The Victory Season Read online

  Mac would drunkenly fire employees on a regular basis, only to rehire them in tears when he sobered up, none more often than Leo Durocher, whom Mac hired in a fit of brilliance to manage the Dodgers upon taking over the team. “There is no question in my mind but that Larry was a genius,” Leo recollected. “There is a thin line between genius and insanity, and in Larry’s case it was sometimes so thin that you could see him drifting back and forth.” MacPhail once punched a newspaperman, then hired him to run PR for his team. He would thump people on the arm and chest to make his point, leaning in close and exhaling Scottish mist in their faces. He loved opera, and his life resembled a tragédie en musique, with his many successes offset by his volatile temper and inability to handle his liquor.

  Both of Mac’s sons, Lee and Bill, were in the navy, and when war broke out, Larry felt a call to duty in large part because of them. He had hardly been a model parent—when Bill was asked once to describe his father as a parent in one word, he responded, “miscast”—but now Mac felt it would draw him closer to his fighting children if he donned a uniform once more, beginning in late 1942. MacPhail’s role in the army was as special assistant to Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson. Mainly, it meant writing letters and giving speeches exhorting the troops.

  His prose was rather purple, as evinced by a letter he wrote for a wartime periodical called Brief Items describing the fight ahead:

  The bunch you’ll be stacked up against have as much conception of sportsmanship as the sons of rattlesnakes who mass-married a pack of black widow spiders. If they can find a way to use rusty razor blades instead of spikes they’ll have them on their shoes for tomorrow’s game. Every sack is ‘booby-trapped’ and every bean ball that skins your kisser didn’t get there by accident—it was tossed that way, son, and don’t ever forget it.

  “I doubt I’ll ever hold another job in baseball,” Mac said upon entering the service, but it was the army that midwifed his return to the game. In late 1944, the estate of the recently departed owner of the Yankees, Colonel Jacob Ruppert, was looking to sell the team, and through bluff and bluster, and while touring the battlegrounds of France, Lt. Colonel MacPhail arranged to buy it. Of course, he didn’t have nearly the cash to do so. He returned to New York to sign some papers in early 1945 and, naturally, stopped in at a corner watering hole—in this case, the 21 Club—to ponder his next move.

  While Mac worked his way across the top shelf, through the saloon door walked a man in a marine uniform. He was Dan Topping, heir to a tin fortune and owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers—the National Football League version. He knew Mac from their joint use of Ebbets Field and had gotten to know him better during the war. MacPhail convinced Topping over drinks to help finance the purchase of the Yankees, and they subsequently recruited an even more liquid (in cash, not spirits) partner, Del Webb, a construction magnate from Arizona who built airfields for the army. Topping and Webb put up the dough (approximately $3 million), and Mac became the man in charge of the filet mignon of franchises—for next to no money down.

  It was quite a coup. And now that he was in charge, Mac intended to fulfill the dream he had when he first heard the Yankees were for sale.

  He would remake the team in his own image, for better or worse.

  While MacPhail was pulling off his coup de main, his soon-to-be star player lay on a cot in Hawaii, his stomach in knots, his baseball career and marriage withering before his eyes.

  Joe DiMaggio’s war was spent raging against not the Japanese or the Nazis but the injustice of missing out on prime earning years. Even before he was called up, he was forced to walk a PR tightrope similar to the one Williams had. After Joe’s astonishing fifty-six-game hitting streak in 1941, the Yankees incredibly didn’t offer him a raise on his $37,500 salary. It was a slap in the face, couched in cynical patriotism (You’re lucky to be playing ball at all, Joe). DiMaggio couldn’t put up much of a squawk—after all, there was a war on (You’re going to bitch about money at a time like this?).

  DiMaggio squeezed forty-three grand and change out of the team, was jeered for most of the season, and the Yanks lost to St. Louis in the 1942 World Series. Like Williams, he realized that putting off enlistment was a losing battle, so he joined the Army Air Corps. His donning of the national uniform had a revitalizing effect on his marriage, at least for a spell. Joe was wedded to actress Dorothy Arnold, whom he had met back in ’38 on the set of Manhattan Merry-Go-Round. They had a son together, Joe Jr., and DiMaggio’s inattention to them both pulled the family apart. Dorothy had been spotted by the press journeying to Reno, quickie divorce capital of the world, before Joe was able to talk her into staying. Now, with Joe a flyboy, she suddenly was happy to play housewife in L.A. as DiMaggio went off to Santa Ana Air Base each day, mainly to drink beer and slug homers for the base team.

