The Victory Season Page 37

  The usual array of baseball royalty was there, including Chandler, Frick, Harridge, and Rickey, along with retired greats like Rogers Hornsby, Tris Speaker, Arky Vaughn, and Ol’ Pete, Grover Cleveland Alexander, the Cards hero of 1926. Military brass was represented by several top officers, along with Jimmy Doolittle, the Missouri boy who had galvanized a shocked nation with his raid on Tokyo shortly after Pearl Harbor. Given St. Louis’s status as baseball’s western frontier, an appropriate whiskered face in the crowd was the star of many Hollywood oaters, Gabby Hayes.

  Rader’s band entertained early arrivals once again, and at 1:15 sounded “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” At 1:28, the orchestra whipped through a tight national anthem, and precisely at 1:30, Dickson let loose the first pitch of the game.

  Seeking to avoid a repeat of his previous start in Game Four, when photographers prevented him from a proper warm-up, Dickson had ushers ring the mound as he loosened up this time. It didn’t help. The first two batters, Moses and Pesky, lined singles, and DiMaggio knocked a run home with a sacrifice fly. Williams came up with a man on first and a chance to really get his team off to a flying start, and he laced one to center. It had extra bases written all over it, but ancient, ailing Terry Moore rewrote the play, running down the liner, “his knee knocking like an old crankshaft,” gloving the ball in the deepest part of the park. Williams trotted grim-faced back to the dugout, getting a sympathetic pat on the back from first base coach Del Baker en route.

  Ted made up for his failure at the plate with a rare bit of hustle and dash in the field. Schoendienst led off the game for the Cards with a base hit that curled away from Williams. Thinking double all the way, and realizing who was in left field, Red tore for second. But Williams got to the ball with alacrity and gunned Schoendienst down. Red’s shame mounted when Musial doubled down the left field line. The Man was stranded when Slaughter, shaking out his injured arm after every pitch, struck out.

  Harry the Hat got his team even in the second inning, lashing a line drive that Williams caught but scoring Kurowski on a sacrifice fly. People inexplicably tossed dollar bills from the upper deck after the run, enriching the lucky fans below. Ferriss was pumping in sharp curves that required catcher Hal Wagner to squat well to the side of the plate, and he got out of the inning. The score was one-all, and stayed that way until the fifth.

  The question was which pitcher would make the next mistake, and it appeared to be Dickson. Pinky Higgins launched a “Mastodonic clout” to center. Moore once again gave limping chase. The Post-Dispatch judged he was running “at the speed of Whirlaway,” a testament to Moore’s ability to block out pain. At the last second, after a fifty-yard gallop, the captain reached out backhanded to snare the fly as he slammed hard into the wall. The crowd was orgiastic in reply to their battered hero’s nimbleness with the leather.

  Walker led off the bottom of the fifth with yet another base hit, and was sacrificed to second. Then Ferriss, whose brother Bill had gotten a friend to watch his gas station back in Shaw, Mississippi, so he could drive to Missouri and see the game, made the mistake. He threw a curve to Dickson, perhaps not realizing the good-hitting pitcher had batted .277 on the season. Dickson had his “pants in the grandstand,” Boo said, but the fooled Dickson still managed to loop one down the left field line that fell for a double, scoring Walker easily. Back-to-back singles by Schoendienst and Moore scored a third run, driving Boo out of the game with a suddenness that surprised everyone. Cronin went to Dobson, who navigated the Musial-Slaughter-Kurowski minefield without giving up any more runs. It was a key dousing of a significant brushfire, but the Sox trailed 3–1 nevertheless.

  Williams flied out once more with a man on in the sixth, slamming his bat down in disgust. The game proceeded quickly, tensely, to the eighth. Dickson had cruised for seven innings, allowing just three hits, baffling the Crimson Hose with his usual wide array of pitches. But some managerial maneuvering by Cronin pumped a bit of life into his team. Cro pulled one colorfully named pinch hitter, Rip Russell, from his bench to hit for Wagner, and he led off the eighth with a single. Another pinch hitter, the even more memorably monikered Catfish Metkovich, hit for Dobson, and he pulled one down the left field line for a double, with Russell stopping at third. Just like that, the tying runs were in scoring position.

