The Victory Season Read online

  The 175 friends and family of Cronin’s in from California to watch the Fenway portion of the Series put their food-gathering troubles on hold for a few days while partaking in hotel fare. The Sox manager was chesty before Game Four. “The show’s over after tomorrow’s game, boys,” he assured reporters. Many of them took notes while fighting sleep. The press headquarters, the Copley Hotel, had been overbooked thanks to the playoff delay. “You had to be Harry S. Truman or Dizzy Dean to get a room without a gun,” wrote one St. Louis reporter. “Here’s a tip to the out-of-town visitor,” wrote Jerome Sullivan. “Bring a full field pack complete with pup tent, blankets, and bedding roll with you. There is no room in Boston hotels, period. Bring some K-rations as well, for there is no meat in town, either.”

  Dozens of newsmen were forced to sleep in the lobby, which was constantly packed with “suave notables of film and other worlds,” including the underworld, as a “queer assortment of rough looking characters talked Series odds” long into the night. All over the city, strange bedfellows were formed as people packed into hotel rooms, echoing the national housing shortage. Durocher was staying with three NL umpires, “which shows you how tough it is to get a room in this town,” according to the Atlanta Journal. The Kenmore said it would have no problem accommodating Hank Greenberg in a ballroom. “What he needs is a seven-foot bed, and we have one,” the night manager told the Globe.

  The Cards were at the Kenmore too, where the worst they had to deal with was an invasion of bobby-soxers in the lobby, screaming for autographs and hounding bellboys. To escape, several players took in “Captains Courageous” at the Orpheum Theatre.

  A common theme in both hotels and among fans across the nation was the performance of the Mutual Network radio announcers, in particular the genial but bland lead broadcaster, Arch McDonald. McDonald called Washington Senators games during the season and was best known for saying, “They cut down the old pine tree!” after Senators wins. McDonald was one of the first voices of New York baseball, broadcasting Yankees and Giants home games in 1939 after MacPhail brought Barber to Brooklyn. Arch had dubbed Joe DiMaggio the “Yankee Clipper,” but otherwise proved too cliché-ridden and low-key for the big city. He was known as “Master of the Pause” for his habit of calling a pitch, and simply staying silent until the next one. He played better in DC, where a slower style was more appreciated.

  Arch and his Series partners, Red Sox broadcaster Jimmy Britt and columnist Corum, were called dull, drab, and severely lacking in enlivening detail. Variety panned the national broadcasts as “terrible.” “Britt sounded pedantic and stilted and at times seemed to be talking about some game he remembered seeing during spring training,” opined the entertainment mag, continuing, “A Broadway wag accused McDonald of trying to muscle in on Ralph Slater’s racket—you know, the hypnotist who defies you to stay awake.”

  St. Louis fans were especially vexed, accustomed as they were to the captivating likes of Dizzy and Harry Carey. The East Side Journal wrote that McDonald “broadcast a game with the same lack of animation with which the treasurer of a Morticians Association might read his annual report.” Much of the blame went to the sponsor, Gillette, and its Detroit ad agency, Maxon, which had selected the trio, notably leaving the Ozark-accented and English-challenged Dean out of the booth. The razor company pushed the blame onto Chandler, while stealthily trying to recoup the $175,000 it was paying as title sponsor. Thousands of fans wrote angry letters and telegrams to Gillette, including one critic who set his complaints to verse:

  Our razor blades are keen

  The sharpest ever honed

  Broadcasts! They have been

  The dullest ever droned

  Williams, himself hoping to regain his usual razorlike keenness, spent much of batting practice lining ropes to left, apparently having found religion. He ducked into the clubhouse as the Cards meandered onto the field, many of them aiming their bats at the sky like shotguns, mocking Williams’s penchant for coming to Fenway in the early mornings to shoot the birds that congregated in the grandstand.

  The Cardinals may have been down two games to one, and the sharps put long odds on a comeback, but they remained confident in the clubhouse. The feeling may have been uncorked by a pregame stem-winder from Dyer, who uncharacteristically lit into the team for playing “listless, stupid ball.” Red Barrett loudly told anyone listening that Hughson had no chance of beating the Cards on three days’ rest. The numbers backed him up. Tex was 8–1 on the season with four or more days off, but a pedestrian 12–10 when given just three days to reenergize his wing.

