The Victory Season Read online

  After playing in the final game of the ’43 World Series, Walker had risen before dawn the next day, appearing as ordered at the Jefferson Barracks Army Induction Center in St. Louis at five a.m. He was sent to Fort Riley, Kansas, for basic training, along with teammate Alpha Brazle. Before Walker could even load his first carbine, he contracted spinal meningitis. He was delirious, and placed in a straitjacket for his own protection. For six weeks, he teetered near death. “They said if I’d been sick only four years before, I would be dead,” he recalled years later. “Only the advances in medicine during the war, particularly in sulfa drugs, saved my life.” Ordinarily, he’d be sent home, but the army didn’t want to be accused of going soft on ballplayers.

  Walker recovered and spent several weeks training in jungle warfare. In classic army wisdom, he was then sent to the frozen forests of Europe. He was part of the 65th Reconnaissance Troop (Mechanized), a mobile unit that prowled in jeeps behind enemy forces (similar to Murry Dickson’s wartime job). “Sometimes we’d be 30 or 40 miles behind the German lines, just like the scouts in the Old West. We wouldn’t see our outfit for several days.” Walker’s unit lived off the land, swapping cigarettes for food and beer, and “fishing” with hand grenades.

  The work was incredibly dangerous, even though Walker claimed he “got in at the dog race—before that the 65th was almost a suicide unit.” One moonless night Walker rounded a corner in a road and found himself face-to-face with three German soldiers. They raised their rifles, but Walker was packing a .45 revolver he had bought, and he was handy with it. Harry the Hat got off five quick shots, killing all three Germans. “It was close,” Walker said. “That rifle was only about four feet from me when I started shooting. What saved me was that he was trying to get his safety bolt off. He couldn’t get it off before I was able to get him.”

  Soon after, Walker captured two dozen enemy soldiers after flushing them from their trucks. “They didn’t want to surrender to the Russians, so they surrendered to us in droves,” he said after the war. Walker killed many more men who wouldn’t give up, however, often with the .50 caliber machine gun mounted in his jeep.

  Walker received a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart for shrapnel he took on March 22, 1945, and several commendations for his service. He helped liberate several concentration camps, and the images of the wasted-away humanity he encountered haunted him for decades. “The war left a lasting impression on me,” he told an interviewer. “But whatever price it took, it had to be paid.”

  When the Germans surrendered, Walker, the biggest star and most identifiable ballplayer in the Third Army, was tasked to find a way to help keep the multitudes of suddenly idle American soldiers occupied. Walker helped build the diamond at the Hitler Youth Stadium, and put together the Third Army league. He and the other ballplayers bused all over Germany and Austria playing games, until Walker went to the Third Army brass and managed to wheedle a B-17 Flying Fortress, Bottom’s Up, to ferry the teams around.

  Walker’s team was the 71st Infantry Division “Red Circlers,” so-called for the distinctive patch of the unit. The squad was a powerhouse, listing on its roster Johnny Wyrostek, an outfielder for the Phillies; Benny Zientara, an infielder with Cincinnati; Herb Bremer, a catcher with St. Louis in the late ’30s; Pirates pitcher Ken Heintzelman; and Kenny’s teammate in the Steel City, Maurice Van Robays, nicknamed “Bomber” for his on-field exploits, not his wartime specialty (he drove a truck during the fighting). In addition, the team was stocked with several top minor league prospects from the American Association and the International League. Most, including Walker, had been transferred to the unit by General Patton himself, to ensure victory for the pride of the Third Army.

  The team’s star pitcher was Cincinnati Reds hurler Ewell “the Whip” Blackwell, a 6'6" beanpole with a terrifying sidearm delivery. For right-handed hitters, Blackwell’s delivery seemed to start from a few inches beyond their left ears. He wasn’t particularly well known yet, having pitched all of three innings with the Reds in 1942 before joining up, but it was readily apparent to all who had to face him that this was a guy with a future. Indeed, Blackwell would make six straight All-Star teams upon war’s end.