  Dyer was pacing back and forth, wondering about making a move of his own. Dickson was primed to fall, and Dyer was inclined to lift him. But exactly who would face the top of the Sox lineup was the question. Dyer only trusted two men in this spot. One, Howie Pollet, was too infirm to play. The other, Harry Brecheen, not only had hurled nine innings in Game Six but also had been coughing and shivering for the past few hours.

  Dyer ambled down to where Brecheen sat miserably in the corner of the bench, and asked him how he felt. The question hung in the air. There was no noise in the Cards dugout.

  “My arm feels okay, at least,” said the Cat. And with that, he rose with a bit of a wobble, grabbed his glove, and went out to try to bring a championship to his team.

  The next batter was Wally Moses, who later said he was “astounded” to see Brecheen come in. The surprise was enough of an edge for Brecheen, who struck out Moses with a curveball in the dirt. The Cat was relying purely on guile at this point, and that wasn’t enough with Pesky at the plate. The Sox shortstop guessed at a screwball and tattooed one right at Slaughter. Ten feet in either direction, and Pesky might have gotten both runners home. Instead, Country barely had to move for it. At third base, Russell, remembering the throw that nailed York earlier in the Series, didn’t test Slaughter’s arm, damaged though it was.

  That brought the Little Professor, DiMaggio, to the dish. He adjusted his glasses and focused his laser-beam stare at the Cat. In a guessing game, few were equipped to defeat Dommie. He looked screwball away and rapped the first pitch off the right field fence on one hop, scoring both runners to tie the game at three. A stunned hush descended over Sportsman’s Park, the only noise happy shouts from the Boston dugout.

  It was a great moment for the oft-overshadowed little brother of the Clipper in the Bronx. It might have been the singular moment of his career. But it came with a catch. DiMaggio was thinking triple from the time the ball leapt off his bat, but as he dug hard, he came up lame and had to hobble into second. It was what the press called at the time a “charley horse,” a medically meaningless phrase that disguised the painful true injury, a torn hamstring. It took a full twenty minutes to stretcher Dommie off the field, and the St. Louis crowd gave him a nice ovation as he left. Leon Culberson went in to run for him.

  And that brought Williams up with a chance to undo all the negative karma from the game, the Series, the last month, the kerfuffle over his enlistment, his relationship with the press and the city of Boston—every damn thing. A hit here, six outs by the Sox pitching staff, and Ted would be forever remembered as the hero of the ’46 Series, regardless of what had transpired earlier. Indeed, his injury and struggle at the plate would be spun as something he had majestically overcome when it mattered most, adding to his legend. It was the biggest single at bat of his career, both to that point and in retrospect.

  On the first pitch, Williams fouled one right into Garagiola’s bare hand, smashing his index finger severely enough that the catcher had to come out, replaced by Rice. The delay of several more minutes stretched the tension taut. Ted couldn’t help but think about what Brecheen might throw him with one strike, and try to stay a step ahead. He effectively iced himself.

  Brecheen came in with a fastball, and Williams, looking for the screwball that was Brecheen’s out pitch, was jammed. He popped one to Schoendienst on the infield grass. There was no classic Terrible Ted outburst after this failure, no cursing, no busting lights in the dugout runway. He was numb.

  Still, Dommie’s clutch hit had pulled the Sox from the brink of defeat, and now the pressure was on the Cards to respond. Boston made three changes before the bottom of the eighth. With Wagner pinch hit for, Roy P
artee went in to catch. Culberson took over in center field for the lamed DiMaggio. And the new pitcher was…

  Bob Klinger?

  The by-the-book move was to bring in the relief specialist and southpaw, Earl Johnson, to face the lefty Slaughter, who was leading off the inning. Instead, Cronin went with Klinger, US Navy 1944–45, a right-hander who had pitched with the Fifth Fleet team in the Pacific. Now, just over nine months after his discharge, Klinger stared in at the redoubtable Country, who carried his bat to the plate with his pain-free arm. Coincidentally, Klinger had faced Slaughter in Country’s first major league game, way back in ’38. Enos got a knock off him that day.

