The Victory Season Page 26
When the Japanese Baseball League began play in 1936, Sawamura was the star. Pitching for the Yomiuri Giants, the Tokyo-based team that are the Yankees of Japan, he hurled the league’s first-ever no-hitter that September and posted a career record of 63–22 with a 1.74 ERA, despite losing two seasons to war, 1938 and 1939. Sawamura had been called to mandatory military service at age twenty, and in January 1938 was inducted into the army, the 33rd Regiment based in Tsu Mie Prefecture. He fought in China until April 1940, seeing little combat but little baseball as well. Discharged from the fighting across the East China Sea, Sawamura went back to the Giants and threw his third no-hitter of his career in July.
In 1941, Sawamura was called back up to the army and was sent to the Philippines, seeing considerable action as the Japanese chased General MacArthur from the archipelago and conquered the country. He earned a discharge in late 1942, and played what passed for Japanese wartime ball that year. Most of the other great stars, like Masaru Kageura, Masaki Yoshihara, Yukio Nishimura, and Miyoshi Nakagawa, were off at war—indeed, almost all were killed in action.
As the Allies closed in on the home islands, Sawamura, like all able-bodied men, was called back up for duty in the fall of 1944. He was on a troop-transport ship off the Ryukyu Islands, in the South China Sea, when the convoy was attacked by the USS Sea Devil, an American submarine. Two ships, the Hawaii Maru and the Akigawa Maru, were sunk. Sawamura was aboard one of the two (it is not known precisely which), and he disappeared beneath the waves forever.
The Japanese Baseball League would name its version of the Cy Young Award after Sawamura.
In another lifetime, Sawamura and his triple-digit fastball might have had the opportunity to play in America and chase the major league single-season strikeout record. In 1946, it was a man who had spent the previous few years fighting the Japanese who was in hot pursuit of Rube Waddell’s mark of 347 whiffs.
With the Indians hopelessly behind the Sox, Feller (and Veeck) cast aside any thought of team play and single-mindedly chased the record. Feller was no doubt prodded by a promise of a $5,000 bonus from Wheaties if he could do it, and there was whispered talk of a cut of the extra box office he would generate. He began to pitch every fourth day, make relief appearances, and react angrily when he retired batters by methods other than the strikeout.
He was still dominant despite the extra work. On July 31 he took a no-hitter against Boston into the ninth inning, when Bobby Doerr broke it up. Feller won the game 4–1 for his twentieth win of the season. On August 9, Frankie Hayes, who had homered back in April to get Feller the win during his no-hitter in the Bronx, blooped a single off Feller in the seventh inning. Hayes had been traded to Chicago, and his hit was the only one the Chisox could muster. It was Feller’s eighth one-hitter of his career, breaking the record held by Old Hoss Radbourn. On the thirteenth, he no-hit Detroit for six innings, but lost 1–0.
He reached three hundred Ks on September 8, and later a ten-strikeout game against the White Sox put him at 336. There was one series left in the season, at Briggs Stadium in Detroit. Two days after the start against Chicago, Boudreau put Feller in the game in the fifth inning, and let him go the rest of the way, even though an exhausted Rapid Robert was throwing lobs by the ninth. Detroit scored four times against him in the frame but fell just short, 9–8. More important, Feller struck out seven, leaving him at 343, five shy of the record.
Two days later, Feller was back on the hill for a showdown with the American League’s other top pitcher, Hal Newhouser. Newhouser was considered the antithesis of Feller—he had padded his stats during the war, winning the victories, ERA, and strikeout crowns in 1945, and the MVP Award in both ’44 and ’45. “Prince Hal” was 4-F because of a leaky valve in his heart. To his credit, he tried to join the service several times anyway, only to be rejected at every turn.
Newhouser spent the season disproving the cynics who felt he would struggle with the return of the servicemen. He won 26 games, with a 1.94 ERA and 275 strikeouts of his own, finishing second to Williams in the MVP race. The week before, he had two-hit the Indians in a ballyhooed showdown against Feller in Cleveland, a heavyweight fight that was awarded pitch-by-pitch coverage in the Sporting News. But Feller was better on this day, winning 4–1 to match Newhouser with twenty-six wins. In the sixth inning, he fanned Jimmy Bloodworth for strikeout number 348, besting Waddell and setting a new record that held until Sandy Koufax shattered the mark in 1965 with 382.
