The Victory Season Read online

  The Cards had little dough, but they had good scouts, Rickey first among them (it was often said he could spot talent from a moving train), so he played to that strength and created a widespread minor league system. It allowed the team, who couldn’t outbid other teams for young talent, the ability to tie prospects to the big league club, use the cream of the crop, and sell off the rest for operating profit. “It wasn’t the result of any innovative genius,” Rickey told the Sporting News. “It is the result of stark necessity. We did it to meet a question of supply and demand for young ballplayers.” The cutting-edge method utterly changed baseball in the 1930s and ’40s, as the Redbirds stockpiled talent, dominated the National League, and remained solvent.

  Rickey, like MacPhail, was a pioneer in several other areas. He had his pitchers use strings to define the strike zone in practice, to help with their control; invented the concept of sliding pits and batting tees; and was the first to implement classroom training to get all his players on the same page fundamentally. Later, he would hire the game’s first dedicated statistician, Allan Roth, to give his team a numbers edge.

  As the Cardinals’ success grew, so did Rickey’s profile. He became a regular speaker on the conservative circuit, as a forerunner to the kind of evangelical sportsman today defined by the likes of Tim Tebow. He was a close friend and supporter of Thomas Dewey, the Republican who became governor of New York and rival to then Senator Truman, even though Truman was a Missourian and rabid Cardinals fan.

  He fell out with Sam Breadon over—what else?—money, and when MacPhail surprisingly went back into the service, Rickey leapt at a chance to replace him in Brooklyn. It was there he earned the nickname “the Mahatma,” after sportswriter Tom Meany read a line about Mohandas Gandhi that described the Indian leader as a combination of “your father and Tammany Hall.” Gandhi was known as “Mahatma”; thus too was Rickey.

  The team Rickey had put together in Brooklyn gathered for spring training in Daytona Beach, where after a long day of drills, the players could go for a swim in the Atlantic, provided they avoided the hot rods racing on the tightly packed beaches of Daytona. (Within a year, the racers would organize themselves into a touring collective called NASCAR.) The swollen roster from all the returnees made life difficult for the team’s traveling secretary, Harold Parrott. He had to scramble to find space for everyone. Some players lived four to a room. The Dodgers, like most teams, had told the players not to bring their families to Florida, but most ignored the order, especially those who had been in the service and already had been away from their loved ones for so long.

  The most important Dodger back from the service was their fantastic, if injury-prone, outfielder “Pistol Pete” Reiser. Also back from a three-year absence was the team’s steady shortstop. Harold “Pee Wee” Reese wasn’t that small—at 5'10", 160, he was near average for players of the time, even a little big by middle-infielder standards. The nickname actually came from his time as a champion marble shooter during his Kentucky boyhood.

  Reese was a scrappy and cannily effective player for the Louisville Colonels, a triple-A franchise, when the Red Sox took note (their farm director suggested Tom Yawkey buy the entire team to secure Reese). But Boston had a shortstop—Joe Cronin, who inconveniently was also the manager, and Yawkey’s favorite son. Cro checked Reese out, deliberately soft-pedaled his ability, and then dealt Reese to Brooklyn for a few bucks and some no-names. The Dodgers also had a player-manager at short, but he willingly stepped aside for the obviously superior Reese. Pee Wee would go on to become the Dodgers’ longtime captain, a ten-time All-Star, and a Hall of Famer.

  The critical pivot in Reese’s career boiled down to the differing mentalities between the managers of Boston and Brooklyn. Joe Cronin thought himself irreplaceable until he had to be carried off the field on his shield. It was a superstar player’s mentality. Leo Durocher, however, forged a career out of pure will. He approached every season—every game—as if it could be his last, for there was surely someone better coming along to take his job. And Leo wanted to win far more than he wanted the glory. If his team was better off with a new guy instead of him at short, so be it.

  In the long, often-fantastic history of baseball nicknames, few have matched “the Lip” for pithy accuracy. Durocher talked a mile a minute, alternately harassing and cajoling players, umpires, writers, fans, and management. And, of course, women, who flocked to Durocher. He splashed on the cologne with two full hands and was always resplendent in $175 suits, custom-fit by the tailor to George Raft, star of The Bowery and They Drive by Night. Raft often played gangsters, and his real-life association with mafiosi helped inform his portrayals. Raft was also close pals with Durocher, an association that lent the skipper an aura of glamour and pizzazz.

  Leo was ultra-intense, a forerunner to Billy Martin in many ways, mainly in his win-or-else attitude. He frequently humiliated his charges, such as pitcher Luke Hamlin, whom Durocher labeled a “gutless wonder” after Hamlin took a beating in a game. In 1943 Durocher’s Dodgers had mutinied under Leo’s unending abuse, threatening not to take the field unless Durocher eased up. The incident softened Durocher—a little. Second baseman Billy Herman nonetheless regularly fired balls from infield practice into the dugout, trying to nail Durocher.

  Sportswriter Dick Young pegged the way most people in baseball felt about Leo. “You and Durocher are on a life raft,” he wrote in the New York Daily News. “A wave comes and knocks him into the ocean. You dive in and save his life. A shark comes and takes your leg. The next day, you and Leo start even.” Durocher’s style could lift a team to heights unachievable under anyone else, but it could also cause blowback. Stan Musial said that Leo “tried to intimidate the other team, but I think it backfired on him more often than not. He was just stirring up a nest of hornets. When Durocher came to town, I was so charged up I could go up there and climb six fences. I wasn’t the only one. Our whole team was up.”

