The Victory Season Read online

  The home team scored first, but it was St. Louis that soon imposed its will. Dickson backed his own effort with a second-inning triple that gave the Cards a 2–1 lead. In the fifth, Musial lashed a line drive down the right field line for a two-out double. In the stands, Arthur Daley of the Times overheard a nearby fan mutter, “That Musial kin really powder them hits…the bum.” Daley wrote, “He almost made it sound tender.”

  Durocher decided to intentionally walk Kurowski so his lefty, Hatten, could pitch to the left-swinging Slaughter. The move backfired in the Lip’s mug. Slaughter slashed a triple to the right-center-field fence, making it 4–1. “It made me very happy when they passed Kurowski to get to him,” Dyer later said, giggling. Dusak singled home Country, driving Hatten from the game and beginning a parade of relief pitchers. Up in the broadcast booth, Dizzy Dean was feeling his oats, calling Brooklyn an “up and coming little town” and, in the ultimate case of the pot calling the kettle black, goofing on the way the locals spoke.

  St. Louis piled on three insurance runs and led 8–1 entering the last of the ninth. Dickson had been dominant, not allowing a hit since the very first inning, and just two overall through eight. Large sections of the crowd emptied, giving up on their beloved Bums before the last out was made.

  Back in St. Louis, Breadon was listening to the game on a portable radio that was a seventieth birthday gift. Several friends and associates were with him, and the mood was loose. As the ninth inning began, Breadon pulled a celebratory bottle of Japanese scotch from his desk, but a friend restrained him before he could pour. “Let’s wait until this thing is over,” he counseled.

  It turned out to be wise advice. Augie Galan led off with a double, the first Brooklyn hit in roughly two and a half hours. Then, a blizzard of bad news for Dickson—a triple, a single, a wild pitch, and a walk to Reese that had Dyer sprinting to the mound to pull his starter. Two were in and two were on, and there was but one out. Ebbets Field, silent just moments before, was now bubbling with noise at the possibility of an epic comeback.

  Dyer turned to Brecheen to put the Cards in the Fall Classic. No sooner had Dyer sat back down in the dugout than Edwards bounced a single to left, scoring a run to make it 8–4. The next batter, Cookie Lavagetto, walked to load the bases. Incredibly, the tying run was coming to the plate with only one out.

  The entire borough seemed to levitate with noise and anticipation as Stanky strolled up. On deck, batting for Whitman, was Schultz, the hero of the opener and a towering Jeff to Stanky’s Mutt. As Brecheen noted afterward, “Stanky had the smallest strike zone in the league, and Schultz had the biggest.” Back in St. Louis, “[Breadon’s] office was now heavy with nervous fear.”

  The Brat was clearly looking for his specialty, the walk. He barely moved his bat as Brecheen fired in pitches. Stanky worked the count to full. Then the Cat went with a curve, and Stanky watched it go by for a called strike three. The volcanic noise stilled momentarily. There were two down.

  Now the “Leaning Tower of Flatbush” came up. He had homered two days before, and all of Brooklyn was praying for one big swing. “I don’t know if the stands could have stood up if he hit one,” said Reese. Dyer came out to the mound and told Brecheen to relax. “Forget about a home run. Just get the ball in there.” Annoyed at the clichéd advice, the Cat waved him away.

  Brecheen put the first pitch in there, as told, and Schultz whacked it down the left field line. It landed in a cloud of dirt…just foul. An inch to the right, and three runs would have scored.

  The count went to 3–2 once more. This time, Brecheen threw a screwball, something he knew Schultz wasn’t expecting. “I almost fell down swinging at it,” said Schultz. He missed the pitch by about a foot, and St. Louis had made it to the World Series.

  Fans filed out of Ebbets Field, crushed. Some yelled, “Yes, you’re bums, you bums.” One approached the celebrating Cardinals with his fists balled, ready to tangle with the whole team, but midseason acquisition Clyde Kluttz endeared himself to his mates by knocking the man down. Another fan dashed in and yanked Slaughter’s cap from his head. A squad of four cops chased the man and returned the lid to Country.

