The Victory Season Read online

  Then he was off to war.

  The navy cost Pesky three years of baseball productivity, but it gained him his wife. Johnny met Ruth Hickey in Atlanta, where he was serving as an operations officer and she was a WAVE (Woman Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). They would stay married for sixty years, until her death in 2005.

  Like Williams, Pesky didn’t see overseas duty, and he wasn’t the pilot Ted was, either. Pesky enjoyed regaling others about his teammate’s ability in the cockpit, though, especially once Williams left Pesky behind in The Right Stuff department and went to advanced training in Jacksonville, while Pesky stayed on the ground. “I heard Ted literally tore the sleeve target to shreds with his angle dives,” raved the shortstop to anyone who’d listen. “He’d shoot from wingovers, zooms, and barrel rolls, and after a few passes the sleeve was ribbons. At any rate, I know he broke the all-time record for hits.”

  It was a hit Pesky supposedly had in 1948 that is his lasting legacy. Former Sox hurler and broadcaster Mel Parnell named the yellow divider between fair and foul ground in Fenway’s right field “Pesky’s Pole” in honor of a game-winning homer he said Pesky hit off it to win a game in 1948. Alas, the only homer Pesky ever hit at Fenway with Parnell pitching came in 1950, in the first inning, of a game the Sox lost. It was his only home run of the season, one of only six he ever hit at Fenway. Still, the honorific speaks to Pesky’s lifetime of service to the franchise, and the Pesky Pole is an iconic part of the Fenway experience today.

  Back when Pesky was a clubhouse boy in the PCL, one of the guys he ran errands and hung up laundry for was Bobby Doerr, who was only a year older than he was. Doerr was with the Padres, a teammate of Williams, and, like Ted, a native of Southern California. His father, Harold, who had played in the PCL himself, was a telephone repairman in Los Angeles and an early booster of Bobby’s career. “He told me, ‘If you want to play baseball, I’ll cut the grass and be sure to get you to all the practices,’” Doerr later remembered. “He had a great bearing on my life. He was a great man.” Harold spread the generosity around to other kids in the area, often buying them gloves, spikes, or sometimes even a meal.

  In the winter of 1936, Bobby traveled to Oregon for a few weeks of fly-fishing for steelhead trout. One night, Doerr went to a dance at a local Civilian Conservation Corps camp across the river from his home. Later that evening, he got in an old rowboat to head back, and plopped down next to his future wife, Monica. “The seat next to her was all white from being cold,” Doerr explained years later. “When I got in Monica put her coat down so I didn’t have to sit in that old icy seat. I thought that was pretty nice. I fell in love with her that night.” Oregon, too—Doerr would live there for the rest of his life when not in Boston (he and Monica lived in Newton, Massachusetts, during the season).

  Doerr hit the big leagues in 1937, the opening-day leadoff hitter for Boston as an eighteen-year-old. He had some thump in his bat for a keystone sacker and was one of the best fielders in the game. He and Williams bonded from the start, mainly over their shared love of Westerns. “He’d call me up and say ‘There’s a Western movie on with Hoot Gibson’ and we’d go,” Doerr recalled.

  At first, Doerr was exempt from the war, as he was a father. But come 1944, that was no longer enough to keep him out of the service. He was forced to leave in September, just as the pennant race began in earnest. Doerr also missed all of 1945, preparing to fight in the Pacific. He was about to ship out when the atomic bombs fell. “I was pretty glad Truman used them, let me tell you,” he said nearly seven decades later.

  Every guy on the Red Sox roster was a hero in those early days of the season. Eddie Pellagrini, a rookie utility guy who had played service ball with Pee Wee Reese and Johnny Mize, went in to his first game on April 22 against the Senators after Pesky was beaned. In his very first at bat, he clouted a home run off Sid Hudson over the high wall in left to win the game 5–4. “I still send Hudson a Christmas card every year,” Pellagrini said years afterward. Three days later, Eddie had a double, triple, and homer against the Yankees. “I should have retired after that,” he said. Pellagrini only appeared in eighteen more games all season.

