Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America Read online

  All the prewar stars were returning to action—DiMaggio, Williams, Feller, and Stan Musial—and their very names seemed to indicate that America could pick up right where it had left off. They were replacing wartime players of lesser quality. Indeed, a player named George (Cat) Metkovich spoke for many of the wartime players when he told his Boston teammates at the end of the 1945 season, “Well, boys, better take a good look around you, because most of us won’t be here next year.”

  The crowds were extraordinary—large, enthusiastic, and, compared with those that were soon to follow, well behaved. In the prewar years the Yankees, whose teams had included Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio, claimed that they drew 1 million fans at home each season. In fact, they had not drawn that well. The real home attendance was more likely to have been around 800,000. After the war the crowds literally doubled. In 1941, the last year of prewar baseball, the National League drew 4.7 million fans; by 1947 the figure had grown to 10.4 million. In the postwar years the Yankees alone drew more than 2 million fans per season at home.

  Nor was it just numbers. There was a special intensity to the crowds in those days. When the Red Sox played the Yankees in the Stadium, they traveled to New York by train, passing through Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Everyone seemed to know the schedule of their train, and as it passed through endless small towns along the route, there would be large crowds gathered at the stations to cheer the players, many of the people holding up signs exhorting their heroes to destroy the hated Yankees. The conductor would deliberately slow the train down and many of the players, on their way to do battle with the sworn enemy, would come out on the observation decks to wave to the crowds.

  Near the end of the 1946 season, a young Red Sox pitcher named Dave Ferriss went into Yankee Stadium to pitch and was stunned by the size of the crowd: 63,000 people, according to the newspapers, even though at the time the Red Sox held a sizable lead over the Yankees. Ferriss had only recently left a tiny town in the Mississippi Delta. That day he was so awed by the noise and tumult that in the middle of the game he decided to commit the scene to memory and take it with him for the rest of his life. He stepped off the mound, turned slowly to the stands, and inhaled the crowd. Ferriss thought to himself: How magnificent it all is. This is the Red Sox and this is the Yankees. I am twenty-four, and I am pitching in Yankee Stadium, and every seat is taken.

  With the exception of the rare heavyweight fight or college football game that attracted national attention, baseball dominated American sports entertainment. Professional football, soon to become a major sport because its faster action so well suited the television camera, was still a minor-league ticket; golf and tennis were for the few who played those sports.

  Rich businessmen, thinking about becoming owners of sports teams, did not yet talk about the entertainment dollar, for America was a Calvinistic nation, not much given to entertaining itself. In the world of baseball, the sport itself was vastly more important than such ancillary commercial sources of revenue as broadcasting, endorsements, concessions, and parking.

  There were only sixteen teams in the big leagues, and in an America defined by the railroad instead of the airplane, St. Louis was a far-west team and Washington a Southern one. California might as well have been in another country. The pace of life in America had not yet accelerated as it was soon to do from the combination of endless technological breakthroughs and undreamed-of affluence in ordinary homes. The use of drugs seemed very distant. The prevailing addiction of more than a few players (and managers, coaches, sportswriters, and indeed owners) was alcohol, apparently a more acceptable and less jarring form of self-destruction. It was, thought Curt Gowdy, a young sportscaster who had just joined the Yankees, the last moment of innocence in American life.

  Baseball was rooted not just in the past but in the culture of the country; it was celebrated in the nation’s literature and songs. When a poor American boy dreamed of escaping his grim life, his fantasy probably involved becoming a professional baseball player. It was not so much the national sport as the binding national myth.

  It was also the embodiment of the melting-pot theory, or at least the white melting-pot theory, of America. One of its preeminent players, Joe DiMaggio, was the son of a humble immigrant fisherman, and the fact that three of the fisherman’s sons had made the major leagues proved to many the openness and fairness of American society. America cheered the DiMaggio family, and by so doing, proudly cheered itself. When DiMaggio played in his first World Series, his mother traveled by train to watch him play. She was a modest woman, but open and candid, and she became something of a celebrity herself by telling reporters (in Italian) that the trip was hard for her because there was so little to do in New York—she wished there was some cleaning, or at least some dishes to wash and dry.

