The Victory Season Read online

  St. Louis was in good shape elsewhere in the diamond. Whitey Kurowski was an All-Star third baseman, Lou Klein solid at second. At shortstop was Marty “Slats” Marion, a string bean from Atlanta who was even more of a splinter than Ted Williams, packing all of 170 pounds on his 6'2" frame. As an eleven-year-old, Marion had fallen over the edge of a twenty-foot embankment and severely broken his leg. As a result, his right leg was shorter than the left one, which resulted in 4-F status but scarcely affected his grace between second and third. Marion was hyper, almost ADD at his position, always gadding about, beating his glove with his fist, or playing with the dirt. At the plate, he always drew a pair of Xs with his finger before stepping in to hit. With all that excess energy, it’s no wonder Marion gave up a promising architectural career to play baseball. And he played it well—Slats made the All-Star team each year between 1943 and 1950, and won the NL MVP in 1944.

  It was on the mound that the Redbirds truly separated themselves from their NL competition. There were so many arms in St. Pete that Red Barrett, who had led the league with twenty-three wins in 1945, wasn’t even guaranteed a spot on the team. Barrett appeared on the cover of Life magazine that spring, which ordinarily would have been grand, except the theme of the accompanying story was how the stars from the war years were meeting stiff competition. Red would make the club but saw his workload drop from 284 innings pitched to 67, and his win total to three.

  At least Barrett got to keep his address. The glut of pitchers in camp turned into a moneymaking bonanza for the team, who sold off a dozen of them to other teams, mainly Southworth’s new squad, Boston (the Braves were laden with so many former Redbirds that they were nicknamed the “Cape Cod Cards”). Two first basemen were also sold off, to make room for a hot prospect named Dick Sisler, son of Hall of Famer George “the Sizzler” Sisler.

  Some voices in the press cautioned the team against selling off so many players—after all, the season was a long one, and you never knew when depth would become critical. The advice fell on deaf ears, because the man pulling the trigger on all the deals was, by nature as well as background, a salesman.

  The Cards were owned by “Singing” Sam Breadon, a native New Yorker who left Greenwich Village for the Midwest to make his fortune in automobile sales at the dawn of the industry. Sam became extremely wealthy selling Fords and Pierce-Arrows. The syndicate that owned the Cardinals had come to the “Dean of Missouri Automobile Men” for some solvency in 1917, when the franchise was on the verge of collapse, and over the years Breadon had put more and more money into the team, until it was practically all his.

  The man he replaced as the franchise’s top voice was Branch Rickey, who had been manager and team president. Breadon’s most canny move was keeping Rickey on to run the organization as business (now we would call it “general”) manager. Rickey had spent much of the 1920s buying up minor league teams and tying them to the Cardinals, thus ensuring an uninterrupted flow of talent to the parent club. Breadon bankrolled Rickey’s system, and it helped make the Redbirds a consistent winner. But the franchise wasn’t big enough for their collective ego, and Rickey wanted to reap the financial benefits of his minor league setup—namely, a healthy cut when his players were sold to other organizations. When Breadon balked, Rickey left to run the Dodgers.

  By the spring of ’46, Breadon was an old man, spending nearly all of his time at the team headquarters. His office was crammed with photos of players and signed baseballs, and few fancy touches. He didn’t smoke or gamble, rarely drank anymore, and had given up his favorite hobby, riding horses up in Fenton, Missouri, where he kept a country home. His main activity, other than singing (“Breadon will warble in his slightly off-key tenor at the drop of a highball glass,” Dickson Terry wrote in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch), was taking long walks. “I like to be with my friends,” he said early in 1946, “but nearly all of them are dead now.”

  “Though it breaks his heart, tight fisted Owner Sam Breadon will have to lose some good players,” Life wrote, a claim that was ridiculous. A crucial chunk of the team’s business model revolved around the hard-hearted selling off of extraneous talent. Breadon had a well-earned reputation for being a skinflint, lowballing his players in the secure knowledge that the Cardinals’ minor league system would churn up plenty of replacements. In the spring of ’46, that merciless method led to the sale of not just a herd of pitching talent, but also the team’s redoubtable catcher, the best the league had to offer—Walker Cooper.

