Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (37 page)

Tommy Byrne started the third game. When he showed signs of wildness, consistently falling behind the hitters, Stengel did not hesitate to pull him. With one out and the bases loaded in the fourth, he brought in Joe Page, who pitched the remaining five and two thirds innings, striking out 4 and giving up only 2 hits until the ninth. The Yankees won 4-3. That made it 2-1 in games.

In the fourth game Eddie Lopat took a 6-0 lead into the bottom of the sixth. Then the Dodgers scored 4 runs on 7 hits. This time Stengel went to Reynolds, who pitched the final three and a third innings, striking out 5 men. The Dodgers did not get a single hit off him. That made it 3-1 in games. In the fifth game the Yankees gave Raschi a 10-1 lead and, though he needed help from Page, he won 10-6.

The Yankees had won the Series decisively.

The next year they were joined by a young pitcher named Whitey Ford, who was to complete the starting rotation and make it one of the best in baseball history. Ford was nothing if not brash. In the spring Jim Turner asked Reynolds to room with him and “give him some class.” On the first night they were to go out to dinner, Reynolds noted that Ford was putting his shirt collar over his jacket. “Hey, Whitey, we don’t do that here,” Reynolds said. “We wear jackets
and
ties.” “I don’t have any ties,” Ford replied. “No problem. Wear one of mine,” Reynolds answered. Ford looked at Reynolds’s ties. “I can’t wear any of these,” said Ford. “Why not?” asked Reynolds. “They’re all middle-aged ties,” Ford said.

Led by Raschi, Reynolds, Lopat, and Whitey Ford, and with Mantle replacing DiMaggio, they went on to win four
more pennants and four more World Series in a row. No one else had ever done it. In 1952, Gene Woodling, sitting in front of his locker during spring training, turned to friends and asked them what they planned to do with their World Series check that year. Winning had become a natural assumption for him. At the start of the previous season, Charlie Silvera’s wife had asked him for a fur coat if the Yankees won again. He said yes, thinking that no one wins three times in a row. But they won, and at the end of the season he proudly peeled off eleven hundred-dollar bills for her coat.

Those five championships marked both the dawn of an era and, without anyone knowing it at the time, the end of an era as well. Because the Yankees were so powerful and deep, they believed they could, in a moment of crisis, always bring up a talented kid from the farm system. But the arrogance of power would finally come to afflict them, as surely as it does in business or politics. In 1950 they signed several blacks, including Elston Howard, who eventually became their first black player. But that very season they were also scouting a young black shortstop who played for the black Kansas City Monarchs in a ball park the Yankees owned. His name was Ernie Banks, and the reports on him were spectacular. Banks, who was hitting around .350 that year, had heard that the Yankees were interested in him and that on several occasions a scout was in the stands. That excited him because the Yankees were the team for which he wanted to play. In addition, he knew that Rizzuto was aging and that he would arrive in the majors just as Rizzuto was finishing his career. But Tom Greenwade, the Yankee scout, never bothered to meet the ebullient Banks and failed to move quickly on so exceptional a talent. The Chicago Cubs signed him first.

It is doubtful that the Yankees would have moved so slowly on a white player of comparable ability. Their failure to sign blacks brought with it a penalty so severe that not
only would the Yankees’ dominance end but the American League by the late fifties and early sixties would become a lesser league. The National League teams, needing to compete with the Dodgers, worked much harder at signing black talent; it became stocked with the first generation of black superstars—“the black Babe Ruths,” to use Johnny Bench’s description: Mays, Aaron, Banks, Williams, McCovey, Gibson, and Robinson.

Joe DiMaggio, with his remarkable ability, his strength, his speed, and his grace had stood as the preeminent
athlete
of his era. But now a new generation was arriving, bringing with it new definitions of speed and power.

EPILOGUE

T
HE 1949 BASEBALL SEASON
did not end for Ellis Kinder the day the Red Sox lost the pennant. A few days later he was back in Jackson, Tennessee, where his buddies still played semipro ball, usually on Sundays, against teams from other little towns in West Tennessee. There would be a small country store and across from it a ball park with three rows of stands; late in the week word would go out that there was to be a ball game. Hundreds of people would show up to see it, and to bet. The betting was important. The players got only twenty-five or fifty dollars for their efforts, but they could also bet a little on the side.