  Baseball already had achieved outsized importance on the national psyche, and in Boston, it was exponentially more significant thanks to the Sox’s white-hot start. The city had a reputation as an upper-crust haven for stuffy WASPs, but in truth the streets of the Olde Towne were dominated by craftsmen, laborers, machinists, and mechanics. According to a census taken at the time, there were only 27,500 professionals in the city. Roaming knife sharpeners, who rode around on three-wheeled bikes that propped up lathes, were more commonly found than lawyers downtown.

  The nearly 20 percent unemployment rate of 1940 had eased considerably, thanks to the war, and while the census indicated that multiple generations still cohabited together, disposable income had returned to the family unit. A good chunk of that was used on the Sox. Just how big the team had become to the city was demonstrated on Sunday, April 21. Philly was in town for a doubleheader, and the Sox won the opener 12–11 after wiping out a seven-run deficit to win in the tenth, scoring six in the bottom of the ninth alone. That game took so long that the second game was stopped at 6:30 p.m., in keeping with local blue laws, with the A’s ahead 3–0 after five innings. The game was the only one the Sox lost in the first week of the season. The outcry was so great that the law was changed immediately.

  Chapter 14

  Baseball for the One Percent

  Yankee Stadium opened its doors for the first time in 1946 on Good Friday, April 19. Neither the schedule makers nor MacPhail had factored in the New York chapter of Catholic War Veterans, however, a lobby that was at the height of its power so soon after the war. Because of their protest, Mayor O’Dwyer found himself suddenly with a conflict that afternoon, and thus didn’t throw out the ceremonial first pitch. Ever the agile salesman, Mac found a Congressional Medal of Honor winner at the last second to substitute, and the Yanks edged the Senators 7–6.

  Joe DiMaggio and the rest of the Yankees were in unfamiliar territory. As part of the massive renovation of Yankee Stadium, the home dugout was moved for the first time from its longtime spot on the third base side over to the first base line. There was a spanking-new clubhouse as well, completely redone from the original that had remained untouched since the place opened in 1923.

  The players weren’t the only ones with a sense of dislocation. MacPhail had instituted numerous changes to the ethos of the place. As Red Smith wrote, the Roaring Redhead had “celebrated the marriage of baseball and booze by transforming the Stadium into a genteel ginmill.” Mac intuited that in New York, exclusivity was the name of the game. He ripped apart the innards of the park to build a pair of ornate rooms, and called the construction the “Stadium Club,” where select season-ticket holders could bend their elbows and discuss world domination “away from the vulgar gaze of the hoi-polloi.” In essence, it was a baseball-themed speakeasy.

  The four hundred members were carefully screened for eligibility, and once inside the gilded few could hang out in air-cooled comfort, enjoy ritzy service from tuxedoed staff, and be amused by film and theater stars, singers, comics, and other entertainers Mac brought in, making the game itself seem trivial. The Stadium Club rolls included various military brass, politicians, sportswriters, and celebrities, along with popular former athletes like boxer Max Baer and, of course, Babe Ruth. At a stroke, MacPhail added roughly $450,000 to the Yankees coffers through the Stadium Club.

  Next, MacPhail had turned his attention to the best seats with an actual view of the game. He rearranged the box seats, creating more and moving them around to maximize their views and ease of access and egress. He then priced them depending on how close they were to the field and how far they were from the ruffians in the general-admission sections. Everyone who bought a box got a brass nameplate to give the purchase a personal touch. Each seat was now personally identified. And, in a forerunner to the modern sco
urge of personal-seat licenses, those who paid top dollar for the box seats got first call for tickets to boxing matches and football games held at the Stadium, along with access to a private concession stand and fully stocked bar, and what the Times called a “magnificent feeling of aloofness.” Mac sold all 2,500 boxes and probably could have peddled twice that number. In 1944, all of six season boxes had been sold.

  Meanwhile, some fifteen thousand cheap seats were added to the grandstand and bleachers. They were several inches wider than the older seats, leading to increased comfort. The new double-decked restaurant was the hub of several concession stands that were added throughout the runways, so fans were never more than a short walk from a dog and a beer. The countertops were all new and gleamed with modernity.

