The Victory Season Page 12

  A few weeks later, Head hurt that expedient right arm again, and never returned to pitch in the majors.

  But Brooklyn’s biggest victory of April came off the field. The season before, Durocher had been arrested for beating up a heckler beneath the Ebbets Field stands. Now he went before a jury of his peers to account for the assault. The courtroom saga was judged by Life as “The most sensational trial held in Brooklyn since the smashing of Murder, Inc.”

  Accuser John Christian was a huge Dodgers fan, a star athlete at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, and a veteran, with a sore knee that he hurt in a glider accident while in the army. Sitting at Ebbets Field with another former Jefferson High star, Dutch Garfinkel, Christian let fly with some choice words for Durocher at top volume. “His voice could carry two or three blocks,” Garfinkel remembered. Durocher testified that Christian had called him a “bum” and a “thief” and had accused him of throwing games.

  A security man named Joe Moore shoved his way to Christian and ordered the fan to come with him. Moore, a gargantuan fellow who pushed 275 pounds, was legendary at Ebbets Field for whaling on kids who tried to sneak into the park. The two men made their way to a small room behind the Dodgers dugout.

  Here the accounts diverged. Christian said on the stand that Leo came back, took a “black object” (most likely Moore’s trademark cosh), and knocked him down. “Then he punched me in the face while I was down.…Moore pushed me out and Durocher followed me and beat me again with his fists. I fell down again and Moore said ‘I’m going to throw you outta the park.’”

  Leo, unsurprisingly, remembered it differently. “Have you a mother?” he said he asked Christian. “Well, how would you like it if…I went to your house and called her the names you have been shouting out tonight?”

  “You’re still an asshole,” Durocher testified Christian replied.

  “I ran at him,” the Lip continued. “I saw him fall against a wall. He fell into a water trough. I did not pursue him. I don’t know what might have happened if…I had gotten my hands on him.” Somehow, Leo managed to maintain a straight face during his time on the witness stand.

  It took the all-male jury a mere thirty-six minutes to acquit Leo and send him triumphantly back to Ebbets Field, where curious reporters would search in vain for the alleged “water trough” that supposedly bloodied the plaintiff. The courtroom erupted in cheers at the verdict. Several weeks later, Durocher quietly paid Christian $6,750 to settle a civil suit, although it was rumored that actor Danny Kaye, a Durocher buddy, paid the settlement.

  Brooklyn parlayed the fast start and its manager’s legerdemain into a 15–7 record and a surprising two-game lead on the Cardinals by the time of its first matchup with St. Louis, a two-game set beginning May 14. The Redbirds had started much like Brooklyn—an opening-day loss, followed by seven straight wins. They had scuffled of late, but in Brooklyn served notice that they remained the pennant favorites. In the opener, the Dodgers gave away free nylons as a promotion, though the game hardly needed extra buzz. Thirty-one thousand packed the park, but went home unhappy when Marty Marion knocked in a pair of runs in the eleventh inning to win it for the Cards, 7–5. Sure enough, Lanier, the Scourge of Brooklyn, went the distance for the victory. By now, Durocher had decided to go with veterans in the outfield, and Hermanski and Whitman hit the bench, in favor of Walker and Reiser. Furillo got regular action, mostly in center field—though he would become an acclaimed right fielder in later years, he played only four games there in 1946.

  The next day, Howie Pollet bested Dodgers starter Lew Webber 1–0, and the teams were tied for first. The game was most notable for an incident that took place in the fifth inning, when Webber brushed Country Slaughter back with a pitch. The Cards outfielder responded by bunting up the first base line and running over Webber as the pitcher tried to field the ball. The benches emptied, “indicating another free-for-all indicative of Dodgers-Cardinals relations,” according to the Post-Dispatch. The crowd gave Slaughter a fierce hammering out in right in the bottom of the inning, but Enos shut them up by making a sensational catch and doubling off Furillo at first to kill a rally. The crowd was quiet after that.

  It was the sort of old-school vengeance that endeared Slaughter to baseball lifers and new fans alike. Hall of Famer Bucky Harris would say of Country, worshipfully, “His name should be in school textbooks along with this country’s most revered heroes. He never quit. He never will. He won’t even let down.”

