The Victory Season Read online

Page 22


  Indians games immediately went on the radio. The doors were removed from Veeck’s office, and he advertised his phone number, so fans could reach him day or night. He installed a full orchestra in the outfield, protected by chicken wire. He was the first to post NL results on the scoreboard of an AL park, figuring rightly that fans wanted to stay abreast of the entire majors.

  “I’m a publicity hound,” Veeck flatly told the press, and they loved him for the endless copy he offered. The Tribe, a going-nowhere club with only Boudreau and star hurler Bob Feller worthy of attention, were suddenly the talk of the town. Newspaper ads enticed Indians fans with slogans like “New Teepee For A Whooping Tribe” and “A New Band Will Beat The Drums.” On August 2, Veeck staged a titanic fireworks display, with the sparklers forming a re-creation of planes dropping a huge bomb on a (presumably Japanese) battleship. The next day, Veeck wheeled out jugglers, drum majors, and a man who did a tricky bullwhip act, dodging players who were warming up even as he made like Indiana Jones. Word got around, and the following afternoon, with the Yankees in town for a doubleheader, an astonishing 75,595 paid to enter Municipal Stadium.

  Not every gimmick worked out. Veeck hired Max Patkin, the “Clown Prince of Baseball,” to goof around before games, which was fine, but then Veeck installed him as the first base coach. The league office cried foul. Veeck defied them, but when Ken Keltner was picked off first base at Yankee Stadium while Patkin made goofy faces, the experiment came to a screeching halt. Veeck hired another comic, Jackie Price, who liked to use a slingshot buried in his sleeve to “throw” a ball from home plate out over the wall. On his first two attempts at the trick, he beaned fans, who were hospitalized. The vaudeville hook came out to yank Price off the stage.

  Like Paul Bunyan or Bill Brasky, tall tales of Veeck’s exploits abound. Some of them are even true. Some are presumed true but probably aren’t. For example, Veeck liked to talk about a movable screen in right field that he would have rolled in whenever a team with good lefty power hitters came to town. Likewise, Veeck is supposed to have signed a deal to buy the Philadelphia Phillies in 1942 and proposed to stock the team with Negro Leaguers, four years in advance of Jackie Robinson. But extensive research has uncovered no evidence that either story is true.

  That November, Veeck would lose his damaged right foot to amputation, the thirty-sixth and final operation he would have on his war wound. He famously used his wooden leg as an ashtray while he chain-smoked through a thirty-four-year career as owner of the Indians, Browns, and White Sox.

  In 1951, while in charge of the Browns, Veeck remembered what he had seen that afternoon back in ’46. He employed a midget named Eddie Gaedel, wearing uniform number 1/8, to bat in a game against Detroit. Gaedel’s 3'7" frame practically ensured a base on balls, which he drew, in his one and only plate appearance. Gaedel moved on to the Ringling Brothers Circus, while Veeck continued to dream up promotions on his way to the Hall of Fame. He would loudly proclaim his good fortune in life to anyone he met.

  But when it came to luck, he had nothing on a farmhand down in Class B ball named Jack Lohrke.

  Chapter 24

  Lucky

  On the morning of June 24, the Spokane Indians of the Class B Western International League were traveling by Washington Motor Coach at the start of a road trip. The first stop was Bremerton, Washington, on the state’s Pacific coast. Rain hissed down in small torrents as the coach snaked through the Palouse. A couple of hours into the trip, the bus stopped in Ellensburg for lunch, while the driver, Glen Berg, zipped over to a nearby garage. He didn’t like the way the engine sounded, and the treacherous Cascade Range and the Snoqualmie Pass were just ahead.

  The major leagues continued playing right through the war, but the same couldn’t be said for many of the minor leagues. With more than four thousand minor league players across the nation, of widely varying ages and abilities, going off to the service, only a handful managed to keep playing. Anyone with any spark went right to the majors.

  Major leaguers who saw combat were relatively thin on the ground; not so, minor leaguers. With no reputation to protect them, many minor leaguers found themselves in infantry units, aboard warships, and flying bombing missions. Some wound up in horror, like Jim Blackburn, a pitcher in the Cincinnati chain. Captured at the Battle of the Bulge, he survived malnutrition and a sadistic guard pulling his toenails out with a pair of pliers to return to baseball in 1946, briefly making the majors two years later.