  Blackwell had pitched a no-hitter in the Third Army championship series against the 76th Division “Onaways,” and then a two-hit shutout in the decisive game. Now, the Red Circlers were taking on the champs of service teams based in France, a squad called the Overseas Invasion Service Expedition (OISE) All-Stars. They were huge underdogs to the Third Army juggernaut. The only major leaguers on the team were Russ Bauers, a mediocre right-handed pitcher who won twenty-nine games with the Pirates in the late ’30s, and “Subway” Sam Nahem, who had been reduced to “the egregiously anonymous position of pitching batting practice to the batting practice pitchers,” as he put it, in Brooklyn, St. Louis, and Philly before getting called up. Nahem coached the motley crew of semipro and low-level minor leaguers.

  Subway Sam did have a secret weapon, however. Actually, two—one a slugging outfielder, the other a dominant pitcher.

  They just happened to be Negroes.

  Jucksch and his friends could sit wherever they liked in the massive stadium, the seating being general admission, and officers and enlisted men commingled in the stands. Gambling was reportedly widespread in the crowd, but Jucksch didn’t remember much of it, possibly because he was too awed by the size of the venue. “Soldier’s Field was a huge place,” he recalled. “I had never seen anything like it.”

  At precisely 2:30 in the afternoon the game got under way. Blackwell pitched for the Red Circlers. “He sure was a whip that day,” Jucksch remembers, as Blackwell made short work of the OISE Stars, fanning nine of them in an easy 9–2 win. Considering Blackwell was getting over a nasty case of strep throat, the dominance was even more impressive. The France-based side didn’t make it too hard on the Third Army, committing seven errors.

  Jucksch and his buddies may not have gotten much of a contest that day, but it hardly mattered. They were in the sun, drinking beer and watching a ball game. The long months of combat melted away in the heat. This afternoon with the National Pastime reminded them of what was coming, and soon—a return to their homes, and their families, and a life without war.

  The second game was held the following day at Soldier’s Field. It was September 4, Labor Day back in the States, and a holiday vibe infused the shirt-sleeved crowd. Jucksch wasn’t at this one, but close to fifty thousand others were, with the huge majority pulling for the “home” team, the Red Circlers. This time, the visitors from France were winning, thanks to a sterling pitching performance from a man the New York Times identified as “Leo Day.” His name was actually Leon Day, and he was hurling a four-hitter, all scratch singles, taking a 2–1 lead into the ninth inning.

  The only thing more noteworthy than his performance was his skin color. The pitcher’s mound wasn’t far from the spot where Hitler and Goebbels and the other Nazi leaders had preached Aryan racial superiority. How they would have frothed had they been in the Hitler Youth Stadium on this afternoon, watching a black man, a schwarzer, shut down a team of whites!

  Before surviving the war in one piece became the focus of his attention, Leon Day was a star hurler for the Newark Eagles of the Negro Leagues. In 1942, his last year of competition before the war, Day had fanned eighteen men in a single game for Newark and closed the Negro League All-Star Game by striking out five of the last seven hitters. In 1943, he enlisted. In 1944, he was driving an amphibious supply vehicle called a “duck” with the 818th Amphibian Battalion onto Normandy Beach.

  He hit dry land six days after the initial landing, “scared to death,” on June 12. “When we landed we were pretty close to the action because we could hear the small arms fire,” he remembered to Negro Leagues historian James Riley. A couple of nights later, a wave of German fighters appeared over the beach, “dropping flares and [lighting] the beach up so bright you could have read a newspaper.” Day evacuated his ammo-laden duck an
d jumped into a sandbagged foxhole, manned by a white MP. As the Luftwaffe strafed the beach, the MP shouted, “Who’s driving that duck out there?”

  “I am,” admitted Day.

  “What’s it got on it?”

  “Ammunition.”

  “Move that duck from out in front of this hole!” screamed the MP.

  “Go out there and move it your own damn self!” Day replied.

  Now Day aimed to continue his defiance of white folks while on the mound in Nuremberg. Coming up to the plate, trying to tie the game with one big swing, was Harry Walker.

  Walker had been trying to get a read on Day all afternoon, managing a single in three trips to the plate so far. Day used a sneaky short-armed delivery, the precise opposite of Blackwell’s, whose elongated arms made hitting him like facing a kraken. Day barely started his windup before the ball was shooting into the catcher’s glove, its speed magnified by the suddenness with which it was upon the hitter.

