The Victory Season Read online

  Leo was flying to Hollywood at every opportunity, using his pal Raft as a beard for his affair. Day had two adopted children, and they swiftly bonded with the animated Durocher. Not as swiftly as Day, perhaps, although she swore in her memoir that when Leo proposed to her, they had never been alone together. More likely, she fell for Durocher’s savoir faire in the boudoir. Leo once explained his way with the ladies:

  “Say you pick her up at seven o’clock. Grab her where it tickles at 7:05. No go? Tough, but hell it’s early yet. There’s still time to call another broad. You’d be surprised. Some damned famous broads say OK quick.”

  With charm like that, it’s small wonder Day said yes when Leo asked her to marry him. They took a short jolt down to Juarez, Mexico, where Laraine got a quickie divorce and married Leo on the spot, not two months after they had met. Jorge Pasquel was not invited. Her kids would become Durochers, and she grew a new celebrity as the First Lady of Baseball, chucking aside her initial disinterest in the game to sit at every home game and bellow her support.

  Today, the affair would be embarrassing. In 1946, it was scandalous, even though half the nation, it seemed, was splitting up. Reno, the traditional spot for quick splits, granted eleven thousand divorces in 1946, still the single-season record. Returning vets and the girls who married them just before they had marched overseas realized in droves that it wasn’t true love that had brought them together. If it weren’t for the huge number of new babies (five hundred thousand more births were recorded than in ’45), there would likely have been even more divorces. Dr. Benjamin Spock reaped the benefit of the Baby Boom—his The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care was published that spring and went on to sell fifty million copies.

  It wasn’t the New York press, oft eager to don a righteous cloak if it drove newsstand sales, that led the moralist charge against Leo. It was political columnist and right-winger Westbrook Pegler who whipped up an anti-Leo frenzy. Pegler hated Leo and his louche life, and he lambasted Durocher day after day. When asked whether she knew about her paramour’s rough-and-tumble life, Day said sarcastically, “If I didn’t I got it from Westbrook Pegler.” Pegler’s stiff-necked take on the Day affair cost the Dodgers when he convinced the Christian Youth Organization to withdraw sponsorship of the Knothole Gang, a Dodgers fan club aimed at kids. The CYO called Leo “a powerful force for undermining the moral and spiritual training of our young boys.” That meant a lot of unsold tickets, and Rickey was incensed.

  Most of the local press boys were more forgiving. They were a young group that rolled a couple dozen deep. Ordinarily, they were feisty and loved a good public hanging, but scribes like Dick Young of the Daily News, Bob Cooke of the Herald Tribune, and Herb Goren of the New York Sun preferred to rip the Lip over his baseball foibles, not his personal ones. They had plenty of material when it came to chronicling Leo’s tantrums, which were legion. “I popped off on everything,” Durocher admitted in his first memoir, The Dodgers and Me. He referred to the press as the “Assistant Manager’s Association,” and no one lived up to the title like Arch Murray of the Post.

  “Tiger Arch,” so-called for his Princeton degree, was a die-hard Dodgers fan first, unbiased chronicler last. He wouldn’t change clothes if the team was on a winning streak, and traveling secretary Harold Parrott would put Murray on a low floor of the team hotel if things were going bad, lest he hurl himself off the balcony. Murray loved to send signals down to Durocher from the press box, giving him instructions on who should pitch and how best to position the defense.

  The press was far harder on Rickey than on Durocher. His cheapness was their favorite subject, along with his sanctimony and his stretching of the truth to fit his needs. “The more he talks, the more we count the spoons,” was a typical insult. Mainly, they preferred MacPhail, because he was great copy and shoveled them plenty of booze.

  Jimmy Powers, aka the “Powerhouse,” of the Daily News was Rickey’s bête noire. He held Branch responsible for every setback, including the Cardinals’ surge back into the race. The inciting incident of his season was the trade of displaced second baseman Billy Herman in June. Herman was popular and had a Hall of Fame career, mostly with the Cubs in the 1930s, but he was pushing thirty-five and had been supplanted by Stanky. So he was dealt to the Braves, a prison sentence traceable back to spring training, when Herman had demolished a Miami hotel room (a plasterer had to come in and dislodge the whiskey glasses embedded in the ceiling) and stuck Rickey with the $30 bill.