  Then there was Mickey Grasso, who replaced Dick Bouknight (the catcher who welcomed Jackie Robinson to white baseball by using racial epithets and humming balls close to his head) behind the plate for the Jersey City Giants. Grasso landed in North Africa in 1943 and was among the six thousand Americans taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht at a place called Hill 609. Flown to Europe, Grasso was imprisoned at Stalag Luft III in Furstenburg, Germany. He subsisted on bread and soup for months, dropping from a strapping 205 pounds to a sickly 145. But he still managed to play softball, and the Stalag had a sophisticated league, with American and National divisions and even a World Series pitting the champs of the two against one another.

  Late in the war, the Russian army approached the camp, so the prisoners were marched in the opposite direction. Grasso and about ten others found themselves guarded by a group of senior citizens, as the able-bodied Germans had all been called away to fight the invaders. Grasso and his mates took the opportunity to run away into the forest. They were free, but now foraging in enemy territory. One of their group was a Jew who had escaped Germany years before. He spoke the local tongue, and talked them out of several dicey situations.

  Grasso and the others walked all the way to the Elbe River, found a rowboat, and drifted toward a battle that was thundering across the river. They paddled to the American side and were met by the 35th Infantry Division, who told them that escape was foolishness—a few more weeks and they would have been liberated anyway. Grasso tried to eat the plates of food the soldiers gave him, but his stomach was so contracted he could only nibble on a chicken leg.

  Less than a year later, he was behind the plate in Jersey City, and would get called up to the bigs for a cup of coffee at the end of ’46.

  Then there were those minor leaguers who paid the ultimate price. Joe Pinder, a pitcher with a “blinding fast ball,” was killed at Omaha Beach. Hank Nowak would have been competing for a spot on the Cardinals staff, but he was killed in the Ardennes Forest during the Bulge. Another highly regarded Redbirds prospect, Luster Pruett, was shot to death in early 1945, as the Allies invaded Germany for the first time. Jimmie Trimble was a superstar prospect out of Washington DC, but his path to baseball glory was interrupted at Iwo Jima, when a Japanese soldier detonated a mine strapped to his body, killing himself and Trimble. Orioles farmhand Harry Imhoff was killed storming the beaches of Okinawa. Jerry Angelich pitched in the Pacific Coast League, and once took on Japanese legend Eiji Sawamura in an exhibition game. Angelich was killed defending Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

  According to research by the estimable Gary Bedingfield, 143 players with some minor league experience died in the war. That doesn’t count Audrey Stewart, a member of all-black teams in West Virginia mill leagues who had volunteered for service despite being thirty-six years of age. Stewart was part of the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion, and he and ten others were captured in a farmhouse in Wereth, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge. Stewart and the others were marched into a field, tortured, and then executed. They would later be known as the “Wereth 11.”

  The Class B Western International League canceled play for three full years while the Pacific Northwest’s finest young men went off to fight. Its first season back was 1946, and the play was ragged. The same was true across the minor leagues, which now numbered forty-two separate leagues, up from a dozen the year before. The White Sox alone operated seventeen teams; in 1945 they hadn’t owned a single club.

  The Spokane Indians were a mediocre group, even by the
iffy standards of the WIL. They were in fifth place and headed nowhere special on the morning of June 24. The evening before, the Indians had played a doubleheader against Salem at their home park, Ferris Field in Spokane. The Indians rallied in the ninth in the nightcap to earn a split of the two games against Salem, the first-place club in the WIL.

  In Ellensburg, the team ate hungrily, and quietly. The meal was interrupted by a state trooper who approached infielder Jack Lohrke with a message—report to San Diego with dispatch. The Padres, then a Pacific Coast League outfit, were recalling Lohrke to their team, a step up in class (more accurately, several steps up). The Indians’ business manager had taken the call from San Diego and relayed the message to the police, asking them to find the bus and tell Lohrke.

  Jack had a choice—continue to Bremerton and transfer there to a bus down the coast, or hitchhike back to Spokane and fly. He wanted to move on to his better gig as soon as possible, so he bid his teammates farewell over hamburgers and fries, grabbed his gear, and thumbed his way back east.