  Day tossed one of his stealthy fastballs in on Walker’s hands, and the Cardinals/Red Circlers outfielder could only lift a harmless fly to center field. It was easily caught by a charismatic, powerfully built black outfielder named Willard “Home Run” Brown.

  He had been the cleanup hitter for the Negro Leagues’ best team, the Kansas City Monarchs. Pitcher Satchel Paige was the Monarchs best-known player, and he gave Brown his nickname after Paige watched his teammate outslug the Negro Leagues’ Paul Bunyan, Josh Gibson. In 1947, playing for the St. Louis Browns, Willard would hit the first home run ever hit by a black man in the American League, his only major league tater. For now, he had to content himself with playing ball in between shifts on guard duty.

  Some said he could have been as great as Gibson, if only he cared to be. Brown was ultra-talented but also what was known as a “Sunday player,” one who gave his all when the stands were full but loafed it otherwise. His alternate nickname, Sonny, came from this trait—he didn’t like to play on cloudy or misty days. Sometimes he would stay in the outfield while his team was at bat, promising to move if a ball came his way. Other times he would take a copy of Reader’s Digest out to his position and check it out during play. But he also ran down drives and swatted tape-measure homers with ease, too, which contributed to the legend.

  Brown knocked in OISE’s first run of Game Two, and Nahem knocked in the second. Brown’s Negro League rival-turned-service-ball-teammate Day polished off the Third Army team in the ninth. He finished with ten strikeouts, one better than the Whip had whiffed the previous day. The All-Stars won 2–1, evening the series at a game apiece. Years later, Day recalled that he “knew who [Walker] was but I never had any trouble with him or any of the other major leaguers.” After all, he said, he “was bearing down” that day.

  The OISE All-Stars may not have been the first integrated team in the service—other Negroes had played informally with whites throughout the war. But these were the highest profile games, by a huge margin, to feature blacks playing with whites. The biggest news from the games may have been the lack of comment Day and Brown’s presence engendered.

  If the doughboys on hand knew what was coming just over the horizon, they might have paid more attention. They were witnessing firsthand an out-of-town preview of baseball’s new frontier.

  The teams flew over to Reims, France, for the next two games. Three months earlier, Germany had formally surrendered to the Allies just a few kilometers west of the Stade de Reims, in a small schoolhouse that served as General Eisenhower’s headquarters. With Hitler dead, Alfred Jodl signed the surrender documents for the Germans.

  The All-Stars took a shock lead in the series with a 2–1 win in Game Three, Brown doubling and scoring the first run in the lone rally against Blackwell. Thanks to the pitching of Nahem, those two runs were enough. In Game Four, Walker had his revenge on Day. He launched a two-run homer in the first inning to spur Patton’s Men to a 5–0 win, tying the series at two-all.

  A coin flip was held to decide the site of the decisive fifth game, and the toss was won by the Red Circlers, thus sending the teams back to Nuremberg. Once again, it seemed like everyone in the country with an American uniform and a pass turned out to watch. They would witness a dandy affair. Stars and Stripes would rave, “The game was so close all the way through that it kept the crowd of over fifty thousand on its feet cheering wildly and rewarding unfavorable decisions with sounds as wild as any ever to emerge from Ebbets Field or the Polo Grounds.”

  Nahem decided to start himself on the mound. A native of Bensonhurst born to Syrian parents, Nahem was a Communist, a Jew who spoke flawless Arabic, an atheist, and a lawyer who passed up the bar to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. “An Attorney Who Obtains Injunctions Against Batters” was how he was once described in the Sporting News. Nahem was with the Phils when he entered the service after the 1942 season. He fought with an antiaircraft battery, and was put in charge of American baseball in France when the war ended.

  Fortunately for his reputation, Nahem wasn’t part of the GI squad that had lost to a local French team a few weeks earlier. The Fédération Française de Baseball fielded a team that was among the oddest-clad ever to take the diamond. Infielders wore blue shorts, aviation goggles, and coal miner’s caps. The pitcher wore hockey pads; the left fielder, a steel helmet straight from the front lines. The right fielder was “an apparition in a tight one-piece bathing suit and straw hat that pranced out to occupy right field,” reported an aghast witness. The umpire sported a World War I–vintage gas mask, and wore his wire mask not over his face but his groin.

