The Victory Season Page 21

  The Hall of Fame catcher-turned-manager also ended up running afoul of MacPhail. Dickey led the team to a respectable 57–48 record, and as the season waned, he wanted his future status made clear by the team. When Mac refused to commit to Dickey, he too quit, leaving coach Johnny Neun to finish out the final fourteen games of the depressing season in the Bronx. “I have no hard feelings about not managing,” Dickey said on his way out the door. “I didn’t enjoy it.”

  The Yankee Clipper wasn’t enjoying much about his 1946 experience, either. Like McCarthy, the “New DiMaggio” went AWOL in late spring, thanks largely to another twist in his relationship with Dorothy Arnold. She had gone back to the man she was promenading with after the divorce, a wealthy stockbroker named George Schubert. The couple lived it up in a suite at the Waldorf while the Clipper slept in stony solitude at the Edison Hotel, a relative flophouse. At least he had lodging, unlike so many others. The likable guy who went out of his way to please was replaced by the familiar surly, monotone Joe D. the New York press knew from before the war.

  Joe’s dourness only increased on July 7, the final day before the All-Star break. DiMaggio wrenched his knee sliding during a game in Philadelphia. He would miss about a month of action, which erased any hopes of a Yankees rally in the second half of the season. It wasn’t like Joe was so dominant at the plate—when he went out, he was hitting just .271, albeit with 17 homers and 56 RBIs. He was named to the All-Star Game, of course—he would’ve had to have been lost at sea not to be named to the Midsummer Classic—but he couldn’t play, and thus didn’t make the trip to Boston.

  No one else dreamed of missing it.

  Chapter 23

  All Things Eephus

  It was hard not to laugh. The pitcher looked so goofy, the ball lobbed so high, up to twenty-five feet in the air. It didn’t cross the plate so much as plop down on top of it. Umpires were as confused as batters. If the hitter dared swing, he was made to look foolish, often winding up on the seat of his pants.

  Truett “Rip” Sewell may have been a behind-the-scenes force in torpedoing the nascent labor movement, but he had a clownish public persona that was defined by this mortar shell of a pitch. It was known as the “eephus” pitch, so named by teammate (and 71st Division Red Circler) Maurice Van Robays, who posited that “an eephus ain’t nuthin’ and neither is that pitch.” Perhaps not, but it served Rip well enough to wrangle him an invite to baseball’s best party.

  The thirteenth All-Star Game was fittingly played at Fenway Park on July 9. Williams was the unofficial host. There had been no 1945 contest, due to wartime travel restrictions, and of course many of the stars had been away for two or three All-Star Games. Everyone missed the Midsummer Classic. Many of the players had not seen one another in years, and the sibilant whack of backs being slapped in joyous greeting filled the Olde Towne.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more festive occasion,” remembered Phillies All-Star Frank McCormick, who was 4-F thanks to a back injury sustained when he attempted a one-and-a-half gainer into a hotel pool. “Guys who hadn’t seen one another in years were crossing back and forth before the game to shake hands and visit. It was great.”

  A fan who was at the Fens for the game, Virginia Hanley, remembered the atmosphere to the Melrose (MA) Mirror in 1999:

  Everyone was in a relaxed, happy mood. We had won the war and most of our favorite players had come home safely. The men in the stands had fought in the same battles as the athletes and shared memories that they never spoke of to us “civilians.” There was a strong feeling of togetherness in the crowd, both on and off the field.

  The 1946 All-Star Game was special in many respects. One was the fact that, save for spring training, this was the first time Williams and Musial had ever been on the same field—at least on the mainland. The two great batsmen had missed each other in previous All-Star Games, with Musial not making the 1942 NL side and Williams being in the service when Stan made his first All-Star team the next year. But the two had competed in the Navy World Series in September 1945, six games held at Furlong Field in Hawaii for the pleasure of sailors and marines based there. Musial’s NL stars got the best of Williams’s AL crew, winning four of the six.

  The All-Star Game at Fenway would be the first “real” showdown of the year between the Kid and the Man.