  When MacPhail first bought into the Yankees, the baseball world, accustomed to a staid if not haughty franchise in the Bronx, wondered how such a clownish figure would act in the sport’s National Cathedral. “Wall Street might react the same way to the news that [World War II shipbuilder and future steel magnate] Henry Kaiser had been named senior partner of J. P. Morgan,” thought Fortune. Mac’s transformation of the Stadium calmed some fears among the moneyed set, but he couldn’t resist dipping into his chintzy bag of tricks to lure and entertain the masses. He hired pretty girls to be ushers, staged weekly fireworks shows, and held mile-long foot races on the Stadium track before games. Barbershop quartets performed and roamed the aisles between innings. Ladies Night, a popular invention from his days in Cincy, was brought in from the sticks to the Big City and proved a hit with the sophisticated femmes of New York, as did Nylons Day. Mac announced that the Yankees would begin sponsorship of a daily symphony program on WQXR, leading one writer to wonder “what possible need Larry MacPhail has for a horn, not to mention a whole orchestra.”

  But marketing was a huge part of MacPhail’s master plan to keep his team in the money, and things like Yankee tradition and understated class were not part of the program. Every inch of available space was used for advertising—Philip Morris, Lifebuoy, Calvert, Burma-Shave, Botany Ties, and the Bronx Savings Bank, among others, hawked their goods and services to Yankees fans. Prior to 1946 and MacPhail, advertising for specific games was usually limited to the basics—time, place, opponent. Maybe, maybe, the pitching matchup. But MacPhail hired an ad firm to begin teasing the newspaper readers of the metropolis with cliffhanger copy in the morning editions:

  Can Washington’s famous “knuckleball” pitchers stop what experts call “the slugging-est team in the League”? Or will DiMaggio, Keller & Co. make mincemeat of the Senators’ pitching staff? Come out to the ball game and see!

  Wisecracks abounded at the cheesy come-ons, but no one laughed at the Yankees bankroll. The team broke its season attendance record by July 3, going over 1.4 million fans before Independence Day. For the season, 2,265,512 would pass through the turnstiles in the Bronx, roughly three times as many as had in 1945. And that was despite the fact MacPhail had raised ticket prices 7.5 percent before the season began. He was raking it in, to the point where he could magnanimously allow servicemen to get into the ballpark for free all season.

  To call the action, MacPhail had tried to lure Red Barber from Brooklyn, offering him a three-year, $100,000 deal to become the Voice of the Yankees. In a spasm of spending quite unlike him, Rickey outbid his former liege, offering $105,000, and kept Red at Ebbets Field. The bidding war underscored Barber’s excellence at the mike and importance to the Dodgers. Stymied, MacPhail came up with another innovation, bringing broadcaster Mel Allen on the road for the games, instead of re-creating them by wire. Shortly thereafter, that would become standard operating procedure for all the teams.

  Alas, the team on the field was a far cry from the typical Bronx Bombers, the powerhouse that had captured fourteen pennants and ten championships in the previous quarter century. At a glance, they were inferior to Boston, without the depth in the lineup or the power pitching. They held a psychic dominion over their rivals up the Post Road, however, which the Sox needed to break if they were to achieve their destiny this season. And indeed, a 12–5 victory over the Yankees at Fenway on April 25 propelled the Sox on a fourteen-game winning streak, during which Boston scored nearly eight runs a game.

  The Sox were 20–3 when they invaded the new-look Stadium on May 10. Inside, the liquor was flowing faster than the Harlem River down the street, the Stadium Club and boxes packed with the “business drunk”—executives who could afford to toast their own brilliance at four in the afternoon, along with the shot-and-a-beer rank and file that swelled the gate to 64,183 that sunny afternoon. The Yanks were hanging in, 4½ behind the jet-fueled Sox, and a series win would not only sugar those scarlet rocket engines a bit but reinforce exactly which team was the bully of the American League.

  The visitors took the opener 5–4, scoring a pair of runs in the seventh off Yanks relief ace Joe Page. The Clipper knocked in all four pinstriped runs. It was Boston’s fifteenth straight win. Saturday, “Tiny” Bonham, the ironically nicknamed Yankees right-hander with a “torso like a blacksmith,” according to the Sporting News, threw a two-hit shutout to at last put one in Boston’s L column and even the series. It was the first loss of the month of May for the Bosox. Sunday’s rubber game thus became a critical juncture in the early part of the season.

