The Victory Season Page 33
The Sox came to town eager to put the debacle of the exhibition series behind them, and made for the Chase Hotel, only to find that there were few rooms at the inn, thanks to the playoff delay. So the Sox piled wholesale into rooms meant for two. “Fists had been flung, distemper abounded…and some of the Sox slept six to a room,” wrote Davis J. Walsh of the International News Service. Yawkey and Cronin came from New York, where they had watched the playoff series, and were on a train that broke down several times, at last arriving at Union Station hours behind the team. The Sox pored over scouting reports furnished by the Dodgers. They were constantly reminded that no Bosox team had ever lost a World Series—they were unbeaten in five trips. “Don’t let us down!” read the front-page headline in the Globe. In many baseball quarters, it was considered unthinkable that Boston would ever lose a World Series—and certainly not this one.
Confidence may have reigned among the Sox players and coaches, but Williams was an island of despair unto himself. His elbow hurt (“See my red splotch?” he would say to reporters who asked him about it), probably far worse than he let on. His head cold refused to go away, and he downed drugs in the clubhouse—he was “stuffed with antibiotics,” Doerr remembered decades later. His downturn at the plate had left him doubting his wondrous talents. Grantland Rice wrote, “After several visits with Ted I can only see a bewildered and baffled young fellow who is over-trying, over-anxious, and wondering what it is all about.”
Worse than the physical ailments was the mental torture, especially now that rumors abounded that he would be traded after the season, for DiMaggio, for Newhouser, for a bag of balls and a used fungo—it depended on who was writing with what “reliable source.” The papers practically needed to add extra sections to accommodate all the trade talk.
All Williams could say about the matter was, “I have kind of a hunch I won’t be with the team next year. I’ve heard nothing, that’s just what I pick up from what I read. After all, I probably would be the last one to know about it.” There was talk Ted had made a couple of $100 bets that he would be in a different city come spring. So long as it wasn’t New York, he could live with it. “I just don’t want to play there,” he often said. He preferred to quit, or play in Mexico, than to suit up for MacPhail in pinstripes.
Fueling the bonfire were Yawkey’s lukewarm non-denial denials when asked directly about his star. By the time the Series traveled to Boston, the owner would be forced to state outright that Williams would be back in 1947, if only to untangle the coils that had wrapped around his star slugger’s mind. For his part, Cronin thought the rumors were part of an elaborate “National League scheme” to throw the Sox off stride.
Yawkey was no doubt angered over the public negotiating Williams was engaged in over his coming salary. He was making $50,000 and had been telling the press that figure should rise to at least $75,000, “or the waters of the Charles will be seared from the heat,” as one writer described Ted’s state of mind. A recent article in Collier’s on Ted had stirred the Hub too, especially a quote from Williams about Yawkey’s supposed lack of empathy for his boys. “Three years in the war and never a letter from [the Sox],” groused Williams to Collier’s. “Never one to Dom or Johnny Pesky or any of the fellows. Just wait till they want to sign me next year.” It was a criticism that went against the run of play, given Yawkey was far more loyal than most owners, often to his ruin. The fact that Ted had been going through a slump while unloading to reporters about his contract stuck in Yawkey’s craw.
At least Williams wouldn’t have to worry about the Boudreau Shift in the Series, according to Dyer, who insisted, “We plan to play Williams straight up.”
Sportsman’s Park, the “somewhat dilapidated but none the less [sic] historical arena,” according to the Times, was a miasma of sound and color. There wasn’t an inch to be had for a little personal space. Fans clung to walls to peer onto the field, others perched on railings, while the stands were packed four and five deep at each seat. Many who bought standing-room-only tickets were backed so far from the field by the crush they were marooned up against the refreshment stands in the outfield, left without a view of the field.
Tragically, a sixty-two-year-old man chasing a batting practice foul was caught in a pileup for the ball and died of a broken neck. Another, a forty-three-year-old, suffered a fatal heart attack before the game got under way.
There was a decided frontier feel to the crowd. Many wore ten-gallon hats, and many more clanged cowbells, reminders of the Cardinals’ appeal to the wide swath of the Midwest and Southwest that was far from the regular migrations of the big-city baseball traveling circus.