  On the train to Boston for the game, Rip Sewell sat with Marty Marion and Terry Moore, and, perhaps feeling guilty over his role in smothering Murphy’s union efforts in the crib, helped the Cardinals draw up a rudimentary pension plan, one that they hoped to unveil to the owners later that summer. Doc Weaver, the Cards trainer, was along for the ride too, and he helped with the details as well. Marion’s back was so bad that Weaver was forced to room with his ailing shortstop on the road, and give him plenty of rubdowns and stretches. His proximity to Marion and his fondness for his charges got Weaver interested in helping them post-baseball as well, and so he got involved in Marion’s pet project.

  Rip was a longtime minor leaguer who appeared to end his career when he shot himself in the foot while hunting before the 1941 season. After recovering, he developed a lob delivery to augment his diminished fastball, and fattened up on weakened wartime opposition. He won seventeen, twenty-one, and twenty-one games from 1942–44, but his inclusion on the ’46 All-Star team smacked of vaudeville. He was 5–5 at the break, was nursing an elbow injury, and was included mainly because NL manager Charlie Grimm needed another pitcher and it was thought Rip might elicit a few guffaws with the eephus.

  Indeed, the game was a laugher. The American League had won eight of the twelve All-Star Games played to that point, and would dominate the rest of the ’40s. True to form, the AL romped. Charlie “King Kong” Keller of the Yankees hit a two-run homer in the first off Claude Passeau, scoring Ted, who had walked. In the fourth, Kirby Higbe came in to face Williams. He threw a knuckleball that Ted walloped to dead center for a monstrous homer, one that had the crowd screaming for several minutes. Ol’ Hig would forever maintain that the Splinter had “hit a pop up that the wind carried out of the yard.” Williams singled in a run in the fifth as the AL extended to a 6–0 lead, and singled and scored in the seventh as well.

  It was 9–0 in the eighth when Sewell came in to pitch. Grimm asked him to “throw that blooper pitch and see if you can wake up this crowd.” Throwing a few eephi to go with a batting-practice fastball, Sewell gave up a run and let two men reach with two out. That brought Williams to the plate, and the remainder of the 34,906 who had bothered to stay to the end roused. The eephus was considered many things, including home-run proof. The Best Damn Hitter Anyone Ever Saw was about to test that theorem.

  Williams didn’t want any part of the circus and was shaking his head to say, “Don’t do it.” Sewell nodded right back—“Yes, I am.” Sewell started right off with an eephus that Williams fouled off at the plate. Then a fastball that traveled about 80 mph tangled Ted up almost as badly, and he took it for strike two. Another eephus landed well wide of the dish.

  The fourth pitch was what Sewell described as a “Sunday Super Dooper Blooper.” “It was amazing how high Sewell threw it up in the air,” Doerr recalled much later. “It came straight down on you.” Williams had the pitch measured by now, though, and it looked more sumptuous than any meatball served up in the North End. He hopped forward a few steps to meet the arcing ball. In truth he stepped out of the batter’s box, technically nullifying what came next, but no one gave a hoot.

  That’s because Williams sent the eephus hurtling over the right field wall and into the bullpen for a three-run homer. The screaming from the fans carried as far as the North Maine woods. Ted had parked the eephus! The un-homer-able pitch, homered. “I guess if anyone would hit it out, it would be Ted,” said Doerr. “Don’t you wish you could hit like that?” Williams asked Marion with a smile as he rounded the bases.

  The final score was 12–0, Americans. Feller, Newhouser, and Jack Kramer of the Browns had combined for a three-hitter
. The Senior Circuit was humiliated, and in the wake of the blowout, Breadon huddled with NL president Ford Frick for an emergency summit. The two discussed one of two options—going all-out to win, fan showcase be damned, or dropping out of the game altogether. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, and the exhibition nature of the contest went on until 2003, when it was decided that home-field advantage in the World Series would go to the league that won the All-Star Game.

  After the break, the Sox swept the Tigers, then welcomed Cleveland to Fenway for a Sunday doubleheader on July 14. In the opener, Boston fell behind 5–0 and 10–7 but came back to win 11–10. Williams hit 3 home runs, including a 3-run bomb in the bottom of the eighth to win it, to go with 8 RBIs, an exceptional week for most hitters.

  Cleveland’s manager, Lou Boudreau, was also its starting shortstop. He had had a pretty good game at the plate himself, hitting four doubles and a homer, setting a record for extra-base hits in a game. But he was best known for being a smart and slick fielder, one of the best gloves of the era. Boudreau was also a canny strategist, and he spent some time before the nightcap brainstorming some way of stopping Ted defensively. Short of putting five guys in the right field stands, there had to be a way of at least cooling him off.

