The Victory Season Page 2

  Among the hopefuls were the established players who had been away two or three years and wondered if they still had the skills required for the majors. There were all the rookies who were on the cusp of the show when they’d been called up to the service rather than the bigs. And there were the wartime replacements who were out to prove they belonged in the postwar game. The hustle and double-timing on the spring fields was noticeable. “In the old days,” wrote Time, “if a player got his sweat shirt damp by working too hard, it usually took him a leisurely hour in the clubhouse to change; now the men were back on the field in five minutes.”

  As if the times weren’t strange enough, there too was the most irascible diva in baseball—“the skinny slugger with the cucumber build and the red pepper personality,” as United Press described him once—all smiles and handshakes down in Sarasota, where the Boston Red Sox held spring training.

  The 1946 season would be, in many ways, defined by Ted Williams. His ability to return to the major leagues after three long years away from the game was the sport’s number one talking point that spring. Once the season began, every high and low moment the “Splendid Splinter” encountered would be refracted through the mirror of his wartime experience, his emotional maturity (or his inexplicable lack thereof) attributed to the time spent in the service of his country.

  Ted had gone through a PR nightmare over his draft status in 1942. Before the season, he had claimed he was the sole supporter of his divorced mother in San Diego, which got him reclassified from 1-A status. For that, the press painted him as an unpatriotic coward, hounding him relentlessly, and the fans in Boston let their displeasure be known, as did Quaker Oats, which pulled its $4,000 endorsement contract. Finally, Williams enlisted in May, though he wouldn’t have to report until the end of the ’42 season. In retrospect, the treatment seems harsh, even by the standards of a Boston press corps and fan base that treated Ted as its whipping boy. But the war was going against the Allies on all fronts in 1942, and the picture of a star ballplayer refusing immediate service was bad optics. This was especially true when compared to the early enlistments of stars like Hank Greenberg and Bob Feller.

  When Williams reported in the fall for duty with the navy (“my gal thinks I look sweet in Navy blue” was how he explained his choice of branch), he wanted to fly. Charles Lindbergh had spent much of his early days on the forefront of aviation in San Diego and he was Ted’s first hero. Williams knew the mathematics of the job would be a challenge, but he preferred that to some “soft berth teaching gymnastics.” Attacking the fine art of combat flying as he had the demanding ritual of hitting a baseball, he excelled, earning a 3.85 GPA in pilot training classes and working his way up to instructor status.

  “He made the transition from civilian life to the service amazingly well,” said fellow navy serviceman and ballplayer Johnny Sain, a pitcher for the crosstown Boston Braves, after the war. “What I noted chiefly about him as an airman was that he was never satisfied with himself. Ted was always trying to improve his technique. I imagine that is what makes him such a great hitter.”

  He got his wings as a marine aviator on May 2, 1944, and married “his gal,” Doris Soule, the same day. He spent the war teaching newbies how to master the SNJ, the main navy training warplane. “Ted could make a plane and its six machine guns play like a symphony orchestra,” remembered fellow aviator and Red Sox teammate Johnny Pesky. Williams had over a thousand hours in the air by then, and though he was en route to the Pacific when the Japanese surrendered, he would see plenty of combat a few years later when he left baseball for a second time to fly missions over Korea.

  Williams played a little ball during his time away from the majors. He hit a bit with the Chapel Hill “Cloudbusters” while training in North Carolina (a fellow trainee named George H. W. Bush saw him play there). He and Babe Ruth took part in exhibitions at Fenway to raise money for the war effort. And he played on the Hawaiian Islands while awaiting combat orders that never came. Howard Alley, a fellow navy aviator based at Pearl Harbor, remembered that Williams was “aloof” while there, and certainly that had been his prewar reputation.

  When it came time to return to his peacetime vocation, the self-described “Best Damn Hitter That Ever Lived” was worried that the cruddy wartime baseball itself would affect his hitting. He could tell, even from afar, that the ball being used in the major leagues while war raged was terrible for hitting, mainly due to the ersatz rubber used in the core. The real thing was too valuable to go to baseballs, but the replacement was dead. “Wouldn’t it be something to grab the East Indies back from the Japs and get that good rubber again?” he mused in 1943. “Give the ‘balata’ [the name of the substitute ball] to the Japs, I say.”

