The Victory Season Read online

  The “Mound City,” so-called not for pitching rubbers but for the enormous Mississippi Indian temple and burial mounds that dominated the area when St. Louis was first settled, had seen explosive growth during the war. Rural whites and blacks alike came to town, attracted by factory work and cheap rents. The city was mainly populated by these blue-collar workers, who made up the majority of the fans that came out to watch the Cards.

  The “Gateway to the West” was a city of opportunity, attracting transients and tourists alike with the promise of frontier riches just over the horizon. Denizens were often people who originally had planned to merely stop over en route someplace else, and wound up staying. That trend accelerated during the war, and the city’s prosperity during the conflict emboldened city fathers to embark on a long-range plan to clear out the slums that had blighted the waterfront for years, in favor of a more modern urban center. Meanwhile, the docks had new bosses. In the summer of 1946, the papers were full of reports that the Kansas City mafia, disenchanted by the locals, had sent over some muscle to take control of the St. Louis gangland.

  Despite its reputation as a great baseball town, St. Louis fans could be a tough draw, living up to the state motto, “Show Me.” “The average Cardinal fan does not risk going down to the ball park unless Sam Breadon guarantees a no-hitter in advance and a diamond ring in every hot dog,” wrote one fan to the Post-Dispatch, explaining low turnout during the ’46 season. The Cards’ attendance numbers were not that bad—they drew 1,061,807 fans, good for seventh in the majors and nearly double from the year before. The small ballpark also held the numbers down. Still, given their perennial contention, there was a sense that the city had other things on its mind.

  Fortunately, Mary Ott made enough noise to offset the fans who stayed home.

  The most pressing concern that afternoon with Stan at first base and the Phillies in town was a musical number. Harry Walker, looking for any method to shake the team from its funk, recalled that back in the summer of ’42, the Cards rolled to a pennant after changing the pregame music from Kay Kyser’s version of “Jingle Jangle Jingle” to a goofy Spike Jones tune called “Pass the Biscuits, Mirandy.” Snag was, the copy belonging to team trainer Harrison Weaver (known far and wide as “Doc”) had disappeared from his record collection at some point during the war. Weaver trolled the St. Louis record shops for another, but came up empty. The lack of team unity built through song showed in a lackluster 5–2 loss to Philly, with Musial going hitless in his first game at his new position. “We sang and played music all the time,” recalls Schmidt. “We played for peanuts, all we had was singing!”

  Desperate, Weaver called the team doctor, Robert Hyland (unlike Weaver, a licensed physician), who arranged with a local radio station to press a new copy for the team. Thus sustained musically, the next day the Cards clobbered Philly 7–0, with Musial clocking a two-run homer in the third and adding an RBI single later on. He had found a new home in the infield, where he would later say he “didn’t want to play…I thought I would be there three or four days. I ended up playing there ten years.”

  Still, the Cardinals remained frustratingly inert. June had begun with a home sweep at the hands of the mediocre Giants, a three-game losing streak that had the Post-Dispatch calling the Cards “butter-fingered and inept.” Part of the trouble was that the team was riven into two disparate cliques. The “College Kids” drank soda pop and eschewed gambling and were a genial bunch that slouched toward intellectualism even though, despite the moniker, hardly any of them actually attended college. Their number included Marion, Walker, Pollet, and Brecheen among others. Save Walker, they were pals with Dyer, and did what they were told.

  The other group was the “Mean Bunch,” a two-fisted crew that drank heavily and played ruthless card games on train trips. Kurowski and Slaughter were the leaders of this group, whose numbers were dwindling with the sale of Cooper and Lanier’s departure. Still, the lack of chemistry in the clubhouse was palpable, and the press noticed without ever coming out and writing openly about it. (In Boston, the divisions would have been front-page news.) The only public notice of any rift was when several of the wives went to Dyer and insisted he ban the high-stakes card games, for their husbands were losing needed cash.

  Musial was above such high school divisions—he was well liked by everyone, and his good-natured midseason switch to an unfamiliar position underscored his devotion to the team. And, of course, he was crushing the ball, despite the distractions.