  The team also remained faithful to Munger, even though he was still trying to regain the strength and stamina on the hill he had displayed before the service. Few could forget the sizzling stuff he had displayed in 1944, when he had gone 11–3 with a 1.34 ERA, and with Pollet still questionable with his injury, there was little second-guessing of Dyer’s choice of starters, even if Munger had been unimpressive in his ten appearances since returning from Germany. The big redhead walked out to the mound with a “wad of eatin’ terbacker bulging in his right cheek” and went to work.

  It was another frigid afternoon in New England, “a topcoat as necessary as a scorecard.” Luminaries including George Raft, Toots Shor, Joe Louis, and Joe DiMaggio were in the crowd, emerging from several layers of warm clothes to sign autographs. Robert Murphy was spotted before the game, headed away from the Fens, as though the players’ “pancaking” of his union plans had turned him off the game. Kurowski brought his four-year-old boy onto the field, swaddled in a huge coat. Whitey introduced his son to umpire Al Barlick, and his kid refused to shake Barlick’s hand.

  The chill didn’t seem to bother Big Red, as he disposed of the Sox lineup the first time through without a hit. By the time Moses got Boston’s first knock in the third, the Cards were ahead 6–0. A “Modern Boston Massacre,” in the eyes of the Globe, was under way.

  Barrett and the others who questioned bringing Hughson back on three days’ rest were spot-on. It was apparent that Tex’s fastball lacked zip when Slaughter turned on a second-inning heater and sent it four hundred or so feet into the right field stands, a shot that “imperiled the occupants” of the seats there. It was the first Cards run in fourteen innings. Slaughter, true to his nature, sprinted all the way around the bases, “as though Governor [Maurice] Tobin would veto the hit before he got home.” Two more scored on a hit by Harry the Hat and a Pesky error, a portentous chain of events, as it happened.

  The third inning undid Hughson, as the “run-starved Redbirds tore into him like a pack of hungry wolves.” He surrendered a single to Schoendienst, threw away a sacrifice bunt attempt by Moore, and left a fat curve hanging for Musial to poke off the giant wall for two runs. That was it for Tex—five runs allowed, and an early shower. He hurled his glove into the dugout wall with more force than he had any of his fastballs. “Poor Tex,” muttered Rowena Hughson, his wife, in the stands. During the pitching change, Williams slumped miserably against the left field scoreboard.

  The game was as good as over. The “Blokes in the Red Blazers” pummeled six different pitchers for twenty hits. Cronin was forced to “juggle his pitchers as fast as Leo Durocher.” The ninth inning was a twenty-minute-long debacle for the home team, as the Cards scored four runs on five hits and two Boston errors, mercifully leaving the bases loaded. About a third of the 35,645 that had jammed the park remained to see Munger finish off the 12–3 rout. Slaughter, Kurowski, and Garagiola all had four hits (tying the Series record), Marion three, and every starter at least one. The Series was tied at two, or as the inimitable Diz put it, “tighter than a ranch hand on Saturday night.”

  The press was astounded that the Cards, who oddly, despite the presence of strong hitters throughout the lineup, were casually dismissed as a banjo team reliant on defense, could so thoroughly destroy an excellent hurler such as Hughson. “You might as well say Babe Ruth was famous for all those defensive home runs,” wrote one astonished
onlooker. Inevitable comparisons were made to the Battle of Bunker Hill and other slugging outbursts by the Colonial Army. About the only positive the Globe could find in the day’s events was that none of the Sox wives had worn the same hat as she had to Game Three.

  Fans back in St. Louis celebrated the win, and some got an extra treat. A meat truck overturned downtown, and the locals descended on the spilled beef like piranhas. Meanwhile, Yawkey’s horrid day was completed when he returned home to learn that the hotel room of his sister, Mrs. Emma Auerbacker of Louisville, Kentucky, had been burgled. She lost $2,700 in diamonds and emeralds.

  Friday, October 11, was Eddie Dyer’s forty-sixth birthday, and it was only appropriate that he turned to his favorite son, Howie Pollet, to help make it a happy one. Pollet was on the field early, stretching his shoulder and back, hoping to make it through one more big game. But his body didn’t have any miracles in it. “Pollet asked me to tell Dyer that his back was killing him,” recalled Schmidt. “I did, but Eddie didn’t want to listen to me.”