  Had his teammates known much about Jack Lohrke, they might have thought twice about letting him walk away. In 1943, a troop train Lohrke was riding on crashed, killing three, with dozens seriously burned. Lohrke walked away without a scratch. He then went into combat in Europe, fighting with the 35th Infantry Division. Lohrke survived the Normandy landings and the Battle of the Bulge. On at least four occasions, the soldier standing or sitting next to Lohrke had been killed. Lohrke emerged from the war unhurt.

  When he returned to the States, Lohrke was scheduled to fly to his home in Los Angeles from Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. Lohrke was bumped for “some VIP or something” from his transport flight at the last minute. He was angry and disappointed: “For one thing, I’d never been on a plane before.” Luckily, he missed this one. En route to San Pedro, California, the transport crashed, killing everyone onboard.

  Lohrke wasn’t the only veteran on the Indians. Bob Paterson and Fred Martinez, two fine major league prospects, had seen combat. So had right-handed pitcher Milt Cadinha, 8–1 on the season, who had fought at Normandy and the Bulge, then been transferred to the Pacific, bound for Okinawa. Fortunately, he arrived after the hellish fighting on the island had ended, although he did make it just in time to be caught in a typhoon.

  They all were lucky, but none so fortunate as Lohrke. That’s because an hour after the third baseman began retracing his path back to Spokane, the Indians’ team bus swerved to avoid a car that crossed the median on US 10 and plunged into the Snoqualmie Pass, a five-hundred-foot drop into a heavily wooded ravine. Nine of the players were killed, including Paterson, Martinez, and the team’s best prospect, Vic Pacetti. Of the nine, all but Pacetti served in the war. Six others were injured, three critically. Berg, the bus driver, survived but spent four months in the hospital recovering from burns. Other teams lent players to the Indians, and the shell of the club finished out the 1946 season. Part of the proceeds from the major league All-Star Game was donated to the families of the perished.

  “I guess it just wasn’t my turn‚” Lohrke said afterward. “But how did the owner know we would stop in that town? And what if the call had come five minutes later?”

  Jack Lohrke was indeed lucky. But he was plagued by survivor’s guilt. “When you’re the age I was back then,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1994, “you haven’t got a worry in the world. You’re playing ball because you want to play—and they’re giving you money to do it. And then…well, sometimes those names spring back at me.

  “I’ll tell you this: Nobody outside of baseball calls me Lucky Lohrke these days. I may have been lucky, but the name is Jack. Jack Lohrke.”

  Chapter 25

  The Leo Beat

  On a sunny afternoon in early July at the Polo Grounds, Durocher was shooting the bull with reporters and Dodgers radioman Red Barber. The writers started talking fondly of Mel Ott, who they were watching give some batting tips to a Giants player; their comments got a derisive scoff from the Lip.

  “C’mon, Leo, you have to admit he’s a nice guy,” Barber prodded.

  “A nice guy?” Leo roared, loud enough for all five boroughs to hear. “I’ve been in baseball a long time. Do you know a nicer guy in the world than Mel Ott? He’s a nice guy. In last place. Where am I? In first place. The nice guys are over there in last place‚ not in this dugout.”

  Frank Graham was there, and wrote up Durocher’s rant in the New York Journal-American as “Nice guys finish last.” As famous misquotations go, it’s right up there with “Play it again, Sam” and “Just the facts, ma’am.” But it is remembered today because it neatly encapsulated the win-at-all-costs ethos Durocher lived by.

  Durocher’s lippiness was considerably wind-aided by his presence in New York and its wolfishly competitive press corps. The typing class loved Durocher, who stood out from the genial but bland Ott and the cranky McCarthy like a peacock on the arctic ice. Bons mots were Leo’s stock-in-trade, especially when telling the boys exactly how ultracompetitive he was:

  “Show me a good loser in professional sports and I’ll show you an idiot. Show me a sportsman and I’ll show you a player I’m looking to trade.”

  “Win any way you can as long as you can get away with it.”

  “I want players that would put you in the cement mixer if they felt like it.”