  A “near non-entity,” Klinger had gone but 3–2 on the season (albeit with a 2.37 ERA) in just twenty-eight appearances. Worse, his son had contracted polio in September, and Klinger hadn’t pitched in a real game in nearly a month, not since September 19, when he didn’t retire a single St. Louis Brown he had faced, right there at Sportsman’s Park. It had been exactly thirty-four days since he last got an out. Now here he was, taking the mound on the road in the late stages of a tied Game Seven of the World Series.

  Sure enough, Country ripped a single up the middle, and the Sportsman’s Park throng roared. But Klinger, to his credit, quieted the instant second-guessers who were calling for Johnson in the press box, retiring Kurowski and Rice with little trouble. That brought another dangerous lefty to the plate—Harry Walker. Cronin still refused to play the percentages, and stuck with his right-hander. Walker had been getting the business from the Sox bench all Series. “The boys think Dixie’s younger brother is something of a show-boat,” the Globe explained, and the catcalls doubled in intensity as Walker strode to the plate.

  It had been a frustrating season for Walker, one in which he hit merely .237 with three homers, but he had stroked six hits in the Series thus far. He was making up for his failure to deliver in the ETO Championship back in Nuremberg, a series that seemed like a lifetime ago. In fact, little more than a year had passed, but much had changed. The stakes were a bit higher, but to Walker, the situation wasn’t much different—it was a big moment in a big game, and he had vowed to come through. He pulled at his cap edgily, ten, twenty times, then stepped in.

  Just at this crucial juncture, one massive Cardinals fan was forced to leave his radio. President Truman was listening in the Oval Office with some Missouri cronies when he was reminded that the annual visit from the Supreme Court was nigh. He dashed up to the residence to change into formal attire, only to discover later that his guests had arrived in business casual. Meanwhile Dommie sat on the bench, leg extended and covered in ice bags, and tried via hand signals to move Culberson over toward left. He did move a bit, but not enough for DiMaggio’s liking.

  Down at first, Slaughter looked into the Cards dugout, expecting and getting the steal sign from Dyer. For the man who believed running was everything in baseball, the man who had once been admonished by Dyer for not sprinting in from the outfield, this situation was a no-brainer. Country would be off for second with dispatch.

  He was off on the first pitch, but Walker fouled it away. The next two pitches were well out of the strike zone, Klinger giving the catcher, Partee, a chance at throwing Slaughter out. But Country had outguessed the battery, and stayed put. The count was now 2–1, a good hitter’s count. Hat on, hat off…

  Dyer signaled for a hit-and-run play. Slaughter bolted. Klinger, pitching from the stretch, critically failed to pause after taking the sign, allowing Country to get a walking start without fear of a pickoff. Pesky, the shortstop, went to cover second base. The pitch was a good one, a sharp breaking ball that Walker didn’t get much wood on. But he managed to lob a “dying seagull,” in his words, out into left-center.

  Now came one of the most fabled, dramatic, and controversial moments in baseball history.

  Playing center for Boston wasn’t the fast, slick-fielding Dominic Paul DiMaggio, who was considered an even better defensive player than his brother. Culberson, an average gloveman, was out there. He had no chance to catch the ball, despite Dommie’s efforts to move him over. He raced about fifteen paces to his right, cut in front of Williams, who had more ground to cover, and got the ball on a hop.

  Of all the critical elements to this oft-dissected play, that bounce is usually ignored, but it played a large role in what unfolded. The horrendous surface of Sportsman’s Park was very much on Culberson’s mind. He was a little psyched out by the idea of the ball taking a weird hop and getting past him, in which case Slaughter would surely score the go-ahead run. “He was a little too cautious,” Bobby Doerr remembered long after. “I don’t blame him—that ballpark was terrible. They put in a new turf for the Series, and in practice a ball went right under the grass. I actually had to reach under the grass to get the ball, that’s how poorly the field was kept. Certainly the outfield wasn’t smooth during game seven.”

  So Culberson took a safe arc toward the ball, retreating more than he should have. The difference was hardly noticeable to the fans and press above, but the hurtling Slaughter picked up the delay at a subatomic level and made the decision then and there to try to score. And, of course, the mere presence of Culberson rather than DiMaggio, who had thrown out three runners in the Series, was reason enough to weigh a dash for it all.

