The Victory Season Page 24

  Red, Whitey, and “Four-Sack” Dusak

  It was nearly nine o’clock in the morning, local time, when the atomic bomb went off. Code-named “Able,” it was practically identical to the “Fat Man” that was dropped on Nagasaki eleven months earlier. On July 1, the device was dropped by a B-29 bomber called “Dave’s Dream” and detonated over Bikini Atoll. “We found the only place untouched by war,” said Bob Hope, “and blew the hell out of it.”

  The explosion was deafening, although the denizens of St. Louis were out of earshot. Still, something seemed to stir the Cardinals once July came. Maybe they were roused by another, less notable line from Durocher—“The Cubs are the team we’ve got to beat, not the Cardinals.” The Brooklyn Eagle piled on, asking “Whatever Became of the Cardinals?” in a banner headline. Regardless of the sparking incident, once the Fourth of July passed, the Redbirds began to resemble the “old gray mare scenting the home feedbox,” a phrase the Post-Dispatch directed squarely at its rural readership.

  Musial was Musial, and Slaughter Slaughter, but otherwise, the first three months of the season had been marked by slumps (Marty Marion and Harry Walker weren’t hitting), injury (Terry Moore was limping around on his bum knee), and poor pitching (Brecheen was 4–8, Lanier was gone, and most of the depth was in Boston on the “Cape Cod Cardinals”).

  It was a couple of kids that sparked the team. Red Schoendienst had proven himself valuable at several positions. As a rookie in 1945, he had filled in for Musial in left field while Stash was in the service. He began ’46 at third to replace Kurowski, who had gotten hurt after a lengthy holdout. Then Marion went down for a brief spell, and Red took over at short. Finally, after Klein left for Mexico, the freckle-faced boy straight out of a Mark Twain novel took over at second, a position he held down as a regular for the next decade.

  Al “Red” Schoendienst was from Germantown, Illinois, about forty miles across the Mississippi from St. Louis, and grew up worshipping the Gashouse Cards. His hair was strawberry, like the rest of the family, whose surname translates to “good service” in German. Clinton County was coal country, and the mines all had ball clubs wearing their jerseys. Red’s dad, Joe, worked the mines, had been a good catcher in his day, and umpired the coal league games on Sundays. “Sunday was a big day for us,” Red remembered. “Straight from the mines to the ball field.” Red was more partial to fishing the nearby Kaskaskia River than playing ball, but he sensed he wasn’t going to avoid a life underground in the mines by baiting hooks, so he played.

  At sixteen, Red joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program that put the able-bodied to work building roads and houses across the Depression-hit country. He was mending a fence one day when a nail ricocheted off the wood and went straight into his left eye. At the marine hospital in St. Louis, he pleaded with doctors not to remove his eye, and they obliged, but his vision was severely reduced on that side thereafter. Hitting righty against right-handed pitchers was a problem, so he taught himself to switch-hit.

  Undeterred, Red hitchhiked to a tryout with the Cardinals and was signed to a minor league contract. He tore up the bus leagues, hitting over .400 in 1943 and .373 in 1944 when he was called up for duty. His eye damage meant he wouldn’t be a rifleman, so instead Red guarded Italian POWs at Pine Camp in upstate New York. While there, he built baseball fields and organized the prisoners into teams, teaching the soccer-mad prisoners the finer points of the National Pastime.

  By the spring of ’45, he was back with the Cards and swiftly became a fan favorite. Reporters called him “an itchy undershirt” for his ability to annoy opponents with his play. He was a solid hitter and an outstanding fielder, holding the record for fielding average in a season (.9934) for thirty years. Musial said Red had “the greatest pair of hands I’ve ever seen,” and his ability to handle so many positions in the majors was a testament to that.

  In the late ’50s, Red was dealt to Milwaukee, where he mentored Hank Aaron on the finer points of the game. In 1958, his coaled upbringing came home to haunt him—he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and part of his lung was removed. It didn’t slow Red much—he played for five seasons afterward. He coached and then managed the Cards for decades, leading the Redbirds to the World Series in 1967 and ’68 and winning it the first time, and he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1989. In all, he was with the Cardinals organization for fifty years. After that long in a Cards uniform, his nickname would be “Red” even if his hair was not.

