The Victory Season Read online

  But they were ballplayers first, so they put aside their financial calculations in favor of the pennant chase. Brooklyn was agog over the race, which stayed tighter than Rickey’s wallet for the last couple of weeks. On the steps of Borough Hall, the Rev. Benney S. C. Benson knelt and intoned: “Oh Lord, their chances don’t look so good right now, but everyone is praying for the Bums to win. We ask you not to give…St. Louis any better break than you give us.” Meanwhile, a new young couple took their honeymoon at Ebbets Field during a key stretch. A Dodgers fan named Raphael Skopp, on death row in Massachusetts for armed robbery and homicide, spent his final hours listening intently to a September game. The criminals went the other way with the Redbirds. While the Cards were beating the Cubs 1–0 at Wrigley Field, with Brecheen pitching a shutout and knocking in the game’s only run, thieves were making off with several gloves left behind in the St. Louis clubhouse.

  Two days earlier, the Cards had come to Chicago to open the series. Waiting for Slaughter was a process server. His estranged wife, Josephine, was filing for divorce. Enos accepted the papers while in the dugout runway taking practice swings, waiting to hit. He almost missed his at bat dealing with the server. His teammates, knowing Slaughter could have drummed up an injury to miss the trip and avoid the Illinois court, “made him virtually their hero,” according to the Boston Globe. He was giving new meaning to the phrase “taking one for the team.”

  Everyone, it seemed, was doing likewise. Pee Wee Reese had a deep gash on his leg that required seventeen stitches, but he didn’t miss an inning. Reiser was a mess, typically, playing despite the bum shoulder and a badly sprained ankle that caused him to miss several games in September. Meanwhile, Howie Pollet continued to take the ball despite a shoulder injury that sent waves of pain down his back and neck. He went 3–3 with a 3.96 ERA in September, not bad considering his injury but a far cry from the 10–4, 1.33 he put up in July and August before he felt that first stab of agony.

  St. Louis returned home from its long road trip on the Illinois Central, putting both the Dodgers and the Cardinals on home ground for the final week. “Cards Reach Fork in Road, Need Knife to Butter World Series Bread” read a somewhat baffling Post-Dispatch headline upon the team’s return. The Brooklyn Eagle set its own feelings to verse:

  If Lippy kicks the flag away

  And hands it to the Birds

  He won’t have much to say

  Except ten thousand words.

  Leo was left speechless by the results of the twenty-fifth. Leading Philly 9–6 in the ninth, his team came unglued and coughed up five runs and the game. Durocher used a record eight pitchers to try to save the day, to no avail. Meanwhile, Sportsman’s Park rocked as Musial tied a game against the Reds with a ninth-inning hit off the nasty Johnny Vander Meer, and Dusak played hero again by knocking “a fastball that now is the souvenir of a sure-fingered fan who was sitting halfway up in the bleachers just under the hot dog stand.” The full house went crazy. A New York writer covering the game said, “For the first time I’ve got the feeling I’m in Brooklyn.” The attendance figure at Sportsman’s Park went over the one million mark, leading J. Roy Stockton to write, “No longer can the magnates weep in their beer pleading they are struggling along in a small population center and therefore cannot afford to pay big salaries…the players all know there is gold in them there strong boxes, and the boys will want some of it—plenty of it.”

  The Cards led Brooklyn by a game. But then Pollet and Dickson were rocked on consecutive days, and the Dodgers brought the race back to equipoise. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. Reiser, now also hobbling with a bad hamstring, had told Leo he could “play but not run” against the Phillies. He reached on a fielder’s choice in the first inning. Inexplicably, Leo flashed him the steal sign. Reiser therefore took a long lead, and when pitcher Charley Schanz threw over, Pete jammed his ankle awkwardly sliding back in to first. As his star screamed in pain, Durocher rushed out, ashen, yelling, “Get up, you’re all right!” But he wasn’t. The bone was sticking through the skin. Reiser had a broken ankle and was done for the season. Durocher, casting about for someone to blame other than himself, settled on the Ebbets Field groundskeeper, saying, “The rocklike ground grabbed his spikes.”