  The ill-fated Culberson bobbled the ball slightly as he tried to glove it. Pesky now changed direction (he had been lunging toward second base as Slaughter broke, remember) and raced out to grab the relay throw. Slaughter was still two long steps from third base as Culberson reached the ball. He whirled and casually tossed a lollipop to Pesky. The center fielder was convinced the runners would hold at first and third, and there wasn’t much he could do about either. Pesky recalled that Culberson “kind of lofted the ball.” Pesky took the throw, his back to the plate. Country had just stepped on third base and…holy moly!…was not stopping.

  Slaughter had had the whole play in front of him. Had Walker’s hit been to right-center, Country might have been forced to check up a little and make sure the play was developing as he anticipated. He surely would have relied on his third base coach, Mike Gonzalez, for help.

  Instead, Slaughter got to third and picked up speed. Gonzalez was frantically waving for him to stop, but Slaughter knew there would be no repercussions for ignoring Gonzalez. “It was a suicide run,” remembered Schmidt, who saw it all unfold from the Cardinals bullpen. “He went right by Mike Gonzalez, who was signaling for him to stop.” (Some papers reported that Gonzalez actually was signaling Slaughter home—“Gonzalez flapped the come-in sign like an excited mother hen,” went one recap—proving only that the boys in the press box were caught unaware by Slaughter’s gambit too.) Gonzalez had held up Slaughter at third earlier in the Series, and Country had gone to Dyer to ensure that the next time he thought he could score he could disregard his third base coach. “Traveling like the western wind,” Slaughter cut the base hard and sprinted home. Gonzalez desperately backpedaled to get out of the way as Country sprinted right past him.

  Pesky turned, looked toward third, took an instant to locate Slaughter barreling homeward, and threw to the plate. That moment of hesitation has gone down in baseball history as a colossal blunder, a flub that kept the Sox from winning the Series, an extension (or, more precisely, the first real bitter taste) of “The Curse of the Bambino.” In reality, Pesky reacted about as well as could be expected, given he was caught off guard, like everyone else.

  By the time Pesky got the ball, realized what was happening, and threw home, only a missile of a throw was going to get Slaughter. It wasn’t. The Star-Times described the toss—“Pesky lobbed it with a peculiar gentleness as though he finished the apple and this was the core he was flinging away, the lightness of it making it impossible to travel fast.”

  Partee’s parents had driven all the way from California to see their son play, so at least two members of the crowd were hoping for a play at the plate. As the catcher remembered the play years later,
“Pesky took a little hop—a skip—and he threw the ball to me, but it was so high. He didn’t have a real strong arm like [utility infielder Eddie] Pellagrini. If Pellagrini had been playing shortstop he’d be out by ten feet.”

  Unfortunately for the Partee family, Pellagrini wasn’t even on the Series roster. Pesky’s throw sailed well up the third base line. The catcher was well in front of the plate when he fielded it, “as though he had started toward Pesky in order to take the ball away from him.” Country actually slowed before sliding in safely, mainly to avoid colliding with the next hitter, Marion, who was a few feet in front of home on the third base line and surprised to look up and see Slaughter bearing down on him. He pointed down to instruct Country to slide, a moot gesture—Slaughter could have scored standing up with ease.

  Sportsman’s Park went berserk. Fans threw programs, scorecards, hot dog wrappers, hats—whatever they could get their hands on. The crowd noise had gone through several distinct notes—a huge roar as Walker’s hit touched down safely; a downshift that swiftly turned into a shocked clamor as Enos barreled around third; an urging bellow as he chugged home; and now an eardrum-shattering detonation as the Cards went ahead. It was now 4–3, and who could believe it had just happened?

  The question has reverberated down through generations. Did Pesky blow it? A careful examination of the game film reveals, well, just about anything the viewer wishes to see, like most frame-by-frame parsing of videotape. Pesky certainly doesn’t come straight home, and there is a brief but noticeable double clutch. But it’s also apparent that the die had been cast by that point. In retrospect, the play was over as soon as Culberson threw the ball to Pesky, rather than coming straight home.