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

  With the trade completed, Williams and Dom DiMaggio argued with each other over which of the two new pitchers was more valuable. Williams, a great authority on pitching, insisted that Kramer was; but DiMaggio, whose intelligence William greatly admired, said that Kramer was a finesse pitcher, which was not ideal for a small ball park like Fenway. Kinder, DiMaggio added, was interesting, much better than his reputation. Kinder was already thirty-four years old at the time of the trade, had been in the major leagues for only two years, and had won a grand total of 11 big-league games. Some thought that his best pitch was his change-up: that is, a pitch thrown seemingly with the full force of the fastball, in which the pitcher deliberately masks the fact that he is taking off some of the speed. The object, of course, is to throw off the hitter’s timing. “A pitcher who depends on a change can’t win,” Williams said. It was valuable, he argued, only if supported by another major pitch: “A good hitter sees a change, and he can step out of the batter’s box, count the crowd, and still hit it out.”

  Certainly the deal helped the Red Sox immediately: In that first year Kramer won 18 games while losing only 5; and Kinder, showing that DiMaggio was at least partially right, won 10 games and lost 7. Stephens hit 29 home runs and drove in 137 runs. The three of them played a critical role in bringing the Red Sox to the playoff game with Cleveland, and the very brink of the pennant, in 1948.

  That year saw another important addition to the Red Sox: Joe McCarthy came to manage them. He was sixty-two, a blunt old-fashioned man who had been a dominant figure on the Yankees in the thirties and forties. He was largely credited for making the Yankees the elite organization of baseball. They traveled first-class; they always wore jackets and ties. He wanted them, whenever they were in public, to look like professionals. Before they came to the ball park, they were to shave at home, or, if they were on the road, at the hotel. “You’re a Yankee,” McCarthy would tell his players. “Act like one.” In 1946 during spring training a rookie pitcher named Frank Shea was trying to lose some extra weight, so he created an extra-heavy sweat suit in which to run extra laps. He was proud of how hard he was working to get in shape. One day he came back to the dugout soaked with sweat and pleased with himself for staying with so ambitious a program. But his cap was turned sideways. McCarthy took one look at him and said, “Young fellow, if you can’t wear that uniform right, don’t wear it at all.”

  McCarthy even extended his idea of class to lectures about the use of hard liquor. He did not want his players to drink, he would tell them, but he knew that on occasion they needed to relax, and that liquor helped. Therefore, if they had to drink, they should drink what he drank: White Horse Scotch—because it was the best, and the real danger in drinking came from using cheap, off-brand stuff. It was said that while managing Chicago in the twenties, McCarthy had once lectured Hack Wilson about the seriousness of his drinking. He illustrated his lecture by pouring a shot of whiskey into a glass filled with worms. The worms quickly died. “What did you learn from that?” he asked Wilson. “That if I drink I won’t have worms,” the slugger answered. Unfortunately, McCarthy’s own drinking increased significantly in his later years as a manager. His players had a code name for it. When he was on one of his benders, he was, they said, “riding the white horse.”

  When McCarthy first became the Red Sox manager there was a great deal of speculation about how he would handle Ted Williams. Williams was famous for his love of hitting, his impetuous relationships with fans and the press, and his hatred of wearing ties. It was said that he owned two ties, a blue one and a brown one, and that once a year, on the occasion of some special charity fund raiser, he would actually wear one. McCarthy showed up for his first meeting with Williams without a tie himself and later explained to reporters that a manager who could not get on with a .400 hitter did not deserve to manage in the big leagues.

  McCarthy had strong opinions about almost everything. He was an inveterate smoker of cigars, which he could move nimbly around and through his fingers in various positions. He did not like pipe smokers on his team because he thought they were too contented. (Red Rolfe, the Yankee third baseman, had been a pipe smoker and had tried to hide it from the manager; the other players were sure that McCarthy knew and tolerated it only because Rolfe was so good a player.) McCarthy even had his own peculiar views of history. For example, he liked what he called the “dark-haired Poles” because, he claimed, they came from the south of Poland and had fought fiercely whenever Poland was attacked. But he wanted no part of blond-haired Poles, who he said had not resisted their enemies at moments of crisis.