  The race went to the final weekend tied. As Hollywood unions picketing studios brawled with hired strikebreakers and a car ran over a striker, Roy Rogers (star of no fewer than eight pictures in 1946) was far from the strife, watching his beloved Cardinals from a box seat at Sportsman’s Park. The Redbirds beat the Cubs 4–1 behind Brecheen’s brilliant pitching. It was the Cat’s fourth victory of the month, combined with a 1.69 ERA. Brooklyn responded with three in the first off Johnny Sain, Boston’s twenty-game winner, and won 7–4. The race was tied after 153 of the 154 games scheduled.

  Sunday, September 29, was gloomy in St. Louis, and since a rainout would not be replayed, the pennant could have been decided with one team listening on the radio and not competing, a scenario that seems outlandish today. Fortunately, the wet stuff stayed away. So did the offense for the two front-running clubs. Mort Cooper, a former Cardinals pitcher, was the ironic hurler for the Braves against the Dodgers, and he did his old club a favor by shutting out the Brooks on four hits (President Truman sent Cooper a congratulatory telegram for his effort). St. Louis led Chicago 2–1 after five innings, but Munger gave up five runs to the Cubbies. “Back to the Army with ya!” yelled a fan as Munger left the game. Back at a downcast Ebbets Field, “Everybody and their Aunt Kate lifted their dragging chins” as the score was posted on the out-of-town scoreboard late in the Dodgers game.

  The Cards lost 8–3, and for the first time in major league history, two teams were tied with no games left. They were both 96–58. “The ding-dong battle ended in a blanket finish Sunday and wound up even-Stephen,” according to the Post-Dispatch.

  The unprecedented situation would require something brand-new in the sport’s long history. A three-game playoff between Brooklyn and St. Louis would decide the 1946 NL pennant and give one team a berth in the Fall Classic. “There’s a World Series every year,” noted Red Smith, “but there’s never been a clambake like this.”

  Chapter 34

  The First Playoff

  The Publicity Director of the National League, Charlie Segar, flipped the coin. Down a scratchy telephone line to the Cardinals’ office on Dodier Street, Sam Breadon called heads, and lost. Thus the choice was Durocher’s. Leo looked over at Ford Frick, the league president, whose feet were up on the massive oak desk in his office, and announced his decision. The first-ever playoff series would begin in St. Louis. The Lip wanted to have the potential deciding game played at home, so he agreed to head to Missouri for the opener, then host Games Two and Three, should a third be necessary.

  Unfortunately for the Dodgers, Durocher wasn’t factoring in the marathon train journey west. In retrospect, he should have raced to Rickey and traveling secretary Harold Parrott and demanded that the team charter an airplane. But the Dodgers hadn’t flown all season, and they weren’t about to start now, on the eve of the biggest games of the year.

  Game day dawned with good news from Germany. Twelve Nazis who were on trial in Nuremberg had their fates decided not far from Soldier’s Field. They were sentenced to death, the appointment with the hangman set for two weeks hence. The condemned men appealed to face the firing squad instead, but were rebuffed. Three others, including Rudolf Hess, got life in Spandau Prison. Albert Speer was given twenty years, Admiral Karl Dönitz, the German naval commander named to succeed Hitler after the Führer killed himself, ten.

  Back in St. Louis, writers filled out MVP ballots. Musial was the obvious winner. But the Man was in no mood for self-congratulation. He was too busy sweating the coming best-of-three series. Stash thought this new playoff setup carried far more pressure than did the Fall Classic. After all, as he pointed out, “Once you’re in the Series, win or lose, you’re in the money.” The loser of this tiebreaker wouldn’t get an extra
dime.

  Durocher chose Branca as his starter for the opener, still impressed by the big righty’s late-season charge. “It’ll be Branca and we’ll win,” the skipper swaggeringly told the press mob on the train west. Brooklyn, despite the limp to the finish, seemed, to the press at least, to be playing with the house’s bankroll. The Times reported that the Dodgers “breeze[d] into town with their characteristic jauntiness…from their general mien one could easily imagine they had achieved their objective by winning their last twenty in a row.”

  The Cards, by contrast, looked far more wooden, at least to the amateur psychologists at the Paper of Record. The Redbirds “appeared extraordinarily subdued if not downright discouraged.” Certainly Pollet was trending downward; he had been shelled in his previous two outings, and his shoulder injury, which by now had led to a further oblique strain, was affecting his play. Whether or not to start him in this most crucial contest was a question that gripped the city and the manager.