  As his nickname suggests, Slaughter grew up in the backwoods—in his case, a tiny cabin in Roxboro, North Carolina. His father, Zadok, was a farmer who played true country hardball, taking his catcher position in semipro games with no shoes and no glove! The bravery apparently was a hit with the ladies; as Slaughter wrote in his memoir, “I guess Ma figured that a guy who wasn’t afraid to handle speeding baseballs without the protection of a catcher’s mitt or even shoes had what it took to handle droughts, floods, and anything else that could get in the way of a farmer.”

  The Slaughters were poor, but Enos and his five siblings grew up happy. The farmwork built his wrists and back and shoulders. Baseball specific skills can be traced to his formative days too. He built up his arm strength hunting rabbits with rocks, killing them with a well-aimed throw. His future batting stroke was honed in communal wood-chopping contests. His keen eye came from shooting his rifle, which was seldom more than an arm’s length away. There weren’t many automobiles in Roxboro during those Depression years, so the extended Slaughter clan, up to twenty strong, hopped in “Hoovercarts”—engineless auto chassis pulled by mules. In this manner, they would make their way to civilization, represented by the Durham Athletic Park, twenty-five miles away, where the minor league Bulls played ball.

  Enos was rangy and athletic as a teen, and was offered a scholarship for baseball and football at Guilford College in Greensboro. But Slaughter worried that his bumpkin mien wouldn’t fit in at school, so he signed on to play second base for the local textile mill, where his brothers worked. Billy Southworth, then a Cards scout, spotted him at an area tryout and signed him in 1935. He also passed along a key tip. Enos had been running flat-footed, and Southworth told him to run on his toes. With that, Slaughter’s speed increased dramatically.

  When Enos had progressed to his first minor league team, in Columbus, Georgia, a more pivotal bit of advice was passed his way. Slaughter had a tendency to lope, if not loaf, especially on defense. His manager told him, “Listen, are you too tired to run all the way? If you are, I’ll get some help for you.” From that day forth, he hustled out every step once his uniform was on.

  That manager was Eddie Dyer, the same man who was now Cardinals skipper.

  Dyer also refined Slaughter’s fundamentals. “You seem to think that your strike zone is over your head,” he’d rage at Enos after he whiffed. “It isn’t. Don’t swing at the high ones.” Dyer turned his right fielder’s howitzer into a more accurate rocket as well. “An outfielder throws a ball low and on a hop to permit a cutoff. Stop throwing those high flies.”

  In double-A ball, at a different Columbus, this one in Ohio, his stellar play warranted a nickname, in the opinion of the sports editor of the Columbus Daily Journal. The paper held a contest to pick a winner. “Country” was the overwhelming suggestion, and Enos himself seconded the motion. Certainly, it fit the plainly unsophisticated Slaughter.

  By ’38 he was at Sportsman’s Park, the summer home of the Cardinals; he was by now more fully developed, with thick muscle through his haunches, giving him a low-slung appearance. His “fairish amount of nose,” in Red Smith’s description, remained unchanged. By his sophomore season, he was getting MVP votes. On the field he was a classic success story, a guy who overcame his underprivileged upbringing to reach the pinnacle of acclaim in his profession. But there was tragedy away from the diamond. His first wife, childhood sweetheart Hulo, hated St. Louis from the first, missing the rural life in Roxboro. They divorced soon after Slaughter made t
he bigs, their marriage not helped by the loss of an infant daughter in 1936 after just six days of life.

  In the winter of ’39, Slaughter returned home for his annual Christmas-week rabbit hunt with Zadok. It was a Slaughter family tradition, one handed down since the family first settled in Roxboro generations earlier. Father and son were cutting up their haul when Zadok accidentally cut his hand. Unfortunately, one of the bunnies had tularemia, aka “Rabbit fever,” and Zadok contracted it. He was dead within a month.

  Just before the war, Slaughter remarried to a St. Louis woman named Josephine. (It was the second of five marriages Slaughter would accrue in his lifetime.) Then the Cards made the 1942 World Series, where they met the defending-champion Yankees. It was the first Fall Classic to be broadcast live to American troops overseas. After the fourth game, Slaughter was asked to speak to the troops by radio. “Hi fellows,” he told them. “We played a great game today and we won. And we are going to finish this thing tomorrow. Then I’m going to report for duty in the Army Air Corps and join you.” True to his word, Slaughter homered to help win the Series the next day, then went to San Antonio to become a flyboy.

