all, Americans were moving to the suburbs. That was the real threat. There, aided by better refrigeration and new beer packaging—for the first time beer came in cans—potential customers could now drink at home. The old-fashioned tavern might well go the way of the blacksmith shop.

Therefore, the city’s tavern owners saw a considerable lure in the early television sets, which they displayed prominently over their bars, and tuned almost exclusively to the sports shows: the Friday night fights, the occasional football game, and, above all, the big baseball games. In their windows they displayed huge signs with the Ballantine (or a competing beer’s) logo which announced the games and fights to be televised. Business prospered; for a big baseball game, the crowds in the bars were enormous—regular customers had regular seats, and newcomers had to stand in the back.

For Ballantine, a relatively small Newark-based company that was trying to gain a more significant share of the New York market, the radio and television sponsorship of the Yankee games was a gift from the gods. The package was unbelievably inexpensive. It gave the Ballantine salesman immediate identity in his area. He did not merely sell beer; he was the man who brought you the Yankees. Faupel, though, had a sense that an entirely new era was beginning, and that television sets were not going to be exclusively in taverns for long. The price of sets, he was sure, would continue to drop, and their technological capacities would increase. What was coming was nothing less than a great new American theater in the home where the best live entertainment would most likely be sports.

Not everyone shared his enthusiasm. Such traditionalists as George Weiss were wary. Weiss had never liked radio broadcasting. It struck him as being perilously close to giving away the product, and he resisted it as much as he could. If he made a connection between the staggering jump in postwar attendance and the coming of live radio broadcasts, he never admitted it. As far as he was concerned, the attendance came from superiority of his product, not from this new cumbersome amplification system that was stealing it.

There was a constant pressure for increased broadcasting rights, but Weiss was going to make the broadcasters do it his way. He lost no opportunity to remind everyone who held the power and who was the supplicant. Every meeting with the WPIX people was a battle, every increment of expansion a small war.

Slowly, Otis Freeman of WPIX realized that there was a ritual to dealing with Weiss. The broadcast people were not to congratulate themselves in front of him on how much their ratings had increased, or how many letters they were getting from fans, Quite the reverse. They were to go in and listen to a litany of their failures. Weiss would berate Freeman and Ben Larsen, the station manager—their coverage
was clumsy, they promoted the games poorly, and they did not have a proper respect for the Yankee mystique. Then, when Weiss was finished, he would turn to Arthur Patterson and say, “Okay, Red, now you tell ’em.” Patterson would continue the assault. It was, Freeman soon realized, really about money. It was a negotiating strategy.

Weiss did not see television as expanding the market for baseball; rather he saw it the same way he saw radio—as competition with Stadium attendance. He fought a constant rearguard action, trying to limit TV’s presence. That very first year there were prolonged struggles over camera angles. In the beginning there were only two or three cameras—one behind the plate, one at first, and occasionally one at third. But Mel Allen came up with the idea of placing a camera in center field. The engineers experimented with it, and they were impressed with the results; it provided an entirely different view of the game, and fans could see things they had never seen before. It made the game infinitely more immediate. But Weiss refused to let them use it all. “Why not, George?” Len Faupel asked. “It’ll give away the catcher’s signals,” Weiss answered. They argued and finally Faupel won permission to place the camera there, but Weiss immediately set a ceiling on how many shots from it they could use per game. Three. Then four. Then five.

Frank Scott was the road secretary for the Yankees in 1949, a job that was part wagon master, part secretary, part nursemaid. During that season Weiss asked Scott, as was his custom, for information on the players’ private lives. To do that, Scott thought, made him nothing less than a spy. He felt Weiss was placing him in an untenable position. He refused to produce the information, and Weiss did not forgive him. After the 1950 season Scott and Weiss had an angry meeting in which Weiss accused Scott of disloyalty. Scott protested that he had been loyal to both the Yankees and the management. “You don’t get paid to be on the
players’ side,” Weiss said, “and you took the players’ side.” Weiss won the argument—he fired Scott.

Shortly thereafter Scott spent a day with Yogi Berra in his New Jersey house. Near the end of the day he asked Berra what time it was. “Here,” said Berra, and opened a drawer and flipped him a watch. “Where did this come from?” Scott asked, and Berra opened the drawer again. There were about thirty watches. “That’s what they give me when I make speeches,” Berra explained. Scott understood immediately that there was room for a new role here; that if he represented a player like Berra and negotiated his appearances, Berra might do better than getting a watch. He made an offer to Berra on the spot. Thus in 1950 did Yogi Berra, by Scott’s and his teammates’ reckoning, become the first player in baseball to have an agent. Aided by Scott, Berra probably made about $2,500 from speeches in his first year, instead of adding to his watch collection. Soon most of the rest of the Yankees and many Dodgers signed up with Scott.

George Weiss was not pleased. It was a threat in many ways. It was an outside source of income, which limited management’s ability to regulate the players’ hunger. It might also signal that players would soon want agents to
represent
them. Weiss was convinced that Scott was acting out of spite. He told Scott, that if he was going to represent Berra and others, he could not do it inside the Stadium. In addition he made it clear that there was to be no representation in contract dealings.

A few years later during spring training, Weiss was having trouble signing Berra, and the catcher was threatening to hold out. Red Patterson offered to help out. Patterson walked into Berra’s motel room, feeling confident that he was a friend of Yogi’s and that they could settle this quickly. There, sitting with Berra, was Scott. That still did not bother Patterson; after all, the three of them were friends.