  “I never posed as a choirboy. I was just a guy who wanted to win, and I would have taken your teeth to do it.”

  His battles with umpires were legendary, a stage for Leo to unleash his sharp wit. One time, an ump tried to intimidate him, growling in his grille, “I’ll reach down and bite your head off.” Durocher replied, “If you do you’ll have more brains in your stomach than you’ve got in your head.”

  Another asked if the Lip had called him a “blind bat.” “What, you can’t hear, either?” was the swift response.

  He was a drinking man, like most of his brethren, but unlike the hypocritical stance taken by most dugout leaders, Durocher wanted his players to bend their elbows. “You don’t play this game on gingersnaps,” he’d yell before buying a round for his guys. His casual attitude toward alcohol put Durocher on a collision course with his boss. Rickey was a strict teetotaler, a fact Leo discovered the year before. A pitcher named Tom Seats had been struggling with nerves, and Durocher started giving him nips of brandy for Dutch courage. Seats went on a winning streak, and Rickey asked Leo for an explanation for the turnaround. Durocher gave it to him straight, no chaser, upon which Rickey said, “He will never pitch for Brooklyn again,” and cut Seats loose.

  “Leo Durocher is a man with an infantile capacity for immediately making a bad situation worse,” was one of Rickey’s milder observations about his manager. Like so many others, the Brooklyn majordomo nurtured a fondness for the little battler, especially when he was driving an inferior team to the pinnacle of its collective ability, as he was now. “Put [Leo] in a corner,” marveled Rickey, “and he’s that same little kid from [Springfield] with the butt of a pool cue in his hand.” But he knew Durocher was hanging out with a rough crowd, a group that included mobbed-up actor George Raft and actual wiseguys and gamblers like Bugsy Siegel, Ownie Madden, Memphis Engelberg, and Joe Adonis. Rickey strongly disapproved, and let Durocher know that hosting the gangsters in all-night card and dice games would get him in trouble eventually.

  He didn’t say anything about the ladies, but that would get him trouble, too.

  They first met in 1944 at the Stork Club. She was there with a friend when Durocher walked in to wild applause. “Who is that?” she inquired. Told that it was the famous Leo Durocher of the Brooklyn Dodgers, she naively replied, “What’s a Dodger?”

  Laraine Day wasn’t that innocent. She was a well-known actress by 1946, starring in eight of the ten Dr. Kildare films. When she met Leo again two years after that first encounter, she threw over her husband for him in a matter of weeks. Day was on a flight to Minneapolis that was delayed in Chicago, and Leo was stuck there t
oo. He charmed her by taking Laraine and a friend to the Pump Room for dinner, and by casually greeting Joe Louis back at O’Hare. Just like that, Day was smitten. Women swooned for the slick manager all the time—Durocher was an accomplished swordsman, a rakish raconteur who kept a pad in Beverly Hills as well as Park Avenue, where his apartment looked more like an art dealer’s place than a jock’s.

  For much of 1946, he squired around Edna Ryan, the Copa’s number one showgirl, a long-legged blonde stunner from Long Island who “would have looked good in a burlap sack,” according to Harold Parrott. She used to appear at the train station to tearfully wave goodbye to the team, then slip quietly into town on the next train to spend the evening with Leo. In spring training at Daytona, where there was a tremendous shortage of hotel rooms, Durocher found a way to sneak Edna in by having her bring her “sick mother” along with her. Jaws dropped when Mrs. Ryan turned up—at forty, every bit as gorgeous as her daughter.

  Leo always kept a couple of other ladies on the side, including Nanette Fabray, a clever beauty who disapproved of Durocher’s arguments with the umpires, and Kay Williams, a millionaire divorcée and the future Mrs. Clark Gable. There was always one or another at each road stop, and he was adept at keeping them from running into one another.

  But this time, there was a hiccup. Edna was hanging out at Leo’s place on Park and Sixtieth, while Leo was falling for Laraine. The ravishing showgirl was ambushed by the press, who brandished wire photos of Leo and Laraine canoodling in the Midwest while Edna cooled her heels in New York. “We were going to get married until…well, I met this other girl,” was Leo’s honest explanation. “Durocher Branded Love Thief” was the headline.