  The East Indies were back in friendly hands, but the rubber was still scarce. And, as spring training began in Sarasota, Williams was walking into a great unknown. Like Muhammad Ali a generation later, Ted was a consummate athlete who had missed several years of prime performance due to war, albeit for far different reasons than Ali. As great a hitter as Ted was, would he really be able to simply stroll back into a ballpark and start walloping major league pitching once again?

  Why, yes, as it turned out. He sure as hell could. On his very first swing in Sarasota, he launched a towering home run to right field. Still, during the spring, Williams wasn’t convinced of his ability to regain his prewar excellence. “My legs are in bad shape and my arm is still sore,” he complained to the Sporting News. “It stands to reason a fellow is not going to improve by remaining out of the game for three years. And now I come back, and I’m hitting against pitchers I’ve never seen before, and I don’t know what they throw.” But confidence bordering on arrogance was a key part of his athletic makeup; inwardly, Ted knew he’d always be able to hit. As such, Williams placed a series of bets regarding his 1946 performance with a buddy on the Tigers, Dick Wakefield. Commissioner Happy Chandler ordered the players to call off the wagers, but the bets spoke to Williams’s faith in his ability to rake.

  Before Ted reported to camp, a friend had dared Williams to show up at the ballpark in street clothes and demand a chance to try out. He responded, “No, they’d say I was screwy again,” and said it would be all dignity from there on out.

  This was the “Mature Williams,” a grown man now supposedly made whole by his wartime experience, even though he hadn’t faced live fire. The spring was free of the usual Teddy Tempest—the cruel and foul language directed at fans, the bat tossing when he didn’t get a hit, and the endless battling with his foes in the press, the “human crows who perch on the rim of the ballpark and make typographical errors,” as Austen Lake of the Boston American described his fellow writers, as Ted saw them. He ran hard after every fly ball, and accepted making outs at the plate with equanimity. His teammates orbited him, sucked in by his personable gravity. The writers were astounded—and, it should be noted, impressed. While some wondered openly just how long this “New Ted” could possibly last, most were eager to accept the idea that Williams could be great and take pleasure in his work at the same time, that he had gone to war and emerged with a new perspective on this silly game.

  The Sox were managed by Joe Cronin, a former star shortstop who had been Boston owner Tom Yawkey’s prized purchase, for a then-staggering $275,000, in 1935. A towering figure in the game’s history, Cronin was a longtime player-manager, leading the Washington Senators to the 1933 championship in that role, and later going on to serve as GM of the Sox and president of the American League. Cro was a popular Irishman in a Gaelic-tinged city, and admirers lavished gifts upon him for years—he received more Irish setters than he could possibly house. But the Sox underachieved on his watch, and the fans turned on him. Cronin got the “groundball jitters,” becoming error-prone in the field. He started to kneel in front of grounders rather than stay on his feet, a habit that came to be called the “$275,000 Squat.” He became a subject of derision. “If you’re gonna miss ’em, miss ’em like a big leaguer!
” was the catcall from fans and enemy dugouts. His jovial personality took a maudlin turn. Cro’s wife once showed a visitor around their house. “This is Joe’s Crying Room,” she said, pointing to a bedroom. “He’s used it a lot this summer.”

  But Yawkey worshipped Cronin, and felt vested in him, so he kept him on as manager after the player part of the hyphenate fell away. In that role, too, he had been subpar. “His big chin was a breakwater for complaint,” wrote Harold Kaese in the Saturday Evening Post. It was a line from a long piece entitled “What’s the Matter with the Red Sox?,” a several-thousand-word opus that exploded upon the placidity of spring training like a hand grenade.

  Kaese was a beat reporter for the Boston Globe, and he spent most of his time baiting Williams, Cronin, and Yawkey for good copy. Williams pointed to a line Kaese wrote as the sparking incident for his poor relationship with the Boston writers. In 1939, Ted’s parents had separated, and he decided not to go home to San Diego after the season, as it would have been rather painful. He sent his mother a large chunk of his paycheck and stayed in Boston. The next time Williams displeased Kaese in some manner, the Globe reporter wrote, “Well, what do you expect from a guy who won’t even go see his mother in the off season.”