  He liked to tell his players that he knew all their tricks because he had tried them himself. “I know your games,” he would say. “I was the one who had the phones taken out of the clubhouse in Chicago. I knew what the players were doing—using them all the time to call their bookies.” He hated card games and barred them from his clubhouse. To him they were a waste of time. When he saw his players with cards—the one thing a baseball player had, once the season began, was plenty of time—he would push them to do something else. Why, that man who invented the little wrapper for the sugar cube, he would say, would never have done that if he had been playing with cards. Once the players entered the clubhouse they were there to play baseball. Frank Shea once brought a newspaper into the clubhouse during spring training in 1946. “What’s this?” McCarthy asked, picking up the paper. “It’s a newspaper,” Shea said. “Shea, you just throw it in the garbage pail over there. You’re here to play baseball, and if you want to read about yourself, you do it in your hotel room,” McCarthy said.

  Temptation was everywhere. When Clarence Marshall was a rookie, McCarthy called him over just after the club had reached New York. “Hey, kid, where do you live?” he asked, while his eyes looked at a spot of grass about twenty yards in front of him. He is most decidedly not looking at me, Marshall thought. He is talking to me, but it is as if I don’t exist. “The Edison Hotel, sir,” Marshall said, naming a hotel in midtown. “Don’t let the bright lights and the stinking perfume get you,” McCarthy said. That was all. His eyes never moved. Rookie dismissed.

  He most emphatically did not like the new bonus-baby rules, which allowed teams to sign young players for huge sums of money, but demanded that they skip the minor leagues and start with the big-league clubs. When Bobby Brown had arrived as the Yankees’ first bonus baby in 1947, McCarthy had watched him carefully and skeptically. Finally he took Brown aside and told him, in words that sounded strangely archaic to Brown, “Bobby, we don’t have any rats on the Yankees.”

  He was even more resentful when he came to the Red Sox, which had a weaker farm system. In 1948 the Red Sox had an eighteen-year-old bonus baby named Chuck Stobbs’s on the roster. Stobbs had signed for $35,000—the equivalent of five years’ salary for most rookies—before he had even thrown his first strike. During spring training McCarthy made him feel as if he didn’t exist. Finally, toward the end of spring training, McCarthy signaled Stobbs to come over. Stobbs felt a rush of excitement. Perhaps, this was going to be his big chance. The manager began to talk about how to play second base. The footwork was critical, McCarthy said. Second base? Was he going to be transformed into a second baseman? Bewilderment showed on Stobbs’s face. “You’re not Goodman, are you?” McCarthy said, referring to Billy Goodman, a young infielder. “No, sir,” said Stobbs, “I’m Stobbs.” “Get the hell out of here,” McCarthy roared, and Stobbs gratefully did. He stayed with the team for the entire 1948 season and pitched a total of nine innings.

  As McCarthy saw it, ballplayers were to play hard, and they were not to take defeat lightly. Once in 1937 the Yankees split a doubleheader with one of the weaker teams in the league, losing a game they should not have lost. Afterward, McCarthy came prowling angrily through the locker room. A utility outfielder named Roy Johnson, relatively new to the team, saw McCarthy and complained just loud enough for him to hear that you could not win every game. McCarthy heard him. Later that day he
called up his superiors. “Get me Henrich,” he said. Tommy Henrich was brought up from the Yankee farm team in Newark, and Roy Johnson was waived out of the league. The point was clear to everyone: Even halfway sassing the manager was a very bad idea. But the Yankee players who had come up while he was managing—such players as Henrich, Charlie Keller, and DiMaggio—had a special affection for him. He played them regularly, did not jerk them around, and tried to protect them from the front office and the press.