  Dyer may have thought of Pollet as a son, but with less than two hours before the first pitch, the time for familial grace notes was over. The skipper turned harshly on the little left-hander.

  “Your back either hurts or it doesn’t,” snapped Dyer, a hush falling over the clubhouse. “There’s too much at stake and besides, I’m not going to risk your future on one ball game. So give me a straight answer, not ‘I’ll try.’”

  “Eddie, I’m going,” replied Pollet.

  The box office took a beating due to the lack of advance sale. A frosty evening kept to a handful the overnighters who lined up for tickets. The ones who showed up lit bonfires to ward off the chill. Many were allowed to seek solace in their cars while keeping a place in line. But the cold front moved through quickly. Tuesday, the first of October, was swathed in brilliant warm sunshine, around seventy-five degrees, a perfect afternoon for baseball. Scalpers were selling $1.75 tickets for $1, and only 26,012, about 8,000 shy of capacity, turned up. So as Dyer and Durocher posed for photos, the stands were only two-thirds full. Leo muttered through his smile, “You ain’t gotta chance, Eddie.”

  “I know, Leo,” Dyer laughed back. “Your ghostwriter said that two weeks ago.”

  No one wrote that Durocher had blown the pennant by burying Branca for months, though Ralph sure felt that way. “If they had pitched me, you know we would have won at least one more game than we did,” he said years later. Now Durocher tried to make up for past sins by starting his moody right-hander in the opener.

  Five years later, Branca would surrender one of the most famous (or infamous, depending on your rooting sensibilities) home runs in baseball history, Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ’Round the World” in the 1951 playoff. That, combined with a 1–2 record in the World Series, would saddle Branca with a reputation of being poor in the clutch. That stigma really started with this game, though it’s a bit unfair. The Cards loaded the bases against him in the first inning. Garagiola then blooped one off the end of his bat that didn’t even reach the outfield grass but fell safely, enough to score Moore with the game’s first run. Branca escaped without further damage.

  One of Leo’s first basemen, Howie “Stretch” Schultz, tied it by swatting the first pitch of the third inning into the left field seats, but the Cards reestablished control in the bottom of the frame. A groundout scored one run, and the Hat brought in another with a chopped single over Branca’s head, which made it 3–1 and ended his afternoon. “They really didn’t hit the ball hard,” Branca recalled years later. “It was just a bunch of nub hits.”

  Meanwhile, Pollet was once again “poison to the Brooks.” He winced with every delivery, and each batter appeared certain to be his last. As Sid Keener wrote in the St. Louis Star-Times, “The fog was gone from his fastball and it came up to the plate, hanging and big. Pollet grimaced with agony every time a 3–2 pitch came up and he had to lay it in there with his body behind it. No one could believe he could go nine innings, but he did.” Reiser, itching to mimic Pollet and play while hurt, but unable to do so with his leg in a cast, grew too uncomfortable in the dugout and repaired to the trainer’s room as the Dodgers, clearly affected by the long train trip, wallowed fruitlessly for two-thirds of the game.

  Finally, in the seventh, the logy Dodgers threatened. Two men were on with one out when Schultz came up again. The 6'7" slice of tall timber sometimes called “Steeple” came through again, rapping a single down the right field line. One run scored, but Slaughter screamed over, cut the ball off, and gunned it to third. Bruce Edwards was out by twenty-five feet, ending the threat. In the bottom half of the frame, Musial tripled and scored to restore the two-run lead. In the eighth, the Cards flashed another bit of defensive wizardry, as Marion, using a brand-new, bright-yellow glove, speared a Furillo liner just above his shoe tops with two on and two out. He called it afterward “the hardest ball I’ve had hit at me in a long time.” And in the ninth, a gasping Pollet was rescued by Walker, who ran down Reese’s “lusty drive” into left center, and the Cards held on for a 4–2 win. Pollet had allowed eleven base runners, but gutted his way to a memorable victory.