Chapter 28
The Jewel of Pigtown
The Dodgers lost two of three to St. Louis at Ebbets Field in the first days of August. The third game of the set was a brutal loss, a 3–1 defeat at the hands of Brecheen and Pollet, making a rare relief appearance. Worse, Pete Reiser was back to his old bad habits. In the fifth inning, Kurowski lined a drive to left. Pete gave chase and appeared to make the grab, only to lose the ball when he slammed headfirst into the wall, “cracking it so hard that he was knocked unconscious,” according to the Times, who reported that he was taken to Peck Memorial Hospital and diagnosed with a concussion.
It was just another day at the ballpark—and the infirmary—for the star-crossed Pistol Pete, who might have gone down with the greats of the game if only he could have stayed in one piece.
Durocher called him the best player he ever had, save for Willie Mays. And Leo thought Reiser faster than the Say Hey Kid. Unfortunately, he had no internal governor. Running into walls became his calling card, and it nearly became his cause of death on a couple of occasions. He once fractured his skull after colliding with a cement fence while chasing a Country Slaughter drive (but was able to throw the ball to the infield before collapsing). “My head felt like a hand grenade went off in there,” he said afterward. Reiser was stretchered off the field eleven times in his career. He once had last rites administered to him at the ballpark after a particularly brutal meeting with an outfield barrier. Because of Reiser, Ebbets Field began padding the outfield fences in 1948, and the NL adopted mandatory warning tracks for all its parks.
He grew up in a tough section of St. Louis, to a poor family with an even dozen children. Reiser’s father made $25 a week as a printer, and the Depression made a tough situation worse. Reiser adopted a swagger to keep life’s troubles at bay. He earned his nickname by walking the neighborhood like Gary Cooper in High Noon, with toy pistols in his belt. He’d swipe his grandfather’s old cavalry sword and chase his sisters around, “just to scare them.” He ran with gangs like the Marcus Street Rats and the Sherman Street Creeps, but it was playing ball against his older brother Mike and his friends that made him truly tough. Pete spotted five years to his brother and crew but held his own on the diamond.
Soccer was his first love, and he was gifted. The sport was more popular in St. Louis than just about anywhere in the United States, and he figured he could win a scholarship to Notre Dame. He was even better at baseball, and that’s where the money was. But he considered giving up the game when the Cards cut him early from a tryout camp when Reiser was fifteen.
Turns out, the Redbirds were just being coy. They knew all about the swift young stud who thought he belonged in the majors already. His attitude was key—he lived up to Harry the Hat Walker’s maxim that “You’ve got to step out and take charge in this game or go back to the bushes. It’s no pink tea out here.” The Cards were hiding him from other teams, who watched Rickey’s developmental moves like hawks. At fifteen, he was too young to sign but not too young to drive, so the team made him the “chauffeur” for head scout Charley Barrett at $50 per month. Actually, the legal driving age in Missouri was sixteen, so Barrett did most of the driving, but every now and then “on an open road he’d let me take the wheel,” Pete recalled. They drove all over the South, checking out Cards farm teams and giving Reiser a crack to warm up with the minor leaguers.
Reiser may have had a veteran’s mien on the field, but off it he was hopelessly green. He once picked up Barrett’s tip from a lunch counter, thinking it ha
d been accidentally left behind. “It was the first time I’d eaten in a restaurant,” Reiser said.
His destined path to Sportsman’s Park hit a sizable pothole in 1938. Baseball belatedly ruled that Rickey’s minor league monopoly was against the best interests of the game, and Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis ordered Pete and seventy-three other top prospects set free, for any club to sign. Rickey was aghast, but reacted with a cunning plan. He arranged for MacPhail, his old apprentice, to sign Reiser and then trade him back to St. Louis at some point, effectively stashing him away for the Cards.
Unfortunately, no one informed Durocher of this backroom handshake, and he fell hard for his new outfielder. One day in the spring of 1939, Reiser dumped a veteran shortstop named Billy Rogell on his keister breaking up a double play. “We don’t play like that in spring training up here, you bush son of a bitch!” yelled Rogell. “I do,” Pete responded, which was just what Durocher would have said.