Frank Miller’s local twenty-five-piece group entertained the crowd with its big-band jazz before the game. At one point, a batting practice fly ball was hit toward the ensemble. An agile musician caught the ball in his French horn.
Perhaps the most colorful character in the rickety grandstand was a seventy-seven-year-old bricklayer from Oxford, Georgia, named Harry Thobe. He wore a white-linen suit, a straw boater, and carried a red parasol, a curious costume for a man who claimed to be “crashing my 18th straight World Series.” Thobe liked to say he was the “only bricklayer with diamond teeth,” a setting he showed off to anyone who asked.
Veterans who hadn’t been to the park since before the war were startled to find pretty girls in slacks walking the aisles selling candy and smokes, rather than young boys in caps. Most found it a welcome change. One thing remained unchanged—the pervasiveness of gambling. Fans still bet on virtually every movement on the field, from whether a pitch would be a ball or a strike, to the number of errors in a given inning, to how many runs the losing team would score. Reporters with deadlines complained that it was difficult to find an unused phone to call in stories, as they were all in use by fans placing bets.
The Game One pitching matchup offered a stark contrast in Texan physiques—strapping Tex Hughson for Boston, puny Howie Pollet for St. Louis. It seemed metaphoric for the Series, the atom smashers from the AL tangling with a scrawny but scrappy bunch from the NL. Indeed, the muscular Sox were heavily favored in the betting odds. St. Louis gambling commissioner Jimmy Carroll, the town’s official bookie, put it at 20–7 for the visitors. Those were the longest odds of any team in Series history, save the 1914 Boston Braves, the “Miracle Braves” who won it all despite being a 4–1 underdog. John Drebinger summed up the feelings of most of the country when he wrote, “Stop Musial for a day, and either Slaughter or Kurowski, and you’ve got the Cardinals pretty well bottled up.”
But he also tacked a hedge onto his prediction of Sox in five: “This having been a season wherein nothing appeared too fantastic or incredible to happen, it could be that one more upset lurks around the corner as a rousing climax.”
Happy Chandler threw out the ceremonial first pitch, and the Series got under way even as the cheers for the commissioner were still rolling. Hughson hadn’t found out that he was starting until he showed up at the park and found a ball under his glove, the standard Sox method of informing pitchers they were toeing the slab. The short notice didn’t faze Tex, as he easily retired Musial in his first Series at bat. Pollet started strong too, and neither team got a base runner in the first inning.
In the top of the second, Williams, looking sharp in the Sox’s new gray road uniforms, came up for his first appearance, which featured two jolts—a chorus of boos, which would rain down on him during every at bat in St. Louis, and the Cards fielders pulled around toward right in a “Dyer Shift.” So the rookie manager had been engaging in some psychic warfare by insisting he wouldn’t shift his defense for Williams (a less-charitable explanation was that Dyer was lying through his teeth). Rattled, the Splinter bounded one right into the shift, where Schoendienst grabbed it in short right field and threw him out.
While the crowd was still razzing Williams for his mulishness, the Sox drew first blood. York was hit by a pitch, Doerr walked, and Pinky Higgins lobbed a single to center to put
Boston on the board. Higgins had been trying to bunt, and was pulling his bat back when he accidentally connected to drive in the first run of the Fall Classic.
It stayed 1–0 for several tense innings. In the fourth, Slaughter scythed a rocket to deep center. An inside-the-park home run looked possible, but Gonzalez threw up the stop sign, and Country held up with a triple, where he ended up stranded. Slaughter trotted out to his position in right field, shaking his head over Gonzalez’s conservative approach.
In the sixth, Williams came up again to a shower of boos. “He gives me the heebie-jeebies every time I look at him,” said one fan. On the first pitch, Pollet fooled him so badly “Thumping Theodore” lost control of his bat, which went flying directly over the scalp of Yawkey, who was sitting in temporary box seats at field level. If ever there was a Freudian slip of a bat, this was it. Angry at the laughter from the crowd, Ted proceeded to knock a rope into center for his first hit of the Series, staring at the fans on his way to first. But he too advanced no further, as Pollet squirmed free from trouble.
The Cards tied the game in the bottom of the inning when Musial doubled home Schoendienst. Then they loaded the bases looking for more, but Hughson struck out Garagiola with a “squirt of kickapoo joyjuice,” Red Smith’s frontier euphemism for a blazing fastball, and the game moved to the seventh tied at one.