  Powers went ballistic in print, returning to his moniker for Rickey, “El Cheapo,” and writing, “One reader suggests that all fans get together and donate $20 bills upon entrance to the park…perhaps Rickey’s desire for milking money out of his franchise will be satisfied, and he will pack his carpetbags and go away to another town and run his coolie payroll there.”

  Powers’s vitriol could be dismissed as a lone vendetta, except for his main source within the Dodgers organization. Walter O’Malley was a minority owner and general counsel of the Dodgers at this point, and was steadily accumulating stock and power within the franchise. Mainly, he did this by running Rickey down at every opportunity. O’Malley liked his scotch and his Sunday baseball, and found many like-minded accomplices in the press, Powers especially. O’Malley would goof on Rickey’s slovenly appearance, his miserly tactics, his wealth (Rickey was the sport’s biggest earner when factoring in his cut of attendance and player sales), and his morals—O’Malley called him a “Psalm-singing fake.” He liked to play “Pin the Tail on the Donkey” using a picture of Rickey, when he wasn’t checking in on population figures in California, which had just passed the nine-million mark.

  After Powers demolished Rickey in print for the umpteenth time, the naive team president turned to O’Malley for advice on whether he should sue for slander. No, was O’Malley’s sly response, for “every newspaperman should hate you.” So Rickey held off, and the calumny spread. Fans chanted “El Cheap-O” at games, and despite the surprisingly strong play of his team, he was relentlessly booed at Ebbets Field, to the point where his wife and family stopped going to games.

  Such backbiting and agenda-driven reportage was seldom seen in the Dodgers radio booth. Red Barber was as evenhanded as a judge. Walter Barber, the “Old Redhead,” got his start in broadcasting pushing a broom at the University of Florida. When a professor fell ill just before going on the air at the University Club, where Barber was a janitor, Red filled in. His debut behind the mike was thus reading a scholarly paper about “Certain Aspects of Bovine Obstetrics.” At no point did he use the phrase “catbird seat,” sadly.

  MacPhail had snapped up Barber for Reds broadcasts in 1934, and when MacPhail moved to Brooklyn, he brought the play-by-play man with him. His country cadence and adherence to southern courtesy made him an unlikely icon in loud, pushy Brooklyn, but the marriage worked. His down-home catchphrases, like “They’re tearin’ up the pea patch!,” “can of corn,” and “walkin’ in the tall cotton” are still legendary. He called the games in ’46 with partner Connie Desmond, and as anyone who lived in the borough then will tell you, one could walk down the street and follow the action by radio, with all of Brooklyn seemingly tuned in to Red’s call. He swiftly became a trusted part of the franchise, his reputation beyond reproach. Rickey told him about the plan to sign Robinson before he told anyone else in the organization.

  Barber, broadcasting over WHN, was credited with making Brooklyn baseball popular with the ladies of the borough. Since the games were mostly on during the day, female listenership was high. Red took care to explain the rudimentary aspects of the game along with the nuances, and in so doing became a favorite of the distaff fans. “He is a ladies favorite,” according to the Saturday Evening Post in 1942. “Before he came to Ebbets Field, the games resembled a For Men Only preview. But last year, 15,000 women stormed the gates for one game, and Brooklyn authorities claim the come-hither tones of Red are responsible.”

  Red didn’t travel to road games t
o do live broadcasts until 1948, so in ’46 he was still in the re-creation business, calling games by telegraph wire, and in some respects these were works of art as priceless as his live broadcasts. “We don’t try to fake it,” he explained to Red Smith that summer. “We have the telegraph sounder right in here near the microphone where it can be heard because we don’t want to kid the listeners that this is anything but a telegraphed report.”

  Here’s how it worked: A typist in a radio studio copied the wire report of the play-by-play sent by a stringer in some far-off press box. Red stood next to him at a robin’s-egg blue lectern, where Barber kept his notes and elbows. Next to him was a stat man named John Paddock, cousin of the legendary sprinter Charley Paddock, who used a “Ready Reckoner,” a book that had the calculations prefigured, to pass along batting averages and ERA on the fly. Paddock was a huge fan but willed himself to stay quiet and just gesture to Red. Barber read the report and ad-libbed from there.