  The ultimate example of Musial’s talismanic role, not just for the Cards but across the National League, came on June 21. St. Louis had come to Ebbets Field feeling better about themselves thanks to a four-game sweep of their pigeons in Boston. That didn’t last, as Brooklyn took two of three. It was hardly Musial’s fault, however. He went 4–5 in the opener, including a double and a triple, then singled three times in Game Two.

  As Musial came to the plate for the first time in the rubber game, the Brooklyn faithful began to murmur. A chant started to break out in parts of the crowd. “Here comes that man,” it sounded like to Post-Dispatch writer Bob Broeg, who checked with the traveling secretary, Ward, to confirm it. Ward said it sounded to him more like “Here comes the man.”

  And when Broeg wrote it that way in the Post-Dispatch the next day, voilà! A nickname for the ages was born. “Not that man, but THE man,” wrote Broeg. “And the nickname so aptly applied to a self-effacing player, one who lacks the color and cantankerous individuality of a Ted Williams, summarized the around-the-league regard for Musial, unquestionably THE man in the Redbirds’ race to the wire against the Dodgers.” His previous nickname, “the Donora Greyhound,” was instantly forgotten. “Stash” was still preferred among intimates, however.

  The sound of the Ebbets Field fans chanting for an opponent must have struck a chord within Durocher, for he had the Man walked intentionally on two of his four trips to the plate. Joe Hatten outpitched Brecheen, and Brooklyn ended the day 2½ games up on their rivals to the west.

  The Cards went into a tailspin after that, losing six of nine. Clearly, Doc Weaver’s patented “Triple-Double-Inverted Whammy,” a goofy hand signal he used to “confound opponents since 1942,” as he said, wasn’t working its intended magic. Apparently, some of the Redbirds were having trouble with sign language. As the fireworks exploded over Sportsman’s Park after a Fourth of July doubleheader split with the Cubs, St. Louis trailed Brooklyn by seven full games. It was a time-honored shibboleth in baseball that the leader on Independence Day would capture the pennant. Tradition and Leo Durocher were against St. Louis, and the combination was looking rather fearsome.

  As if that wasn’t bad enough news, St. Loo was struggling through a “hot dry summer,” thanks to a major cut in production by local breweries. Scarce grains like hops and barley needed to be preserved for the starving masses facing famine in Europe, so the city recognized everywhere as “First in Brews” had to give its collective liver a break. “Millions will die unless we eat and drink less,” Truman told the nation. Customers had camped out in the spring when the news was announced, to snap up the limited supply.

  Those prescient few now turned to their cache to boost them through what was turning into a depressing summer on the Mississippi.

  Chapter 22

  “Bullseye!”

  On June 9, Ted Williams made a lasting impression on his home park, and on at least one fan in attendance that Sunday. After helping beat Detroit in the first game of a doubleheader, Williams came up in the first inning of the nightcap with a man aboard. Fred Hutchinson, a burly man who once outwrestled a bear in spring training, tried to get cute, throwing Ted a changeup. “I saw it coming,” Williams remembered with crystal clarity decades later. “I picked it up fast and I just whaled into it.”

  Despite a strong headwind, the ball shot out of the yard as though hurled from the big guns of a battleship. It flew well over the visitors’ bullpen and far up the right field bleachers, landing on Seat
21, Row 37, Section 42. More accurately, it landed on the head of the occupant of Seat 21, Row 37, Section 42, a man named Joseph A. Boucher. Boucher lost the ball in the sun, and only reacquired it when it crashed through his fancy lid and ricocheted a few rows away.

  Boucher was a construction engineer from Albany, New York, who loved the Sox and kept an apartment on Commonwealth Avenue for when his work brought him to Boston and gave him a chance to see his team. Thirty rows deep in the bleachers, a distance later measured by the team at 502 feet from home plate, he figured he was safe from getting conked by a batted ball. He was wrong.