The Cards stranded two runners in the seventh, and Terry Moore threw DiMaggio out at second in the top of the eighth to snuff a threat. The play was doubly inglorious for Little Dommie, who managed to rip a large hole in his pants sliding futilely into second.
In the bottom of the eighth, the Cards got a two-out lucky break. Kurowski singled, and Garagiola fell behind 0–2 before stabbing an indifferent fly ball to center. Ordinarily, DiMaggio would have stuck it in his pocket, but he lost the ball in the thick haze that had begun to settle over the field, and it clonked off his arm, falling for a double. “The rusted girders of old Sportsman’s Park fairly shook,” reported the Times. Kurowski made for home, and Garagiola for third. DiMaggio recovered and threw to Pesky, who checked the situation and pumped home, then threw to third to nail Garagiola, a beat before Kurowski touched the plate, apparently saving the run.
But third base umpire Charlie Berry was waving his arms. He called Higgins for interference on Kurowski as the Card rounded third base. Later he said, “Higgins just about put a wrestling hold on Kurowski.” Grantland Rice called it a “Doc Blanchard block.” The Sox argued for a bit, but after the game all admitted that the call had been correct. The run counted, and the home team led 2–1. When Doerr whiffed to start the Sox ninth, St. Louis was two outs from victory.
Then the baseball gods offset the Cards’ good fortune with some for Boston. Higgins grounded one to Marion at short. While “Slats” was Marion’s best-known nickname, or maybe “the Octopus,” regulars at Sportsman’s Park called him “the Groundskeeper,” for his finicky habit of picking up pebbles in the dirt around him, real or imaginary. Mostly they were real, as the horrible playing surface in St. Louis was well known throughout baseball. Boston players called it the “Rock Pile” or the “Granite Quarry.” “They had infields on those Pacific islands that were better’n this,” Pesky complained. DiMaggio had noted the day before that it was a lightning-fast surface, and shook his head at how it might affect play. “Any improvement made here has to be for the better—it can’t get worse,” thought one writer.
Marion was as adept at handling the minefield as anyone, which is why it was such a shock when Higgins’s harmless grounder took a bad hop and caromed right between the Groundskeeper’s legs and into the outfield. Marion was further angered when he caught broadcaster Arch McDonald calling it an “easy play” on the radio the Cards had turned on in their dugout.
Rip Russell pinch hit and singled a pinch runner, Don Gutteridge, to third. Dyer stuck with Pollet, and was rewarded when the lefty struck out catcher Roy Partee for the second out. But Tommy McBride came up and bounced a seeing-eye single between short and third to tie the game at two. “An inch either way and either Marion or Kurowski would have gobbled it up,” wrote Jerry Nason in the Globe.
In the ninth, Earl Johnson relieved Hughson and showed that Greenberg’s tips had been spot-on. His “puzzling slants” set the Cards down in order, and the game went to extra innings. Pollet came back out, despite the fact that nine innings of work had further damaged his injured shoulder and back. He was in such agony that teammates later said he had been digging his fingernails into his palm to deal with the pain. With one out in the tenth, Williams popped out meekly, which brought a roar from the crowd. Up next was a man who years before would have aroused great passion on the western frontier—the Indian brave, Rudy York.
York had hit well at Sportsman’s Park all season, slugging .578 and knocking in twenty-three runs against Browns pitchers, triple the number of any other road venue. “St. Louis must be part of the reservation,” wrote Harold Kaese. But Pollet had baffled him with slow stuff all game, snarling York “like a kitten in yarn.” Now, though, the lumbering first-sacker swatted a 2–0 pitch well over the left field wall and into the refreshment-stand area, aka Blake Harper’s Frankfurter and Peanut Emporium, where it was caught by a veteran named Phil Waterman with one hand, the other holding a beer at the time. Waterman had played some ball at Fort Knox with one Joe Garagiola, and was rooting all-out for his Cards. Thus he was “sore” that his catch didn’t retire York. “This is a souvenir I could have gotten along without,” he said.