  But the physical marvel had a flaw—he was color-blind. So he couldn’t be a pilot, and he refused to be a bombardier—the idea of handing control over his fate to some other man while he was cooped up in the back of the plane sickened him. Instead, Slaughter became a physical education instructor. He never saw combat but went overseas to play ball in the South Pacific, island-hopping in the wake of Allied forces heading for Japan. Country was still Country, even in service ball. He would slide on the coral reef diamonds of Saipan without a care for the damage incurred by his trousers, and he always ran in from his position in the sweltering tropical heat. He was phlegmatic about the time he spent away from St. Louis too, insisting that “The three years I missed really didn’t hurt that much.” Indeed, after an early series in ’46 against the Cards, Chicago Cubs general manager Jim Gallagher grumbled of Enos, “That big-rumped baboon goes into the Army, drinks beer for three years and comes out running faster than before.”

  The war may not have affected his stats or ability, but it cost him Josephine. It was a classic war divorce, the kind sweeping the nation in 1946. The return of so many millions of servicemen, who came home to women who had married in haste and gotten used to a life without that particular husband, caused the divorce rate to spike from 3.5 divorces per one thousand people to 4.3. Joe DiMaggio’s very public divorce, along with those of several movie stars, took away some of the lingering national stigma attached to splitting up. Josephine filed for divorce in August, citing cruelty and stating that Enos had struck her.

  She had grounds for adultery charges as well. During spring training in St. Petersburg, Enos met a war widow named Mary Walker, who had a two-year-old boy named Rex who never knew his father. Slaughter took up with her, becoming the man in Rex’s life, and married Mary that winter after his divorce from Josephine was finalized.

  The domestic upheaval didn’t noticeably affect Country’s play. After setting off the rhubarb in Brooklyn, Slaughter cracked skulls the next day in a more traditional manner, homering twice and going 4–4 with 4 RBIs. St. Louis beat Boston 9–8, winning in classic hustling Redbirds manner, on a steal of home in the tenth inning by pinch runner Joffre Cross.

  The two games displayed the devastating blend of hitting, hustling, and heart the Cards were capable of. Despite Brooklyn’s strong start, few Cardinals fans were worried. They were secure in the knowledge that St. Louis was still the bully on the block.

  Chapter 13

  Those Splendid Sox

  St. Louis had a history of success on its side. In Boston, a generation of fans had grown up without knowing a high-quality Sox team. So the Hub could be forgiven for being overenthusiastic when the Red Sox exploded from the blocks like an Olympic sprinter. They won their first five games, seven of the first ten, and finished April 11–3. Bobby Doerr had already knocked in seventeen runs. Dom DiMaggio was hitting .361, Johnny Pesky .360. Williams’s on-base percentage was .493. And the pitching troika of Hughson, Harris, and Dobson were all 3–0. They might have been buoyed by the visit to Fenway Park on April 30 by an aspiring congressman who was running to replace James Curley in the 11th District—John F. Kennedy.

  The sole frontline player to struggle out of the gate was Boo Ferriss. Boo was shelled in his first two starts, though the potent Sox lineup bailed him out in both games. It gave ammo to the critics who thought Ferriss a mirage who had fattened up against wartime mediocrity.

  But on April 26, Boo shut out the A’s, and he was off on a tear after that. He won ten straight decisions, not losing until mid-June, and lowered his ERA from 17.25 to 2.98. He had already established a reputation as an excellent pitcher in Fenway Park, his fastball sharp enough to prevent righties from turning on it and tattooing the nearby not-yet-Green Monster in left, the numerous advertisements that festooned the wall giving hitters a target to aim for.

  Everyone had called Ferriss “Boo” since childhood, the result of his inability to say the word “brother.” His youth was Rockwellian, a classic southern upbringing in Shaw, Mississippi, just south of the fabled crossroads at Clarksdale, where Highway 61 meets Highway 278, and where a fair country guitar picker named Robert Johnson mythically met up with a goat-tailed fellow one moonless night and sold his soul to become the greatest bluesman ever to emerge from the cotton fields.

