The Victory Season Page 30
Naturally, the writers took this as the worst insult of all. They were being treated as lepers incapable of social graces, “scullery maids” in the words of Al Hirshberg. And when the irascible Huck Finnegan of the Boston American inconveniently got into the same elevator as Cronin on the way to their respective parties, the result was a swearing match between floors. Then Lake sought out Yawkey after a few belts and engaged in a shouting fight with the owner. After this fateful evening, the press really took it to Williams, Cronin, and Yawkey at every opportunity. Ironically, the Splinter wasn’t even there for the fireworks. He had blown off the festivities, supposedly to visit a wounded war vet at a local VA hospital, though that was never confirmed. His absence caused a sensation, of course. What kind of teammate misses a pennant celebration? wondered the press.
Ted was temporarily cheered a few days later, when two thousand fans from Gardner, Massachusetts, the center of furniture building in the United States at the time, descended en masse on Fenway to present Williams with the world’s largest chair. It weighed 750 pounds, and a photo of the Splinter in his oversized throne ran in papers across the country.
But on September 26, an off day before the final three games of the season, Williams was driving with Doris to an exhibition game when his car slid out of control on a wet highway and skidded head-on into another vehicle. No one was hurt, but both cars were totaled. Williams got his car replaced for free, while the other unfortunate in the accident was ridiculed in the press for committing the ultimate Boston crime—he had never heard of Williams before the Splinter slammed into his automobile.
The scary incident put a capper on a dreadful month. What next? Ted must have thought. Unfortunately, he would find out soon enough. If Williams thought the bad tidings were over, he was quite wrong.
Chapter 32
Victoire
Leo Durocher put up a mighty ruckus, as was his wont, alternately threatening to quit and to punch someone’s lights out, but all his hootin’ and hollerin’ couldn’t persuade Rickey to call Robinson up to the Dodgers in time for the pennant race, though he might have provided the difference in the tight battle.
Instead, Jackie stayed with Montreal for its biggest games of the season. The top four teams in the International League held a playoff. With a 100–54 record, and an eighteen-game margin in the standings, the Royals were seeded first. In the opening round, Montreal led Newark three games to two, but trailed 4–3 in the last of the ninth in Game Six. Royals first baseman Les Burge appeared to take strike three, but it was called a ball. On the next pitch, Burge homered to tie the game. Three Newark players and manager George Selkirk were ejected after reacting hysterically to the call.
But it got worse for the Bears. The next batter singled, and Herman Franks doubled off the scoreboard. The runner scored on a close play, despite the efforts of Newark catcher Larry Berra. Berra went berserk, and teammates had to restrain him from killing the ump, Art Gore. Gore had to be escorted from the park so the Bears couldn’t rip him limb from limb.
In the IL finals, Montreal pummeled Syracuse in five games to win the Governor’s Cup. That left the “Little World Series,” a duel for top honors in triple-A baseball that pitted the Royals against the champs of the American Association, the Louisville Colonels. Best known for Thoroughbred racing, Louisville was also a rabid baseball town, with fans of both races, including Cassius Clay Sr., whose four-year-old son would add another sport to the city’s profile as an adult.
Unfortunately, the races seldom commingled. Louisville adhered to a hard-core segregationist policy. The Colonels ownership, mindful of their white fan base and its attitude, set a strict quota on the number of black fans allowed into Parkway Field. Hundreds of black fans were turned away from the gates for the first three games, all of which were played in Louisville to save money on travel expenses. Many of them had traveled great distances to see one of their own take on the whites.
Robinson was in a “deep funk” in the days before the Series. He had played well but not spectacularly in the IL playoffs. Now he faced his first true exposure to southern mores since spring training. Louisville infielder Al Brancato recalled, “He didn’t even have a place to stay. There were no hotels that would take him, so they didn’t even know whether or not they were even going to play.”
Montreal did, and in the face of “some of the worst vituperation I had yet experienced,” courtesy of the Louisville fans, Jackie crumbled. He went 0–5 in the opener, the first time all season he had done so, and the Royals lost 7–5. “Everything he did, they booed him,” said Colonels pitcher Otey Clark. “I remember our pitcher, Jim Wilson, knocked him down, and the fans cheered.”