  If Schoendienst was a local favorite, Joe Garagiola was a hometown hero. He grew up in the Italian-flavored neighborhood of St. Louis called “The Hill,” a lump on the Mississippi floodplain that loomed over the swank Forest Park area. Up on the Hill, narrow alleyways and crazy-quilt roads were the rule, a contrast from downtown’s wide avenues and straightforward grid layout.

  Joey grew up at 5446 Elizabeth Street. He was best buds with the kid and fellow catcher who lived at 5447 Elizabeth across the street, Larry Berra, later better known by his nickname, Yogi. They honed their talents at a vacant lot on the street that served as an incubator of athletic talent of all stripes. “We played all the time,” Berra remembered to the New York Times. “We would go right after school and play until the 4:30 factory whistle. That’s when our fathers got off work and we had to go home and open a can of beer. Then it was back outside to play.” Joey’s dad didn’t know much about baseball—he called runs “points”—and preferred soccer, as did many on the Hill.

  Garagiola was big and fast and the best athlete in the neighborhood, dominating sandlot games that were a big deal on the Hill. By the time he was fourteen, the Cards were well aware of him, and the organization sent him to Springfield, Missouri, to work odd jobs with their Western Association farm team there. When he was legally able to sign at age sixteen, they got him for a mere $500. There was never any doubt Joe would sign with his favorite team.

  The Cards took a long look at Berra too—and decided he would never be a major league regular.

  Garagiola was called into the army in 1944 at age eighteen and made his way to the Philippines, where he played for the Manila Dodgers, a team fronted by Kirby Higbe. One day in Manila, Garagiola was listening to an Armed Forces Radio vignette from the states that talked about a young catcher in the Cards system who was supposed to set the league on fire when he arrived. “And then, by God, the Paul Bunyan he was talking about turned out to be me!” he remembered.

  A large part of the calculus behind selling off Walker Cooper was the team’s conviction that Garagiola would be a star. He didn’t get discharged until late spring of 1946, and made his way to the big club for the first time on May 26 in Cincy. He singled in his first game, wearing borrowed shoes from pitcher Ken Burkhart, as he had forgotten to pack his own spikes. Garagiola then added a clutch two-run pinch-hit single in his third game, a 12–11 win over Pittsburgh.

  He didn’t hit too much for the season, finishing at .237 with three homers. Truth told, he never did pan out as a star, only hitting forty-two homers with 255 RBIs over nine years. But it was his youthful energy and steadiness behind the plate that helped rally the team. The wit and joie de vivre that ended up making Garagiola such a successful broadcaster after retirement loosened up an often-tight clubhouse, where the dominant personalities were either gruff or quiet. It was impossible to dislike Joey, and the crowds that came out to see him from the Hill helped boost the team’s pocketbook as well.

  Equally important to team morale was a clubhouse speech given by Kurowski in mid-June. After Musial had turned Jorge Pasquel down, the Mexicans had come hard after Kurowski, and with good reason. The third baseman had been outspoken about his feeling that he was underpaid, and had held out in a bitter dispute with Breadon for most of the spring. Upon his return, his bat had helped keep the team within shouting distance of the Dodgers.

  Like Lanier, Kurowski, whose hair had turned shock white before he was a teenager, was a prime candidate to take Pasquel’s cash. Instead, he told his asse
mbled teammates that while Breadon may have been a tightwad, he believed in the sanctity of a contract. Whitey had signed to play ball in ’46 in St. Louis, and he wasn’t going to break that commitment. Coming from the flinty third baseman, who certainly was no front-office lackey (as Musial had been occasionally accused of being in whispers around the team), it meant something to the guys.

  Kurowski may have been bitter about his paycheck, but he had overcome plenty to be a ballplayer in the first place. The sixth of ten children, Whitey grew up in the heart of Pennsylvania coal country, and his daddy lived his life in the mines of Reading (he grew up not far from Carl Furillo). At age seven, Whitey fell off a fence and onto some broken glass. The gash on his right arm turned infectious, and soon he had osteomyelitis, an infection that attacked the bone. Amputation was a possibility, but Whitey was lucky—he only needed four inches of his ulna removed. His deformed right arm was thus much shorter than his left.

  There wasn’t much room for sympathy among large Polish coal families, and Whitey didn’t ask for any. Instead, he played ball as if he had no handicap, insisting on playing third base because it had the longest throws to make. Unlike Ed Head or Max Lanier, he didn’t train to change his throwing arm—he simply willed his weakened arm to catch up.

