Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (31 page)

Stengel liked him and understood his talent. He soon decided that there was only one way for the manager to deal with Byrne. “Look,” he once counseled Ralph Houk, who would eventually be his successor, “don’t watch him pitch. You’ll die too young. Just turn away, and listen to the crowd. You know he’ll walk in a run or two in some situations, but then you’ll hear the cheer when he strikes someone out. Listen to the noise. It’s easier on your stomach. If you watch him you won’t last long.” Stengel knew that Byrne was eccentric. (The first time he returned to pitch against his old teammates after he was traded to St. Louis in 1951, his catcher, Matt Batts, himself traded to the Browns from Boston, was stunned to find that before every pitch Byrne would shout out what was coming to the
Yankee batters. Curveball, Batts would signal. “Curveball!” Byrne would shout out to the Yankee batter. Fastball, Batts signaled. “Fastball!” Byrne shouted. Batts called time. “Tommy, what in hell are you doing?” he asked. “Well, hell, Matt, they couldn’t hit me in batting practice when they called put the pitch when I was with them, so there’s no reason to think they can hit me now when they know what’s coming,” Byrne answered.) Stengel saw that Byrne was an asset, particularly as a number-four pitcher; he might not be the pitcher you wanted in a winner-take-all playoff, but he was perfect to pitch the second game of a Sunday doubleheader in the Stadium—Lopat pitching the first game, keeping the hitters off-balance with his shrewdness, and then Byrne coming in and using his power as the shadows lengthened in the Stadium.

In the beginning of the season, Byrne had struggled. In the middle of July, when Raschi was 15-3, his record was 6-6. Then on July 22, Byrne beat Detroit 8-2 on a 5-hitter, although he walked 7. Starting with that game, he was 9-1 for the rest of the season. His next game was a 6-hit victory over Chicago, in a game in which he walked 6. Then he beat the Browns on a 6-hitter. Then Philly with 6 hits and 8 walks. For the Yankees he was a desperately needed booster shot: He plugged the gap created when Raschi and Reynolds both faltered. He led the league in walks, but it didn’t seem to matter. No one could hit him. His teammates were pleased; they thought he was concentrating better than ever. Byrne thought nothing had changed, that he had always concentrated this well.

The Yankees seemed to be wearing down by a combination of the heat, their age, and injuries. In mid-August the Athletics had gone into Boston, and two of the Philadelphia players, Wally Moses and Sam Chapman, talked to the Boston players and writers before the game. The Yankees, they said, were not as powerful as they might seem on paper.
One reason, they said, was DiMaggio. He was no longer the player they remembered. You had to see it over a period of a couple of days, but he had definitely slowed down. “He’s lost something on that swing of his,” Chapman told one Boston writer. “He isn’t getting around on the fastball the way he used to. He was cutting late on balls he used to send out of the park.” Moses agreed: “I could see it from the bench. When he was hitting, he was hitting curves, not fastballs.” Almost every player in the Yankee lineup had been injured in some way or another. They had started the season with the injury to DiMaggio’s foot, and that had cost them the services of their greatest star for two months. Henrich had been hurt several times and by mid-season was playing in constant pain. Keller’s back problems continued to bother him. Soon the Yankee management was keeping an official record of how many players were injured. It got so bad that when Bobby Doerr of the Red Sox was knocked down in a play at second and was slow to get up, Joe McCarthy rushed out on the field. “Come on, Bobby, get up,” he said. “People will think you’re a Yankee.”

One of the most serious injuries occurred on August 7 when Yogi Berra was hit on the left thumb during a game against St. Louis, and the thumb was fractured. With the Red Sox coming on, the most important of their young power hitters was sidelined—a real blow. Nor was Berra a quick healer. Finally, on August 25, Dr. Sydney Gaynor, the team doctor, visited him and said that the cast was ready to come off and he could play. But just when Stengel was ready to play him, the Yankees went to St. Louis, and Yogi visited with his family. His mother took one look at the thumb, cut open a lemon and placed it on the thumb, and told him not to take it off for a certain number of days. This was the way injuries had been healed in her family in the past, and this was the way they would be healed now. When Berra joined the team later in the day, the lemon was still there. Stengel wanted to put him back in the lineup immediately.
Berra refused. He was not playing until the allotted number of days had passed and it was time to take off the lemon. Folk medicine triumphed over modern medicine. He followed his mother’s instructions, not those of Sydney Gaynor. “My catcher, Mr. Berra,” Stengel told the writers, “is wearing a lemon instead of a mitt.”