  McCarthy was particularly suspicious of the press. He regarded it as a hostile force, and was as pithy with the Boston press as he had been with the New York writers. When a Boston writer suggested that if Williams played in Yankee Stadium, with its short fence, he would break Babe Ruth’s record for home runs, McCarthy looked at him coldly and said simply, “Gehrig didn’t.” The Boston writers soon learned to deal with him by being provocative. Joe Cashman, a reporter for the Boston Herald, decided that the best way to get information was to make a statement, especially a stupid one, rather than ask questions. That so confirmed McCarthy’s view of writers as people who did not know baseball, he could not refuse the bait.

  To the Red Sox, McCarthy brought his old prejudices, with the exception of the tie rule, which was gone courtesy of Williams. Card playing was still out. The first team lecture was, as far as anyone could tell, primarily about pipe smoking. Billy Hitchcock, the utility infielder, was the only pipe smoker on the team, and he spent much of the season trying to smoke it on the team train when McCarthy was not looking. Once, thinking the manager had gone to bed, he tried to smoke in the small antechamber of the men’s room on the train. McCarthy walked in. Hitchcock hid the pipe by cradling the bowl in his hand. Usually McCarthy’s visits were brief and his tone curt. But this time he lingered. He was friendly, almost garrulous. Hitchcock’s hand got hotter and hotter. Still McCarthy lingered. Hitchcock thought he was going to scream. Finally McCarthy left. Hitchcock was sure he had known about the pipe and had enjoyed squeezing him.

  How then to please this gruff old man who sat there all day long saying little, chewing his gum endlessly (and sticking the used gum under the bench where he sat—a McCarthy trademark)? Whom did he like? What did he like? The Red Sox regulars spent much of 1948 trying to figure him out.

  For one thing, he liked hustle. He liked toughness. He liked Billy Goodman, the versatile infielder and spray hitter who played first base in 1948. Indeed, McCarthy even said that his mistake, which had cost Boston the pennant, was in not seeing that Goodman was his first baseman until a quarter of the season had passed. He liked Matt Batts, the backup catcher. Batts had been a long shot to make the team in 1948, but Charlie Berry, who had been umpiring some Boston games in spring training, came over to Batts and said, “Hey you, Batts. You want to make this team?” Batts said yes, indeed he did. “Here’s what you do, kid. You’ve got a good arm and you’re throwing hard in infield practice, and I know old Joe McCarthy and he loves it. You keep doing it. You throw even harder. I’m watching McCarthy, and every time you do that his eyes light up and he chews that gum a little faster.” After that, during the drills Johnny Pesky would complain that Batts was throwing so hard that it was hurting his hand. But Batts paid him no attention; he just threw harder.

  Some of the veterans felt that McCarthy looked down on them, that he believed he had inherited a team where the players were too soft, and it was his job to be tougher. With the Yankees, he had been careful never to criticize his players in front of each other; now there was a sense that his patience was being strained. One day when Wally Moses, one of the reserve Boston outfielders, was on the trainer’s table being worked on, McCarthy asked what was wrong. “I’ve got a stiff neck,” Moses said. “Probably got it in some fancy air-conditioned bar,” McCarthy said acidly, for in those days an air-conditioned bar was something for the elite. “Skip, with the money they pay me, I can’t afford to go to any of those. I got it in a movie theater,” Moses said.

  Some of the pitchers felt that McCarthy was too old-fashioned. According to them he did not understand the changing nature of the game and the importance of relief pitching. He came from a generation, they thought, where if the pitcher was a real man, he would pitch all nine innings. A bullpen in that era was less important, and the men who pitched out of it were not considered specialists who had a particular skill suited to a few innings of late relief work. Rather they were pitchers not quite good enough to be starters. In the spring of 1948 the Boston writers asked McCarthy whether Earl Johnson, who had been at different times in his career a starter and a reliever, would be a starter for him. “He doesn’t throw hard enough to be a starter for me,” McCarthy said, and it was a revealing moment. He had admitted a player was consigned to the bullpen because his arm was not that strong. On the Yankees, by contrast, the hardest-throwing pitcher on the team, Joe Page, resided in the bullpen.