  For example, “Reiser up—bats left” popped across the wire. Red’s description:

  “And here’s Pete Reiser. Hitting .283, 106 base hits. He’s having a tough year, fighting that bad shoulder. Dickson will pitch very carefully to him. Reiser up, square stance, he’s one of those square-built guys, not very tall. Strength is not necessarily dependent upon height. The Cards are playing this fellow a step in because of his speed.…”

  Or, some action would come in—“H. Walker up—bunt, foul…hit—Walker singled to right.” Here was Red:

  “Harry Walker, who’s always nervous and pickin’ at that cap of his, has to have it sittin’ just right. He cuts at the first pitch and tries to bunt it, fouls it off. One strike. Melton working very deliberately, that’s his custom, you know. Walker, with that two-toned bat of his—swings on it, bloops a single to right, turns first and stops as his brother Dixie fields the ball.…Walker and Musial takin’ a lead off first and second. They both of them can run like scalded cats, you know.”

  The wire reports came in by Morse code, a language Red refused to learn, as he didn’t want to know what was coming. “If you know in advance what’s happening, you’re no longer a broadcaster,” he told Smith. “You’re a dramatic artist.”

  That wasn’t a description many threw at the Cardinals’ best-known radio voice. Jay Hanna “Dizzy” Dean was even better known and beloved than Barber, at least in the Midwest, due in large part to his Hall of Fame career as the ace of the “Gashouse Gang,” the team that captured the 1934 World Series for St. Louis. His broadcast style was…unique. He was so down-homey that he made Barber appear like a Boston Brahmin. Unlike Red, however, he wasn’t drippin’ southern honey but Missouri mud, with diction and grammar that wouldn’t have been out of place among Missourian Jesse James and his bushwhackers.

  Typical constructions included “Musial (“Moo-sal”) stands confidentially at the plate,” “The runners held their respectable bases,” and “Slaughter slud safe into second.” A frequent sign-off was “Don’t fail to miss tomorrow’s game!” His grammar was so awful that midway through the season, a group of Missouri English teachers filed a complaint with the FCC complaining that Diz was destroying the language. It was a losing battle, for Dean, broadcasting over 1230 WIL, was wildly popular with Cards fans. “I know most of my fans are from my part of the world, the Ozarks,” he explained. “They like it. A man’s got to do that sort of thing in this business.”

  But this would be Dean’s final year in the Cards’ broadcast booth. At season’s end, J. Roy Stockton, the talented and cranky elder statesman of the St. Louis press corps, brought a team party to a screeching thud by sarcastically toasting Breadon, aka “the man who made the close race possible” by selling players and being cheap. Jumping to the owner’s defense was Harry Carey, who competed with Dean on 770 WEW (there was a third outlet that did Cards games as well, 1490 WTMV, but Breadon was working on a deal to consolidate all the games on a single rights holder).

  When Carey finished brownnosing, he was greeted with death stares from Stockton, and warm thank-yous from Breadon, who promised, “I will never forget it.” The following season, Breadon formalized a deal for a Cardinals radio network, one that soon would have KMOX and its massive signal as its flagship station. He chose Carey to be the main voice of those broadcasts, despite Dean’s popularity and the sponsor he could bring with him, Falstaff Beer. “I told you that I would never forget what you did,” Breadon told Carey. “Well, consider this proof of that.” Dean was out of a job, though he would soon be dropping his Ozark stylings on national audiences through Mutual Radio, and on television, which was just appearing over the horizon as an existential threat to radio in 1946.

  Baseball’s first televised game had been a collegiate affair in 1939. The NBC telecast of Princeton’s 3–2 win at Columbia was simultaneously a technological breakthrough and a fuzzy, blurry mess. Still, the mere fact that pictures had successfully been transmitted from ballpark to set device meant that a professional game was next. The Yankees and Giants both passed on the honor, but when MacPhail was asked if the Dodgers would like to be a part of the first telecast, in August of 1939, he of course answered, “I’d love to.” Barber interviewed Durocher on camera before the game, against Mac’s old crew from Cincinnati, ironically. The screen was full of snow, the players indistinguishable and the ball invisible, as only one camera was used.