  The great waves of immigration from Europe had taken place in the latter part of the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries. Few of the children of those immigrants had yet succeeded in politics, business, or academe. It was baseball that first offered them a chance for fame and glory. That this chance came in—of all places—a sport did not always thrill their parents.

  Giuseppe DiMaggio at first frowned on baseball as too frivolous. Only as Joe became a major star did his opinion change, and he came to enjoy his son’s success. Because he could not read English he would wake his youngest son, Dominic, at four o’clock in the morning when the newspaper arrived so that Dominic could read and interpret the box score for him.

  Phil Rizzuto’s parents came from Calabria. In America his father was first a laborer and then a conductor on the BMT subway. He also thought baseball was a foolish choice for a career and argued vehemently against it. Finally his wife softened his opposition—she observed that if it didn’t work out, then their son could take a real job. Still, Fiore Rizzuto was suspicious of this new world, outside New York City, that his son was entering—it might be like the old country, filled with people from the Black Hand. As Phil set off on his first train ride to a town in Virginia, his father pinned twenty dollars (Phil’s only money) into his undershirt so that robbers would not be able to find it. He warned his son not to fall asleep on the train, no matter how tired he was.

  Johnny Pesky of the Red Sox was born in Portland, Oregon, to Croatian immigrants named Paveskovich. Pesky picked up his abbreviated surname first as a schoolyard nickname, then it became a means of simplifying box scores, and finally he took it as his legal surname. That bothered his parents—did this mean their son was ashamed of his real name? They worried as well that by choosing sports as a vocation Johnny was becoming a bum.

  Tommy Henrich, grandson of German immigrants, knew how hard it was for the members of his family who had come from the old country to understand his career. On the occasion of his first contract, his father told his grandfather, “Tommy is going to play professional baseball.” “Oh, is that so,” the grandfather replied. “What is he, anyway—the striker?”

  Baseball, then, came to symbolize the idea of America as a land of opportunity and justice for all. And in 1947, finally, with the coming of Jackie Robinson, the sport was going to open up not just for the sons of recent immigrants but to native sons of color as well. The coming of Robinson did not take place without some rumbling, most notably from players who were from the South, or whose talents were so marginal that the coming of blacks represented the most basic kind of a job threat. In spring training, 1947, Leo Durocher, heading off an early protest by some of his white players, warned, “He’s just the first. Just the first. They’re all going to come, and they’re going to be hungry, damned hungry, and if you don’t put out, they’ll take your jobs.”

  He was right: That very sense of continuity, the belief that life would once again be the same, was erroneous. The country was already changing, the pace of life accelerating, due in no small part to the coming of a powerful new communications empire, of which baseball itself would be a prime beneficiary. In 1947, the World Series was telecas
t to a few Eastern cities. In 1948, there was a crude attempt to televise the Series to the East Coast from so distant a city as Cleveland by having a plane fly above the ball park in a kind of horse-and-buggy version of a satellite. That year there were so few television sets (by one count, 325,000 in all of America, half of them in the New York City area) that the Gillette Company, which was sponsoring the games, placed 100 new sets on the Boston Common so that ordinary fans might gather there and watch.

  It was immediately obvious that there was a natural affinity between sports and television, and by the spring of 1949, advertisements in The New York Times pushed baseball as the reason for buying a set: “Batter Up! Imperial offers you a Box Set. RCA Victor Television. $375. Installation and home owner policy $55. 52 square inch screen.” That was in contrast to a GE set: “So Bright! So Clear! So Easy on the Eyes! $725.”

  Television’s vast impact on sports was still to come. For the moment, though, radio had greatly increased the size of audiences and put fans in daily contact with their favorite teams. In 1946, a radio broadcaster named Mel Allen traveled with the Yankees to every game and did the first live broadcasts of away games. Previously, those games had been done by local sports announcers using the Western Union ticker and re-creating as best they could the sounds and sights of the ball park.

