The Victory Season Page 38

  The forces that have sought to alleviate Pesky from blame tend to point an accusatory finger at the press for pinning it all on the shortstop with its usual lazy pack mentality. Certainly, lines like “Pesky stood as though mesmerized by Slaughter’s impertinence” and “Pesky plucked the ball from his glove and held it in his bare hand…an unexplainable disinterest seemed to tamper with his reasoning and he placed the ball back in the hollow of his greasy leather” (both from St. Louis writers) gave an impression that Pesky had screwed the pooch, and unfairly so. The concept that these writers, and others, embellished the delay thanks to a penchant for dramatic overstatement and the groupthink of the press box is fair.

  However, it should be noted that radioman Arch McDonald thought Pesky had “hesitated” right away as he called the action. It is also fair to argue that any time a shortstop takes a relay throw as a runner is only just touching third base, as Pesky had, he should be able to gun down or force that runner to turn back. Cronin thought the instant it took for Pesky’s eyes to adjust to the shadows surrounding home plate in the late afternoon sun was the decisive factor.

  Some fault certainly lies with Pesky’s teammates. Williams and Doerr in particular should have been able to make the oblivious Pesky aware that the ball needed to head for the plate. “If Doerr…had hollered ‘come home with the ball,’ I think he could have thrown me out by 8 or 10 feet,” Slaughter said afterward. Doerr recalls that he did just that, and that Ted was yelling “home! home!” as well, but that the freight train roar of the crowd prevented Pesky from getting the message. Years later, the other shortstop in the game, Marion, absolved his opposite number for that very reason. “I can’t blame Pesky at all,” he said.

  Instead of seeking to place goat horns, the better bet is simply to acknowledge the verve and élan Slaughter displayed. “Running bent over as though he were on an invisible bicycle,” the balding hustler scammed Pesky, even as he was making an amazingly athletic play. Given the fact that the team doctor had strongly encouraged him not to even dress for the game, and the throbbing pain continued to drum away at his focus, Slaughter’s gumption is even more astounding. His Mad Dash is rightfully still mentioned among the most dramatic and memorable moments in World Series history.

  There is another, slighter controversy attached to the play, less important save for sentimentalists and the man who got the hit that allowed Country to score. While baseball lore and fans of the phrase “Slaughter scored from first on a single” cling to the idea that Walker indeed slapped a mere base hit, the play was scored a double right away, despite some disagreement in the pressroom. “Gentlemen,” scolded Bob Broeg, “you have taken all the romance out of a great play.” Dutifully, his and the all the other accounts in the next day’s papers refer to the hit as a double.

  Again, to the film—upon reexamination, it is rather apparent that the play was truly a single, with Walker advancing a base on the throw. No one could tell that to the Hat, however. He spent the rest of his days reminding people that he had doubled in Slaughter—Just ask the official scorer!

  Perhaps the best way to conceptualize Slaughter’s Mad Dash is to put oneself in the mind-set of a fan that afternoon, one of either the lucky thousands in the park or the millions listening on radio. Exhausted by years of war, the expected benefits of peacetime had largely been denied this fan. The prospect of more war loomed. Everyday goods that should have been in abundance were either impossible to find or cost a fortune. He or she had been forced to descend to bribery or the black market to house, feed, clothe, and clean the family. In all likelihood, this fan had struggled to find a decent place to live, had either walked out on his job or been affected by others walking out on theirs, or had seen his cost of living skyrocket, and quite possibly all three. St. Louis fans had also spent the last few months living under the specter of a polio outbreak that claimed hundreds of lives.

  It may have been small recompense, but the thrilling baseball season had offset the pummeling this fan suffered almost every day in 1946. The game was constant, the excitement and thrills it provided powerful enough to put a smile on his or her face even though tomorrow promised another excruciating battle on any of a dozen fronts. And now, on the final day of an amazing season, the tension had risen to unbelievable heights. Fans huddled nervously around radios in office buildings and country drugstores, in schools and luncheonettes and public spaces across America.

  Then one man, whose very name evoked God and country and war, had taken matters into his own hands, seized upon a calculated risk, and saw it pay off in spades. He had ignored tradition and conventional wisdom, cast off advice and resistance from outside forces, and changed history with one moment of valor and gusto.