  Back in St. Louis, the town went nuts. Hundreds of people listening to a radio loudspeaker in front of a liquor store on Washington Avenue danced in the street, stopping traffic. Confetti and wastebaskets were dumped from office buildings. Baggage men wearing broad grins broke the news to travelers at Union Station. Fans eager for World Series tickets started to gather at Sportsman’s Park within half an hour of the pennant being won.

  Back in Brooklyn, the Cards celebration was somewhat muted by the frigid showers in the visiting clubhouse. Slaughter came out shivering. “You go and make history with everything you do, and then they give you ice water to take a shower in.” Garagiola ran up and down the lockers, stark naked, yelling, “There will be no joy in Flatbush tonight!” Dyer pointed out to reporters who had been praising Brooklyn for its gumption that “no one club has the monopoly on courage.” The press boys grumbled in reply. They had preferred a Brooklyn win, thus saving them the long schlep west for the Series. Few gave either side a shot against the mighty Red Sox, but at least a Brooklyn–Boston Series would leave more time for carousing. Leo Ward disagreed—on the bulletin board, under the details of the train trip back to St. Louis, the traveling secretary wrote, “Next Victim—Boston!”

  Across the hall, Rickey was first to the losing clubhouse, but found himself shoved aside before he could get in. “Just a minute, Pop, stand back!” A burly man with an angry sneer rushed past, followed by a dapper gent with slick-backed hair and movie-star looks. It was a movie star—George Raft, Durocher’s buddy, with his bodyguard, Killer Gray.

  Soon, other friends of Durocher filled his office. The Lip, squeezed out, sat smoking on a trunk outside. He rubbed his face with the palm of his hand, and quietly told reporters, “In my book, the Dodgers did a better job finishing second than the other club did winning. In spring training I looked at this club and couldn’t see it above fourth place.” Nearby, a box of lovely thirty-eight-page World Series programs the Dodgers had printed up in case they had won sat unused. “I’ll probably be here until I die,” he told reporters who asked him about his taking the Yankees job.

  Durocher had worked wonders. His masterful season pulling the strings of his blue-clad marionettes had taken a merely above-average squad to the brink of a pennant. The Manager of the Year Award didn’t exist until 1983, but if it were voted upon in 1946, Durocher would have won in a landslide. As he walked slowly out of the park and onto Bedford Avenue, Killer Gray up ahead to clear out the riff-raff, the Lip could temper his disappointment with pride in the job he had done.

  Certainly, few would have believed that he had just managed his last full season in Brooklyn.

  Chapter 35

  Splintered

  Ted Williams lay in a crumpled heap at home plate, his face contorted in pain. He had just been beaned by Washington Senators lefty Mickey Haefner, and his right elbow was already swelling up. Bobby Doerr, standing down at first base, was horror-struck. The small crowd at Fenway was dead silent. Their collective dreams of a championship season had just turned into an apparent nightmare.

  Worst of all, this was a game that should never have been played.

  The Sox finished the regular season with a 104–50 mark, the most wins by the franchise since 1912 and a record that hasn’t been matched by the team since. Williams was voted the AL Most Valuable Player in a trot, despite falling short of the Triple Crown. It was the first time he had won the award, having lost out to Yankee Joes DiMaggio and Gordon in 1941 and ’42, despite hitting .406 one year and winning the Triple Crown the next. His final stat line read thusly—a .342 batting average, 38 homers, 123 RBIs, and a staggering 156 walks. That put his on-base percentage at .497, meaning Ted reached base nearly every other time he came to the plate. His OPS was an off-the-charts 1.164, the third highest of his storied career. His wins-above-replacement
player rating, or WAR, was 10.7, the highest of his career. In other words, a team that sported an average player in left field instead of Ted would win eleven fewer games. To appreciate just how incredible Williams was in 1946, consider that Musial’s WAR was only 8.4, and Ted’s figure was twice that of Bobby Doerr (5.3), himself an All-Star having an outstanding year. The year Williams hit .406, 1941, his WAR was 10.1.

  Williams had considerable help in the Boston lineup. Pesky led the league in hits with 208, batting .335. Doerr and York knocked in 119 and 118 runs, respectively. Along with Dom DiMaggio and pitchers Hughson and Ferriss, the Sox had an astounding seven players in the top thirteen of the MVP voting. As a team, Boston led the AL in runs, hits, batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage. The Sox also committed the fewest errors of any team. Ferriss finished with 25 wins, Tex 20, and the staff compiled a 3.38 ERA, an excellent showing in such a hitter-friendly park as Fenway.

