Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (30 page)

The first words out of Berra’s mouth were, “All right,
Patterson, none of your shit.” “Yeah,” added Scott, “Yogi’s right.” I don’t need this, thought Patterson, and immediately removed himself from the negotiating team.

Slowly the old order was changing: Television was making everyone richer and it was turning the players into personalities. They began appearing on
The Ed Sullivan Show
and making $500 for it. Soon they began to establish identities that removed them somewhat from the reach of management.

CHAPTER 13

T
HAT AUGUST, AS THE
Red Sox made a run at the Yankees, going to work was a pure pleasure for Birdie Tebbetts, the Boston catcher. There was nothing more satisfying than seeing a team achieve its true potential and begin to believe in itself. Tebbetts had come to Boston from the Detroit Tigers in a trade early in the 1947 season. He had been thrilled about the move to New England because he was born in Vermont and raised in Nashua, New Hampshire. He knew that the Red Sox were not so much a Boston team as a New England team. They were also stronger and younger than the Tigers. Now he was sure he was going to catch every day.

Tebbetts had enjoyed playing in Detroit before the war, for Detroit was an ideal baseball city, a blue-collar town that sometimes seemed to revolve around the Tigers. But things changed in 1945. When he and other veterans returned, and slowly made the adjustment back to baseball, they were welcomed by neither fans nor teammates. It was not pleasant, and for the first time in his life Birdie Tebbetts did not enjoy going to work in the morning.

In 1946 he thought they were booing Hank Greenberg out of town, and then in 1947, when Greenberg went to Pittsburgh, it struck Tebbetts that he was next. The problem was, he thought, that he was not a good ballplayer in 1946
and much of 1947. His hands had gotten hard in the four years away. The one thing a catcher had to have was soft hands—that is, hands that were quick and flexible, and could make last-second adjustments as a pitcher’s ball broke down. Only slowly after the war did the touch come back to his hands. The Boston pitchers agreed. Birdie, they thought, was a good defensive catcher who managed to compensate for a below-average arm by the use of very quick hands—he was as quick on the release of the ball as anyone in baseball.

More than anyone else, Tebbetts became the leader on the Boston team. He was thirty-seven in 1949, feisty and combative by nature. His nickname came from his constant needling and chirping at other ballplayers. Young pitchers learned to let him call his game, and they shook him off at their risk. In the early part of the 1949 season, Tebbetts did not think that the Yankees were a better team than the Red Sox. Their only real advantage, he thought, was Joe Page. He gave them the best bullpen in the league. But for much of the summer, the Red Sox were getting by with only two pitchers—Parnell and Kinder. Dobson and Kramer were struggling. Stobbs was young. McDermott’s control was a problem. Could a team make it on two pitchers? That was the question at first. But Parnell and Kinder began to pitch even better, and some of the other pitchers began to help. On August 20, with Boston only three and a half games out, Tebbetts told reporters that in the last 47 games, the starters had finished 32 times. Since McDermott had beaten the Yankees on July 5, the Red Sox had gone 36-10. Tebbetts was sure there was going to be a real pennant race. He was right: In August, Parnell was 6-0, Stobbs was 3-0, and Kramer was 3-0. Suddenly Boston’s pitching seemed to be more solid than the Yankees’.

Tebbetts himself was having a very good year. He was hitting well, and he was, to everyone’s astonishment, leading the team in stolen bases—not bad for one of the slowest
men on the team. Pesky and Dom DiMaggio were, of course, faster, but their job, with Williams hitting third, was to get on base and not take any risks. Once, when Pesky was a rookie, he had gone to Joe Cronin and asked for permission to run. “I can steal twenty-five bases a season,” he said. “Jesus Christ, Pesky, they told me you were raised in a ball park and now I find out you’ve got a hole in your head. You’ve got the best hitter in baseball coming up right behind you, and he hits the ball and you’re going to score,” Cronin said. “You damn well won’t run.”

Late in the season Dom DiMaggio went to Tebbetts and noted that the catcher was leading the team in stolen bases. “Birdie, that’s embarrassing to the rest of us, especially if you end up the season leading the team,” he said. “I wonder if you’d mind not stealing for a while. I’d hate to go through the winter being razzed about it.” Tebbetts said that was okay, and so Dom DiMaggio quite determinedly set out to correct the record. He was trailing 8-6 when he started out, but he soon had his seventh, eighth, and ninth steals. “Okay,” he said to Tebbetts, “that’s it for now.” He ended up leading Birdie Tebbetts and Johnny Pesky 9-8-8 in stolen bases that year.