  Fans across the country had a strong, unified reaction: How we long to do the same! And much of the story of the coming two decades, during which Pax Americana reigned supreme, was that of people undertaking Mad Dashes of their own.

  The Cards now led 4–3, but the inning wasn’t over. After an intentional walk to Marion, Cronin belatedly lifted Klinger from the game. Johnson at last loped to the mound, his omnipresent smile rather out of place at the moment. Dyer let Brecheen hit with two on and two out after Slaughter scored, signaling to all that he was ready to live or die with the Cat. The pitcher rolled out, then readied to take the mound for the ninth inning. It was up to Brecheen to bring the Redbirds the title.

  But nothing was coming easily for the ailing Brecheen. York led off with a single to left. Doerr then eschewed a sacrifice and blooped a hit into short left, just past a lunging Marion, and Boston had two on with nobody out. The crowd shifted nervously in their seats. To lose now, after Slaughter’s dash, would be doubly devastating. A couple of Boston runs here would relegate Country’s heroism to the dustbin of history.

  It was dead quiet in the park as the Cards gathered at the mound to discuss strategy. The infielders agreed that they would go hard after Doerr at second if they had a shot—the potential go-ahead run was critical. Sure enough, Higgins bunted right to a hard-charging Kurowski, who gunned it with his deformed right arm to second to force Doerr.

  The weak-hitting Partee came up with runners at the corners. “He hadn’t given me any trouble,” crowed Brecheen afterward. A squeeze play or a fly ball would have tied the game, but Partee could only manage to pop a foul wide of first. Musial had a long run to glove it, and made a sizzling throw home just in case the pinch-runner for York, Paul Campbell, had any crazy ideas of tagging up. Now there were two out.

  The pitcher’s spot was next, and Cronin sent Tommy McBride up to pinch hit. Brecheen tossed him a “good screwball,” and McBride rolled it to second. “I hit a low liner right by Brecheen’s left knee,” McBride remembered more than fifty years later, exaggerating the pace of the ball a touch. “I thought I had a hit.” Schoendienst didn’t field it cleanly. The ball rolled up his arm, forcing premature roars of victory to gag in horrified throats. But the second-sacker and lifelong Cards fan recovered nimbly and flipped it to Marion at second for the force, and the game was over. “Red goes down as the first man to engineer the final out of the World Series by snaring the ball with his armpit,” wrote Vernon Tietjen.

  At precisely 3:47, the first postwar World Series champion, the St. Louis Cardinals, was officially crowned.

  Chapter 40

  Aftermath

  Sportsman’s Park exploded with release, the tension of the Series erupting in a bellow that caused the Mississippi to ripple. The seat cushions that fans had used as stepladders now came flying onto the field in the hundreds. Fans descended onto the playing field, covering every inch. A dozen tried to dig up home plate, while a lone guard fended them off. Brecheen was carried off the field by his teammates, fighting the mob at every step. He was soon “hauled down like goalposts,” in Red Smith’s description. The Cat “escaped injury at the hands of the crowd only by miracle.” A pair of fans sportingly patted Cronin on the back as he trudged forlornly to the clubhouse, gazing intently at
his shoe tops.

  The excitement was too much for Ol’ Pete. Alexander suffered a heart attack as he tried to leave the game. He was taken not to the hospital but to his room at the Broadview Hotel in East St. Louis, where he recuperated. He lived another four years before dying in 1950.

  Wild celebrations broke out across St. Louis. Fans threw confetti, bills of lading, and toilet paper out of buildings across town. A paper snowstorm enveloped grinning pedestrians. “Parts of Olive and Washington [Streets] were soon ankle deep in paper,” according to the Post-Dispatch. Boys in woolen underwear garnished with green streamers ran through the streets. Car horns honked without pause, and drivers put hastily handwritten signs in their windshields—CARDS WASHED BOSTON’S SOX and CARDS HAD A BOSTON TEA PARTY were examples of the wit on display.

  The celebration continued long into the evening, as bars and nightclubs were jammed while people danced in the streets. “A mild October night felt like New Year’s Eve,” reported the Star-Times. There were “countless St. Louis hangovers” the next day. “Those aren’t blues they’re singing in St. Louis tonight,” the Globe pointed out.