  But come May 1944, the union had again hit the rocks, and Dorothy filed for divorce. She won a $14,000 lump payment and $150 a month in child support for Joe Jr. Days after this blow, the army sent Sergeant DiMaggio and several other top players to Hawaii. Army squared off against Navy in an ongoing series, while also playing local teams. Mostly, it was a great deal for the players—posted in paradise, no marching, plenty of privileges, and maybe a couple of hours on the diamond, at half speed. Forget combat—even compared to other rear-echelon types, it was a breeze.

  But not for Joe. While Pee Wee Reese and Johnny Mize and Joe Gordon and Red Ruffing played ball in the tropical sunshine, accepted slaps on the back from wounded vets watching the games, and put away the scotch and steaks happy brass lavished upon them, DiMaggio stewed. His ex-wife was back in New York now, five thousand miles away and out at night, laughing it up at Joe’s expense. Meanwhile, the Yankee Clipper was swatting ball after ball into the plumeria trees beyond the fence at Honolulu Stadium, and getting what—$50 a week for it? The fabled DiMaggio pride literally couldn’t stomach the injustice.

  It didn’t help Joe’s spirits that his parents were treated as enemies of the state. Giuseppe and Rosalie DiMaggio had come to America in 1904, but upon the outbreak of war, they were lumped in with thousands of Italian, German, and, more notoriously, Japanese immigrants, classified after Pearl Harbor as “enemy aliens” by the government. The DiMaggios were forced to carry photo identification at all times, and not allowed to travel more than five miles from North Beach without a permit. It wasn’t as bad as being rounded up and tossed in Manzanar, as the local Issei and Nisei had been, but it did mean that Giuseppe couldn’t ply his trade in San Francisco Bay, his boat having been seized by the government. At last, in late 1944, Rosalie became an American citizen, and a few months later Giuseppe did too.

  Joe was torn up inside, an internal storm system that manifested itself as ulcers. He was in and out of the infirmary, and whether in his rack or a hospital bed, he spent most of his time totaling up the money he was missing out on making. He told his buddies he was going to stick it to the owners for the time he missed and hold out for a $25,000 raise. “Cost me three years,” he’d grumble. “They’re gonna pay for it.” It was as if Joe was planning to send an invoice straight to Hirohito. He could still slug it—Howard Alley remembers a day Joe came out to give some tips to the swabbies and hit the first pitch he had seen in weeks miles over the center field fence, about “twice the length of the field itself.” But he wanted to be compensated for his outrageous talent. “The war years never seemed to move at all,” DiMaggio would rue long afterward.

  In early ’45, Joe used the ulcers to swing an early transfer stateside, and he was discharged by September. In that time, a miracle—he had apparently reconciled once more with Dorothy. They swanned about the Big Apple through the winter of 1945–46. DiMaggio had lost twenty pounds from the ulcers and seemed to need Dorothy for the first time. He wrote her letters and talked of a family home that would revolve around little Joey’s happiness.

  Uplifted, he reported for duty with the Yankees in St. Petersburg for the first time in three seasons. Immediately, M
acPhail had the ball club up in the air, flying farther south, to Panama, of all places, to play exhibition games against local teams, servicemen, whatever could be drummed up. It was huge business, and DiMaggio was daily chased by Panamanian kids back to his hotel. But it was all a bit carny, beneath the dignity of the great Yankees. Joe professed to enjoy it, but privately he loathed MacPhail and his vaudeville style. Especially he hated the fact that his salary didn’t increase for participating in these extra games.

  The team then barnstormed its way through the South and mid-Atlantic, pulling in enormous crowds at every stop. A staggering 316,846 customers paid to watch Yankees spring games, “from Balboa to Brooklyn,” shattering the old preseason record. MacPhail got an early sense of the nation’s thirst for the return of big-time baseball while counting the profits, which came to about 150 grand.