  The Bombers had on the mound just the man they wanted that day. Spurgeon Ferdinand Chandler hated his name, so when a writer called him “Spud,” he embraced it. Chandler detested far more than just his name, however. The Saturday Evening Post, in an article entitled “The Yankees Angry Ace,” called him an “explosive perfectionist,” noting, “His blue eyes glower an almost visible hatred at the batsman. He snarls, and snaps his pitching arm, until it appears as though the arm will break off at the shoulder and wrist.” When he surrendered a “distance whack” to the enemy, Chandler would walk off the mound in circles, screaming obscenities at himself. A writer named Milton Gross thought Chandler possessed “the emotional unbalance of a woman who has discovered her originally styled hat duplicated in a $2.95 model.”

  Unbeaten in five decisions on the season so far, Spud was eager to take the ball and spit venom at the Scarlet Hose, but was forced to wait for a pregame show that came straight from MacPhail’s fevered imagination. The sixty-five thousand in the Stadium were treated to a fashion show, courtesy of Ohrbach’s Department Store on 14th Street, a “mass seller of mass produced clothes for a mass audience,” sniffed that publication for the masses, Life. Pretty models were driven around the field aboard fifteen marine jeeps, the ladies impressively keeping hands on hips in classic runway poses while standing on the backseats, at risk of being thrown from the vehicle at the feet of Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams. The models showed off affordable lines of slacks, shorts, and bathing suits for the coming summer, while the “jeep drivers dutifully kept eyes straight ahead,” according to Life.

  When the game finally started, twenty minutes late, Spud was off his game, giving up three walks and a run in the first inning. He settled down, but was equaled by Mickey Harris, who held the Yanks to three hits. The game was decided on an error by Rizzuto. His boot allowed two unearned runs to score in the fifth, and that was enough for Boston to win the game and silence the huge crowd, who presumably consoled themselves by taking the subway down to Ohrbach’s to stock up on cabana wear before Sunday dinner.

  Chapter 15

  Casualties

  Both teams headed west after the game. The Sox trained as usual to Chicago. The Yankees embarked on a thirteen-game road trip, one that began in the far west, meaning St. Louis, the historic Gateway to the Frontier. Ordinarily, the team would have hopped on a train a couple of hours after the final out, off on a journey that would last roughly an entire day, give or take a couple of hours. Instead, MacPhail decided it was time for his team to fly.

  It wasn’t the first time Mac had flown a team of his from one park to another. He had experimented with the new mode of transport back
in the thirties with Columbus and the Reds, and the Yankees had of course flown that spring to Panama. The press dubbed it “MacPhail’s Flying Circus,” and the owner soaked up the publicity. But this was different. Mac was making flight the preferred mode of transport on all road trips, save for northeast-corridor jaunts. To MacPhail, there was a decided tactical advantage to shortening a trip from twenty-four hours to five. The guys would get a good night’s sleep in town and make their leisurely way to Sportsman’s Park, rather than try to grab winks while rocking through the Midwest countryside.

  The Yankees gathered at LaGuardia Field for the flight minus four players, including pitcher Red Ruffing and player-coach Frank Crosetti, who refused to fly (their train would then be delayed, and the quintet barely made it to Sportsman’s Park on time). At the airfield, the team boarded the Yankee Mainliner, a forty-four-seat, four-engine C-54 converted cargo plane contracted from United Air Lines. Mac made sure the beer flowed aboard the plane, distracting anyone with pteromerhanophobia.

  One could hardly blame Red and Crow for refusing to take to the air. Flying in 1946 was hardly for the faint of heart, and the nascent commercial aviation industry didn’t inspire much confidence. “Like many other youthful veterans of WWII, commercial aviation is having difficulty finding civilian attire to fit,” Alvin H. Goldstein wrote in St. Louis, the prewar industry center and Charles Lindbergh’s spiritual home.

  There was huge demand for flights, but a shortage of airworthy planes. The pace of refitting military aircraft for civilian use was painfully slow, and shortages plagued the airlines. Airfields were stacked with planes trying to land, but a lack of controllers often meant that planes spent as much time over the field waiting to land as they did on the journey itself. Only critical fuel situations hastened landings, and pilots often dumped gasoline en route to ensure an on-time arrival. Weather delays were endless, and a sizable percentage of commercial craft was unable to climb above the clouds to the smooth sailing in the stratosphere, subjecting paying customers to horrendous turbulence and frequent returns to the point of departure.