The Victory Season Read online

  A stiff breeze was blowing, straight in from center field, and the pitchers took advantage, throwing strikes secure in the knowledge that hard-hit flies would likely stay in the park. Neither team threatened until the third, when Del Rice led off with a double off Harris. Rice was the Cat’s preferred catcher, feeling more comfortable throwing to him than to Garagiola. Rice was an outstanding athlete, and probably better at basketball than baseball—he played with the Rochester Royals in the National Basketball League (the forerunner to the NBA, which would begin play for the first time a few weeks later) in the off-season. Ironically, he was 4-F because of a physical disqualification, thanks to bad knees from his days playing college football.

  Now Rice took a small lead off second as Brecheen stepped in. The pitcher was no threat with the bat—he’d hit .183 during the season, with 6 measly RBIs. But now he “pickled one” to right, scoring Rice with the game’s first run. The crowd erupted at the unexpected largesse. One unlucky fan, who had been filming the proceedings with his rudimentary movie camera, was so startled by the sudden explosion of noise that he dropped his camera, ruining his film.

  As updates of the game were announced regularly over the PA system at St. Louis police headquarters, the Cards struck again in the fifth. Rice started the bonfire again with a base hit, and Higgins kicked Brecheen’s easy grounder to third. Then the Sportsman’s Park infield decided to even things out from the day before. Moore’s bounder to second “suddenly elected to avoid Doerr as if he were a typhoid carrier.” The bad-bounce single scored Rice, and Musial brought in the inning’s second unearned run with a groundout.

  That made it 3–0, and that was more than enough for Brecheen. He cruised to a four-hit shutout, tossing screwball after screwball at the hapless Bostons. “His screwball wasn’t a strikeout pitch, but it was an out pitch,” Schmidt explained decades later. “He’d keep it down and get one ground ball after another.” The Series was tied at one.

  “Brecheen had the ball doing just what he wanted,” lamented Williams, who had been unable to get the ball out of the infield. “I hate to admit it, but it was beautiful to watch.” Not so lovely was the sight of Williams bashing into the shift time and again, like a football team determined to run the ball against an eight-man line. Ted just wouldn’t call an audible. “I know that those wide-open spaces in left loom invitingly, but with that short right field fence, the percentages are still in my favor for hitting to right,” he explained chattily after Game Two. Cronin was less upbeat. “I’ve talked myself blue in the face” to get him to hit to left, he complained. “As soon as he steps to the plate all he can see is the challenge that the set-up presents to his hitting ability.”

  Perhaps there was more to the slump than the shift. Years later, Bobby Doerr would lament that the umpiring had thrown off Williams and the other Sox. “I always felt, ever since that Series, that umpires become pitcher’s umpires during the World Series,” said writer Clif Keane. “Brecheen would throw inside and Williams would back away and during the season those were balls but during the World Series they became strikes.” Indeed, Williams had taken six called strikes in the first two games. For a hitter of his renowned eyesight and plate judgment, that was an unusually high number. Brecheen and Pollet had gotten consistently ahead of the Splinter, and any hitter, no matter how immortal, is less effective down in the count.

  Despite the fact that the sun had disappeared behind threatening clouds, happy fans milled on the field long after the final out, reluctant to leave. Ushers prevented them from cutting across the diamond to the Grant Avenue exit, in an attempt to head off damage to the field, which was a classic case of shutting the barn door long after the horse had escaped.

  The Sox wanted to get on a chartered plane and get back to Boston as soon as possible, but the weather turned for the worse as they dressed. Before long, sheets of rain poured down, and the flight plans were canceled. Traveling secretary Tom Dowd was forced to feverishly change plans from air to rail at the last moment, leaving the team to make a desultory trek to Union Station for the long train trip back east. As they traveled through western Massachusetts, their tired eyes could look out the window and see Sox fans making obscene gestures at the passing train. A sheet draped across the outside of an envelope factory near Springfield held a succinct message for the Scarlet Hose—RED SOX, YOU SMELL.

  Imagine the reaction if the Sox hadn’t won the opener.