  Cooper was a tough hombre, a guy who would spit tobacco juice on a batter’s shoes and then ask, “What are you going to do about it?”

  “When Big Coop was on your club,” Musial remembered, “you didn’t have to worry about squabbles with anybody else, because he was in all of them.” The team called Cooper “Muley” out of respect for his great strength and endurance. It took him years in the minors to crack the big club—then he complained to the umpire about the very first pitch he saw in the big leagues.

  Coop starred during the war years before finally going into the navy and missing almost all of the 1945 season. Now that he was back, he’d be damned if, à la Slaughter, he was going to play for the same salary as before he left, even though at thirty-one, he was a year older than the “old” Country. Cooper squabbled over his contract and found out the hard way that, despite his import to the team and his military service, he held no aces. The Reserve Clause tied him to the Cardinals until the team decided what to do with him. In this case, they sold him to Boston, as they had his less-ornery pitching brother, Mort, the previous spring. Walker fetched an extraordinary $175,000 ($2,085,666 today), one of the highest cash-only deals made at the time.

  The team would surely miss such a bull behind the plate, the remaining pitchers most of all. It was a talented group, however. There was Alpha “Cotton” Brazle, the white-haired righty known as “Old Boots and Saddles” for his laconic cowboy demeanor; Max Lanier, a tricky lefty; and Ken Burkhart, who had won eighteen games in ’45.

  And there was Johnny Beazley, who won the Rookie of the Year Award in 1942 and beat the Yankees twice in the World Series that year. After the Cards won, Beazley got a telegram from a recruiting office in Memphis, his hometown, that read, “If you can toss hand grenades like you pitch ball for them Cards, hurry up. The marines need you.” Perhaps put off by the unimaginative sales pitch, he joined the Army Air Corps instead. One day, he pitched in a service game without any warm-up and hurt his arm. All spring he had been putting on a brave face, but he worried he was no longer what he had been before the war, and with so many quality hurlers about, he might be in trouble.

  Righty Howie Krist didn’t care about that. He was just glad to be pitching at all. After winning thirty-four games in three seasons for the Redbirds, he went into the army in 1944. While he hadn’t been injured by enemy fire in France, Krist had hurt his neck diving into a foxhole and his leg carrying extra ammo on a long march. As it turned out, Fortress Europe was safer than home. When he was discharged in January 1946, he got into a bad car accident that fractured his jaw.

  Murry Dickson had better luck. A right-hander with a potent fastball, Dickson loved to experiment on the mound, inventing so many variations of pitches that he was called the “Tom Edison of the Toeplate.” A carpenter in the off-season, Dickson loved magic tricks and practical jokes, and he had a nervous habit of scooping up dirt before every pitch.

  Dickson never said whether he had picked up the nerves in the European Theater, but he might well have. Sergeant Dickson fought across the continent with the 35th Infantry Division as a recon scout, a dangerous position with a job description of prowling behind enemy lines, wreaking havoc. He won four battle stars, including action at St. Lo and the Battle of the Bulge, went on a number of top-secret missions, and was among the first GIs to liberate Dachau.

  Like many combat-scarred vets, Dickson preferred to focus on the lighter side of his service, such as the time he killed several chickens with a slingshot on Thanksgi
ving Day, 1944, so his patrol, deep behind German lines, could have a holiday feast without using gunfire that might give away their position. He loved to talk about the time a shell exploded nearby, causing him to jump into a foxhole. Another soldier landed on top of Dickson—when the pitcher looked up, it was General Patton himself! The two men got to talking, and Patton offered to make Dickson his driver, but Murry begged out of the assignment, worried that the “crazy” general would be the death of him. Dickson preferred to take his chances with the Wehrmacht.

  He came home laden with souvenirs and a burning desire to rejoin the Cardinals and forget his combat service. Although physically unimposing (a mere 155 pounds), his unique repertoire gave him a leg up. Still, he seemed ticketed for the bullpen.