  The Dodgers and Durocher dressed “with ornate slowness” in their clubhouse, baffled that they had lost. Several admitted that the long trip west had sapped them of energy, and wondered why they hadn’t flown. Durocher mustered enough juice to race out of the shower, naked but for flip-flops, to order the press out of the clubhouse. “This is a real big story,” mused one writer on the wrong side of the door. “Leo Durocher not talking should be the lede in every newspaper in the country.”

  One Dodger available for comment was clubhouse “boy” Johnny Griffiths, a middle-aged man with a gift for making mystifying Berra-style proclamations long before Yogi arrived on the major league scene. Johnny’s take on the game—“The Cards didn’t look so good today, except for the score.”

  Pollet certainly didn’t look good afterward. He resembled a “feeble old man” as Doc Weaver ripped the tape away from his rib cage and back. Dyer yelled out, “The Cokes are on me, boys!” (Durocher, he was not), but the Cards barely cracked a smile in the locker room, aware of the challenge that still lay ahead. As the First Fan, President Truman, said to Newsweek, “I’d feel better if the last two games weren’t in Brooklyn.”

  Dyer decided it would be prudent to keep the baseball gods on his side. He rummaged through a packed-up trunk to pull out the pencil that he’d used to make out that day’s lineup card. The superstitious manager wanted to ensure that he would use it again for Game Two.

  The Cardinals’ train back to New York made excellent time, pulling in after just twenty hours. The Dodger Special, on the other hand, was delayed. It arrived at 4:45 p.m., just under twenty-three hours from the time it crossed the mighty Mississip’, headed east. No fans were on hand to greet the team at Penn Station—they were busy elsewhere. While the players were sleeping off the journey at home or in hotels, several thousand fans camped overnight along Montague Street for the right to buy unreserved seats for Game Two of the playoff series. More than twenty thousand fans had lined up three days before to buy the reserved seats, despite a cold downpour. The first man to arrive on line offered the night watchman $25 to allow him to sleep in the vestibule of the Dodgers’ offices, but he was rebuffed. A special detail of police from the nearby Bergen Street precinct was called in to keep order. “We could sell this game out on out-of-town sales alone,” remarked one Dodgers executive in awe. The fans who showed up and braved the elements were taken care of, but not the ones who sent in telegrammed requests.

  The foul weather, the violent tendrils of a hurricane making its way north, extended up the Atlantic coast and was a primary cause of yet another deadly air crash, this one in Newfoundland. Thirty-nine army wives flying a charter across the ocean to visit their husbands perished when the plane flew straight into a hillside. Rickey and Breadon no doubt read the news and congratulated themselves, cynically, on not hiring planes for the playoff.

  The weather leading up to
Game Two was frightful, but as in St. Louis, the baseball gods conjured perfect conditions for the action. Thursday, October 3, was sunny and warm, with the game-time temperature at 65 degrees. Dyer’s men had gained confidence from the win back home—the team only packed one day’s worth of clothes, assuming they would finish Brooklyn off. The scoreboard operator disagreed. The display announced to incoming fans that St. Louis would be playing at Ebbets Field “Thursday and Friday.”

  Some 31,437 fans managed to cram into the ballpark’s every cranny. Over four hundred of them were active servicemen, who got in free with their uniforms. Scalpers charged $25 for $1.75 seats, but the fish had to buy a seat for Game Three as well, making the total cost of admission $50. There was no shortage of ticket swapping anyway. The Post-Dispatch thought, “You couldn’t have traded the Brooklyn Bridge (with a sirloin steak thrown in) for a ticket.” The arena was festive, as a World Series air pervaded, minus the bunting on the fences. Dizzy Dean sported a ten-gallon hat for the occasion, looking as out of place in Flatbush as one possibly could. Brooklyn Borough President John Cashmore (a born politician with that name) appealed to local businesses to allow employees to listen to the game during the workday.

  Murry Dickson and Joe Hatten took the ball for St. Louis and Brooklyn, respectively. It was a matchup of established vet against nervy rookie, as well as righty versus lefty and army versus navy. Hatten had mostly lived up to his promise, with a 14–11 record and a 2.84 ERA that was eighth-best in the NL. But he was wild, walking 110 and leading the league by plunking 7 batters. Dickson, by contrast, was the model of control, with but 56 walks allowed. The right-hander, 15–6 on the season, preferred to confound hitters and have them dribble harmless grounders than to pump away with heat that was difficult to contain.