  Most teams took to walking Williams. He took a free pass more often in 1946 than anyone had in history to that point, except Babe Ruth in 1923. As Arch Ward put it, “Williams walks so much Joe Cronin has to slip carfare into Teddy’s uniform pocket before every game.”

  But Boudreau had something more interesting in mind. He placed the left side of his infield, himself and third baseman Ken Keltner, on the right side, while also shifting the outfield around to right, “further to starboard than even Westbrook Pegler,” wrote Red Smith. The “Williams Shift” was born. “On July 14, French-blooded Lou Boudreau, playing manager of the Cleveland Indians, celebrated a baseball Bastille Day by trying to guillotine the league-leading Red Sox’s mighty Ted Williams,” wrote Life.

  It wasn’t the first time a lefty slugger had seen such an alignment. Indeed, two other fellows named Williams—Ken and Cy—had seen shifts back in the early ’20s. Ted smiled at the stratagem, and then pounded a double off the right field wall. He also walked twice in the game, another Sox win that put the team ahead by eleven full games in the AL race. He wasn’t satisfied, however. “I wanted to hit a homer in the worst way so I could tell Boudreau, ‘you put them in the right position all right, Lou, but you should have had taller men.’”

  This iteration didn’t get off to much of a start. But the Williams Shift had a curious effect on Ted. Other teams started employing it, and Williams steadfastly refused to bunt or slap balls to the gaping green in left for the easy hit. Hitting, of course, was his religion, and he was not about to change faiths because of some wacky defensive alignment. Changing course would just mess him up, he reasoned.

  The shift mainly gave the Boston press another club with which to beat Ted for his supposed egocentricity. A team player would take the gift base for the good of the club. Williams clearly preferred to do what was best for Williams instead. His harshest critic, Dave “the Colonel” Egan, wrote in the Boston Record that the shift wasn’t “a compliment to the hitting greatness of Williams. It is a sneer at his inability to hit successfully, except to one particular part of the lawn. It is a challenge, not to hit the ball where they are, but where they ain’t, and he has been pitifully unable to cope with that challenge.”

  Boston swept the Browns in a doubleheader on July 21 to cap an 11–2 home stand. Williams hit .469 during the stretch, with 4 homers and 18 RBIs. If that was “pitifully unable to cope,” then a competent Splinter would have truly destroyed the AL. As Boston prepared to head out on a long western swing, Ted was hitting .365 with 27 homers and 85 RBIs, leading the league in all three Triple Crown categories. His swing was locked in, a beautiful object to behold. The Sox were 65–25 at that point, 11½ games ahead of the Yankees. The Pinstripes had disappeared, and Detroit’s hitting star, Hank Greenberg, was suffering through a horrendous season. The race was essentially over before August.

  While Williams was dominating, Boston was hardly a one-man gang. DiMaggio was hitting .339. Doerr and York were 2-3 in the league in RBIs, Pesky and Doerr 2-3 in runs scored. Ferriss won his fifteenth game on July 21. Dobson and Hughson had won ten apiece. The team was a colossus, rolling to a pennant like Patton’s Third Army.

  Boston’s generally laid-back (some would say stiff) fans noticed. The bandbox was filled to capacity every day. As would happen multiple times in the future, Fenway was proving itself too small to fulfill demand. “Fenway Park is just a surrey with a fringe on top, and seats approximately as many,” wrote Egan. “The fact is that private enterprise, in this case represented by Tom Yawkey, was completely unprepared for this tremendous sports boom.” Thousands of fans were turned away on a daily basis. “We had to turn away over 25 thousand on a dozen occasions,” remembered Sox PR man Ed Doherty to Fred Lieb. “On several Sundays, and when Bob Feller pitched his two games against us, we had to stop people as far away as Kenmore Square if they didn’t have tickets. There were as many people heading back for the subways an hour before the game as there were coming to the ball park.”