  Chapter 37

  The Series Comes to the Hub

  The ball rolled to a halt on the infield dirt near third base. No one was within fifty feet of it. A more perfect stratagem to achieve a base hit against this particular Cardinals defensive alignment couldn’t have been devised. The only surprise was the identity of the man who had dinked his way on base. He stood down at first, laughing in spite of himself.

  Ted Williams had bunted. He had finally foiled the shift.

  The packed, sellout crowd of 34,500 were astonished, waiting for several pregnant seconds before letting loose with a standing ovation. At last, Williams had used common sense and hit one where they ain’t. The way he was going, the only question anyone had was “What took so long?”

  The moment would be summed up in the next day’s Globe, which used Pearl Harbor–sized headlines to scream, “TED BUNTS!”

  The return of the Fall Classic to Boston had apparently been a tonic to Ted’s warped noodle.

  Certainly, the populace of the “Athens of America” was at a fever pitch for Games Three through Five of the Series, all of which would be played at Fenway Park. “Not since Paul Revere aroused the countryside 180 [actually 171] years ago has this [city] found itself stirred to such a high pitch of excitement,” reported the Times.

  World Series tickets had gone on sale on September 10, and the volume of applications mailed to Fenway would have sunk a Boston whaler. Some five hundred thousand hopeful fans sent in their paperwork, for only sixty-six thousand available tickets over the three games. Those postmarked after 12:30 a.m. simply didn’t have a shot. Tickets were thus “harder to come by than a southern accent on the Commons.” The line for eighty-five hundred game-day tickets wound down Lansdowne Street in an arctic chill, several tens of thousands strong. The first man on line was the wonderfully named Grover Cleveland Gilmore. The Back Bay resident sat for thirty-four hours in his candy-striped chaise lounge to snag the precious pasteboard.

  Unfortunately, the ordeal tuckered Gilmore out to the point that he fell fast asleep in the third inning of Game Three. Even the roar that accompanied the Williams bunt couldn’t rouse him. According to his wife, the shouts merely caused him to mumble, “Just wanna see Ted hit one more time, he’s sure to park one…,” before resuming his snoring. The missus dragged him home, where he slept straight through Game Four as well.

  The hope of seeing some October baseball had been a salve for many fans otherwise buffeted by the ill winds of the day. One shut-out Boston booster was so disappointed that he sent Dyer a lucky penny that had been in his family since 1826 and vowed to root against the Sox. The Times reported that “big business men” unable to find tickets had been bombarding the Fenway catering firm with requests to be vendors for the Series. “Even executives” were clamoring to fling peanuts and hawk beer if it meant a glimpse of the action.

  The shift to Boston gave the national press a chance to take its full measure of the local fan base. The writers, especially the New Yorkers who dominated the faction with a national forum, came away with an odd admixture of praise and condescension that is jarring to the modern fan, accustomed as he is to the top-volume shriek of Red Sox Nation.

  The general ethos was summed up as neither Brooklyn fanaticism nor the bland sophistication of a Yankees fan but a dull middling of the two extremes. “[The Boston baseball fan] takes his pennant winning in a moderate manner that sets him apart from other fans,” thought the New York Times Magazine. But at the same time, “Outsiders will be surprised to learn that the Red Sox fan does not wear a tuxedo when oc
cupying a box seat.” With the outsized success of this team, though, matters were on the uptick. “Only occasionally now does one come across the traditional Boston fan who shouts “Yippee!” in a thin and timid voice, and then only after looking around carefully to see that he is heard by no one who knows him.”

  Reverse elitism soaked through the coverage, as the working-class reporters poked fun at the Brahmin swells suddenly discovering hardball. According to the St. Louis Star-Times, “even on elite Chestnut Hill, where lawn tennis and tea drinking are customarily the favorite sports,” the Sox were the talk of the Olde Towne. Another out-of-town reporter insisted he overheard a conversation between a couple of young chaps with crew cuts. “How do you think the big game will turn out?” asked one. “We have a splendid club,” responded his chum. “I would say we shall defeat Princeton by at least six points.”