  DiMaggio struggled at the plate all spring, in contrast to Williams. “After you’ve been away from it a couple of years you have trouble,” he told reporters in Panama. But, like the Splinter, the Clipper was all smiles and sunshine, making time for the fans and the press. To hear the papers tell it, the war was fought not to end tyranny but to offer Williams and DiMaggio a chance for some much-needed maturation. “Fans Just as Important as Hits to ‘New’ Dimaggio” read one headline. “To have dubbed prewar Joe a ‘sour apple’ would have been harsh but very close to the truth,” wrote Joe Trimble of the Daily News, but this “New DiMaggio” was candy-coated. There remained a sense of calculation in his new openness. Few were as conscious of their public image. In New Orleans, kids jumped from the stands to besiege him for his signature. The local groundskeeper tried to stop them, but Joe waved him away. “I don’t want them going off saying, ‘DiMaggio was the kinda guy who wouldn’t give an autograph,’” he explained.

  Earning the extra cash from a World Series appearance was one thing that would make Joe genuinely happy, and there was every sense the Yankees would be in the 1946 Fall Classic now that DiMag was back, along with mainstays like shortstop Phil Rizzuto, second baseman Joe Gordon, and outfielders Charlie “King Kong” Keller and Tommy Henrich, who had missed a dozen seasons collectively to war. But a closer examination showed signs of fray. Two key members of the pitching staff were ancient mariners Spud Chandler, thirty-eight, and Red Ruffing, forty-one. The lineup was weak at the corner infield positions, and behind the plate, Aaron Robinson was the unlucky gent set to take over from legendary catcher Bill Dickey, who would move into a reserve role at age thirty-nine.

  The Yanks were managed by the very successful, very sour Joe McCarthy. The skipper that led the late-1930s dynasty to four straight championships, and seven overall, McCarthy had accomplishments that spoke for themselves, which was fortunate, because he had little of interest to say for himself. He was respected, if not exactly beloved, by the team, though the younger players were devoted to him, mainly because of his willingness to play them—many of his colleagues shied away from the untested. He was a stout disciplinarian, squat of build, with a penchant for cigars as short and stubby as he was.

  The stolid McCarthy couldn’t stand the turbulent MacPhail from the first, and the feeling was mutual. Indeed, one of Mac’s first moves was to try to hire Brooklyn coach Charlie Dressen to switch boroughs and manage the Yankees. Rebuffed, MacPhail steeled himself for a season of collision with McCarthy, who was noticeably hitting his ever-present scotch bottle particularly hard. That was the one thing the two men had in common.

  But at least McCarthy was a known quantity. The championship favorite in the National League was beginning a new era with a rookie manager at the helm.

  Chapter 4

  Reunited Redbirds

  In the end, baseball meant more to Eddie Dyer than oil did.

  He was a Cardinals lifer, a key cog in a top franchise. A star athlete at Rice University, Dyer was signed by Branch Rickey back in 1922, and Dyer was a pitcher for the Redbirds in the 1920s. He wasn’t much in the bigs, with a lifetime record of 15–15, but he impressed Rickey with his smarts and baseball sense. Rickey hired Eddie to run the southern and southwestern minor league teams for St. Louis throughout the 1930s. Dyer was minor league manager of the year in 1942 with the Houston Buffaloes, then took over the job of running the entire minor league operation when Rickey left the Cardinals for Brooklyn in 1942.

  But by 1944 he had tired of the game and hoped to make a little scratch down in Houston, his hometown. He quit the Cards to run a successful oil speculation business, and swiftly became a tycoon in both Texas tea and insurance. Dyer would quite happily have gone on being a Lone Star business mogul but for a wartime tragedy.

  One of the best managers in Cardinals history was Billy Southworth. He guided the Birds to the 1942 and 1944 championships, and his career winning percentage (seven seasons in St. Louis, six in Boston) trails only Joe McCarthy. His son, Billy Jr., was in the Cardinals chain, a promising young outfielder. But then came Pearl Harbor. Billy Jr. signed up with the Army Air Corps. He flew twenty-five missions over Europe piloting a B-29 Superfortress, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross for his efforts.

  Billy Jr. would write his dad in code, using baseball lingo to describe his wartime exploits. He named his plane “Winning Run,” and on missions he wore his father’s cap from the ’42 season for good luck. He started a trend with that stylistic choice—bomber pilots were soon spotted wearing ball caps in their cockpits at airfields across Britain. He was a good-looking son of a buck, cutting a strikingly handsome figure in his bomber jacket. He once took a Hollywood screen test on a lark and was offered a movie contract. He also had a job waiting for him at Eddie Rickenbacker’s fledgling aviation outfit, American Airlines, when the war ended, if he wanted it. It was all pointed upward for young Billy.