The worse Robinson played, the more vicious the crowd got. “A torrent of mass hatred burst from the stands with virtually every move I made,” Jackie recalled. Typical badinage from the stands:
“Hey black boy, go on back to Canada and stay there!”
“Yeah, and take all your nigger-loving friends with you!”
Robinson was hitless again in Game Two and committed an error, but the Royals pitching dominated in a 3–0 victory to tie the Series. But the Colonels crushed Montreal 15–6 in Game Three, to retake the series lead. The season was threatening to come apart. After months of brilliant play, Robinson and the Royals were bowing to hate and anger at the worst possible time.
But on October 2, the Series shifted to Montreal, and everything else shifted as well. Robinson returned to a city livid over the way he had been treated in Louisville. The Colonels players bore the brunt of their anger, getting booed vociferously every time they emerged from their dugout. “I didn’t approve of this kind of retaliation,” said Robinson in his 1972 autobiography, “but I felt a jubilant sense of gratitude for the way Canadians expressed their feelings.”
Gratitude was one thing, scoring runs another. On a freezing night, Montreal was being shut down by Otey Clark. Down 4–0 and then 5–2, the Royals were in danger of being put on the brink. But Robinson doubled in the eighth and scored to make it 5–3. In the ninth, Clark gave up a pair of runs to tie the game. “It was my most embarrassing moment in baseball,” Clark said fifty years later.
In the tenth, Jackie came up with a man on second. He looped a curveball into center field for a hit that knocked in the game-winning run. Fans flooded the field in celebration, and Robinson couldn’t get back to the clubhouse for nearly half an hour, such was the adulation.
Thursday, October 3, wasn’t nearly as cold as the day before, and Montreal celebrated by getting off to a fast start. Jackie doubled and scored to give his side the lead. He tripled and scored in the seventh, and bunted for a hit to score Campanis in the eighth. Montreal won 5–3, and was within a game of the LWS title.
Over nineteen thousand fans packed Delorimier Stadium for Game Six. Curt “Coonskin” Davis got the ball for Montreal. The ancient (he had turned forty-three a month before) hurler had won 158 games in the majors (mostly with the Cardinals), and pitched in two All-Star Games and the 1941 World Series, but he would say that this game meant more to him than any he had ever pitched. Ol’ Coonskin pitched the game of his life that chilly afternoon of October 4. He held Louisville to three hits and no runs. Robinson singled, stole second, and scored the game’s first run—as it turned out, the only one Davis would need. Montreal added an insurance run to give them a 2–0 win and the Little World Series championship. After the horrid start in Louisville, Robinson wound up hitting .400 for the Series.
A massive throng swarmed the field after the final out. Jackie weaved his way through the crowd and made it to the locker room. A wedge of police tried to clear the park, but no one wanted to leave. As Sam Maltin reported in the Pittsburgh Courier, “They refused to move and sang Il a gagné ses épaulettes [‘He won his bars’] and ‘We want Robinson.’ It was a mob ready to riot.” Hopper and Davis came out and were carried around the field, but the throng wasn’t satisfied—they wanted to show their love for Jackie.
A group
of ushers went to the clubhouse to tell Robinson “some fans were waiting to see him.” Jackie went back out to the field, where thousands slapped his back, hugged him, and kissed his cheek. Jackie, tears streaming down his face, tried to disengage himself, but the crowd would not be denied.
After the hero’s treatment, Robinson was finally released to shower and dress. He had little time to linger—he had a train to catch. Robinson was off to Detroit to begin a month-long barnstorming tour. He had signed up his fellow black farmhands in the Dodgers chain, Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe, along with Negro League stars Larry Doby and Buck Leonard, by guaranteeing them $5,000 apiece (the tour would prove disappointing at the gate, and Robinson would have to dip into his signing bonus to make good on the promise of five grand to his fellow stars).