Jim Turner, the Yankees’ pitching coach, faulted himself for Raschi’s August slump. Short-handed on starting pitchers, he had pitched Raschi on three days of rest in the first half of the season. It had worked initially, but then Turner realized he had asked too much of his pitcher.

The Yankees’ problem was that they were still short a fifth starting pitcher. In the spring they had seemed blessed: They had Frank Shea, who had pitched brilliantly in 1947; Bob Porterfield, seemingly the most talented young pitcher in the minor-league organization in 1948, and obviously destined for stardom; and Fred Sanford, whom the Yankees had gotten in December 1948 in a major trade with St. Louis, giving up three players and $100,000.

But Shea had been bothered by a sore arm, and Porterfield, a star performer in the minor leagues, had not blossomed as a Yankee—in three years he won only eight games for them and was traded to Washington. But the biggest disappointment turned out to be Sanford. In 1948 he had won twelve and lost twenty-one for St. Louis. Twenty-one defeats was the high mark for the American League, but Sanford’s team had lost 94 games. That qualified him as, so to speak, the ace of the staff. He had been happy playing for a team where everyone was relaxed, where no one really expected to win. So what if it was unbearably hot and the infield was like concrete. So what if the franchise was dying right underneath them and every year they lost their best players to the Red Sox or the Yankees in an ongoing fire sale. Still, like any player, he longed to play for a contender. When Sanford heard he was going to New York a few weeks before Christmas, he said that Christmas had come early.

Sanford was a small-town boy from Garfield, Utah. He was thirty years old that year, already a veteran player. Never had George Weiss checked out a deal so carefully—he even questioned the St. Louis clubhouse boys and the St. Louis reporters about Sanford’s personal habits. An exorbitant price was paid for him—$100,000. Much was expected. There was talk in the papers that he would be a 20-game winner. The Yankees seemed to demand high performance from Sanford even in spring training. The first day, Pete Sheehy, the clubhouse attendant, handed him a uniform. “You know who wore that number?” he asked. Sanford admitted that he did not.
“Spud Chandler,”
Sheehy said in a voice that implied very clearly that Sanford better be worthy of it. Spud Chandler’s number, Sanford thought—all I wanted was a uniform. Spring-training games with the Yankees seemed to Sanford to bring more pressure than regular-season games with the Browns. Writers, quick to criticize the deal, were everywhere. They were, he soon decided, merely an extension
of the fans. But he quickly sensed management’s disappointment with him. Both Jim Turner and Frank Crosetti began to tinker with Sanford’s delivery, trying to make him change it, “You’re throwing against the weight of your body,” Crosetti told him. “But that’s the way I’ve always pitched,” he said. “It feels right to me.” They wanted him to have a smooth motion and objected to what they thought was a herky-jerky motion. He tried to change, and ended up satisfying neither them nor himself.

Sanford started the season poorly, and the pressure grew worse. The writers were very hard on him. Joe Trimble wrote in the
Daily News
that he was “the one-hundred-thousand-dollar lemon.” He was stunned by that. The
Daily News
was a newspaper with more than 2 million readers. Two million people think I’m an expensive lemon, he thought. Soon he heard fans yelling angrily at him, always the same chant: Sanford, you hundred-thousand-dollar bum; Sanford, you hundred-thousand-dollar lemon. He knew that Turner and Stengel were unhappy with him. New York was unlike anything he had ever seen before—it was dog-eat-dog here. It was, he told his wife after it was all over, the worst two years of his life—he had been near a nervous breakdown. The final ignominy came when George Weiss told people that trading for Fred Sanford was the worst deal he had ever made.

With Sanford a disappointment, the Yankees got help from an unexpected source on their team—Tommy Byrne. Byrne was a power pitcher with an exploding fastball, which Eddie Lopat thought must have been around ninety miles an hour; a curve almost as good as Reynolds’s or Feller’s; and such exceptional all-around athletic ability that he was frequently used as a pinch hitter. He had only one weakness—an almost complete lack of control. His games were masterpieces of a sort, a lot of two-hitters and three-hitters, but usually with about eight or nine walks as well. “And the hit batsmen,” Byrne reminisced years later, “don’t forget
the hit batsmen. I always hit two or three men as well. I
was
wild, wasn’t I? I’d have walked my own mother if she had come up to the plate and looked half sorry.”