  Then on February 15, 1945, he took off from Mitchell Field on Long Island for a routine training flight to Florida. Immediately, his engines started to flame out. He tried to make an emergency landing at LaGuardia Field, but missed the runway, crashing into Flushing Bay. He was killed on impact.

  Billy Sr. was destroyed. “It tore him up, wrecked his life,” said Cards outfielder Harry Walker, who would later lose a son of his own. After a distracted second-place finish in ’45, Southworth desperately craved a change of scenery. So he accepted a lucrative, almost fanciful offer from the Boston Braves, who paid him $60,000 for his services, far above the $16,000 he had been making in St. Louis. It tore him up to leave—this was a man who had the Cardinals logo inlaid in the linoleum on his kitchen floor. But staying put would have hurt even worse, so he decamped east, leaving a hole in the Cards dugout. Eddie Dyer was the first choice to fill it.

  Dyer agonized over replacing Southworth, which would require leaving his comfortable life in Texas for the stresses of the National League, but in the end it was advice from his wife that swayed him. “You have had all the other jobs in the organization,” Geraldine Dyer pointed out. “Now if you turn the big one down they will say you were afraid to take it.” Practically double-dog-dared, Dyer took the gig.

  Dyer was a shade under six feet, with an average build. His unremarkable looks would have made him an ideal wartime spy, as he didn’t stand out in crowds. The biggest thing about Dyer may have been his prominent teeth, which snapped when he talked in a manner reminiscent of Teddy Roosevelt. He was friendly, upbeat, and self-effacing, greeting total strangers with “Hiya, pal!” and a firm handshake. He was a pure player’s manager, not surprising since he had managed many of the Cardinals in the minors. “It’s natural I sort of look after them,” he said that spring. The writers had liked Southworth, but they worshipped Dyer—he gave them all the time they could want, and never grumbled. He had been a stud fullback at Rice, and he understood the needs of the sporting press.

  No amount of hale fellow well met would be worth much if the team faltered. But given how much talent was on hand, it was hard to picture that happening.

  St. Louis possessed what most considered the finest outfield trio in baseball. Center f
ielder Terry Moore had missed the last three years to the service and was getting up in years (he would turn thirty-four that May). But Moore could still run down fly balls with anyone in the sport. Flanking him were a pair of superstars back from the war, Enos “Country” Slaughter, the hard-hitting, hustling right fielder, and the incomparable Stan “the Donora Greyhound” Musial in left.

  Slaughter, “a swift, bald man who combs his hair with obvious deceit,” in the judgment of Jimmy Cannon, had only been discharged on March first after three years of military service, and he was less than thrilled to see that, financially anyway, nothing had changed since he left. “I was getting the same contract as before—$11,000,” he recalled. “They said I was an old man. I was thirty.” With the money, such as it was, Slaughter underwent a hemorrhoid operation, then “got me a pillow and drove to Florida.” In one of his first training sessions, he badly strained a muscle in his throwing shoulder and wouldn’t be able to throw normally until June.

  Musial wasn’t there when Country arrived in St. Petersburg. After a year spent repairing ships and playing ball at Pearl Harbor, he was discharged from the Naval Training Center in Bainbridge, Maryland. He caught a train to Philly, but was unable to get a bus to his hometown of Donora, Pennsylvania—everything was jammed up by discharged servicemen and -women. So he hitchhiked the three hundred miles, getting all the way across Pennsylvania in about a day, helped at the end when a motorist recognized the Cards slugger and hometown legend on the shoulder of the highway and took him to his doorstep. Due to the delays, Musial reported to camp a week late.

  The Pulitzer Prize–winning war cartoonist Bill Mauldin captured the state of the nation’s overburdened transportation system in a cartoon from about the time Musial was thumbing his way home. In the panel, a railroad man is running down the contents of a freight train to the conductor. “Car 29, mixed soldiers and poultry; car 30, frozen-fruit; car 31, soldiers; car 32, mixed soldiers and farm machinery…” Stan, better known as “Stash” to his family and friends, would have seen plenty of other men in uniform on the shoulder of the road.