The Victory Season Page 39

  News of the gut-wrenching loss had stunned the Towne that was so confident of victory just days before. Theaters interrupted matinee shows to break the news of the loss. A switchboard operator answered calls “Hello—the Sox lost 4–3.” A traffic policeman appraised of the final score distractedly waved two right-angled lanes of cars forward at once, causing a jam up in the intersection. Not everyone was upset. Claire Brown, a secretary at CIO headquarters on Tremont Street, said, “I’m glad the Series is over. I’ve heard nothing but Sox and the Series from my boyfriend for the last couple of weeks. Gets a little boring.” Aboard the USS Walton at the Charlestown Naval Base, a navy CPO from St. Louis ironically named Walker sweated out the final innings. “I was a nervous wreck,” he admitted. “The night’s on him,” said one of his mates after the Cards had won.

  The Red Sox disembarked at South Station, “still wearing those ‘we didn’t know it was loaded’ expressions,” according to United Press. Three hundred fans awaited the team. Cronin had gotten off near his home in Newtonville, Massachusetts, so he was spared any second-guessing on the platform. Williams detrained and was whisked away by a policeman friend.

  There was to have been a public reception for the Sox at Copley Square emceed by Mayor James Curley. It was canceled at the players’ request.

  Epilogue

  Harry Walker didn’t even stick around for the party in St. Louis. As soon as Game Seven ended, he piled into his car and drove south to see his new daughter and injured son. He drove through the night, and crossed into Alabama early the next morning. A highway patrolman pulled him over, as Walker was considerably exceeding the speed limit in his haste.

  “Buddy, I’ve been gone for seven months,” Walker said, and told the officer why he was in such a hurry.

  “Man, get on home,” said the cop, and Walker was back on his way to Leeds.

  It was a happy homecoming for the Hat, who spent the off-season running the family hardware store with his brother. “Not many people talked baseball with me that winter,” he remembered later. “It was a little surprising, to be honest.” Early in 1947, Walker got into a salary dispute (what else?) with Breadon and found himself traded to Philadelphia. It turned out to be a blessing. Shibe Park was tailor-made for his stroke, and Walker switched to a heavier bat that kept him from trying to pull too much. He wound up leading the NL in hitting in ’47 with a .363 average. Coupled with Dixie’s batting title in 1944, the Walkers became the only brother combo to each win a batting title.

  Walker went on to have a solid managing career. His logorrhea and baseball acumen were memorably captured in Jim Bouton’s groundbreaking diary of life in baseball, Ball Four. The Hat managed the Astros and Bouton in 1969, and is portrayed as a man who gives nonstop advice to his players—and is always proven correct. At one point, Bouton admires a blazer with a family crest Walker is wearing. “Contrary to rumor,” Bouton writes, “the crest is not an open mouth on a field of wild verbiage.”

  Walker wasn’t tarnished with the same stain of racism that is usually applied to his brother Dixie, who is remembered as having protested Robinson’s presence on the 1947 Dodgers, forcing Rickey to trade him (the truth is more subtle than that). But Harry, too, betrayed his Alabama roots on several occasions, and had troubled relations with black players throughout his playing and managing career.

  Like his country, Walker was slow to let go of old prejudices. Even the finest of men, ones who had sacrificed and fought for freedom to defeat fascism, had to be dragged into a rapidly changing era. Harry Walker, and many more like him of the so-called Greatest Generation, was a man of nuance and contrast. These men had fought for their country and come home to find it (and themselves) irrevocably changed. Each dealt with it with varying degrees of acceptance.

  Away from the game, Walker’s life was laced with tragedy—young Terry never fully recovered from his injuries, and he died from a staph infection in 1948, not yet six years old.

  The other half of the Mad Dash duo, Country Slaughter, had a difficult off-season. His injuries left him so battered he thought he might be finished with the game. “My elbow is still hemorrhaging, and I have two broken ribs,” he told a reporter later that winter. Worse, his divorce threatened to leave him destitute. “Enos is just a country boy on a country income,” said his lawyer during the proceedings. “He has slim hopes of ever playing again.” The lawyer said all Country had to live on was his slight farm income back in Roxboro and his World Series share, which, thanks to the small capacity of Fenway and Sportsman’s Parks, was the lowest in decades.