  Two other smallish pitchers, lefties both, rounded out the staff. Howie Pollet was overjoyed to see Dyer take the managerial job. Eddie, a mentor since Pollet turned pro as a teenager, had hired him in the off-season to work in his oil-leasing business office. Pollet was a good Catholic boy, attending church regularly and preferring to talk fishing rather than head out on the town with the boys. He had two distinguishing characteristics, one public (he made a loud grunt while delivering every pitch, like a karate master splitting a board) and one private (he fell asleep with his arms folded across his chest like a mummy and never moved all night long).

  Pollet served two years in the air corps, entirely stateside, playing with Country Slaughter in San Antonio for a spell. Pollet’s good buddy Harry Brecheen was exempted from duty due to a childhood ankle injury. This was ironic, because his extreme agility and athleticism had earned Harry the nickname “the Cat.”

  Brecheen grew up in Oklahoma, the son of a lumber surveyor who was among the first to settle the town of Broken Bow. From the time he was young, Harry always held either a rifle, a fishing rod, or a baseball in his hand. He and Pollet spent off-seasons together in various woods and streams, pursuing their favorite hobbies. Brecheen owned a baker’s dozen worth of bird dogs, and often resembled one when he leaned way forward to get the sign from the catcher, the bill of his cap low over his brow.

  “Brecheen wouldn’t give his grandma a good ball to hit,” Terry Moore said of him. He outthought hitters, changing speeds masterfully, in the manner of future great Whitey Ford. Like Dickson, Brecheen was wee—just 160 pounds of stripling. He was always told that his size would prevent him from making it through the long major league season, but he had won forty games over the previous three years. He made up for his diminutive frame with aggression, making copious use of brushback pitches, to the point that he would yell “Look out!” at batters who dug in against him.

  It was a powerful team, and enthusiasm was palpable all spring, buoyed by the joy the locals felt at seeing the team for the first time since wartime travel restrictions had banned southern training camps in 1943. “Even the flocks of fat sea gulls that had waddled unmolested in Waterfront Park’s left field for the past three years seemed infected with the excitement,” Life noted. Groups of boys stripped down to patrol Tampa Bay for balls knocked into the drink. Caught up in the optimism, virtually every prognosticator that spring picked the Cardinals to win the pennant in a trot. Only Dyer himself sounded a note of caution.

  “Things unforeseen happen to ball clubs that can greatly change the picture,” the new manager said.

  Not every Cardinal liked Dyer. Pitcher Freddy Schmidt felt the manager played favorites. “His guys from the minors got put forward,” Schmidt remembered decades later, his bitterness still palpable. “The rest of us sat in the bullpen and never got a call.” Then there was outfielder Harry Walker, who had been close with Southworth and feuded with Dyer. Perhaps that was because of Walker’s infuriating habit of endlessly tugging at his cap before and after every pitch. Before the war, his teammates on the Cardinals called him “Cappy,” but during the spring they hung him with a more lasting moniker—“the Hat.” His habit of tugging on his caps meant he went through about twenty a season, and that got him in dutch with Breadon, who totaled up the money all those hats cost him and wasn’t pleased. Dyer was asked if Walker’s manic hat-pulling bothered enemy pitchers. “Pitchers?” Dyer responded. “Hell, it bothers everybody.”

  Walker had been a part of the 1943 team that won the pennant and lost to the Yankees in the World Series. He then went into the service, where he saw intense combat in Europe. But he also saw some baseball action while overseas, including an extraordinary series of games that took place in a most unusual setting.

  Chapter 5

  From Hitler to Hardball

  Not long before, this site in Nuremberg, Germany, had been filled by National Socialists swearing fealty to the Third Reich. Now, the swastikas were painted over, brown shirts were considerably out of fashion, and the Stadion der Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth Stadium) had been converted from a cauldron of hate to a place for uniquely American games. The US Army ran the show now, and fifty thousand Yank soldiers shouting and laughing and cheering over the decadent contest was the ultimate proof.