  “How far away must one sit to be safe in this park?” he complained to the Globe afterward. “I wish I would get hit by a home run,” whispered a child who sat nearby. The paper ran a page-one photo the next day of Boucher holding his hat, a finger stuck through the hole. “Bullseye!” read the caption. Boston went on to win 11–6 and sweep the doubleheader.

  Much later, the Sox would paint Seat 21, Row 37, Section 42 bright red, forever marking the spot of Ted’s epic clout.

  Williams has often been called the “greatest hitter who ever lived,” a distinction that underlines his exceptional stats at the bat while nodding at the fact that he was an indifferent fielder, a clumsy base runner, and an exhausting teammate. He surely could rake, though, and that was all that mattered to him. In Bob Feller’s deathless phrase, “trying to get a fastball by him was like trying to get a sunbeam by a rooster.” Feller and Williams were close friends, two iconoclasts who recognized each other’s prickly genius.

  “Ted and I visited all the time,” Rapid Robert remembered, “especially before ballgames in Fenway Park, where it was easy to meet between the clubhouse on the runway there under the grandstand.” Williams thought Feller “the fastest and best pitcher I ever saw during my career.” Warren Spahn wasn’t so close with the Splinter, but would watch Ted watching him. “I mean, he studied ’em,” Spahn said of hurlers. “He’d sit in that dugout with his hat pulled down over his face, looking out of the little holes in the top of his cap, blocking out everything else so he could focus just on the pitcher. That was his way of getting an idea if the guy threw a fastball, a curve, whatever. He was a great hitter with a keen eye.”

  His relations with the fans were far more contentious than they should have been, given his new war-induced attitude, not to mention his extreme success at the plate, especially at home, where he hit some thirty points higher over his career. But they failed to embrace their chilly, flawed superstar, and the lack of complete devotion set up a feedback loop, where Ted would go out of his way not to acknowledge or forgive the fans, despite the relative sweetness with which he’d begun the season. “I wanted to lift my cap to their applause,” he admitted late in his career. “For some reason, I couldn’t do it. And I knew it was wrong.” He was a misunderstood genius—the fans thought him egotistical when Ted, by his own description later in life, carried a huge inferiority complex with him to the ballpark every day.

  Williams seldom let his standing among the Hub’s fan base affect his hitting, and thus far he had been dominating the American League. Cronin told the Sporting News that Ted was hitting the ball “as hard as anyone ever hit it. Yes, as hard as Babe Ruth.” The rest of the Sox were matching the pace set by their slugger. Boston was an unstoppable offensive force through the season’s first three months. The team scored 408 runs by the end of June; only two others even cracked 300. Bosox hitters were 1-2-3 in runs scored and RBIs, 1-2-4 in hits. Rudy York, the new Sox first baseman, alone powered 6 homers and 18 RBIs in June, ensuring a warm welcome from the Fenway faithful.

  The team added another newcomer that summer. The offense’s lone flaw was the lack of a pure leadoff hitter, so when the White Sox waived outfielder Wally Moses, the “other Sox” snapped him up. “Words can’t express my happiness,” Moses said about leaving the sad-sack Chisox for a team apparently racing to the pennant. “I’m glad to get my nose out of the mud.” A bad shoulder kept Moses out of the service, but his brother wasn’t so lucky. Harry Moses was a pilot in the Eighth Air Force, and he was interned in a German POW camp for twenty months after being shot down.

  Moses was a gentle soul, one who seldom raised his voice, much less got into trouble on the field. But while still in Chicago, he had been thrown out of a game by umpire Red Jones. Wally could take some comfort in the fact that he was one of fourteen Chisox ejected. Jones warned a Chicago pitcher not to throw at Williams, and the Chisox dugout responded with catcalls. Jones ambled over and cleared out the lot of them. “Red, I’ve been in the big leagues 11 years,” Moses pleaded. “I’ve never been thrown out of a game in my life. Honest to Pete, I never said a word to you on the bench. I was way over in the corner.” Jones responded, “Wally, it’s just like a raid on a whorehouse. The good go with the bad.”