  Of course, Slaughter would play again—for thirteen more years, in fact. He won two more championships with the Yankees at the end of his career, and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1985. Three more marriages, for a lifetime total of five, qualified Country for a far different enshrinement.

  Joe Garagiola had a happy World Series winning night, as the Hill toasted its favorite son until dawn. The following day, the hungover and exhausted catcher went to Sportsman’s Park to gather up his gear. He loaded his car, then went inside to say farewell to a few team employees. Unfortunately, Garagiola neglected to lock up. By the time he returned to his auto, all his equipment had been stolen.

  As an omen for the future of Garagiola and the Cardinals, it served its dark purpose. Joey never did live up to his promise, lasting only eight largely mediocre seasons with four different teams. “I thought I was modeling uniforms for the National League,” he said of his itinerant career. It was the kind of wit that made Garagiola a better TV personality than ballplayer, and he would become a longtime analyst for NBC, along with doing guest-host duty on the Today and Tonight shows.

  Marty “Slats” Marion went on to manage the Cards in 1951, only to be replaced by, of all people, Eddie Stanky. He ran the Stadium Club at Busch Stadium for nearly two decades, like so many of his teammates remaining forever close to the franchise. He never did make the Hall of Fame, a fact that incenses Stan Musial and Red Schoendienst, who stumped for their fellow infield partner for years, unsuccessfully (Red was voted in by the Veterans Committee in 1989). Harry “the Cat” Brecheen pitched effectively for several more seasons, as did his buddy Howie Pollet, and Murry Dickson too, though Dickson would later be accused, without much convincing evidence, of being an inveterate doctor of the ball. “I don’t use anything but ‘woofle dust,’” he claimed, which hardly quieted his critics. Dickson made up for the two years he lost to the army by pitching until 1959, when he finally hung it up at age forty-two.

  The wrenching adjustment from a wartime footing to a peacetime one got smoother after the ’46 season was over. Dickson was one of millions of soldiers who eased back into civilian lives, a great many of them helped mightily by the GI Bill. A crash program to create more housing got people off the streets and into homes of their own. The newly elected Republican majority in Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, known as the “slave-labor bill” in union circles for its draconian measures aimed at blunting the power of organized labor. For better or worse, the paralyzing strikes of ’46 vaporized, not to be repeated. Shortages eased, wages rose, and the Depression never returned. The Cold War waxed and waned, but never exploded into an atomic exchange.

  Baseball benefited from the era of peace and posterity, embarking on a decade of interest and grandeur unmatched in the sport’s history. The era between 1947 and ’57 remains distinct, albeit in the main because of the preeminence of the New York teams; it may have been the “Golden Age” in the Big Apple but not so much in Chicago, Philly, or Boston.

  One major part of the sport’s appeal during the late 1940s and 1950s was, to hear many from within and without baseball tell it retrospectively, the lack of player movement, by which is meant the absence of free agency as was ushered in by arbitrator Peter Seitz in 1975, when he declared pitchers Andy Messerschmidt and Dave McNally free to sign with any team, at last killing off the Reserve Clause. Those who extol the greatness of this time talk about the true loyalty betwe
en player, franchise, and city that were built up, leading to a bond impossible to replicate in modern baseball, when the player who spends the entirety of his career in a single uniform is rare (of course, the Golden Era ended when the Dodgers and Giants shattered that bond by moving to richer pastures in California, a form of free agency available to the owners of those teams).

  While the fact that Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams and Stan Musial, among many others, played their entire careers in one city was laudable to some extent, it is a rather meaningless construct. Few would doubt that free agency, and the resulting interest in the annual guessing game over where top stars will sign, has been a net positive for the sport, and the progress in simple freedoms and employment rights the players have won is self-evident.