  Somehow, this bizarre collection of batteurs and lanceurs bested the Americans 5–3. The soldiers’ excuse was no doubt that they were laughing too hard to compete at their best.

  No one was laughing as the decisive Game Five of the ETO World Series proceeded. Nahem wasn’t nearly as effective as he had been back in France. The Red Circlers scored an early run off him, then loaded the bases with no one out in the fourth. The “Brooklyn Barrister” was no dummy, so he took himself out, waving in Russ Bauers, the only other OISE All-Star with experience in the bigs. Bauers lived up to Nahem’s faith in him, getting out of the jam in the fourth and holding the Third Army champs off the scoreboard the rest of the way.

  Blackwell started once more for the Red Circlers, and was throwing darts again, though he also committed two errors in a sloppy game “replete with miscues and thrills,” according to the New York Times. The game was still 1–0 in the seventh when the Negro players turned the tide. Day was sent in to pinch run after one of his teammates had reached base. He stole second and third, and came home on a short fly ball to tie the game. It was the sort of hard-charging ball that was on display every day in the Negro Leagues.

  In the eighth inning, it was Brown’s turn. With a man on first, he clubbed a double to the deepest reaches of Soldier’s Field. Walker ran it down and relayed the ball in, but the runner beat the throw after a dramatic dash that had the crowd roaring. Walker hung his head out in center. He probably couldn’t imagine that in a little over a year, he would be at the center of a similar play that would decide the next World Series.

  Trailing 2–1, on the verge of being the victims of a monumental upset, Walker came to the plate hoping to start a rally and avoid a humiliating loss, and presumably a slap in the face from an outraged General Patton. Instead, he flied out. Moments later, Day, Brown, Nahem, and the OISE All-Stars were celebrating on the mound, having won the series three games to two. The crowd grumbled a bit in disappointment, then gave the teams a standing ovation for the outstanding show.

  Back in France, the winners were feted by Brigadier General Charles Thrasher. There was a parade, followed by a banquet complete with steaks and champagne. Day and Brown, players who would not be allowed to eat with their fellow players in many places back in the United States, chowed down happily.

  Meanwhile, Harry Walker stewed. He was more upset at losing than he thought he would be. The competitor in Walker was roused.
r />   Back home, the Hat vowed, if he got another crack at a big game, he would come through.

  Chapter 6

  The Dodgers Take Daytona

  In the opening weeks of January 1946, Branch Rickey was walking to the Brooklyn Dodgers offices at 215 Montague Street when he felt a slamming pain in his chest. He was rushed to Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, where he was treated for a heart attack. Just a couple of months before, Rickey had been admitted with nausea, dizziness, and vertigo. He was diagnosed then as having Ménière’s disease, which affects the inner ear. He lost a considerable amount of hearing on one side.

  Now he had almost dropped dead on the streets of Brooklyn. “I just can’t slow down,” he admitted. “I’d rather die ten minutes sooner than be doing nothing all the time.” The nonstop Antony & Cleopatra cigars he puffed probably didn’t help. Nor did the stress of running the Dodgers, which he had taken over just as MacPhail had turned the perennial “Bums” into pennant winners. The pressure to not just succeed but exceed his former protégé was enormous. It was probably the reason Rickey always left games in the bottom of the eighth inning, regardless of score.

  Wesley Branch Rickey hailed from southern Ohio, which is more Bible Belt than Rust Belt, and he carried the piety of a deacon throughout his life, refusing to drink or attend ball games on the Sabbath. He wouldn’t play on Sunday as an aspiring pro, either, which helped submarine his career (as did his lack of elite skills) and drove him toward a career in the law, where, if anything, he was even more of a failure.

  But he was friendly with the owner of the St. Louis Browns, Robert Hedges, who rescued Rickey from anonymity in 1911 by bringing him in to help with scouting. Thus began one of the more impactful baseball careers in the sport’s history.

  Rickey moved across the street to the Cardinals in 1917, becoming team president. He fought in World War I, like MacPhail, and returned to a team in financial distress. Rickey named himself manager to cut costs, the first decision of many that would get him labeled as extraordinarily thrifty. He was awful at the job and wisely kicked himself upstairs in favor of Rogers Hornsby in 1925. Hornsby promptly led the Redbirds to a championship the next year.