By the time Berra came back in September, the Yankees badly needed him. For by then the Yankees had lost another player they could not afford: Tommy Henrich. On August 28, in Chicago, in the first inning, with Fred Sanford pitching, a batter named Charlie Kress had been up, a left-handed hitter. Kress was not a power hitter, and Henrich was not playing him deep. But Kress hit the ball over Henrich’s head, which annoyed him at first. Henrich had a sense as he went back that he had room, but that he wasn’t going to get back in time. He put on all his speed, and just as he reached for the ball, he crashed into the wall. The pain was crushing. He lay in the outfield knowing that it was a serious injury. Casey Stengel rushed out to right field and hovered over him like a mother hen. “Lie down,” he commanded. “Don’t get up. Take it very easy.” He really cares about me, Henrich thought through the gasps of pain, that coldness I felt in the past wasn’t real. This man cares. I was wrong. “Lie down and give me a little more time to get someone warmed up and get this clown out of here,” Stengel added.

Henrich had fractured the second and third lumbar vertebrae processes. The injury seemed a final cruel blow from the gods. Along with DiMaggio, Henrich was considered to have the highest threshold of pain on the team. Earlier in the season he had broken a toe and the team doctor said he would be out for at least a week. He played the next day. But this pain was different. The doctors put him in a cast at Lenox Hill. Henrich prided himself on never taking pain killers, but this time he relented. Then he begged for an additional pill. Henrich was sure that they had put the cast
on wrong, trapping his body at the wrong angle. The next morning the doctors, without ever admitting a mistake, redid the cast. The pain decreased significantly. The immediate prognosis, they told him, was that he was out for the season. “Can’t be,” he said, “there’s a pennant race on.” He decided that no matter what the doctors thought, he would return in three weeks. From then on he hoped for rainy days, especially when the Yankees played the Red Sox. Each rained out Red Sox game meant one more time he might play against them.

The Yankees returned from a long road trip to play three games against Boston in the Stadium. Their lead had dwindled to a game and a half, and for the first time in a month Berra was ready to play. Before the game the Boston writers gravitated toward Stengel. “I’ve never seen anything like this for injuries,” Stengel was telling them. “Bauer just tore a stomach muscle warming up.”

“You’ve still got more players than us,” Harold Kaese of the
Globe
said. “With the players you’ve called up from the minors, you’ve got thirty and we only have twenty-five.”

“I don’t have the one I want,” Stengel said. “Mize?” asked Kaese, referring to Johnny Mize, a veteran National League power hitter whom the Yankees had picked up in August from the obliging Giants.

“Henrich,” said Stengel.

The matchup in the first game was Reynolds against Kramer. Reynolds was wild, and eleven of his first twelve pitches were balls. He walked the first three men he faced—Dom DiMaggio, Pesky, and Williams. Then he struck out Junior Stephens with a ball that almost bounced in the dirt. Doerr hit a ground ball through the middle, and two runs scored. But Reynolds settled down and kept them from scoring any more. By the eighth the Yankees were ahead 3-2. With one out, Doerr tripled into the alley in left. Stengel immediately went to the mound. That was it for Reynolds. In came Page. He struck out four of the five men he faced.
Only Al Zarilla touched the ball, a weak pop-up to Coleman. The game was over. The Yankee lead was back to two and a half again.

Afterward, Tebbetts, one of the men Page had struck out, told reporters that the last two pitches were the fastest he had ever seen. If Zarilla hadn’t popped up, Page might have struck out all five men, he said. “Zeke didn’t get a good piece of the ball,” one of the reporters said to Tebbetts. “No, but he got a better piece than the rest of us,” Tebbetts answered.

Joe Cronin was almost ill over the failure of the Red Sox to drive Reynolds out in the first. “If we knock him out we win, because they can’t go to Page so early and they have to go to their humpty-dumpties and we would have flattened them,” he said. Joe DiMaggio, talking with reporters, agreed. “When you have a chance like Boston had in the first and don’t make the best of it, you don’t win. I think that’s one of the big differences between the Yankees and the Red Sox. We don’t flub chances like that.”