  Boston led the Yankees by eight games after the Williams blast off Joseph Boucher’s head, with an incredible 39–9 record. The New York press was suitably awed. “Cruel mothers are wont to scare little children by merely mentioning the Sox,” wrote Arthur Daley in the Times. A few days later, seven hundred fans declared the race over and done with and applied for World Series tickets. Aghast at the presumption, the team refused them and banned the word “pennant” from Fenway Park until matters were clinched.

  Meanwhile, the Sox ran ads in the Boston papers obliquely poking fun at the hucksterism going on in the Bronx under MacPhail’s watch. “We Have Nothing To Sell But Baseball” was the tagline. Behind the scenes, however, Yawkey was huddling with his New York counterpart, brainstorming ways to keep their cash register ringing without cutting into profits or paying the players more.

  The Yankees were on their second manager of the season, en route to three, a Steinbrenner-esque total that doomed the team to failure. Joe McCarthy had turned more and more to whiskey to get him through his hatred for MacPhail, and by late May, he had deteriorated badly, thanks to the team’s mistake-strewn play and the sense that nothing he did would help the team against the machine from Boston. On May 23, the team boarded the Yankee Mainliner for a trip from Cleveland to Detroit. McCarthy was hitting the bottle hard and took out his frustration on a familiar target, pitcher Joe Page.

  Page was a free-living, free-spending son of a Pennsylvania coal miner who inherited the old man’s habit of spending whatever cash happened to find its way into his pocket as soon as possible. McCarthy would scream at Page that he was throwing his career down the toilet, a bit of hypocrisy given the fact McCarthy himself could often be found sipping at his omnipresent fifth of White Horse and plotting an exit from the Bronx.

  On the flight to the Motor City, manager corralled player by slipping into the aisle seat next to Page and putting his leg up on the seat in front to lock him in, a maneuver that, given the Yanks’ pioneering of regular flights on road trips, has to be considered another innovation by the Hall of Fame skipper.

  McCarthy tapped Page on the arm. “You’re going to sit and listen to what I have to say,” McCarthy said. “What the devil’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing,” Page responded.

  “When are you gonna settle down and start pitching? How long do you think you can get away with this?”

  “Get away with what?” Page asked angrily. “I’m not trying to get away with anything. I’m doing the best I can. What do you want outta me?”

  McCarthy began shouting so that he was audible over the plane’s engines. The other players and the press, embarrassed, tried to act as if they weren’t listening and nothing unusual was happening. “Who the hell do you think you’re kidding?” McCarthy shouted, his Irish temper at the boiling point. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to send you back to Newark, and you can make four hundred dollars a month for all I care.”

  Page wasn’t one to be shaken by that sort of threat. “That’s okay with me,” he said. “You wanna send me to Newark, send me to Newark. Maybe I’ll be happier there.”

  Page’s
refusal to tremble at the hole card in any manager’s deck—shaping up a bad apple by putting his job at risk—was the final straw. McCarthy stopped off at his hotel room for a brief respite, then flew home to Tonawanda, New York, and embarked on an epic bender. He managed to telephone MacPhail at some point the next day and resign. The Yankees publicly chalked it up to “hypertension.”

  Bill Dickey was named the player-manager, the first man other than McCarthy to lead the Yankees since 1931. The “Man Nobody Knows,” so-called because of his bland personality, took over as top kick on May 28, which also happened to be the first night game ever played at Yankee Stadium. It was the pièce de résistance in MacPhail’s agenda to boost attendance. Night ball had been banned during the war due to blackout conditions, but now that peacetime was here, the man who had brought artificial lights to the summer game was sure as hell going to bring night ball to the sport’s grandest arena. The main grandstand featured six new light towers, with a total of 1,409 reflectors, all of a new design that MacPhail himself had overseen. Each reflector had a 1,500-watt lamp. The next brightest park, Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, had 864 reflectors.

  It was a frigid night, cold and windy, the chill barely alleviated by the intense bright lights shining down from the rim of the Stadium. “Baseball’s nocturnal trailblazer…overdid the thing a trifle,” reported the Times. The intense wattage from the lights made the players feel like ants under a magnifying glass. It was as good an excuse as any for the 2–1 loss to the lowly Senators.