  In the Saturday Evening Post, Kaese unloaded on the whole organization, blaming Yawkey for spending money recklessly and unwisely. “He is stubborn, wealthy, and loyal,” Kaese wrote. He also painted a memorable portrait of Cronin as an overmatched skipper who couldn’t make the transition to the dugout. He was what we would call today a “player’s manager”—his team loved him, but he was seen as missing the icy unfriendliness thought necessary to win in pro sports. Kaese quoted the great former Bosox slugger Jimmie Foxx as saying Cronin didn’t know what he was doing, a message that put Cro squarely on the hot seat, especially with the stars back in the fold.

  Cro was from San Francisco and was thought to favor West Coasters when making his lineup. With Williams and his center fielder, Dom DiMaggio, it was an excusable bias. Dommie, aka “the Little Professor,” was charming and bubbly, a far cry from his famously remote older brother.

  A catchy song parody of the day went—

  Who’s better than his brother Joe?

  Dom-i-nic Di-Mag-gi-o

  —and while that may not have been accurate, Dommie certainly wasn’t coasting by on his surname. An excellent fielder and the fastest player on the team, DiMaggio was a key piston in the Sox engine.

  Dommie was the youngest of nine DiMaggios born to Giuseppe and Rosalie, and like his brothers Joe and Vince, Dom gravitated toward baseball over the protests of his fisherman father, an immigrant who thought the game frivolous. They grew up in the North Beach section of San Francisco, with the whiff of the Pacific filling their nostrils when the strong winds off the bay ceased. Dom was a wee lad, myopic and brainy enough to fancy a career in chemical engineering before the crack of the bat turned his head. He starred as a pitcher and shortstop at Galileo High School, and was snapped up by the San Francisco Seals, the Pacific Coast League team that had launched his brothers to the majors.

  Dommie quieted the cynics who felt he had been signed for his name alone by excelling in the PCL, despite the thick glasses he wore on the field. He was the MVP of the league in 1939. The Red Sox bought him for $75,000 after the season. DiMaggio was an All-Star by his second season, having earned the nickname “the Little Professor” for his studious mien and his 168 pounds (at 5'9"). The youngest DiMaggio had an exceptional 1942 campaign, despite the fact that his attention was mainly focused on gaining entry into the service. “I had to fight my way into the Navy,” said DiMaggio. “They rejected me because of my eyesight, and for the longest time, I told them I wanted to be in the Navy. I was not about to sit out the war.” He was 4-F, but through persistent wheedling managed to enlist despite his classification. The navy wouldn’t put Dom in harm’s way, but recognized his value in terms of propaganda and baseball. He played for the powerful Norfolk Naval Training Station nine, as well as on foreign diamonds across the Pacific.

  DiMaggio was a potent hitter, but it was in center field that he truly shined, covering huge swaths of terrain with the same effortless grace as Joe, with an even stronger arm. He played extremely shallow, causing enemy fans to snicker when a liner was smacked over his head. But Dommie would race toward a predetermined spot on the grass, turn his head, and uncannily snare the ball at shoulder level. Unlike most outfielders, Dom would crouch sideways before the pitch, “with my left foot facing the plate and my right foot parallel to the center field,” he explained to Baseball Digest, adopting a stance that resembled a runner anticipating the starter’s pistol. It gave him an advantage getting to bloop hits and grounders as well as balls hit over his head. “I’ve never seen anybody else do that before or since,” said Charlie Silvera, a catcher on the Yankees in the 1940s and ’50s. “He played more like an infielder in the outfield,” remembered Sox second baseman Bobby Doerr.

  Williams was more than happy to let the swift gloveman to his left handle the majority of the balls hit their way. “The wolves in left field were always yelling about how Dom was playing his position and mine,” Ted wrote in his memoir, My Turn at Bat. He left little doubt about how he regarded his outfield neighbor when it came time to pen a foreword for Dom’s own memoir, Real Grass, Real Heroes. “There is no finer person on earth than Dom DiMaggio,” Ted wrote.

  Dom’s relationship with the game’s other moody superstar was more fraught. He and Joe alternated brotherly love with sibling rivalry, and Dom struggled to escape the Yankee Clipper’s considerable shadow. “It’s been a struggle all my life.…I was always Joe’s kid brother,” he admitted to the Globe, and he refused to let his two sons get into baseball, to spare them the comparisons to their uncle. But later in life, long after the spotlight faded, Dom became a fierce protector of his brother.