He had taught himself to switch-hit in the summer of 1938 while in the minors, and dominated spring training in 1939. He was sure to make the club under normal circumstances, but because of the secret deal with Rickey, MacPhail sent him back down, which set off a tear-filled brawl between manager and owner. Leo retaliated by talking up Reiser to the press, so much so that it became impossible to simply hand him back to St. Louis for some no-names. Rickey balked at the new price, and since he could hardly go public with details of his devious and illegal plan, he was forced to let Reiser stay in Brooklyn.
Pete was a mainstay by 1941, leading the league in batting, runs, doubles, triples, and OPS—a spectacular season overshadowed by the historic campaigns put up by Williams and DiMaggio that summer, and by Dolph Camilli, his Brooklyn teammate who won the NL MVP over Reiser. Pete also quickly established his reputation for knocking himself into next week, usually by running headlong into the outfield wall. He missed nearly forty games due to injury in his first two full seasons.
There was a positive side effect to the reckless play—Reiser was considered 4-F by the services. The navy rejected him, and the army was about to, until a zealous captain at his indoctrination center pulled his papers from the reject pile and sought Pete out. “What will you do if we let you go?” he asked. “Play ball,” said the guileless Reiser.
The next sound Pete heard was the stamping of his orders to Fort Riley, Kansas.
On his second day at the base, he was sent on a fifty-mile forced march in subzero temperatures, and caught pneumonia. He was about to be discharged but a baseball-loving colonel intervened, keeping a now-well Reiser to build a team for the base. The colonel tore up his discharge papers right in his face. Years later, Reiser said he could still hear the tearing sound.
Loads of pro players passed through Fort Riley and played on Reiser’s teams, including Harry Walker, Joe Garagiola, Alpha Brazle, and Murry Dickson. One day a black soldier came over to the field and asked to try out. A nearby officer told him he had to play for the camp Negro team, which didn’t actually exist. Reiser long remembered the forlorn soldier walking away alone. “That was my first encounter with Jackie Robinson.”
Most of the Riley players were sent to Europe, and combat, but Reiser was sent to Camp Lee in Virginia, where this time, his discharge was overturned by a general who wanted the best damn ball club in the armed forces. Reiser promptly slammed through a wooden fence chasing a fly ball, tumbling down a twenty-five-foot hill and into a ravine. Onlookers thought he was dead, but Reiser escaped with a dislocated shoulder. He might have been safer in combat.
In 1946 Reiser was making just nine grand, with a performance bonus that lifted him to $13,000. He easily achieved the standards required for the extra dough, despite reinjuring the same shoulder in May. Brooklyn trainer Doc (Harold) Wendler examined the wing, consulted Gray’s Anatomy and the Hippocratic Oath, and told the Herald Tribune, “A few sunny afternoons will provide a cure.” Flatbush must have been plagued by cloudy skies, for Pete’s shoulder hurt all season, and he was forced to miss the All-Star Game because of it. “It wasn’t as serious as the head injuries but it did more to end my career,” he told writer Donald Honig. “The shoulder kept popping out of place, more bone chips developed, and there was constant pain in the arm and shoulder.”
“Without Pete, the All-Star Game is a hoax,” declared Jimmy Cannon. “He’s the best player in the NL. Can you hear me good?” But, due to the injuries, that was no longer the case. In ’46, it was his legs that provided the biggest threat. He would lead the league in steals with thirty-four, including seven steals of home. His patented move was to slide past the plate and flick the dish with his hand. Once in Chicago, he was called out on a steal attempt of home by ump George Magerkurth, who then admitted sotto voce, “Goddamn did I blow that one. Sorry kid.”
But Pete was already on the downward slope, and another close encounter with a cement wall in ’47 accelerated his decline even further. “It had always been so easy for me, but now it was a struggle,” he remembered. “The fun and pure joy of it were gone.” He lasted a few more mediocre years and was out of the game by the early ’50s, never having quite fulfilled that superstar potential. He made a lasting impression, however, on fences and fans alike. For example, every winter he was asked to visit the Missouri School for the Blind, and one day he asked the principal why they liked him so much. “Our children here have problems with walls,” came the reply, “and we hear you do too. They figure you’re one of them.”