  The infirm Pollet wouldn’t have to worry about one key element of the Boston attack. Doerr had been forced to leave Game Four late in the afternoon after suffering a migraine brought on by looking into the sun, and he would be unavailable for Game Five. His replacement at second base was Don Gutteridge, whom the Cards knew well. Gutteridge had been a Redbird early in his career, and spent the war years with the Browns, including the ’44 team that tangled with the Cards in the “Streetcar Series.” He had been in Toledo as a player-manager for much of 1946, but the Sox begged him to come aboard midseason as bench depth, and here he was, back in the World Series.

  Gutteridge celebrated his good fortune by leading off matters for the Sox with a base hit off Pollet. “Eddie’s Boy” clearly wasn’t right. He had gutted his way through two solid postseason starts, but this time, he lasted a mere ten pitches. Pesky singled after Gutteridge, and Pollet grasped his side in agony. With one out, Williams lined a single to right over the shift to knock in his first (and only) run of the Series. Dyer came to get Pollet after that.

  Alpha Brazle limited the damage for a while, but the Cardinals had trouble with Joe Dobson. The burly righty, called “Burrhead” for his curly shock of hair, had lost his left thumb and part of a forefinger to a boyhood accident involving a dynamite cap and some juvenile hijinks. He spent his war service at Camp Wheeler in Georgia, pitching steadily, so he was in good shape for the ’46 season. His wife was the secret hero of this day. Against the odds, she had managed to find a restaurant that served steak and surprised Joe with a reservation the night before the game. “There hasn’t been any meat in our house since the boys made their last western trip,” she told reporters.

  The protein gave some zip to Dobson’s “atom ball,” a sharply breaking curve that he used as his out pitch. “It exploded like ‘Operation Crossroads’ [the code name for the Bikini nuclear tests],” he said with a touch of crass. After an unearned run due to a Pesky error in the second, Dobson and his nuclear device handcuffed the Redbirds the rest of the way.

  Gutteridge singled again in the bottom of the second, barely scoring Partee, giving the Sox a 2–1 lead. Garagiola argued the call bitterly, claiming he had blocked the plate—and showed the ump a cleat mark in his arm as proof, to no avail. In the fifth, the Sox threatened again. Pesky singled again, and stole second. DiMaggio walked, bringing Williams to the plate.

  Behind the dish, Garagiola chatted up his new pal. “I always thought he was stuck up,” Joe admitted later, but after joshing with Ted over the course of five games, he had changed his mind. Williams had a habit of filling in the cleat holes others had left in the batter’s box, and Garagiola yelped, “I do the same thing!” After that, the two were fast friends. “The original dream of boyhood is big and clean in him and untouched by the sickness of greed that is gripping the world,” Jimmy Cannon wrote of Garagiola that morning, and he spent most of the Series sporting a broad grin, astonished at his Providence. “I saw Chico Marx the other day,” he gushed after Game Four, “and I was looking for George Raft all game, but didn’t see him.” “He’s walkin’ on air,” said his roommate, Slaughter. “He’s the happiest boy in the world.” It didn’t hurt that his admirers on the Hill had just gotten him a new car.

  But he wasn’t some overawed yokel—the kid belonged on the big stage, as shown by his four hits in Game Four. Now, with two on and nobody out, he showed more mettle by calling for a high fastball from Brazle, anticipating a double steal. Sure enough, the play was on. Williams struck out on a ball near his eyes, and Garagiola hummed one to third to nail Pesky, a rousing strike-’em-out, throw-’em-out double play.

  But cunning wasn’t enough for the Cards on this icy afternoon. Leon Culberson, the third right fielder Boston used in the Series, homered to make it 3–1, and in the seventh, the Sox busted it open. Dommie started the rally with a double. In a clear signal of Williams’s weakness, Brazle pitched to him and struck him out again, then intentionally walked York. Pinky Higgins doubled to foil the strategy, and later in the inning Marion let a sharp grounder carom off him for a two-run error to make it 6–1.

  Harry the Hat pulled a pair of cosmetic runs back with his fifth hit of the Series in the ninth inning, but Dobson finished off St. Louis for the complete game victory, 6–3. The Sox now led 3–2 in the Series, and celebrated in the clubhouse as though they had won it all. After all, the teams had alternated winning each game, so logic dictated Boston would win Game Seven, at worst. Dobson, overcome with emotion, was too teary to speak with reporters.