  He had trouble reaching outside pitches, so he crowded the plate, taking the inevitable plunkings that followed. He was also a dead-pull hitter as a result of his shortened arm, which meant he sometimes saw shifts in the opposite direction of the ones aimed at stopping Williams. Second basemen would come over to the shortstop side of the bag when Whitey hit.

  That didn’t slow him much. His arm kept him out of the war, and Kurowski celebrated by becoming the best third baseman in the weakened circuit, averaging seventeen homers and posting an OPS of about .800 from 1943–45. But as if to disprove the calumny that he was only the best of a poor wartime lot, he hit .310 with 27 homers and 104 RBIs in 1947, his finest season as a pro.

  But the player who perhaps best symbolized Redbird resiliency was Johnny Grodzicki. A top pitching prospect from Nanticoke, Pennsylvania (yet another kid to see hardball as an escape from the mills and the mines), Grodzicki pitched well in a trial in 1941. But five weeks after Pearl Harbor, he followed his two brothers into the army.

  He transferred into the paratroopers, the 17th Airborne Division, and was dropped into France to relieve units defending the Meuse River sector in late 1944. From there, it was into the snowy Ardennes Forest to rescue the 28th Infantry Division, who had been overrun by German armored units during the Battle of the Bulge.

  In March, the 17th took part in a massive drop over the Rhine and into Germany for the first time. On March 29, 1945, the 17th was moving eastward over the Issel Canal and toward Münster when it was hit by an incoming artillery barrage. Grodzicki caught shrapnel in his right hip and leg. His sciatic nerve was badly damaged, and the doctor at the field hospital thought Grodzicki’s days of walking were over.

  With the help of a cane, Grodzicki showed that walking wouldn’t be an issue. He returned to Nanticoke for rehabilitation, but was itching to pitch again, despite the pain it caused. He worked out with the Cards in spring, and aided by daily treatments and hot towels, his leg didn’t balk at the trauma of pushing off the mound. He wore a leg brace and got through four innings in a spring training game. Dyer would sooner cut off his own leg than cut Grodzicki. A roster spot was his for as long as he needed.

  It was midsummer before Grodzicki was ready. He pitched for the first time on July 11, coming in to mop up during a 13–3 massacre at the hands of the Giants. The first batter he faced, Johnny Mize, launched a three-run homer. Welcome back to the majors, doughboy. He got the next two outs and took a seat, his amazing comeback complete.

  Two days later, Grodzicki was on the mound again, in relief against the Giants once more. He was a little more awkward this time around, stumbling while fielding a bunt and getting charged with an error. He gave up two runs and three hits in two innings, as the Cards again lost. Grodzicki wouldn’t get another chance to pitch until September. In a loss to Pittsburgh, Grodzicki was wild, walking four batters and surrendering two runs in an inning and a third.

  The end was seemingly nigh, but Grodzicki kept working in the off-season, and in 1947 he was much more spry. He appeared in sixteen games that season, with a 5.40 ERA and mammoth respect from his teammates, and especially his manager. “Eddie loved his spirit and his stark refusal to accept defeat in his ambition to make the big time,” said sportswriter Bill Corum of Dyer’s belief in Grodzicki. Although Grodzicki’s 1946 contributions were minimal, the Cards never replaced him on the roster.

  The loss in Grodzicki’s debut was one of the few in the 8–3 run that the Cards were on when Brooklyn came to Missouri for a four-game set on July 14. The Dodgers led by 4½ games, so even a split would be a satisfactory result from the series, which began with a Sunday doubleheader.

  The opener was tied at three in the eighth, with starters Higbe and Beazley long since departed. Brooklyn reliever Rube Melton, a wild sort who led the league in walks and wild pitches in 1942, aimed rather than threw a fastball to Slaughter, and Country launched a two-run homer to win the game. He had knocked in four of the five Cardinals runs.

  In the nightcap, Brooklyn scored a first-inning run when first baseman Ed Stevens doubled in Bob Ramazzotti, then held on to the 1–0 lead into the eighth. Vic Lombardi gave up hits but kept scurrying out of trouble. But then Musial tripled and came home on a Kurowski groundout, and the game went to extra innings. Dickson matched zeroes with Lombardi until the twelfth. The packed house of thirty-four thousand, having sat through five hours of baseball, was tense on their seat cushions. Even Mary Ott was quieter than usual.