  Radio made the games and the players seem vastly more important, mythic even. It also pioneered in another area: the use of sports as an advertising vehicle. Until the coming of radio, commercial exploitation was limited; a local semi-pro baseball team might bear the name of a neighborhood car dealer on the back of its uniforms, and at a local ball park there might be signs lining the outfield fences to advertise various products. But when advertising executives discovered that sports and athletes could be used to sell products, a new, high-powered marriage was soon arranged. Radio formed the first national commercial network. If a rose was a rose was a rose, then an athlete was a hero was a salesman, although baseball players received, of course, a disproportionate amount of the new endorsement opportunities. In the spring of 1950, an ad for Camel cigarettes portrayed two major-league pitchers—Johnny Vander Meer, a veteran pitcher, and Gene Bearden, Rookie of the Year in the American League—exhorting ordinary Americans to share in the pleasures of Camels. Vander Meer said, “I’ve smoked Camels for ten years, Gene! They’re mild and they sure taste great.” Bearden answered, “Right, Van! It’s Camels for me too—ever since I made the thirty-day mildness test!”

  Soon the athletes would become the beneficiaries of the new commercial affluence. In 1988, the players on the starting lineup for the Yankees earned an average salary of $694,000; in 1948 that was more than the entire payroll of even the best teams, which averaged about $450,000. Even accounting for inflation, the figures reflected the coming of the entertainment society and the passing of power from owner to player.

  The rivalry of the Red Sox and the Yankees was an important part of the myth of baseball. In 1920 the Red Sox’s principal owner, a Broadway producer named Harry Frazee, was desperate for funds, so he sold a twenty-four-year-old pitcher named Babe Ruth to the Yankees for the unheard-of sum of $125,000. Boston fans never recovered. Ruth was an outstanding young pitcher, but he had won only nine games the year before. What made the sale so bitter for Boston fans was the fact that Ruth had hit 29 home runs that season, an amazing number for the time, 19 more than the runner-up.

  Five years later Frazee opened a show called No, No, Nanette which became his greatest hit. However, the show’s success, considerable though it was, brought little consolation to New England, since in the previous season Ruth, already well established as the premier power hitter in the game, batted .378, with 46 home runs (16 more than the entire Boston team) and 121 runs batted in.

  The Yankees, with Ruth, went on to dominate the American League in the twenties and thirties, although in the years just before World War II the Red Sox were an ascending team. A wealthy young man named Tom Yawkey bought them in 1933, and proved to be the most loving of owners. In fact, some thought him too loving and referred to the team as a country club. Be that as it may, he dramatically upgraded the Red Sox and improved their scouting system as well. They finished second in 1938, 1939, 1941, and 1942, always, of course, to the Yankees. On the eve of World War II, Boston finally appeared ready to challenge the Yankees.

  In 1949 the Red Sox were, to all intents and purposes, a mighty team. There was Ted Williams, only twenty-six years old at the time of V-J. To many the best hitter in baseball, he was nicknamed “God” by Johnny Pesky, the shortstop (who, in turn, because of his rather large nose, was called either “Needle” or “Needlenose” by Williams). There was Dominic DiMaggio, the third of the DiMaggio brothers to play in the major leagues, an all-star in his own right. According to his teammates, Dom had the hardest job in baseball since he led off for Boston. That meant he underwent a fierce interrogation by Williams about the opposing pitcher every time he came back to the dugout: What was he throwing, Dommy, was he fast, was he tricky, was he getting the corners? Come on, Dommy, you saw him. In addition there was Bobby Doerr at second base. Smooth and steady, a future Hall of Fame player, he was extremely popular with his teammates.