One day when Reiser had first come up to the bigs, he was out in right field when a female fan dropped him a note to take to Durocher. Figuring it was a liaison of some kind, Pete took the paper to Leo. Durocher read the scrawl, which related that pitcher Whitlow Wyatt was tiring and that Hugh Casey needed to get warmed up. Durocher dutifully made the change, Casey was bombed, and the Dodgers were forced to make a sizable comeback to win the game.
A furious Leo turned on Reiser in the clubhouse. “Don’t you ever hand me notes from MacPhail as long as you play for me!” Reiser stammered out that the note wasn’t from Mac, it was from a woman named Hilda. “Hilda??!!” Leo cried, and just walked away, for once at a loss for words.
Welcome to Ebbets Field, where the fans made pitching changes.
Few would have had the chutzpah to have a player hand deliver strategic advice to Leo Durocher, but Hilda Chester wasn’t any ordinary booster. A pleasantly plump woman in a flower-print dress with a voice like an air raid siren, Hilda had been in love with the game since childhood. She wanted to be the first woman to play in the big leagues, but like most fans her athletic ability fell short, so she attached herself to the Dodgers like a barnacle. As a teen she hung around the offices of the Brooklyn Chronicle, sometimes glomming passes from the writers. She went to work as a peanut sacker at the park, transferring nuts from a fifty-pound sack to individual bags. It was a thankless job for non-pachyderms, but it got Hilda closer to the team.
A pair of heart attacks robbed her of her unique ability to bellow at the men in the arena, so she took to the implements—frying pans, pots, and, memorably, cowbells. She “could make more noise than four male hog callers” with her cowbells, and when she wasn’t clanging away, she was waving her HILDA IS HERE! sign or leading fans in snake dances through the bleachers. Durocher had grown close to her by now, visiting in the hospital after her cardiac arrests and giving “Hilda wit da bell” a lifetime pass to the grandstand, which she eschewed in favor of the rowdier bleachers.
Howling Hilda repaid the favor during Leo’s assault trial in April. She gave testimony that stretched credulity in saying the plaintiff had called her a “cocksucker,” and “Leo came to my defense.” Like Durocher, she managed to stay out of the clink and with her beloved Bums all summer.
For those fans for whom baseball wasn’t enough, Hilda was just a slice of the unique entertainment options on hand at Ebbets Field, where Gladys Gooding, a St. Louis native and veteran of the RKO and Loews Theaters, entertained fans on the organ. “St. Louis Blues
” was one of her favorites, along with “What a Difference a Day Makes,” “Somebody Else Is Taking My Place,” and “Give Me the Moon Over Brooklyn.” One regular tune she played got the whole crowd singing, but visitors from elsewhere in the country wouldn’t recognize the melody. It was a song called “Leave Us Go Root for the Dodgers, Rodgers,” an ode to the fans of the borough written by Dan Parker, the sports editor of the Daily Mirror.
Murgatroyd Darcy, a broad from Canarsie
Went ’round with a fellow named Rodge
At dancing a rumba or jitterbug numbah
You couldn’t beat Rodge ’twas his dodge
The pair danced together throughout the cold weather
But when the trees blossomed again
Miss Murgatroyd Darcy, the Belle of Canarsie
To Rodgers would sing this refrain:
Leave us go root for the Dodgers, Rodgers
They’re playing ball under the lights
Let us cut out all the juke jernts, Rodgers
Where we have been wastin’ our nights
Dancin’ the shag or the rumba is silly
When we could be rooting for Adolf Camilli
So leave us go root for the Dodgers
Them Dodgers is my gallant Knights.
The faithful would belt out every word.
Cramped and small, with hardly any foul territory, Ebbets Field was packed early on game day, with batting practice almost as important a spectator sport as the contest itself. There was no parking around the field (an issue that would cause O’Malley to force a move), so fans walked or trolleyed to the games. The nickname “Dodgers” came from fans having to dodge trolley cars on their way into the park. The narrow aisles and breezeways made Ebbets Field hard to leave as well; as a letter writer to the New York Times put it in 1938, “The home of the Dodgers is harder to get into than the Social Register and harder to get out of than Alcatraz.”