  Musial led off the twelfth. Before sending Lombardi out to the mound, Durocher made it perfectly plain that he wanted his pitcher to dump Musial on his ass with a brushback pitch or two. Lombardi didn’t, and the Man whacked a homer to deep right to win it 2–1. Durocher was apoplectic in the clubhouse. “I’ll never ask you to pitch tight to anybody again,” he screamed at Lombardi, “because I can see you don’t have the nerve to do it. You let them take the bread and butter right out of your mouth.”

  The Dodgers lead was down to 2½ games. Monday was “Red Schoendienst Day” at Sportsman’s Park, an unusual fete for such an inexperienced player. A group from back home in Germantown, Illinois, gave him a shotgun as a gift, then Red helped shoot down the Dodgers with a pair of doubles and 3 RBIs. Musial continued to annihilate Brooklyn pitching with four hits, including his ninth triple and eighth homer of the year. Brooklyn starter Hugh Casey got exactly one man out before Durocher yanked him out by the scruff of his jersey.

  But using five pitchers and sixteen position players in the 10–4 loss was the least of Durocher’s headaches. In the third inning, Slaughter lined one to left that Reiser slid in to catch. Most witnesses felt he caught it, but umpire Al Barlick ruled Pete had trapped it. A run scored, and Leo went apeshit. He “barked and growled and circled Barlick like a contestant of a bull pit,” reported the Post-Dispatch. “Leo waved his arms, kicked dust on Barlick’s pretty blue pants, and all but rubbed noses with the guardian of baseball law in his protest.”

  After a three-minute brannigan, Leo was ejected, along with Reiser. Durocher was suspended five games and fined $150 by the National League. He skipped town that night, “flying to NYC on the QT”—St. Louis wasn’t flashy enough for an idle Durocher, and the lovely Edna awaited back on Park Avenue, not yet having been tossed aside in favor of Laraine Day.

  “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, and what happened to him is something that should be worrying the Brooklyn Dodgers today after three straight unsuccessful brushes with the Cardinals of Eddie Dyer,” was the lede in the Post-Dispatch, and indeed, the “dazed” Dodgers needed some help from the King’s Men. Or from Howie Pollet. The Cards’ ace lefty’s distinctively loud grunts were especially resounding on this afternoon. Pollet turned in a long, gutty effort
. No official record exists, but Pollet estimated he threw two hundred pitches in the series finale on Tuesday. He hung in there and went the distance, but he gave up four runs and thirteen base runners.

  St. Louis trailed 4–2 going in to the last of the ninth. Joe Hatten was pitching a gem. He had been knocked from the box in the first inning by the Cards back in May and made up for it with a complete game win in June, and now he was trying to do it again. But he nicked Marion with a pitch leading off the ninth, and pinch hitter Clyde Kluttz singled, bringing the winning run to the plate in the form of another pinch hitter—Erv Dusak.

  Dusak was a hot prospect, considered by most to be better than Musial when both arrived in 1941. That page of the scouting report was quickly trashed, but Dusak was clearly being groomed to be the heir to Terry Moore’s center field job. The Cardinals had a reputation for getting rid of guys a little early rather than a little late, and it was clear that was the plan for Moore. But Dusak hadn’t impressed much with his chances thus far. Dusak had spent seventeen months in the South Pacific, playing ball on New Guinea and taking long swims to keep his fitness up, but it appeared that he had left some of his timing in the Bismarck Sea.

  He dug in against Hatten, then squared to bunt, fouling it off. It happened again, and he was quickly down 0–2. Dusak scotched the sacrifice idea and launched the next pitch ten rows deep in the left field bleachers for a walk-off, three-run homer that sent Sportsman’s Park into a frenzy, the Dodgers off the field in shock, and the Redbirds to within a half a game of first, the closest they had been to the penthouse in weeks.

  An instant mythology blew up around the home run, the story being that Erv was given a new nickname as soon as he touched home plate—“Four-Sack Dusak.” In truth, he had been given the moniker down in the Southeastern League, when Dusak starred for Mobile and a fan penned an epic poem in his honor that used the nickname. But now it was on everyone’s lips.