  Two other key members of the Sox hailed from the left coast: Oregonian shortstop Johnny Pesky and second baseman Bobby Doerr of California. “Doerr, not Williams, is the key to the Boston offense,” opined no less an expert on the game than Babe Ruth, and indeed, Doerr was the best combination of batting average and power at his position in the game. Pesky was just that, a slap hitter who excelled at getting on base and scoring runs.

  Third base, catcher, and right field would be platoon positions, as Cronin had several players of varying abilities to fill those slots. The lack of definition at so many positions was the usual reason cited by prognosticators who picked Boston to finish below perennial favorite New York and Detroit in the standings. In Sarasota, Cronin himself joked about heading over to nearby Ringling Brothers to see if they had trained seals he could use in right and behind the plate.

  The other regular was a newcomer to Boston, “part first baseman, part Cherokee” Rudy York. He had come over from the Tigers with a reputation for hitting the ball nine miles, and hitting the bottle just as hard. York heard all manner of un-PC cracks from fans and rival players, even in the mainstream press. “York reputedly has been heap big troublesome when heap full of fire water down through the years, but he is one of Boston’s most highly esteemed citizens,” was Lawton Carver of the International News Service’s idea of a compliment.

  York managed to miss military service thanks to good fortune and bad knees. He was one of the baker’s dozen of players to appear in the opening-day lineup for each of the war years. York had a deep gravelly voice, as if he were sick all the time. When he spoke in the clubhouse, that low timbre gave his message greater impact.

  York would be an important veteran voice in Boston, as well as another big bat, though he could be his own worst enemy. As if to seek out the danger that he had avoided during the war, York had a terrible habit of getting soused and falling asleep holding lit cigarettes, thus starting blazes in hotel rooms. As Sox reserve Eddie Pellagrini put it, “One year with Detroit [York] led the league in homers and RBIs. One year with us he led the league in fires.”

  Boston’s pitching
staff was considered the team’s weak link. Dave “Boo” Ferriss had won twenty-five games in 1945, but that was written off as considerably aided by the weak wartime competition. Only twenty-four, he was still a rather unknown commodity, though he had just signed to an endorsement contract with Gillette—“Use Gillette Blue Blades—5 for 25 cents,” he advised shavers across the country. Tex Hughson, a big rawboned slab of beef, had also dominated wartime hitters, then missed the 1945 season when the army changed its policy to begin calling up fathers over the age of twenty-five. He was a nonstop talker, with a country patois that bordered on the inscrutable. Generally, Tex worked blue, favoring constructions like, “He couldn’t look more like you if you had pulled him out of your asshole with a chain.”

  Mickey Harris, Joe Dobson, and Jim Bagby filled out the staff. They would be backed up in the bullpen by a tall, lanky pitcher, whose first words upon arriving in Sarasota were, “Which way is right field? I’ve been away so long that I’ve almost forgotten.”

  Earl Johnson had landed at Normandy with the 30th Infantry Division and fought across Fortress Europe. “We were a replacement unit,” Johnson told the Providence Journal after he returned from the war. “The wreckage [on Omaha Beach] was still there, the burned-out tanks and half-sunken ships and assault boats that were just so much twisted steel.” Johnson was a rifle platoon sergeant, and on several occasions, he came across scores of dead bodies, from both sides of the fight. He also witnessed the immediate aftermath of the infamous Malmedy Massacre in Belgium, where the Nazis executed nearly a hundred American prisoners of war during the Battle of the Bulge.

  Johnson received a Bronze Star for retrieving a truck filled with vital radio equipment back from enemy territory, and got clusters added to it when he hopped aboard a tank, drove through a minefield, and wiped out a German machine gun unit that had his men pinned down. Johnson added the Silver Star for bravery under fire during the Battle of the Bulge. But his war stories were mostly self-deprecating. He liked to tell a story about a time his unit was under attack from German armor. He tossed a couple of hand grenades, which missed badly. A kid in his platoon who had never so much as held a baseball tried next and scored a direct hit, destroying the innards of a German tank. “If only I had that kid’s control,” he would say wistfully.