Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (18 page)

“Someone should have stopped them,” my father said when he read about the unpleasant incident in the papers.
“Where in the world was Dressen?” He shook his head in disgust. “You can’t go on like that—gloating and taunting. Steal a team’s dignity and they’ll fight like the devil to get it back.”

Excessive pride, I thought, one of the deadliest of the seven deadly sins … Perhaps if they all went to confession, things would be all right. But they weren’t all Catholics. “I could pray for them myself,” I suggested, but my father only smiled affectionately.

The following week, after the Dodgers’ lead reached a season high of thirteen and a half games, the Giants began to play their best ball of the season. They played like a team reborn: hitters who were striking out with men on base began to come through in the clutch; pitchers who had lost their control with the game on the line began to throw strikes. It was at last, Giant fans exulted, the team whose prowess in spring training had so excited New Yorkers and stirred sportswriters to prophecies of glory. They quickly reeled off eleven consecutive victories, their longest winning streak since 1938, five years before I was born. They narrowed the Dodger lead from a comfortable two-digit margin to an alarming six games. Delirious Giant fans remained in their seats long after each win, savoring the community which victory had forged.

Invoking the power of ancient baseball superstition, Leo Durocher wore the same socks, shirt, and tie every day the streak lasted. Bobby Thomson refused to change his undershorts with their distinctive pattern of black ants. “He’s got ants in the pants and games in the bag,” wrote a poetic scribe. Closer to home, Max Kropf roamed the butcher shop wearing the same faded Giant cap from the time he arrived in the morning until closing time. “I even wear it to bed,” he told me. And that gave me an idea.

I became convinced that the streak might end if I could
somehow get Max to take off his hat. With accumulated allowances, I went to Wolf’s Sport Shop and bought a new Giant hat, black with the orange logo. “Your team is doing so well I wanted to give you a present,” I explained to Max. With a twinkle in his eye, Max thanked me but explained that he didn’t want it ruined by the blood and grease of the butcher shop. Instead, he reassured me, as my heart began to fall, he would keep it in an honored place on his bedside table so he would constantly be reminded of my generosity. I nodded with pretended pleasure. Thus Max continued to wear his battered old cap, and the Giants kept winning until their streak had reached an astonishing sixteen games.

While the Giants played with abandon, the Dodgers were tight and jittery, swinging at bad balls and stranding too many men on base. Both Snider and Reese fell into a slump, Campanella was injured and Newcombe exhausted. By the third week of September, the Dodgers’ once-formidable lead had shrunk to a thin margin of three games. There was, however, one bright ray of new hope—the pitching of my friend from Rockville Centre Night, Clem Labine.

At the end of August, Labine made his first majorleague start, pitching a seven-hit, 3-1 victory over Cincinnati. He followed this performance with three straight victories in September. Everyone was talking about Clem Labine, who had emerged from obscurity to become the hope of the Dodgers. I pulled my two Labine autographs from my shoe box of baseball memorabilia. Never would I find a better opportunity for trading a Labine for a Robinson. Eddie Rust accepted my deal on the condition I throw in a Billy Cox and an Andy Pafko. I hesitated, not because it wasn’t a good deal, but because I remembered how I had told Labine that I could trade him for a Robinson
on even terms. But Eddie wouldn’t reconsider. It was three for one, or nothing. Reluctantly, I agreed. We came to terms, but later that night, as I placed my signed Robinson card on my bedside table so I could look at it before going to sleep, I felt a twinge of guilt. I worried that my bad faith might bring bad luck to the young rookie.

And sure enough, the very next day, Clem Labine’s star began to wane. In the first inning of his fifth major league start, he lost control of his curveball and loaded the bases. Dressen saw that he was pitching from the stretch and directed him to take a full windup. Labine, feeling he had better control from the stretch, disobeyed Dressen’s order. The next batter hit a grand slam. Furious at the insubordination of his young pitcher, Dressen not only pulled Labine from the game but withdrew him from the rotation. Though Labine later admitted that he had made a mistake in ignoring the manager, Dressen made an even larger error when he sat down his hottest pitcher in order to teach him what would prove one of the most ill-timed lessons in the history of the Dodger franchise. The decision probably cost the Dodgers at least one or two games, games which turned out to be decisive.

The Giants’ incredible surge, twelve wins in their last thirteen games, thirty-seven of the last forty-four, reached a dramatic climax when they tied the Dodgers for first place with only one game left in the regular season. Once again, the entire season would come down to the final day. On the last Sunday in September, the Giants beat the Braves in Boston 3-2, and moved into sole possession of first place for the first time all season. Everything now depended on the outcome of the Dodgers’ contest against the Philadelphia Phillies.

That afternoon the neighborhood was silent. The customary shouts of playing children, the friendly gossip of
grown-ups gathered on front lawns, had all been stilled. As we gathered in my house to watch the game, my parents greeted the Greenes and their three children, my father laughing when he saw the entire family wearing caps of Dodger blue. Mr. Rust and Eddie entered, along with Elaine Friedle, whose Yankees had already clinched the American League pennant.

The game started disastrously. The Phillies took a 6-1 lead in the third, due in part to an error by Robinson, who had struck out and hit into a double play in his first two trips at bat. In the fifth inning, it was Robinson again, this time as hero. He sent a triple to the wall which drove in one run, and then he scored a second run himself a few minutes later. In the eighth, the Dodgers scored three more runs, and the ninth inning ended with the game tied.