  Boston was the gambler’s choice against any team from the NL by a wide margin, but the fact that the Senior Circuit was taking so long to decide a pennant winner wrong-footed the team. The age-old sports argument of rest versus rustiness came into play, as the Sox looked at nearly a week of waiting before the Series got under way. “It certainly hasn’t helped my disposition to have things drawn out so long,” Williams admitted.

  Where others saw difficulty, Yawkey and the front office saw a profit opportunity. They announced that a best-of-three series of exhibition games would be staged at Fenway, pitting Boston against an All-Star squad made up of the best the AL had to offer.

  Exhibition games were commonplace in the prewar era, and the tradition carried into 1946. Owners used them to gin up extra income and interest, raise money for charity, and wring some more ball out of the players, at little or no cost to the team. In-season exhibition games generally gave players who saw little playing time a chance to play, and the better players, like Williams, sometimes got a bonus for dressing up and taking some no-pressure whacks.

  So Joe DiMaggio came up from New York, managing to lose his uniform along the way. He took the field wearing Boston red, a development that led many to speculate on how he would look donning that uniform full-time, should he be dealt for Williams in the coming winter. Newhouser, Greenberg, Eddie Lopat, Dizzy Trout—nearly twenty top players, including Phil Marchildon, came to an icy Boston for the games. They were issued rooms at the Kenmore Hotel.

  Cronin liked the idea that his team would get to face some competition instead of lying idle during the NL playoff. The press wasn’t wild about it, slamming the games as typical behavior for the “money-mad magnates.” As it happened, the exhibitions were a bust at the gate, drawing only a couple of thousand diehards in the chill. The Sox won two of the three games, a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one.

  That’s because the plan blew up in Yawkey’s face in the third inning of the first game. He was rewarded for his efforts with the sight of his talismanic star writhing in pain. Haefner had tried to throw a sweeping curve, but was unable to grip the ball properly in the frigid air. “My hands were so cold I just couldn’t break it,” he lamented. Williams was helped from the field, his arm hanging limp at his side. Cronin was white as a sheet. Yawkey looked as if he were about to vomit.

  The team doctor, Ralph McCarthy, examined the elbow, and assured Ted that nothing was broken. Just to be sure, however, the two men rushed up the street to McCarthy’s office for X-rays, which confirmed the doc’s diagnosis. “It should be as good as ever unless unforeseen complications develop,” he told the press, while noticeably refusing to speculate about Ted’s prospects for the World Series. Williams spent the rest of the afternoon in the Sox whirlpool, the lump on his elbow growing to the size of an egg.

  It was the worst-case scenario for the Sox: the club superstar injured on the cusp of the Series during meaningless, and unnecessary, exhibition play. Cronin took the opportunity for some spin, saying the incident was cause for rethinking the playoff system, ignoring the elephant in the room—he had backed the exhibition plan, and now was reaping the whirlwind.

  The day wasn’t a complete disaster for Boston, thanks to an unlikely source. Earl Johnson, unhittable in April and May, was no longer a reliable pitcher out of the bullpen, in the main because of a family near-tragedy. Early in the summer, he had been called home to Seattle suddenly, as his wife was near death. Johnson gave her no less than six blood transfusions, and she pulled through, but the stress, both physical and mental, wearied him badly. His numbers cratered, and Boston blew leads in several games as a result. But there was another reason, and Hank Greenberg was kind enough to let Johnson in on it—the hurler was tipping off his pitches. Hank felt comfortable revealing the tell, now that Johnson would be facing National Leaguers in the Series.

  Useful news as that was, the Hub was completely focused on Ted’s damaged ulnar joint. Williams woke up the next morning “in agony,” according to Doris, and sitting around a hotel room with nothing to do didn’t help matters. Finally, the couple decided to go for a walk and some shopping. Naturally, they were spotted, and the press derided Ted for having the unmitigated gall to walk around when he should have been resting his arm.

  The man just couldn’t win.