  What those who hark back to the greatness of the postwar game are really referring to is the money players made; more accurately, the ratio of average player salaries to that of the average fan. Aside from the game’s few highly paid superstars, your typical ballplayer in the ’40s and ’50s made about, and often less, what the middle-class rooter in the grandstand made, and often had to work a second off-season job to achieve that. Today, of course, the difference in tax brackets is a chasm, with the fan finding little to no common ground with even the most marginal of players.

  The fact that baseball managed to enact its own version of a Taft-Hartley Act, with the full cooperation of the players, no less, is what gets celebrated in the sepia-toned longings for a return to this period. Indeed, when the era is invoked, the players are invariably called “the Boys.” In no other epoch of baseball is there such a juvenilizing of the men who played the sport. None considered Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth or Dizzy Dean “boys,” nor Reggie Jackson or Dick Allen or George Brett, nor Dwight Gooden, Ken Griffey Jr., or Mike Trout. But the postwar players willfully acceded to far less than they had coming to them, and their reward was to live on in a nostalgic halo, worshipped forever by fans who thought they too would play the game for peanuts, if only they could.

  The Golden Age that was at hand was in many ways a sunset hue, the fading light of a time when fans could see themselves in the ballplayers they cheered.

  There was a group of players who missed out on the glory, however. The Mexican jumpers were banned from returning to the majors, and though the Liga was listing badly in 1947, most of them played on, having little option. By 1948, however, nearly all had jumped back to the country that had barred them from playing ball, despite the fact that they had no jobs.

  Max Lanier had a plan, though. The southpaw pitcher got the band together by forming a team that included fellow former Cards Lou Klein and Fred Martin, plus jumpers Sal Maglie, Harry Feldman, George Hausmann, and Danny Gardella, and took them barnstorming, hoping to earn $1,000–$1,500 per game. Unfortunately, almost every team of worth refused to play them, for fear of being banned by Organized Baseball for consorting with known felons, so to speak. Lanier’s team wasn’t even allowed to play in any park used for major or minor league games. So their 81–0 record was amassed against third-rate collectives on remote, often shoddy diamonds. And financially, the team was ruined by the lack of notable competition. Lanier lost about $8,000, though he made some of it back by selling the bus the team used to transit the countryside, looking for games.

  Gardella was about the only player to enjoy the experience, crooning songs aboard the bus to rapturous reviews from his fellow outcasts. The good feelings wouldn’t last, however, once Gardella sued baseball for compensation and reinstatement. He won a loud victory in early 1949 when a federal appellate court in New York called the Reserve Clause “an enterprise holding men in peonage.” Justice Jerome Frank sent a chill through the moguls who ran the game when he opined, “Only the totalitarian minded will believe that [salary] excuses virtual slavery.” The appellate court recommended a jury trial, one that would not only adjudicate Gardella’s case, but test the Reserve Clause, as well as baseball’s long-held exemption from antitrust laws. “I’m helping to end a baseball evil,” Gardella, who was reduced to a $36-a-week job as a hospital orderly, told reporters.

  While some players, notably Jackie Robinson, backed Gardella, most remained unable to bring themselves to break the shackles that bound them. In a disturbing irony, it was the Mexican jumpers who worked hardest to undermine Gardella. Mickey Owen, who was bankrupt and desperately selling off farms and livestock he had acquired with his Mexican bonus money, met with Commissioner Chandler in early ’49 and was given assurances of a quid pro quo—Owen and the other jumpers would be reinstated if they could get Gardella to back off. Owen got eleven of his former Liga playmates to sign a “reinstatement petition,” and they presented it to the singing former Giant. He refused to drop the case.

  Branch Rickey was loud in his opposition to Gardella. Just a few years earlier, he had broken from his fellow moguls to integrate the game; now he turned company man, saying any who opposed the Reserve Clause had “avowed Communist tendencies” and “deeply resent the continuance of our National Pastime.” Chandler vowed to fight the case all the way to the Supreme Court but in June attacked on a different front, reinstating the jumpers after all. He was counting on Gardella to return to the game and forget his day in court. Lanier, Klein, and Martin returned to the Cardinals. Owen had been supplanted behind the plate at Ebbets Field by Roy Campanella, so he went to the Cubs. None had much impact after their sojourns down south.