  There was a careful watch on McCarthy in 1948, and some tense moments resulted. Early in the season the Red Sox went into Sportsman’s Park for a series with the Browns. During one game a St. Louis pitcher was working on Junior Stephens, who was a notorious bad-ball hitter with a special penchant for going after high balls. As Stephens settled in the batter’s box, McCarthy yelled out, “Make him come down.” The first pitch came in high and out of the strike zone. Stephens swung and missed. Strike one. “Make him come down!” McCarthy yelled again, a little more emphatically. Again the pitch came in, high and out of the strike zone, and again Stephens swung and missed. “Make him come down!” McCarthy yelled even more emphatically. Again the scene was repeated: a high fastball, a Stephens’s swing, and a strikeout. Stephens jogged back to the dugout, turned in the general direction of McCarthy, and yelled, “Make him come down, my ass!” There was silence in the dugout: It was the first testing of a veteran manager by a veteran player. McCarthy said nothing, but waited while the regulars went back onto the field and took their positions. Then he said, just loud enough for everyone on the bench to hear, “Got a little upset, didn’t he?” There was no way to call down to Newark for a Henrich. He would not make an issue of this—Stephens was the best he had. McCarthy was going to have to make do.

  As much as anyone on the team, Stephens suffered under McCarthy. As far as he was concerned, McCarthy was always riding him, making snide remarks in the dugout about his fielding and his hitting. “If that toothless old son of a bitch gets on me one more time,” he told his friend Billy Hitchcock, the utility infielder, “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to stuff his gum down his throat.” That struggle lasted all season to the satisfaction of neither of them.

  By contrast, McCarthy continued to cultivate Williams. Early in the season Williams hit a tremendous home run into the bullpen against the Browns. When he came back to the bench, he heard McCarthy’s voice, directed at him alone, so no one else could hear it, saying, “If I could hit like you I’d play for nothing.” Williams was oddly touched, for the old man was not lightly given to praise. After the playoff game in 1948, Williams was the last to leave the locker room. As he was finally going, he heard a voice behind him. “Well, we fooled them, didn’t we?” the voice said. It was McCarthy. “What do you mean?” Williams said. “They all said we couldn’t get along and I thought we got along pretty good,” McCarthy said. “You’re right, Joe, we got along pretty good,” Williams answered.

  When the Red Sox convened in the spring of 1949, there was a generally good feeling on the team. The players from the Browns, wild though they might have been, had become integrated into the team, and there were no factions or divisions. A few days into spring training there was a contest to decide who was the best-dressed Boston player. Jack Kramer, known as Handsome Jack or Alice because he was a dandy (he not only wore silk underwear but washed it himself—most definitely not a baseball-player-type thing to do), was the odds-on favorite. He was very good-looking, and he worked during the off-season in a men’s store. It was said that he once bought a suit because the salesman told him it was the only one
of its kind in the world. Later, he saw someone else wearing the same suit, so he immediately gave his away. Kramer arrived in camp with many suitcases filled with newly tailored clothes, and he showed them off to his teammates, including (this was his greatest mistake) Birdie Tebbetts. Tebbetts was a world-class needler, and he decided to sting Kramer. He brought Parnell and Matt Batts in on the joke. “Whatever I say,” he told them, “you agree.” So as Kramer unveiled one suit after another, Tebbetts would look carefully at it and then say, with a touch of regret in his voice, “It’s a great jacket, Jack, but it’s just a little bit off on the left sleeve.” Batts and Parnell would quickly agree. Visibly upset, Kramer would look in the full-length mirror, and yes, the left sleeve did look a little off. So it went. No matter what jacket he tried on, Tebbetts spotted a flaw in the left sleeve, and the other two players agreed. The following morning Kramer took his entire wardrobe to a tailor, delighting Tebbetts and incurring needless tailoring bills. That, thought some of the players, was just Tebbetts getting back at Kramer for the previous spring, when Tebbetts had arrived in camp with an enormous trunk filled with clothes and announced that he, the lowly Tebbetts, had as many jackets as Kramer. “Yeah, Birdie, but my jackets fit me,” Kramer had answered. But to Tebbetts it was all in good fun; he had played on winning teams in the past in Detroit, and this felt like a winning team.