With less than an hour to get to the train, Robinson threw on his clothes and made to leave. According to Maltin, “he had a tough time packing his gear as people came trooping in to wish him luck. They all said they wanted him back.” Clay Hopper stopped him at the door and shook his hand. “You’ve been a great ballplayer and a fine gentleman,” said the manager who once questioned Robinson’s very humanity. “It’s been wonderful having you on the team.”
Buoyed, Robinson opened the clubhouse door, only to have his heart sink. Thousands of fans remained—if anything, the crowd had grown. There was nothing to do except plunge through and hope for the best. Calling upon his days as a football star at UCLA, Robinson juked, jived, and shoved his way to the street, where he took off at a sprint. The crowd ran after him. Just then, a car hired by Rachel, who was already at the station and feared her husband might be late, screeched up and rescued Robinson.
As the car took off down the street, hundreds of fans trailed in its wake. It was the last Montreal would see of Jackie Robinson, and everyone knew it. He had given them an eternal season, and the fans wanted it to last just a few moments longer. Maltin famously captured the irony in the Pittsburgh Courier: “It was probably the only day in history that a black man ran from a white mob with love instead of lynching on its mind.”
Chapter 33
The Stretch Run
Even after Montreal’s triumph, Rickey and the Dodgers stuck to their guns—no Jackie Robinson in Brooklyn until 1947. He had been through enough for one season, and the team wanted him to recharge for the coming test the following spring. Brooklyn had sputtered through a 16–13 August, but come autumn, Durocher cracked the managerial whip once more, rendering moot the argument over Robinson’s promotion to the big club. In September, Brooklyn won nine of its first ten games. Perhaps the credit should go to Stanky, who on August 31 got into a brawl with Goody Rosen of the Giants and was ejected. Not much roused the Durocher Dodgers like a good brannigan. True to form, seven different Brooklyn pitchers won games during the stretch, and Reiser, fresh out of the hospital from a bout with pleurisy, ran the Giants silly by stealing three bases, including home for the seventh time, in an 11–3 rout.
Arthur Daley was overcome by Reiser’s play, and he was effusive (and unknowingly prescient about a certain Montreal Royal and soon-to-be Dodger) in the Times. “The mercury-footed outfielder has had a moral relapse and gone larcenous once more, stealing bases by the gross lots. He creates such an undercurrent of excitement in the stands whenever he moves onto the base paths that the opposing team immediately gets a mass case of the jitters. He’s the only man in the game who can upset the opposition entirely by doing no more than standing a few feet off base, a quizzical, mischievous grin on his face.”
Leo took the credit, but the strong play may also have come from Rickey’s promise of a new car to each man if they won the pennant. Rickey’s generosity spurred the club to pool some cash and get a nice gift for their boss. They bought him a boat, and wanted to present it to him publicly before a game. But Rickey had stopped attending due to the treatment he was getting from the fans. So the players lured him to Ebbets Field by telling him Durocher and Furillo were brawling in the clubhouse. Rickey enjoyed playing peacemaker, so he hustled down to the park, only to be surprised by the boat. When he came out on the field, he was booed vociferously.
The Brooks would need every victory, for St. Louis went 9–2 over the same ten-day period.
On the eleventh, the Dodgers and Reds hooked up at Ebbets Field for a ridiculous nineteen-inning scoreless tie, the longest in major league history. Johnny Vander Meer, he of the back-to-back no-hitters back in ’38, pitched fifteen blank frames. By the time he finally gave way, “Brooklyn bats were as heavy as crowbars.” Dixie Walker threw a runner out at the plate in the top of the nineteenth, and even heard some boos from the home fans, who were exasperated by the lack of runs. Four Brooklyn hurlers went into the gloaming before the game was finally called, four hours and forty minutes after the first pitch.
It was hardly the way Durocher wanted to prep for the final series of the regular season against St. Louis, who came to town the following day. A listless group of exhausted Dodgers was in no condition to put up a fight in the series opener, and they lost 10–2, Garagiola’s three-run homer off Higbe in the first inning sending all non-diehards (as if there were any) fleeing Ebbets Field within half an hour. That put the Cards up by 2½ games, and hope was leaking out of the borough. The overachievers seemed to have hit their ceiling.