  The efforts improved little during the war years, even as televised games steadily increased in frequency. NBC’s pioneering director, Burke Crotty, returned from the service in late 1945 and by ’46 was ready to implement improvements to the telecasts. The May 26 game between the Giants and Braves is an example. Crotty switched between a pair of cameras on the third base side, going to the batter after the pitcher released, and if the ball was hit, switching back as the other camera picked up the play. It wasn’t perfect, but few were watching and experimentation was important.

  Still, the critics were anxious for better viewing. Variety crushed NBC’s 1946 efforts. “It’s virtually impossible at the present developmental stage of video for a person watching the game from his home to get even a small share of the color and feeling that’s made baseball the national pastime.” Matters had improved by August, when NBC added a third camera to a Red Sox–Yankees game. Variety weighed in again, praising Crotty’s direction, but slamming the man calling the action hard, saying he “evidently hasn’t looked at many ball games,” and was “only annoying.”

  Calling games was harder than it looked, according to the recipient of the abuse, Don Pardo, who would become famous for lending his dulcet tones to Jeopardy! and Saturday Night Live, among other exploits. “I thought I knew the game, until I got [to the Stadium],” he remembered decades later. “I didn’t know enough to keep my mouth shut. I figured I had to keep talking. It seemed all right—what the hell did I know?”

  Pardo was twenty-eight in 1946, a staff announcer at NBC assigned to The Bill Stern Sports Review. Stern was a well-known sportscaster famous for misidentifying players and finding outlandish methods for incorporating the correct one into the play he was calling. It was assumed Pardo knew sports, so he got sent to the three New York ballparks several times in 1946. Pardo had hurt his back playing high school basketball and was originally 4-F, but was reclassified and was about to be drafted when the war ended.

  It was apparent that there were to be plenty of opportunities on television coming for Pardo and his colleagues. TV sets began to flood the market, coming in as cheaply as $130 ($1,500 or so nowadays). Dumont built a tremendous state-of-the-art studio in the Wanamaker Department Store, and linked New York and Washington by wire for the first time. Drama producers began testing Broadway-bound plays on TV instead of in out-of-town theaters. In short, as Life put it, “This year the infant industry began making noises that sounded adult.” Plans were afoot to make the ’46 World Series the first ever televised, but a deal couldn’t be struck in time.

  The industry was growing right in front of people’s eyes, tho
ugh they had to crane their necks to see the “steeplejacks” brave vertigo by climbing to the top of the Empire State Building to build a TV tower for WNBT. Entertainment shows began that summer, but like baseball telecasts, there were growing pains. The very first variety show, Hour Glass, aired Thursday nights at eight p.m. on NBC, theoretically inaugurating “Must See TV” and the historic run of programs the network has aired at that hour.

  The Ed Sullivan Show, this wasn’t. The musicians union threatened a strike unless live acts were banned, and a compromise led to enforced lip-synching by all singers appearing on the show. Mistress of Ceremonies Evelyn Eaton introduced the acts, which included Doodles Weaver’s “rabbit act,” standup comedy, theater-style one-act plays, and the dance team of Enrica and Novello, whose feet were cut out of the frame by inexperienced cameramen. Twenty thousand people tuned in on thirty-five hundred sets across New York City (by contrast, twenty million people listened to The Edgar Bergen Show each week), and the network received two fan letters. Both liked the show.

  On July 13, the Dodgers played in Chicago, and a game was televised in Chicago on WBKB for the first time. Like other efforts, this effort was panned. A Tribune reviewer named Larry Wolters wrote, “Because of the considerable area of action in baseball this sport is much less satisfactory for telecasting than wrestling or boxing.”

  The Dodgers won that afternoon 4–3. But it was the sole victory for Durocher’s crew in a nine-game stretch that threatened to undo their commanding lead. For at the same time, the Cardinals were emerging from their torpor.

  Chapter 26