In the bottom of the twelfth inning, with two outs, the Phillies loaded the bases. Devastation was only ninety feet away. Then Eddie Waitkus hit a screaming line drive over second base. Robinson raced to his right, dove, and lay sprawled on the ground. As the baserunner on third raced toward the plate, the umpire ran toward the prostrate Robinson, saw the ball in his glove, and jerked his thumb skyward, signaling that the inning was over. The crowd in Philadelphia, which had been on its feet, fell silent, but my house exploded in celebration.

The cameras followed Robinson as he was helped back to the dugout, where he sat slumped on the bench. The Dodger trainer held a piece of cotton soaked in ammonia under his nose. The announcers told us that he probably wouldn’t be able to stay in the game. “Push him out there, Doc,” Reese yelled. “He’ll be all right once he gets on the field.” And after the Dodgers failed to score in the top of the thirteenth, there he was, standing right beside second.

I sat tense and silent as the Phillies came to bat. I
always hated it when the other team was up at bat, but this was far worse than usual. Seeing my anxiety, my father tried to comfort me. “I know,” he said, “nothing’s worse than extra innings played on the other team’s field. One swing can end it all.” I wasn’t comforted. That was the whole point.

In the top of the fourteenth inning, the game still tied, with two outs, the mighty Robinson came to bat. “C’mon, Robby,” I urged, “you can do it. I know you can”—and then, flatteringly, “you always do.” I tried to summon all my strength and send it through the television set. Robinson wheeled on the pitch and drove an immense home run into the bleachers that would win the game and send the Dodgers into a three-game playoff for the championship of the National League. We had done it. We all raced out into the street. Grown men were slapping neighbors on the back, pumping each other’s hands, as if they had just received an award.

That night, cheering crowds greeted both the Giants and the Dodgers as their respective trains converged on New York. “I’ve seen a lot of ball games in my time,” Dodger pitching coach Clyde Sukeforth said as he stood on the platform, “but I’ve never seen a greater one.”

It was the second-most-dramatic moment of the 1951 season. The most memorable was yet to come.

T
HE COMPLETION
of a continental cable a few months earlier had made possible the first national audience for any sporting event. Thus baseball enthusiasts from all over America were watching as more than thirty thousand fans crowded Ebbets Field for the opening game of the playoffs, to see home runs by Bobby Thomson and Monte Irvin give the Giants a 3-1 victory. The next day, at the Polo Grounds, his pitching staff exhausted by the ordeal of the closing weeks, Dressen called on Clem Labine, who pitched a brilliant six-hit, 10-0 shutout in the biggest game of his career. In the
Daily News
the next morning, I saw a picture of a smiling Dressen, his arm draped around the young rookie hurler. I couldn’t help imagining how things might have turned out if Dressen hadn’t put Labine into the doghouse two weeks earlier.

Giant Bobby Thomson swings for a home run against Dodger Ralph Branca to make the “shot heard round the world” and win the 1951 National League pennant. The Giants mob Thomson as he crosses home plate. It was the worst day of my life as a fan.

October 3, 1951, was unseasonably warm, more like summer than early fall. When I returned home for lunch, both my sisters had already arrived, having left the city so they might watch the big game with my mother. Jeanne had graduated from high school with high honors the previous June and had followed Charlotte into the nursing program at Lenox Hill. Despite Charlotte’s claim that she had been drawn to nursing for its starched white uniforms, she had already become an exceptional nurse. At the age of twenty-four, she was the head nurse on the evening shift of the male surgical ward. Her tough, no-nonsense supervision of the nursing staff had earned her the nickname “Stonewall Jackson.”

When I implored my mother to let me remain at home after lunch, she agreed without hesitation. “Of course,” she said. What other decision was possible? Our teachers had let us listen to the first two games on the radio. But I badly wanted to watch this culminating game. And I wanted to be in the sanctity of my home, sitting on the couch, my scorebook across my lap. Later, I discovered that more than half my classmates had failed to return to school that afternoon.

Each team had saved its best for last—Sal Maglie against Don Newcombe, both twenty-game winners. For seven innings, they battled to a 1-1 tie. It was the worst kind of stressful game. Then, in the top of the eighth, after
a Duke Snider single sent Pee Wee Reese to third, the fearsome Maglie threw a sharp breaking curve which soared past both Robinson and his own catcher. Reese scored and the Dodgers were ahead. “It serves the old bean-bailer right!” I said. Now, with a man on second, hoping to set up a double play, Durocher ordered Maglie to walk Robinson. But the next batter, Billy Cox singled, both runners scored, and the Dodgers were ahead 4-1. Quickly, I turned to my scorebook and meticulously drew the lines which told the story, anxious to inscribe the glorious moment for enduring history.

In the eighth inning, a visibly tiring Newcombe pitched himself out of a jam, and the score was still 4-1 as the game entered the bottom of the ninth. “Three more outs,” I prayed silently, “just give us three more outs.” And even though I always feared the worst in the most gloomy depths of my imagination, I could never have conceived what was to come.

After Alvin Dark led off with a single, Don Mueller hit a ground ball up the middle, sending Dark to third. With one out, Whitey Lockman hit a solid double, scoring Dark and sending Mueller to third, where he collapsed on the base path, having caught his spike on the base. All eyes were focused on the stricken Mueller, who, grimacing in pain, was lifted onto a stretcher. Almost unnoticed, Chuck Dressen left the dugout and strode purposefully to the mound. “Oh, no,” I exclaimed involuntarily. “Newk will come through. Leave him in.”