  Dommie had seen it coming. He spent a lot of time during the war hanging around an Australian port, thinking about getting back to baseball. To his way of thinking, he didn’t belong to the Sox anymore—the war had made him a free agent, but Cronin—Yawkey’s mouthpiece—came to see him after the surrender, “hopping mad” and wanting him to sign for $11,000. “That wasn’t the figure I had in mind,” DiMaggio said later. He worked Cro up to $16,000, and negotiated something even better—an attendance clause.

  “I had it figured. I knew people wanted to see baseball. And we were going to be good.” He got the team to pay him $500 for every 50,000 fans through the Fenway turnstiles past the 450,000 that had come out in 1945. The Sox drew 1,416,944 in ’46, triple the year before and double the record. The Little Professor took in an extra nine grand thanks to his foresight.

  During one of the Sox-Indians games at Fenway, the drama of the Williams Shift was interrupted by a moment of levity. A midget jumped out of the stands and ran onto the field, delighting the full house.

  The new owner of the Cleveland Indians took in the scene with a mischievous smile on his face. A midget—now he would be tough to strike out.…

  “I believe if baseball is dressed up a little bit, it’s more fun for everybody,” was the credo of Bill Veeck, American Original. Getting fans to come out to the park, and have fun while they were there, was his all-encompassing mission. The owner whose outside-the-box thinking made him a unique figure in the sport’s history first bought into the majors in 1946. He’d fronted a ten-man group that paid $1,750,000 for the Tribe in late spring, and his syndicate included comedian Bob Hope, a Clevelander who looked forward to being an owner as “It’ll give me my first chance to yell with impunity at the guys with the muscles.”

  Veeck’s unusual path in baseball was cut by his father, William Veeck Sr., who was a sportswriter in Chicago. After slamming the Cubs routinely in his column, the owner of the team, William Wrigley, astoundingly gave Veeck the chance to put his money where his mouth was by hiring him to run the team as GM. That brought young Bill Jr. to the park every day, and it was he who conceived of the plan to grow ivy on the outfield walls.

  Veeck started out on his own as a minor league owner with the Milwaukee Brewers. The Brew Crew was bankrupt when Veeck bought the team—on his first night in charge of the Brewers, all of twenty-two fans turned out for a home game. The Brewers under Veeck would become strong on the field, winning three American Association pennants in five years. Even better, they set records at the gate. Veeck greeted fans as they came into the park, sang in pregame serenades, and offered unusual prizes for lucky fans, like horses and pigeons. He had tightrope walkers and boogie-woogie bands perform before games. He held “Swing Shift” games that started at
six a.m. so workers toiling nights and overtime in war factories could come out to the park.

  In 1942 Veeck joined the marines. During the invasion of Bougainville in the Solomons, a mortar recoiled irregularly and smashed Veeck’s right leg. His foot was crushed, and multiple operations failed to save it. His marriage almost went too, but he sold the Brewers in an attempt to rescue it. He couldn’t, but he did turn a sizable profit on the sale, enough to flip it (with the help of bank loans and a number of investors) into ownership of a big league team. Veeck was thirty-three. Almost certainly he was the last magnate who wasn’t independently wealthy.

  In 1946, the Indians were in the final year of playing the majority of their home games in League Park, on Cleveland’s east side. The following season, Veeck would move the team full on into Municipal Stadium, the enormous “Mistake by the Lake” that would be the home of the Indians until the 1990s. League Park was squashed into a city block, and so had bizarre dimensions. The right field fence was only 290 feet away, for example, but was guarded by a 60-foot-high wall, almost twice as tall as Fenway’s left field wall.

  All of 8,526 were at the park on the June day when Veeck announced he was the new owner. He went straight there from the press conference. He mingled with fans, as was his habit, and an enormous ironworker jumped up and slapped him hard on the back. “This is the best damned thing that has ever happened to this town,” the man told Veeck.

  The hardhat had it right. Veeck still sported his jarhead crew cut, which accentuated his massive face and impish look. He refused to wear a tie, which ingratiated him with his working-class fans. Hobbling about, his right leg in a cast, covering every inch of the park on game day even though he got around on crutches, Veeck changed the culture of the Indians overnight. “Everyone agreed,” he wrote in his classic memoir, Veeck—As in Wreck, “that the ‘bush stuff’ I had pulled in Milwaukee, like giving away livestock, would never go in Cleveland. So I gave away livestock in Cleveland, and the fans were delighted.”