  This of course was nonsense, as anyone who had the misfortune of sitting near Mrs. Lolly Hopkins could attest. A Hub version of Hilda Chester or Mary Ott, “Megaphone Lolly” traveled from Providence to Beantown for every game (the Braves, too), a devotion that cost her roughly $1,000 per season (nearly $12,000 in today’s cash, not factoring in the exponential increase in ticket prices). She sat in Section 14, right behind the home dugout, and unloaded on players, umps, even writers up in the press box, with a salty monologue that was further seasoned by the amplifier that occasioned her nickname.

  There were other inimitable Fenway faithful, including the fellow who hauled an ancient ship bell into games and rang it during rallies; the Sun Bums, denizens of the right field bleachers who stripped to their underwear on hot days; a band dressed in British redcoats that scratched out tunes; and a screechy regular who taunted the opposition with a voice that “sounds like a stick being drawn along a picket fence.” During the regular season, one heckler got on a Cleveland player named George Case so remorselessly that Case sprinted from his position in left field into the stands to attack his insulter.

  The Sox were New England’s team, of course, drawing crowds from several states, which made for a far more diverse group than the assemblage at Ebbets Field. As the Times Magazine noted, a typical fan had “to his left a farmer from Maine, the girl to his right a debutante, the man in front of him a GI with a wooden leg, and the gent behind him apparently is a Groton master, the way he keeps imploring the Red Sox, ‘come on fellows, do win this game if you possibly can!’”

  Older fans would insist that this bunch wasn’t nearly the measure of the 1912 or 1916 Bostons (“Kid, if you think Williams is hot stuff, you shoulda seen Tris Speaker”), but overall they were pleased that Yawkey had at last assembled a group worthy of their standards. After all, for a long period between the wars, the best this drowsy franchise could muster were crowds that came to cheer the opposition.

  The fixation of the Boston press on Williams also amused and baffled the out-of-town writers. “[Boston’s Williams Complex] is worth a journey there to behold it, provided you do not mind the risk of being three to five days late in hearing about the declaration of the third world war or the first rocket flight to the planet Neptune,” wrote John Lardner in Newsweek. Bill Corum wrote in the New York Journal-American, “Yessir, [the press] killed the fatted calf for poor Ted and then batted him about the head with the bones. What happened with the meat, as with all meat, is an OPA secret.”

  Williams sold papers, plain and simple, and thus was alternately treated as a piñata or a pearl, depending on the needs of the day. Sometimes, the press couldn’t make up its mind. An alert reader perusing the Globe that morning would find a note determining that “Ted is low” on page 35, only to flip to page 37 and discover the counterdiagnosis—“Williams Happy.”

  Currently, of course, the “Knights of the Keyboard,” as Ted called the Boston press corps, had their knives out for the underperforming Splinter. “Gents who couldn’t hit one of those toy balloons in the park with two tennis racquets are volubly explaining infallible ways to which poor Ted can cope with the shift,” noted Corum. Before Game Three, Williams waved away reporters who asked in a thousand different ways about the state of his elbow and his mind-set. He preferred to talk about a pair of sick friends who were on his mind, one back in Palos Verdes, California, the other in Peoria, Illinois.

  The furor over Williams was handily obscuring the fact that his fellow MVP, Musial, had been a damp squib in the first two games as well, with just 1 hit and 1 RBI in 9 trips to the plate. The less-numerous Mound City press, exemplified by the genteel Bob Broeg, weren’t as bloodthirsty as their Boston compatriots, and Musial was far too winning a personality to be the target of backlash after two poor games.

  Still, the Man was bothered by the troubling start. Two years earlier, he had played well in the Streetcar Series against the Browns, topping .300 and slugging over .500. But that was at the height, or more appropriately the depths, of wartime baseball. The competition wasn’t much better than what he had faced playing ball for the navy in 1945. In 1942 and 1943, Musial had been mediocre in the Fall Classic. In those two Series, plus the first two games of this one, covering a dozen games, he was only hitting .222, with 3 RBIs and no homers.