  Chapter 36

  The World Series

  Robert Kist of Clayton, Missouri, was the first to arrive on line. He got to Grant Avenue outside Sportsman’s Park around two o’clock in the afternoon of Thursday, October 3, eager to be among those purchasing unreserved tickets for the opening two games of the World Series. Sales of the tickets would begin the following morning.

  When the time came to buy his allotted pair of ducats for the first two games, roughly eleven thousand fans were behind Kist, in a mob steadily growing beyond restraint. Several score of police attempted a semblance of crowd control, but they were overwhelmed. Kist bought his seats, but couldn’t get out of the crowd that was pressing forward. He was borne aloft by a sea of humanity. The Cardinals’ ticket sellers promptly closed the windows, and after ten minutes, order was restored—only to devolve into chaos once the windows reopened.

  One woman was so overcome by the scene that she fainted—but the crush was so great, she couldn’t fall down, a fact that may have saved her life. After several minutes she was extricated from the crowd and sent to the hospital for observation. A fan named Louis Menendez unwisely wore a Red Sox cap. He was clobbered over the head with a brick and robbed.

  It got worse ninety minutes later, when the available tickets were gone and the windows abruptly slammed shut. Several thousand fans were unfulfilled, and let the team know it. Boos rang out along Grant Avenue and adjoining Dodier Street. “We’ve been here all night!” fans yelled. “As far as I’m concerned, the Cards can go scrub a duck,” one shouted. “I wouldn’t go see them now on a bet!” Several fights broke out, but the sheer weight of the crowd prevented larger destruction.

  It had been two long years since the all-St. Louis World Series of 1944, and to say the city was eager to have the Fall Classic back in town was an understatement.

  The Series opener was scheduled for Sunday, October 6, and perhaps it was due to the Sabbath, or more likely the wave of negative reaction for the team’s handling of the ticket sales, but the line for unreserved game-day seats was far more orderly. Art Felsch, the self-proclaimed “Number One Baseball Fan,” was first in line, having arrived the night before from Milwaukee with his trusty packing box to use as a seat. Felsch was thus the first on line for unreserved seats for the eighteenth straight World Series. In stark contrast to the playoff game six days earlier, tickets were scarce. A Star-Times reporter wrote that he saw ushers selling tickets, and newsboys hustling game programs—with tickets tucked inside—for $20 a pop. One lucky fan got tickets by writing AL president Harridge a request. She was Grace Goodhue Coolidge, the former First Lady of the United States.

  A “holiday air” settled over downtown as game time (1:30 p.m. CST) approached. Hotels were mobbed, in par
ticular the Chase and the Jefferson, respectively the official baseball executive and press hotels. Streets were jammed with fans, players, buskers, and touts attempting to steer the mob into local eateries and saloons. Most retail stores were closed on Sundays, but the signs on the windows told a familiar story. Shortages were legion, of men’s business shirts, of lingerie and underwear, of toilet paper, of butter and milk.

  The worst shortage, and the one most on the mind of carnivores across the country, was the continued lack of meat. “The U.S. was frustrated and meat-mad,” reported Life. Truman had been forced to end price controls on beef, and “a reckless group of selfish men,” in his words, conspired to hold back millions of cattle and hogs to drive up demand. Truman’s enemies in Congress egged them on—many cattlemen were Republican contributors, and the end of price controls and a hungry populace was good for GOP hopes in the coming midterm elections, bound to be a “beefsteak election,” in Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn’s construction.

  In New York, the shortage was so dire restaurant owners began shuttering their doors. One was desperate enough to hurl himself off the Brooklyn Bridge. The city demanded Truman nationalize the stockyards of the Midwest and end the “meat famine.” The black market thrived as prices were driven up to nearly $25 per pound of prime beef. Exacerbating the situation was a report from Nuremberg, where Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy führer, complained that he was getting too much beef in jail and would prefer some lighter fare, especially some prunes.

  The press gang headquartered at the Jefferson Hotel had dined on sirloin while covering the Series throughout the war, but now, in peacetime, with matters never better in their profession otherwise, they had to suffice with chicken or (horrors!) fish. Something was definitely wrong in America when folks couldn’t enjoy a steak during the Fall Classic.