  Boo was born a decade after Johnson, in 1921. Practice and genetics were the key to his success, not satanic dealmaking. His daddy was a semipro player, manager, and umpire, and Boo grew up inhaling the game, playing pickup ball in the open lot alongside his house. There was no Little League in the tiny burg, so Ferriss was playing with the high school team in the seventh grade. One day, a bigger kid plowed him over and broke Dave’s right wrist. Undaunted, he kept on throwing lefty and never missed a game. As Head and Lanier and Ferriss, among many others, proved, the ability and willingness of Depression-era kids to adapt to crippling injuries and keep on playing ball was remarkable.

  Boston signed the strapping pitcher out of Mississippi State but was lukewarm on his progress until Bill McKechnie, the Cincinnati Reds manager and pitching talent guru, offered to buy him. Cronin refused, figuring that if McKechnie saw something in Ferriss, he was worth keeping. The Sox stood by Boo as he joined the Army Air Corps, playing ball in the San Antonio area against other bases, including one that featured Country Slaughter. To give an idea of Boo’s elite athletic ability, he led the air corps league in not just victories but also batting average, edging out Slaughter .417 to .414. He came down with asthma early in 1945, and that won him an early discharge. Delta Dave was in Boston in time to win twenty-one games in 1945. Tom Yawkey was so happy with Boo’s season he gave him a $10,000 bonus, typical of the owner’s largesse toward players he liked. But such philanthropy had to be on his terms—Yawkey was an outspoken defender of the Reserve Clause.

  Ferriss was a favorite of the writers, for whom he always made time, in stark contrast to the grumpier stars of the club. “He is serious but not humorless; imaginative, but not temperamental,” judged Kaese in the Globe. Ferriss showed some imagination in his choice of superstition. After warming up, he would toss his glove in air. However it landed, face up or face down, he would have to leave it that way after every half-inning on the mound, or bad juju followed.

  Clearly he wasn’t paying attention to his glove on a chilly night in July 1947, when he tore some shoulder cartilage on the mound. Today, he might miss half a season, maybe two-thirds. In ’47, he was rubbed down with alcohol and told by his doctors to “be sure to wear a coat.” Leeches were not prescribed, fortunately, but regardless, Ferriss was never the same pitcher. He gritted his way to a 7–3 record in 1948, and had all of five appearances over the next two seasons before accepting the fact that his arm and career were shot.

  Williams was the face of the Sox, York their muscle, Dommie DiMaggio their soul. But the
beating heart of the team was the double-play duo of shortstop Johnny Pesky and second baseman Bobby Doerr, a pair of West Coasters who formed the finest middle infield in the majors.

  Legally, Johnny Pesky was still John Paveskovich during the summer of ’46—he didn’t have it officially anglicized until after the season. His lineage was Croatian, and his old man was a cook in the Austro-Hungarian Navy. Jakov Paveskovich didn’t think much of baseball, either as a game or as a career, and he let his boy know it. But Johnny couldn’t stop hanging out down at the Portland Beavers ballpark a few blocks from the Paveskovich home. The Beavers were in the powerful Pacific Coast League, and Johnny saw all manner of good ballplayers pass through, including a seventeen-year-old hotshot with the San Diego Padres named Ted Williams. Pesky wrangled a job as a clubhouse boy, washing sweaty jock straps and other assorted sundries.

  In high school they called him “the Needle,” on account of his stiletto nose. Pesky was very active in semipro ball, and one of the teams he played on was the Silverton Red Sox, a timber mill–sponsored club. In an amazing coincidence, the lumber company was owned by Tom Yawkey, so Pesky could be considered Boston Red Sox property way back in the late ’30s. He was signed by the real team soon after.

  Pesky was a rookie in 1942, and while he was learning to navigate the American League, he was also taking classes at Mechanics Arts High School, learning the finer points of becoming a naval aviator. With him in the classroom was Williams, who got considerably more attention. The Splinter would remain the bigger draw, but Pesky proved he belonged in his company, hitting .331 as a rookie shortstop, trailing only Williams. He finished third in the MVP vote and would have won the Rookie of the Year, had there been such a thing.