During the war, he played on a pickup team on an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. He sent a postcard to Joe McCarthy noting that he had pitched a shutout, struck out ten, and walked no one. McCarthy held the postcard up in the dugout when it arrived and showed it to reporters. “Wouldn’t you know,” he said, “Mr. Tommy Byrne has finally found the plate and he’s only five thousand miles from Yankee Stadium.” “My Wild Irish Tommy,” McCarthy called him.

In 1947 in the minor leagues, Byrne’s wildness had exhausted both teammates and manager. Once in Minneapolis he had pitched a typical Byrne game, walking two and three men an inning and then managing to strike out three men in an inning. The bases always seemed to be loaded, but no one could hit him. In the seventh inning Kansas City had an 11-0 lead. At that point Billy Meyer, the manager, sent in a relief pitcher to take over for him. Byrne was enraged. “Jesus, Skip, how can you do that to me—with an eleven-nothing lead?” he complained. “Tom, it wasn’t personal,” Meyer answered. “We have a train to catch in two hours and if I keep you in there we miss it and we spend the night here.”

For three consecutive years, 1949-1951, Byrne had the dubious distinction of leading the league in walks. Batters, unable to touch his best stuff, learned that the way to beat him was to wait him out. Games with him went on and on. Infielders and outfielders alike complained about playing behind him. Of his catcher, Yogi Berra, Byrne said later, “I did more to keep Yogi’s weight down than anyone around—when he caught me, he caught a game and a half.” Finally, because Dan Topping, the owner, could no longer bear watching him pitch, he was abruptly and unceremoniously traded to St. Louis.

Everyone had tried to help him with his control problem. Bill Dickey and Johnny Schulte, the bullpen catcher, put in extra hours in the bullpen, and Charlie Silvera, the backup catcher, worked with him. Even Charlie Keller would put on a catcher’s mitt hoping to help him develop a better sense of the target. They tried to get him to pitch with no wind-up, in the belief that he didn’t need the extra power. They told him he was overthrowing and overgripping, and there was even talk of sending him to a psychiatrist. Nothing helped.

The problem was that he truly believed in his natural ability to overpower hitters. Power pitchers did not need lessons on how to pitch, he thought. They just went out and did it. “I hated for the hitters even to foul the ball off me,” he reminisced years later. “I wanted to get all twenty-seven men on strikes.” In his heart he did not believe he was wild. Once he came into the dugout in the fifth inning of a game in which he was having his usual control problems. “How do you think I’m doing?” he asked Eddie Lopat. “You’re doing fine, Tommy,” Lopat answered. “Pretty good control too, right?” Byrne said. “Absolutely, Tommy, don’t pay any attention to the five guys you’ve walked.” Somehow in those years he was sure it was not his fault. He would be enraged when Stengel pulled him for a pinch hitter. He was sure it cost him $1,500 each time it happened. A twenty-game winner, he figured, made $30,000. A twelve-game winner made $18,000. That made it $1,500 a game. So he hated to be lifted.

Much of the problem, Byrne was convinced, was the umpires, who simply, because of his somewhat unjustified reputation for a little wildness, never gave him a break. He dated part of the problem to his rookie year, when he was on the bench needling some players on the Athletics. Bill McGowan, who was calling balls and strikes, finally turned to him. “Shut up and get back in the dugout, Bush.” That did not deter Byrne, who kept up his jockeying. Finally
McCarthy went over to him and said, “Tommy, that’s Bill McGowan, and he’s the best ball-and-strike man in this league, and he can make your life absolutely miserable if he wants. If I were you I’d go over to the far end of the bench and I’d shut my mouth.” He had gone to the end of the bench, but after that McGowan seemed to want to bait him, even when he was at bat. A ball would come in far wide of the plate and McGowan would look at it and call it strike three. “How do you like that, you left-handed son of a bitch?” he would say.

Byrne’s starts were memorable: long drawn-out games when no one hit the ball. Forty years later, he could remember a game in which he walked 16 and lost 3-2 in thirteen innings; he threw 248 pitches, which he thought might be a record of some sort. He believes he never started a major-league game in which he did not walk someone. In 1948, his career was on the line. The Yankees brought him up with the major-league club but did not know what to do with him. He was too wild to use and too talented to let go of. Finally Bucky Harris, in desperation, decided to give him a shot. He beat Detroit 7-0. With that he had finally made the majors.