The Bostons spilled out of their dugout in celebration. Pollet winced visibly on the mound, dropping into a pained squat. St. Louis was now down 3–2. But fate seemed on their side to the end. Schoendienst led off the tenth by bouncing one to Pesky, who booted it. “The Sox were jittery as new brides all day,” thought the Globe. Red was sacrificed to second, and Musial and Slaughter were next in the order. The crowd, sensing doom for Boston, made a terrific din.
But Johnson, the “Earl of Emergency,” was equal to it. He was a closer before the term meant anything to baseball fans. He had made twenty-four relief appearances during the season, finishing fourteen games. And he put this game away, toying with the best hitters in the National League. Pitching as always with a broad grin, Johnson got Musial, a “poisonous hitter,” in the eye of the Globe, to ground easily to second, and Slaughter to pop a weak fly to right, and the noise in Sportsman’s Park came to an abrupt halt. Boston had won 3–2 and taken a 1–0 lead in the Series. “They need to promote the Earl to Duke,” yelped Williams.
York was nearly stampeded by the press corps after the game, backing away from the throng with his hands up “the way people do when a big dog jumps up at them with their friendly paws,” thought Jimmy Cannon. All wanted to know what pitch it was that York had deposited beyond the grandstand. But no one agreed. York said, “I just shut my eyes and swung,” before dubiously claiming it was a fastball. Pollet said it was a curve, Cronin a scroogie. In the Star-Times, Oscar Fraley summed up the confusion. “Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan, nor the local homicide squad never tackled a problem such as this one.”
Cronin sucked on a cold Coke and bragged on Johnson. “That boy from the Belgian Bulge looked pretty good out there, didn’t he? That Johnson’s not bad for a boy who had 190 straight days of combat service.” The Sox chanted “Three more to go!” in the tiny visitors’ clubhouse, one “built for half their number.” The raucous celebration was “something new for this fighting ball club from staid Boston,” thought Arthur Daley.
It was a much more somber scene across the hall. Dyer was unusually frustrated, actually pushing a reporter away from him. Kurowski angrily fired his glove into his locker and “cussed for a solid minute,” but otherwise the Cards were silent, aware they had let a winnable game slip through their grasp, mainly because of a bad bounce. They had been one strike away, and “may never get that close again,” Grantland Rice remarked. It was a “game to sire nightmares” in the words of J. Roy Stockton. The Times had
a more optimistic take, calling the game “a thrilling struggle that was ample reward to fans for the trouble they experienced in purchasing tickets.”
Meanwhile, up on the Hill, locals told each other that Garagiola had won the game, it was just that “the other guys lost it.” It was as sound an explanation for what had happened as any.
Baseball dominated discussions around breakfast tables and luncheonette counters across St. Louis, but everywhere else the news from Nuremberg was on everyone’s lips. According to the wife of Germany’s secretary of state under Hitler, Otto Meissner, Der Führer had fathered a child with the wife of Joseph Goebbels! The introduction of scandal into such a sober story riveted the nation for a couple of days. Magda Goebbels, known as something of a Nazi Party socialite, had supposedly had an affair with Hitler in 1934 while at a Baltic Sea resort. The resulting love child, named Helmuth, closely resembled Hitler, and Frau Meissner’s newly released testimony claimed that the dictator favored him. Helmuth had committed suicide along with his familial, if not biological, father as the Russians advanced on Berlin.
Meanwhile, the highest-profile Nazi to be sentenced to death in Nuremberg, Hermann Goering, broke down weeping in his cell as photos of his wife and children were removed in preparation for his date with the hangman. Major Frederick Teich, of Newington, Connecticut, the commander of the internal security detachment at the prison, assured the press that suicide precautions were “so good they cannot be improved.”
Much of St. Louis was equally despondent after the Cards threw away Game One, but the team itself got over it quickly. Red Smith got to the heart of it by writing, “tempered in the longest, hottest pennant race that ever was, the laborers in Sam Breadon’s scabrous yard have had plenty of occasion to manhandle adversity in the past.”
Another capacity crowd of 35,815 enjoyed brilliant afternoon sunshine at Sportsman’s Park as Game Two got under way. The Cards were in a must-win situation, unable to fall down 0–2 and go to Boston with any realistic hope of returning to the Midwest still alive in the Series. So with his back against the wall, Dyer turned to the Cat, Harry Brecheen, to oppose Mickey Harris.