On September 9 Kinder beat the Yankees again—7-1 in the Stadium. He gave up only four hits for his nineteenth victory against only five defeats, the last of which was in early June; it was his fifteenth win in a row. The win pulled Boston to within a game and a half of the Yankees.

Kinder was pitching, the Yankees thought, like a man who had studied and mastered all of their weaknesses. His ball was always on the corners of the plate. He never seemed to give a batter a good pitch. He masked his delivery brilliantly, and his change-up was simply the best in baseball. He threw not just one change-up but several—there seemed to be no limit to the variations in speed. He had a good curve, which was really an early slider (a slurve, Birdie Tebbetts called it); what made it so dangerous and kept the hitters off-balance was that it broke at the very last instant without warning—it simply happened. Unlike many other
pitchers with great change-ups, Kinder could throw reasonably hard.

He was also exceptionally skillful at creating doubt in the hitter. If the count was 2-and-2, and the logical next pitch was a curve, Kinder would shake off Tebbetts’s sign. Birdie would signal again. Again Kinder would shake him off. By this time the batter would be wondering what exotic pitch was coming in. Birdie would signal yet again—the pitch he had called for the first time. Kinder would nod. The batter did not know what was going on. It almost always worked.

Kinder, thought Tebbetts, was one very tough man. Birdie believed that all those years in the minors had created a different kind of ballplayer than most of the other players he knew. Kinder neither wanted nor needed anything from anyone else. There was a fierce independence to him. He boasted that he still had his union card from the railroad engineers. It was his way of saying he could always walk away from baseball. No one, he seemed to be saying, told Ellis Kinder what to do.

As the pennant race wore on, it took on a relentless quality. There was no room for mistakes. “Keep your eyes off the scoreboard,” Stengel told his team. “Keep them on your own game. Pay attention to your own game.”

Though not as affected by injuries as the Yankees, the Red Sox regulars were simply exhausted, Bobby Doerr thought. McCarthy was using fewer men than Stengel. Doerr was having a very good second half of the season, but he could feel some of the other players wearing out, notably Junior Stephens. Junior was a power hitter who played the infield, and he was on base a lot. He was playing every day—against second-division teams as well as first-division teams. He also stayed out on the town at night a lot. Doerr thought Stephens needed a rest, but in those days it was a sign of weakness to take a day off. Junior would have been seen as a sissy. It was funny about the prejudices of those days,
Doerr later thought. There was an odd definition to manliness. Often Doerr himself had desperately wanted some kind of a pick-me-up during a game—a candy bar, for instance. But that too would have been seen as a sign of weakness.

As the Red Sox continued their pursuit, a mini-disaster struck them: They played a doubleheader against the Athletics and lost both games. That, the Boston writers noted, virtually ended the American League pennant race. Boston had fourteen games left, and was five games behind in the losing column. The Yankees remained a tough team, with a deeper pitching staff. Nothing less than an extraordinary winning streak would save Boston.

McCarthy told Kinder and Parnell that they would have to carry the team the rest of the way: They would start with three days’ rest and possibly less, and when they weren’t starting he wanted them both in the bullpen. They were his starters, and they were his bullpen. Of the Red Sox’s final 19 games, the two of them started 10 and relieved 7 times. Even on the rare occasions when they didn’t actually go into the game, they warmed up. Both were already tired, but the burden was harder on Parnell, who was skinnier than Kinder and whose weight was down sharply, from 185 to 160. Parnell was already, in this, his second full season, feeling constant pain or a light tenderness in his left elbow and shoulder. Nothing so sharp that he could not pitch, particularly in this pennant race, but certainly enough to make him uneasy. Early in the season he had started using different methods to protect his shoulder and lessen the tenderness. Before each game he would stick it in the whirlpool bath for ten minutes. That improved circulation and helped relieve the tenderness. Before a game in which he was going to pitch, he would rub a fierce red salve into the shoulder. It was so hot that it seemed to burn right through the skin. He recommended it to Kinder, who tried it, but then wanted no part of it. Another technique, which he heard about
later, was a specialty of the great Satchell Paige. After a game, if there was pain, he would go to the shower, turn the water on as hot as he could bear it, and then let it cascade down his arm.