But Brooklyn bounced back strong the next afternoon, thanks to a clubhouse meeting before the game conducted at top volume by the inimitable Leo the Lip. The Dodgers responded to the expletive-laden pep talk with four in the first off Red Munger, who had at last returned from the service. Munger trudged to the showers, knocked from the box in the very first inning. Suddenly, the strains of reveille and artillery fire wouldn’t have sounded so bad to him.
The Cards fought to within 4–3 by the ninth inning. Musial then tripled. Kurowski lifted a fly to center, and Musial, thinking third base coach Mike Gonzalez was yelling, “Go, go!” broke for the plate. But he was screaming, “No, no!” and Furillo unleashed his cannon arm to throw out Musial and save the game. Ol’ Hig, driven from the box the day before, relieved with 2⅔ hitless innings. When asked afterward if he should think more about tomorrow, and not risk burning out his players, Durocher sneered, “Tomorrow!? Tomorrow it might rain!”
He was platooning Howie Schultz and Ed Stevens at first, Furillo and Whitman in center, Bruce Edwards and Ferrell Anderson behind the plate, choosing daily between three different third basemen, and tossing in whatever pitcher seemed to strike his fancy at that moment. There were only four regulars in the lineup—Stanky, Reese, Dixie, and, when healthy, Reiser. Leo was getting mileage out of every man on the roster.
So Durocher’s stratagem for the rubber game of this enormous series wasn’t a complete shock. Leo started Ralph Branca, who was back in good graces after the salary dispute back in the spring. Branca had also gotten on Durocher’s shit list by refusing to pitch batting practice. But the Dodgers pitching staff was spread thin, so all was forgiven for the former NYU star.
Sort of forgiven, anyway. Durocher planned to use Branca for a single batter, then switch to lefty Lombardi, mainly just to screw with the Cards’ heads. But Branca retired Schoendienst on two pitches, and then Walker and Musial went out softly as well, so Leo, ever the hunch player, stuck with his big righty. “Being angry, I guess it pumped me up,” remembered Branca. “The adrenaline got to flowing, cause in the first inning I got them out on five pitches. I walked in, and Durocher said, ‘Keep throwing like that, kid. We’re going to keep you in.’”
Branca went on to hurl a three-hit shutout, a 5–0 win that brought the Dodgers back to a virtual tie for the lead. “His assorted curves caught corners as if magnetized,” wrote the Post-Dispatch. “After that, I believed in myself,” Branca recalled. “That was the tempering of Ralph Branca.” Meanwhile, the thirty-three thousand fans at Ebbets Field put the Dodgers over the 1.5 million mark on the season, setting a new NL record.
“Not even Hitchcock could improve upon this race,” wrote
Broeg, and the next day brought a scene that could have come straight from the fabled director’s twisted imagination. The Cubs were in Brooklyn for a doubleheader and won the first game in ten innings. The second game lasted half that, for Ebbets Field was invaded by a pestilential horde of gnats in the fifth inning. “The unusual spectacle of thousands of persons frantically slapping scorecards and newspapers puzzled the denizens of the press box,” Roscoe McGowen admitted in the Times, until the little biters descended on them too. The game was called, and umpire Beans Reardon told the press, tongue firmly in cheek, that “anyone who thinks the game was called for any reason but darkness is bugs.” Since the Cubs had batted five times, the game was official, and Brooklyn was awarded a 2–0 win.
Up in Boston, the Cards kept pace. Williams, Cronin, and several other Sox watched as Musial lasered five hits around Braves Field as the Redbirds won the next day. “Every one of the hits left Musial’s bat with the velocity of .30 caliber bullets projected from a Garand M-1 rifle,” Broeg wrote, as if auditioning for Stars and Stripes.
Stan and the rest of the players couldn’t help but notice that later that night, Joe Louis defended his heavyweight title for the twenty-third time, knocking tomato can Tami “the Bronx Barkeep” Mauriello out in just two minutes and nine seconds of work, for which Joe was paid $103,611. Between that figure and the new attendance records, the wiser of the ballplayers would have realized then that the owners had pulled a fast one and were getting an incredible bargain for the players’ services.