  The basic lineup of the Red Sox seemed set. It was filled with hitters, and, especially in Fenway, pitchers hated to go against them. The feel of the team was good. It had the right mix of veterans and young players, the right balance between country boys and city boys—as exemplified by the baiting of Boo Ferriss, the quintessential country boy, whose harshest expletive was “Shuck-uns,” by Mickey Harris, who was from New York City. Harris’s mouth, even in this profession of unexpurgated language, was considered uniquely foul. He devoted great energy to trying to get Boo Ferriss to say a dirty word. He would needle Ferriss constantly about what was wrong with him as an athlete and what was wrong with Mississippi, Ferriss’s home state. Finally, Ferriss would explode. “You said it! You said it,” Harris would joyously proclaim. “Mickey,” Ferriss would answer, “I did not say what you thought I said—I merely said ‘John Brownit.’ ”

  Pitching was a perennial problem with the Red Sox, however. Fenway’s short fence encouraged better-than-average hitters to think they were very good hitters, but it worked psychic damage on the team’s pitchers. In spring training, 1946, Red Sox veterans paid particular attention to the young pitchers—namely, Ferriss and Tex Hughson—who had been pitching well, albeit during the war years. Ferriss, for example had won 21 games and lost only 10 in 1945.

  But in spring 1946 Ferriss had to face Williams in batting practice. Williams was the most passionate hitter in baseball, and the philosopher king of hitting as well. He was always discoursing on the science of it; pitchers, he thought, were “dumb by breed.” When Williams stepped up to bat, suddenly, Ferriss realized it was as if spring training had stopped altogether and something different and tougher had started. Most of the other players stopped whatever they were doing to watch. Much depended on this. World Series checks might ride on how good this young pitcher was.

  Williams, it was well known, liked batting-practice pitching to approximate the real thing. He liked to be challenged. Ferriss was in a delicate position: He had to throw well but also be careful not to be a hot dog. So he tried to put as much movement on the ball as he could while not throwing too hard. Williams took the requisite swings, getting some hits and hitting some balls into the ground. When he left the cage, the Boston writers immediately gathered around to find out what he thought of this young right-hander. Was he the real thing or was he, in a phrase appropriated from the Germans during the war, ersatz? “He’ll win,” Williams said, “he can pitch.” That was immediately relayed to Ferriss, who felt that God had spoken on his behalf. Later Williams went over to Ferriss and said: “Kid, I told those writers that all you have to do is throw it like you threw before and you’ll be all right.” Ferriss now felt he could count on those 21 victories of 1945 as real; it was as if an asterisk had been removed from beside them
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  That had signaled the emergence of a new Red Sox team, one with young pitchers who could match the powerful, if slow, regular lineup. In 1946 the Red Sox veterans regained their skills more quickly than did the returning Yankees and ran away with the pennant. Ferriss won 25 games and lost only 6 that season; Tex Hughson won 20, and Mickey Harris, another young pitcher seemingly on the edge of stardom, won 17. Some people were talking of a dynasty.

  But the dynasty did not take place. Ferriss developed serious arm trouble in the middle of 1947; Hughson had two thirds of a good season in 1947, and then he developed arm trouble; and Harris, also plagued by a sore arm, never again won more than 7 games. That so many strong and talented young arms could go bad so quickly seemed to indicate what fans had long suspected: that the Red Sox were dogged by the fates.

  Another team watching three of its best pitchers come up with sore arms might have been finished. That was almost too much to ask even of such teams as the Yankees or the Dodgers, with their formidable farm systems. But this misfortune did not stop the Red Sox. In those days, weak teams with owners perched on the brink of bankruptcy could always be counted on to part with a good player for a number of lesser players and a considerable amount of cash. St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Washington were such teams. Late in the 1947 season, Joe Cronin, who was then still managing Boston, took aside Birdie Tebbetts, his catcher. “I don’t have the pitching, do I, Birdie?” Cronin asked. “No, it’s not there, we’re coming up short,” Tebbetts answered. “That’s what I was afraid of,” Cronin said. When the season was over, Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey engineered a massive trade with the St. Louis Browns, a trade so complicated that it had to be accomplished over two days. Boston traded away nine marginal players for Jack Kramer, a star pitcher, Vern Stephens, a slow but powerful shortstop, and then, almost as a throw-in, a veteran pitcher named Ellis Kinder. In addition, the Red Sox gave the Browns nearly $400,000 in cash, an immense sum in those days, more than enough to save a bad franchise’s existence for yet another year, while, of course, destroying any remaining shred of credibility it had with its fans. When the deal was consummated there was a feeling that the Red Sox had virtually bought themselves another pennant.