  The scene inside the winning clubhouse was almost as wild. “Soft drinks were forgotten” amid a celebration that “almost beggars description,” according to the Times. Beer flowed in immense quantities, and the players poured it over each other’s heads. There was no champagne. Red Barrett yelled for some, and Dyer yelled back, “I’ll buy it, boy, I’ll buy it!” Dyer, who was still in full uniform thirty minutes after the game ended, quickly went hoarse from shouting. His hair was mussed, his uniform askew, and a large vein throbbed noticeably in his neck. He hugged Breadon tightly. “And we’ll win it again next year!” the owner promised, less than an hour after winning this year.

  When asked about his pitching star, Dyer said, “I figured I could get two good innings from him.” Brecheen could barely speak, overcome by emotion and exhaustion. He stammered out, “Who got the [game] ball?” and Marion came over to present it to the Cat. “I was saving it for you,” said Slats with a smile.

  Eddie Dyer Jr., sixteen, pushed his way through the crowd to embrace his old man. Both started to cry. Eddie Jr. had begged his father’s permission to miss school that day, assuming (correctly) this “probably will be the only Series you will ever be in.” The manager made sure to credit Doc Weaver, who “saved Slaughter, Moore, and Pollet for me.”

  Writer James B. Dawson was knocked over three times by giddy ballplayers, then wrote, “It was risking life and limb to be there.” The room shook as a partition collapsed. Ford Frick was carried around on victorious shoulders, while his AL counterpart, William Harridge, was “elbowed and jostled,” apparently the cost of being on the losing side.

  Harry the Hat was busy assuring people that the official scorers got it right—he deserved a double. “My regular season average was only a decoy!” he yelled with a broad smile. “Them Sox pitchers kept thinking ‘here’s a guy who can’t hit nothin’.’” Walker had finished the Series with a .412 batting average, and a 1.053 OPS, along with 6 RBIs, none bigger than the last one. More important, he made good on the promise to himself made a year earlier, on a makeshift diamond in Nuremberg. This time, he had come through in the World Series. Nearby, Musial laughed as though he had been the one to hit .412 (Stash managed to hit just .222).

  Slaughter was surrounded at his locker, his right arm encased in bandages, uniform top off, mostly bald pate gleaming from suds. He downplayed his dash, the “electrifying spurt that doubtless will linger for many years,” as the Post-Dispatch called it. “I just had to run, that’s all,” said Country with his best down-home humility. “To me it was just a routine play.” He professed ignorance as to what Gonzalez was signaling to him—and that it was a moot point. He was coming home from the moment the hit landed safely and Culberson took that safe angle to the ball. He chalked up his speed on the base paths to Billy Southworth, “who taught me to run on my toes.”

  The press gang wanted to hear from the day’s starter, Dickson, but he couldn’t be found. Turned out he was so furious at being taken out that he left the park and drove around in his car, listening to the final innings on the radio. After the final out, he tried to return to the clubhouse to celebrate, but the chaos on the streets prevented him from getting anywhere close.

  Sixty feet away, in stark contrast, the Red Sox clubhouse was funereal. They could hear the Cards whooping it up next door. It had been a crushing loss. A team that seemed so superior had been outhustled, outplayed, and outwitted. “What happened to Klinger, to Cronin, and to the Red Sox en famille, was something not fitting to wish upon a hound dog,” wrote one reporter. It had been a major upset, one that set Jimmy Carroll back a reported $45,000 (over half a million bucks today) in gambling losses. As Daley wrote in the Times, “The red-faced gambling fraternity either is paying off in sheer embarrassment or else heading over the nearest fences, suitcases in hand, taking it on the lam.” One local fan had a different challenge. Losing a bet on the Sox, he was forced to push a potato with his nose two city blocks. It took him forty minutes.

  Williams, catatonic, sat in front of his locker, unable to speak. He had been a complete bust in the Series, managing just five hits in twenty-five at bats, all singles, with but a mere RBI. He at last rose, silently handed his Series check to the clubhouse boy, Johnny Orlando, went to the shower, and wept openly for several long minutes. He stayed in the clubhouse, poleaxed, long after his teammates had dressed and boarded the bus that would take them to the train bound for home.