  But Gardella refused to fold. Even as his trial began in September, and Chandler was deposed in open court, and a settlement seemed imminent, Gardella wanted to keep fighting. “It was baseball which was so wrong—so undemocratic for an institution that was supposed to represent American freedom and democracy,” he said. His attorney, who was in for half of any settlement amount, pushed him to take baseball’s offer of $60,000. “If you sue someone for something, why should money appease you?” Gardella asked. “It is like Judas taking money and saying, ‘I’m being bought off.’” But for all his talk, the player finally caved at the endlessly repeated urgings of owners, Chandler, and his own attorney. Gardella took the $30,000, agreed to never again sue baseball or discuss the Reserve Clause, signed with St. Louis, got one at bat, and was released unceremoniously. Chandler told reporters after the settlement, “I’m so relieved. If I were a drinking man I’d get drunk.”

  From his home in Bel Air, Maryland, Larry MacPhail no doubt raised a glass for him.

  Leo Durocher was suspended for the 1947 season by Happy Chandler, a harsh punishment for assorted misdemeanors that included consorting with Raft and his underworld pals, allegedly rigging a craps game that took an active player for a sizable amount of cash, staining the sport with his affair with Laraine Day, and, most damaging, feuding with Larry MacPhail. Chandler called them the “accumulation of unpleasant incidents” in announcing the suspension; the press, stunned, fell on the side of Jimmy Cannon, who likened the yearlong ouster to a man “getting the electric chair for running a red light.”

  So Jackie Robinson was managed by Burt Shotton rather than Leo in his rookie season. A genteel sort, the polar opposite of the combative Durocher, Shotton gave a lone demand upon accepting the job—that he not have to wear a uniform. Robinson won the inaugural Rookie of the Year Award, the Dodgers set attendance records, and the team won the pennant, losing the World Series to the Yankees in seven wondrous, memorable games. It’s hard to imagine Durocher improving on that, though watching him coexist with Robinson on a day-to-day basis would have been fascinating. The press horde missed out.

  Durocher returned in 1948, but he was damaged goods. Ironically, the friction with MacPhail drove a final wedge between Leo and Branch Rickey, and in July of ’48, Durocher negotiated a jump across the river to the hated New York Giants (replacing the “nice guy” himself, Mel Ott), a spit in the face of loyal Brooklyn fans and a traitorous move whose impact is hard to comprehend in this modern day of regular team movement. But true to Leo’s tenacious nature, he thrived in the face of controversy, winn
ing a couple of pennants (including the memorable 1951 playoff, a crushing blow to Brooklyn made even more painful by Durocher’s presence in the opposing dugout) and the 1954 crown in Harlem, and managed until the mid-1970s. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1994.

  The “other” manager in the historic race of 1946, Eddie Dyer, didn’t last as long, getting fired in 1950 after a fifth-place finish, returning to Texas and the oil business for good. He remains one of only four managers to win the World Series in his rookie season at the helm.

  He is less remembered for a moment from the following season, when Jackie Robinson paid his first visit to St. Louis. There was widespread talk of the Cards refusing to take the field against a black man, and legitimate rumors of violence from the stands. “I had serious misgivings about what was going to happen in St. Louis,” Robinson wrote later. “Then a wonderful thing happened. When I walked out onto the field, Dyer got up from the bench and shook my hand. He welcomed me to St. Louis and the big leagues. I’ll never forget some of the things he said in that quiet moment. It lifted some of the load from my shoulders.” As with Lou Rochelli and George Shuba, Dyer’s matter-of-fact tolerance has been lost to history in favor of Pee Wee Reese’s moment of acceptance of Jackie. There are no statues of Shuba shaking Robinson’s hand, or Dyer huddling with Jackie in front of thousands of Cards fans spitting venom.

  “Singing” Sam Breadon sold the Cards after the 1947 season, and died eighteen months later. The team then entered a long fallow period that was difficult to comprehend for their fans, who were quite used to regular pennants and championships by this point. Ironically, it was in large part because of those fans, in particular the ones management thought would react badly to black players wearing Cardinal red, that the franchise declined.