Kinder’s old buddies had followed the pennant race and taken great pride in his exploits. In the past when he came back from St. Louis or Boston, he had always been willing to play with them. But now he was a big-time star, so who knew?

A few days after Kinder returned to Jackson, Fred Baker, a close friend, called him up. Fred had once been a bat boy with the old Jackson Generals, and no one had been nicer to him in those days than Ellis Kinder, then a star pitcher for the Generals. He had seen talent in the young man and had hit fly balls to him by the hour. Baker had become a good all-around athlete and had gone on to Union College, where he played several sports. He was now the catcher for
the Jackson semi-pro team. Baker explained to Kinder that they had a tough game coming up on Sunday at Alamo, against Dyersburg. Ed Wright, who had pitched for the Phillies, was a Dyersburg boy, and he was going to pitch. The Dyersburg boys were doing a lot of bragging, he said, because they had Ed Wright.

“Can you pitch for us on Sunday, Ellis?” Baker asked.

Kinder paused. “Can you get me anything?” he asked.

“How about a hundred dollars?” Baker answered.

“Let’s go,” Ellis Kinder said.

So off the team went to Alamo, rather cocky now because Ellis Kinder of the Boston Red Sox was pitching for them. That cut down on the betting a little, though. What struck his old friends about Ellis that day was how easy it seemed for him. He barely warmed up. “Just three or four pitches,” he said, “that’s all I need.” Then he was out on the mound, and the motion seemed so fluid and easy, as if he were not really throwing hard. But the ball would zoom into the plate.

Kinder seemed just as serious as if he were in a big-league game. Dyersburg could not do much with him that day, and late in the game Kinder hit a grand-slam home run to win it. He could not have been more pleased had he done it at Yankee Stadium. “Country boy,” his friend Billy Schrivner thought as he watched him cross the plate and grin, “You’ve never really been away—have you?”

Ellis Kinder became a genuine star with the Red Sox, and soon became the best relief pitcher in the American League. The next year at spring training, when Johnny Pesky batted against him for the first time, Kinder deliberately plunked him on the butt. The pitch was hard enough just to sting a little. His control was pinpoint perfect, and every spring from then on Kinder would hit Pesky in the exact spot. It was all good fun, but there was a small reminder here that hitters were the enemy.

Kinder also became something of a sage among the Boston
pitchers. In 1951 the Yankees sold a young bonus pitcher named Paul Hinrichs to the Red Sox, and Chuck Stobbs took him over to meet Kinder. Hinrichs, bright and eager, told Kinder that he was anxious to learn how to become a major-league pitcher and wondered if Kinder had any tips for him

“Do you smoke?” Kinder asked Hinrichs.

“No,” said Hinrichs.

“Do you chase women?” asked Kinder.

Again, Hinrichs answered that he did not.

“Well, son, do you drink?” asked Kinder.

Again, Hinrichs answered that he did not.

“I’m afraid you’ll never make it,” said Kinder and walked away. Paul Hinrichs pitched a total of three innings in the major leagues.

Kinder’s last years were not easy ones. He continued to drink hard. He was not successful in work and there was a succession of jobs—as a house painter, a taxi-cab driver, a repairman. His health steadily declined. In 1967 he underwent open-heart surgery. After the operation he sat in his hospital room talking with Hazel. The World Series was on television, St. Louis versus Boston. “You know what, Mama,” he said to her. “They’re playing for real money now. Some of those old boys”—he motioned toward the television set—“are making one hundred thousand dollars a year.” “Ellis!” she said, as if catching him once again in some terrible exaggeration. “No, it’s true, Mama,” he said. “And what’s more, in just a few years they’ll all be making a million dollars.”
“Ellis!”
she said, as if afraid some higher authority would strike him down for such a blasphemous idea. “A million dollars,” he said. “All we played for, Mama, was love.” Two days later he was dead at age fifty-four.