  So he was eager to do something to shake himself from the doldrums, and that was obvious from the first inning of Game Three. Batting on a cold but sunny afternoon, as advertising balloons floated above the scene, Musial walked with two outs and stole second, putting him in scoring position for Slaughter. But Musial was interested only in a solo act. Boo Ferriss was Boston’s starter, and as he looked to the plate, the former “Donora Greyhound” took off for third, only to be easily thrown out when the pitcher calmly stepped off the rubber. It was a long, humbling trot back to the dugout after that, the Fenway fans proving their vocal capabilities were at least comparable to those in Brooklyn.

  The Sox compounded Musial’s misery in the bottom of the frame. Pesky singled off Cards moundsman Dickson with one out, overcoming a bout of the jitters that he admitted was plaguing him. “It didn’t help to have well-wishers telling me about it all the time,” he laughed. He moved to second on a grounder. Williams was intentionally walked, a sign of utmost respect given his struggles. That brought up York, and the hero of Game One provided the home folks with an encore, pulverizing a “let-up curve” from Dickson over the word “Shadow” in the Gem Blades ad board (“Avoid Five O’Clock Shadow”) on the tall wall in left for a three-run homer.

  “I didn’t want to walk him,” Dickson explained after the game, “and I thought he’d be looking for a fastball, so I threw him a curve that didn’t fool him a bit.” For his part, York called it a “dry spitter.” “It was a bad pitch, that’s all,” Dyer said ruefully. “I love Indians,” Ferriss said of his Cherokee catcher after the game.

  Dickson’s early struggles might have been traced to the fact that his warm-up pitches were interrupted by photographers who kept running between him and the plate. Prevented from properly stretching out his arm in the chilly air, Dickson was still trying to loosen up during the first inning. “That was my own fault,” he admitted. “I could have gone to the bullpen while we were batting. Maybe I should have knocked over a couple of those photographers.”

  The three runs were more than enough for Boo, who dominated the Cards as thoroughly as Brecheen had held the Sox down the game before. The final was 4–0, and the only time a Cardinal got past second base was with two outs in the ninth, when Musial finally got a hold of one and tripled to deep center. But Ferriss struck out Slaughter (strike three was pitch number 107), and the game was done. True to his habit, Boo grabbed the ball as a keepsake, and gave it to his mother, who was sitting behind first base. He was now 14–0 on the season at the Fens. The Sox had restored order and led two games to one.

  All talk in the happy Boston clubhouse, and in the papers the following day, was of Williams’s capitulation back in the third inning. As Red Smith wrote in the Herald Tribune, “The Kid’s bunt was bigger than York’s home run. 34,500 witnesses gave off the sam
e quaint animal cries that must have been heard at the bonfires of witches in Salem when Williams, whose mission in life is to hit baseballs across Suffolk County, pushed a small, safe roller past third base.” Drebinger added, “Boston’s pet and number one problem child had made a monkey out of a very unorthodox defense and the home folks were happy.” The only one silent on the subject was Williams himself. “It’s not my day, it’s Ferris and York’s,” he said, and left quickly.

  Dyer had even less to say. He trudged into the clubhouse, muttered “Munger” when asked about the starter for Game Four, and went straight to his office, not to reappear.

  Williams was bunting, and Dyer was blowing off reporters. Only three games had been played, and the Series was already one for the books.

  The Sox win on Wednesday only catalyzed the already simmering passions in Boston. A melee erupted on the game-day ticket line Thursday morning, fans brawling with police who desperately tried to restore order. Not enough windows had been opened to serve the demand, and as a result, a large number of the 125-man security detail was injured in the brannigan. Police Commissioner Thomas Sullivan was so upset that he canceled the detail for Game Five the next day.

  It may well have been that the fighting fans were upset over all the ordinary, day-to-day goods they still couldn’t acquire. In addition to meat, everyday items such as eggs, cheese, coffee, milk, sugar, and toilet paper were almost impossible to find. A truck strike in the city had even caused a shortage of baby food. A story in the Globe told of housewives fistfighting over goods in stores across the city.