  An endless number of doughboys of every rank and specialty poured into the newly built field: the infield finely crushed red brick, the outfield perfectly mown green grass. A brilliant sun warmed the faces of the GIs. Vendors sold beer and Cokes and peanuts, just like back home. The Stars and Stripes flew over the field, and a bugle corps played the national anthem before the cry of “Play ball!” Armed Forces Radio had a setup behind one dugout, transmitting the action to the boys throughout Europe and Africa who couldn’t be there.

  It might not have been a scene to inspire Leni Riefenstahl, but for these citizen-soldiers and smashers of the Axis war machine, it was paradise.

  On his first night of combat in World War II, PFC William Jucksch of Missouri was, like the rest of his unit, “scared shitless.”

  Jucksch (pronounced “Jukes, like a jukebox”) was from a small town near Joplin. He joined the army at age eighteen, and because he was a Boy Scout, and knew Morse code, “they made me a radioman,” he said some sixty-eight years later. He was a forward observer with an artillery unit, and he landed in France on D-day plus five months. “We saw a lot of war,” Jucksch said. “We shelled a lot of towns, trying to avoid their churches, but let’s face it—we destroyed pretty much everything we saw.” Slowly but surely, he became numb to the death and destruction that was all around him.

  “You get immune to it,” he admitted. “The human body is an amazing thing.”

  With war’s end, the numbness gave way to “euphoria.” “After the Japs surrendered it was so great,” Jucksch recalled. “We took trips to Switzerland, Rome, wherever you liked.” But sightseeing wasn’t going to be enough to keep the hundreds of thousands of American boys still in Europe awaiting discharge from getting in trouble. After all, “the first thing we did was get the breweries going.”

  So a massive military athletics program was put in place. Now nineteen and a staff sergeant, Jucksch played some football, but it was baseball, America’s number one sport, that attracted most of the servicemen’s interest. To make a powerful statement, the brass decided to build a baseball diamond in the symbolic home of the Nazi Party—the Hitler Youth Stadium. “We had a conqueror’s frame of mind,” Jucksch explained. “The Germans had surrendered unconditionally, and this proved it.”

  It was renamed Soldier’s Field, and soon the sound of lumber connecting with horsehide filled the Luitpoldhain. Come September, German prisoners of war were directed to erect removable bleachers for a special event to take place at Soldier’s Field—the European Theater of Operations (ETO) World Series. It was the championship series for all service teams based on the newly liberated continent, and on September 3, 1945, it was the center of attention of the entire American war effort in Europe.

  Beyond the center field fence was a long concrete strip where the Nazis used to parade, and all morning, and right up until first pitch, airplanes landed there, disgorging the panoply of generals, colonels, and majors eager to see the op
ening game of the Series. Jucksch, like most enlisted men, rode in a truck to Nuremberg, bouncing along on bomb-damaged roads from Austria. “When you’re in a 6x6 [army truck] it sure felt like a long drive,” he remembers.

  One of the main dramatis personae of the Series was down on the field stretching, getting ready to play. Harry Walker was one of several former pros on his service team, the one representing the Third Army, General George Patton’s fiefdom.

  Walker was a southern boy, from Leeds, Alabama, and part of a baseball family—his father had pitched in the bigs, and his elder brother Dixie was currently starring with Brooklyn. Harry succeeded as a ballplayer more on grit than talent. Down in the minors, one setback after another had befallen Walker. Once, he complained of stomach pains and fainted in the clubhouse before a game. The trainer threw cold water on Walker to revive him, then informed the groggy, dripping player that no other outfielders were available, so he had to play. Walker gutted out both ends of a doubleheader, then went to the movies, where he collapsed with a burst appendix and needed emergency surgery.

  The following season Walker was hit in the throat by an errant throw in warm-ups and couldn’t speak for three months. This was considered a tragedy, as Harry was a great “barber,” slang for talker, willing to chew the ear off teammates in the dugout, reporters on the train, or complete strangers wherever he met them.