Piper Davis, the player-manager of the Birmingham Black Barons, whom the Red Sox had signed instead of Willie
Mays, was a skilled athlete, over six feet three, who had once played with the Harlem Globetrotters. The price of signing him was $7,500, paid to Tom Hayes, the Memphis undertaker who owned the Black Barons. The agreement was that if Davis was with a Boston club of any sort, major or minor, on May 15, Boston would pay Hayes an additional $7,500, half of which he would split with Davis. Davis went off to spring training in the spring of 1950, but it was not an easy time. He was very much alone. He ate with the black waiters in the service section of the hotel, and he roomed with one of the waiters from the hotel. Davis realized from the start that he was not going to make the big team, but he hoped to play at Louisville. Instead, he was sent down to Scranton, where he played well for the first month, hitting around .330 and leading the team in home runs and runs batted in. Soon there was talk that he might be promoted to Louisville. Just before the May 15 deadline he was called in by manager Jack Burns. “I’m sorry, I’m going to have to let you go,” Burns said. “Why, man?” Davis answered. “I’m leading the team in hitting.” “For economic reasons,” Burns said. Then he shook his head. “It isn’t my doing,” he said. “It’s orders.” He pulled out the lineup card for that night’s game. “Here, take a look,” he said. “I already had you penciled in.” Economic reasons, Davis thought, that can’t be true—everyone knows how rich Mr. Yawkey is. But his career in the Boston organization was over, though he went on to play one year in the Mexican League and five with Oakland in the Pacific Coast League.

Mickey McDermott’s career was a disappointment. In 1953, his best season, he won eighteen games. His arm was a great God-given gift, but his talent, he said later, had come to him so easily that he had never learned how to master and exploit it. Besides, there was always fun to be had—an evening with friends, songs to be sung in nightclubs.
“Nightclub pallor,” Dave Egan wrote of his coloring. Though he resented Egan’s attack (it had come after he had done a charity benefit for Egan, who paid McDermott back by saying that he couldn’t pitch, couldn’t hit, couldn’t sing, and had nightclub pallor), there was some truth in it. Soon he was traded. He went first to Washington and then to the Yankees. When he was assigned to Hank Bauer as a roommate, Bauer, who had always hit him well, screamed at him and slammed the door. “What’s the matter, Henry?” McDermott asked. “That means I don’t get to hit against you anymore—I just lost sixty points on my batting average,” Bauer said.

On the Yankees McDermott continued his undisciplined ways. He never let his work interfere with his pleasure, which was something Casey Stengel understood. One night McDermott came back to the hotel about four
A.M.
and, to his consternation, ran into the manager. “Are you drunk again, McDermott?” Stengel asked. McDermott, fearing that this was the end, nodded that indeed he was. “Me too,” said Stengel. “Good-night, Maurice.”

From the Yankees, his third team, McDermott went to Kansas City and then Detroit. There, Freddie Hutchinson, his manager, did not appreciate his work habits. In one game McDermott loaded up the bases, and from the bench heard Hutchinson’s voice: “Okay, McDermott, let’s see you sing your way out of this one.” He soon slipped into the minor leagues.

In 1961, after a good season in the Southern Association, McDermott was given a tryout with the St. Louis Cardinals. Johnny Keane, the manager, was determined to set a high moral tone on his team, and hated the idea of having a carouser like McDermott. That season Tim McCarver was a nineteen-year-old rookie catcher, just brought up from the minor leagues. Virtually his first memory was of Keane assembling the team before a game and ripping McDermott in front of his teammates. It was a brutal, scathing rebuke
about how the Cardinals had been generous enough to give McDermott a tryout when no one else wanted him and how he had reciprocated with this appalling behavior. McCarver found it an unbearably cruel scene. But McDermott had been oddly graceful. “Well, John, if you feel that way I’ll take my uniform off and leave the team,” he said. “That’s exactly what you’ll do,” Keane said, then reached in his pocket and pulled out a pink slip.

McDermott continued through life, managing to survive by charm. Jobs came and went. It was impossible not to like him. Even in hard times he could always laugh, and so there was always another job.

In 1978 he ran into his old teammate Ted Williams. “Bush, how old are you now?” asked Williams. “Fifty,” McDermott said. “Fifty,” Williams said. “That’s terrific. I never thought you’d make it.”

In the madness of the Yankee locker room after the victory over the Dodgers, Allie Reynolds had noticed that Casey Stengel, while celebrating, was also staring at him with a very cool eye. Reynolds wondered what Stengel was thinking, and why he was giving him so cool a look. He soon found out. Stengel walked over to him. “Congratulations, Allie,” he said, “that was a great year. Now I want to make a relief pitcher out of you for next season.” That struck a bell with Reynolds, for Stengel had always praised him as a relief pitcher. “Why, Allie,” he would say, “they see you walk in from the bullpen and half of them faint right then and there.”