  Down the hall, Dyer concentrated on the positives, mentioning Walker’s continued strong play and his team’s resilience. As Marion said, “You can’t name a single game we haven’t won when we absolutely had to. We can do it again.” But all eyes were on the corner of the room, where the indispensable heart of the Cardinals was writhing in pain as Doc Weaver examined him.

  Slaughter had been hit on the elbow by a pitch in the fifth inning. It wasn’t an “atom ball” but a good, old-fashioned ninety-five-mile-an-hour heater from the strapping Dobson. Country hadn’t reacted when nailed, in true country hardball fashion, and in a show of defiance stole second on the next pitch. But the pain forced him from the game a couple of innings later. The elbow had swollen alarmingly since. Now both teams had a star slugger with a lame appendage.

  The Cardinals trained it back to Missouri on the Pennsylvania Special, which needed a hospital car to minister to the various damaged players. Slaughter wore “one of them electric jackets pitchers wore in those days but it didn’t do me no good.” The heavy covering over his arm and shoulders made Enos sweat as if “he’d just climbed out of a kettle.” Moore was limping badly on his damaged knee, which had the consistency of polenta. Only a “special ‘dope’ ointment,” as the press called it, applied by Doc Weaver before every game, allowed him to play. Marion’s back was so stiff that after the season he would forgo his usual winter job at a printing firm in town and retreat to his home in Richburg, South Carolina, to rest it. Pollet, Rice, Grodzicki—the infirm outnumbered the healthy on the Redbird roster. “There’s gloom aboard this special train,” reported the Star-Times.

  The casualty count nearly worsened when the Special collided with a stalled auto that straddled the tracks in El Dorado, Ohio, about thirty miles from Dayton. “I tried to start it but I couldn’t so I jumped out just before it was hit,” said the driver, Gene Alger. His car was demolished, but a trailer full of corn he was towing was undamaged—“not an ear was lost,” according to reports.

  The Sox flew back west, save for eight players who preferred the train, including Doerr, who didn’t want the pressurized air to inflame his migraines. Despite the two games of resistance from the Cards, the Boston team remained a “wisecracking, swaggering crew that cockily predicted a speedy end to the Series,” according to the United Press. “Don’t worry about any seventh game,” Cronin, who turned forty on Saturday’s off day, assured all who listened. “There
won’t be one.” If Cro’s braggadocio was spot-on, Boston would have its first championship since 1918.

  Chapter 38

  Cat Scratch Fever

  The Pennsylvania Special backed into Union Station. Slaughter, still sweating heavily, was off the train seconds after it stopped, pushing through the thousand or so fans who greeted the team so he could race to St. John’s Hospital for X-rays. They were negative, but he remained unable to wiggle his fingers. “My whole hand’s dead,” he admitted to Jimmy Cannon. Early reports off the train en route to St. Louis put Slaughter as being out for the remainder of the Series, and even Robert Hyland, the team doctor who had procured the music for the team the night Musial took over at first base, concurred.

  But Doc Weaver wasn’t so sure. He spent the Saturday off day wrapping Slaughter’s wing in towels soaked in hot saltwater, and lugged a portable electric heater to Slaughter’s room at the Chase, where Country “baked out” the elbow. While contrary to modern training thought, which prefers ice, the heat treatment had the effect of reducing the swelling to the point Enos felt he could give Game Six a go.

  The placebo effect shouldn’t be discounted. The simple fact was that Slaughter was determined to play, and no doctor was going to dissuade him. Hyland had told him in no uncertain terms that playing was an enormous risk. “You have such a bad hemorrhage that if you get it in the elbow again I may have to amputate your arm,” the “famous surgeon” (as the Times referred to him) told his patient.

  “I guess I’ll have to take that gamble—the fellers need me,” he told Hyland. “No matter what you say, I’m playin’.”

  The off day was like Super Bowl week, where the combination of hundreds of reporters and no game made for some brief illusory scandals. Several Red Sox, including Ferriss, York, and Culberson, took in the St. Louis Zoo in Forest Park, where the Post-Dispatch’s W. J. McGoogan encountered them complaining about the meager shares they would be getting due to the small size of Fenway and Sportsman’s Parks. The players then spent the next twenty-four hours or so insisting there was no place they’d rather be than playing for a championship.