  Ferriss, the losing pitcher, was likewise desolate. “Those were good pitches they hit,” he said sadly. “I just don’t understand it.” Cronin was besieged with questions asking why he used Klinger when he did, for which there was no good answer—Cro thought Klinger would come through, and he hadn’t.

  In the championship cauldron, a team’s weakness is invariably, often ruthlessly, exposed. Dating back to the Saturday Evening Post article in the spring, Cronin’s competence in the dugout had been the Achilles’ heel Sox fans worried about. While he’d had a mostly triumphant 1946 season, there were still concerns—his inability to boost the club late in the year and to get Williams to stop ramming his head into the shift, and his use of the pitching staff. Sure enough, when the games mattered the absolute most, Cronin had gone wobbly with pitching decisions and been unable to rouse his signature player from the Cardinals’ mind games. Inevitably, it seemed, the lone flaw in this magnificent team had been its undoing.

  Happy Chandler dropped by to pay his respects, patting several players on the back. He stopped to whisper in the ear of the miserable Williams.

  “God love you, Ted,” he said.

  “I never missed so many balls in my life,” responded the Splinter.

  Pesky quietly, stoically, took the blame for the loss. “If I was alert, I would have had him. When I finally woke up and saw him running for home, I couldn’t have gotten him with a .22.” A little later he said, “I’m the goat. I gave Slaughter at least six strides with the delay.” A couple of weeks later he was still at it, telling Grantland Rice, “Slaughter simply outsmarted me—that’s all there is to it.” These comments cemented Pesky’s “holding the ball” gaffe in baseball lore, making him a goat on par with Bill Buckner and Mike Torrez in Red Sox history. They were unnecessary, but no one, not Culberson, nor Williams, nor Cronin, spoke up and shifted culpability away from the shortstop. So the blame vacuum was filled completely by Pesky. As he put it many years later, “There are still people today who think I’m a piece of shit.”

  He did speak for the team when he summed up the Series loss. “It’s a sad thing when you think you should have won and you don’t.” He paused for a long minute, deciding whether to say more. “It doesn’t make any difference now. The hell with it.”

  Roughly a thousand fans gathered outside the clubhouse gate. They showered Cards players with cheers and kisses as they emerged. Musial pushed through and hopped in a waiting c
ar that sped him to the airport. Like Robinson after the Little World Series, the Man had more baseball to play. He was joining Bob Feller’s barnstorming tour in Los Angeles, and there was a game the next afternoon. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, he went 0–4.

  Most had dispersed by the time Williams finally dressed and made his way out of the clubhouse. A small group of remaining Cardinals fans jeered him—“Where’s Superman?” they yelled. The bus brought the team to Union Station, and Williams trudged alone to the train. A reporter for the International News Service captured the melancholy scene:

  It was 2 hours and 48 minutes after the last out of the last game of the 1946 World Series, and into Union Station at St. Louis came an outsized gent with glazed-in hate in his eye and the elaborately careless tread of a man who walks alone. Glancing neither right nor left, he stalked up the ramp to his Pullman, seated himself at the window and gazed glumly at the banal scene without. His name was Ted Williams, and only three months ago, at the All-Star Game, he had been the delighted and united chant of the press pavilion and the toast of a nation’s fans.

  Less than two minutes later came a motley array, straggling along without interest or apparent destination, as might a broken-down old theatrical troupe, or the forlorn remnants of the historic retreat from Moscow. But naturally that wasn’t Napoleon in front shambling along with head down and eyes lowered. It was Joe Cronin.

  Williams let his emotions flow in the train car, crying again as fans looked on awkwardly outside the window just a few feet away. Their natural urge to taunt was offset by the naked anguish they were witnessing.

  The endless train journey back to Boston was about as chipper as the one that had brought Franklin Roosevelt’s body from Warm Springs, Georgia, to Washington eighteen months before. Williams got control of himself and killed time chatting with Doerr and reading books on his favorite subjects, including one Cronin had given him, To Hell With Fishing by Harold Tucker Webster. Teammates awkwardly tried to cheer Ted by talking about other stars who had flubbed in the Series. Meanwhile, Cronin and Huck Finnegan got into it again, with Cro threatening the writer with a bread knife.