  “Lippy” was a rogue, a hard-drinking, two-fisted braggart who loved to whip ass on the field and then tell anyone who would listen all about it. There was little pretense at playing nice or being a family-friendly guy. Even though he worked in the outer boroughs, Durocher was made for Broadway, and he wasted little time combining sports and nightlife in the big city. Latter-day lotharios like Mickey Mantle, Joe Namath, Joe Frazier, and Derek Jeter were merely following the blueprint Durocher had laid down.

  He grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, the son of a railway worker. His first sport wasn’t baseball but pool, and his second was probably rock throwing. By the ninth grade, Leo had beaten up a teacher and been expelled. He played semipro ball for an electric company team and was spotted by fabled Yankees scout Paul Krichell, who had signed Lou Gehrig a couple of years earlier.

  Durocher was in the bigs by 1928, a great glove man who made up for his lack of hitting ability with ultra-competitiveness. As a rookie, he once hip-checked a runner trying to leg out a triple. Said runner was a shrinking violet named Ty Cobb. “If you ever pull a stunt like that again,” the Georgia Peach screamed, “I’ll cut off your legs.”

  Instead of shying away from the oft-psychopathic Cobb, Durocher got in his grille. “Go home, grandpa!” he yelled back. “You’re gonna get hurt playing at your age. You’ve gotten away with murder all these years, but you’re through. You’ll get a hip from me any time you come down my way, and if you try and cut me, you’ll get a ball rammed down your throat!”

  He would sometimes call time-out when in the field so he could stroll closer to the batter and insult him. Hank Sauer of the Cubs was a favored target. Sauer’s prominent nose reminded Leo of a hood ornament, so he would yell “Pontiac” at the Cubbie, who would then call time to compose himself. Shocked by his audacity, his teammates were won over, save Babe Ruth, who relentlessly needled Durocher, calling him “the All-American Out.”

  Yet another nickname for Leo was “C-Note” in honor of his highfalutin lifestyle and his incessant need for cash. He was foreve
r welshing on bar tabs and haberdashery bills, which would get him (a) the unwelcome attention of local legbreakers and (b) summoned repeatedly to the Commissioner’s office. Such was his charm that even the grim moray Kenesaw Mountain Landis offered to give Leo a loan.

  Branch Rickey hardly seemed the type to coexist with such a rampaging rake. But he brought Durocher to the Cards, telling Leo, “I have a firm belief that with you at shortstop we can win pennants. That’s all I care about.” A year later, Durocher captained the team to a World Series title. The Cards paid him $50 a week and gave the rest to his creditors. But it was MacPhail, not Rickey, who gave Durocher his first shot at managing, installing Leo as the Brooklyn skipper in 1938.

  Managers dating back to John McGraw had dominated every aspect of their players’ lives. After the war, this was no longer possible. Night games and swollen urban populations made curfews and tight control over the ballplayers folly. Players no longer accepted the fact that management could dictate their personal lives away from the ballpark. Meanwhile, social mores were changing, with women becoming more aggressive, showering constant attention upon the ballplayers, even ones not as famous as Babe Ruth.

  Exhibit A: Kirby Higbe. Ol’ Hig was a Dodgers pitcher from North Carolina with a taste for flashy cars and flashier women. Back in his hometown of New Bern, he once drove a yellow roadster for several blocks on the sidewalk, then got off with no penalty when he winkingly told the judge he had done it to avoid a woman driver.

  His courtship of the fairer sex was equally tasteful. He flaunted the fruits of road trips, claiming that no less than thirty-five women once showed up to his hotel room looking for some action. “I was too obvious,” he said years later. “I’d walk through the hotel lobby arm and arm with a blonde and a bottle of booze. Other guys would just have those things sent up.” Higbe deserved to enjoy life, having served in both Europe and the Pacific Theater during the war. He spent the bulk of his time in the Philippines, arriving just as Leyte was recaptured. Ol’ Hig spent most of his hitch selling American beer to the local Filipinos. After baseball he became a prison guard in South Carolina and was busted selling drugs to an inmate. He found religion as a result, becoming an acolyte of Billy Graham.

  Higbe owed his place on the team to pinochle. He had been a career mediocrity when the Dodgers picked him up for loose change in 1941. Higbe and Durocher began a season-long card game, with Durocher swiftly establishing himself as the superior cardsharp. Leo then offered Ol’ Hig a deal—he would knock two hundred points (at a quarter a point) off his lead every time Higbe won a game on the mound. Incentivized, Higbe won twenty-two games that summer, helped lead Brooklyn to the pennant, and wound up even at the gaming table.

  The Dodgers were less affected by the war than many clubs, both in terms of key players going into the service and having them see combat. Durocher’s 4-F due to a punctured eardrum was a typical good break in that department. But a squadron of minor leaguers who had been called up were in Daytona. Three of them were vying for a place in the Brooklyn outfield. One, Gene Hermanski, had served stateside. The other two saw action, and suffered for it.

  Dick Whitman was, by most accounts, the best ballplayer ever to pass through the University of Oregon. A native of the Beaver State, Whitman was working his way up the Dodgers chain when drafted into the army. He was with an infantry unit in the Ardennes Forest during the Battle of the Bulge. Like so many other soldiers in that frozen forest, Whitman suffered frostbite to his toes.

  But worse damage came when an enemy artillery blast detonated near him. The shrapnel flayed his back and neck, while grazing his ear. When asked of the moment after the war, Whitman could only remember falling into the snow with a hell of a headache. Not knowing how badly he’d been hit, he got up and asked the soldier behind him how it looked.

  There was no one there. “He was carrying the tripod [upon which to mount a machine gun],” Whitman said. “But all I could see of him was his shoes; he was just blown all over.” No, Whitman did not steal the name and identity of the soldier and become Mad Men’s Don Draper, but he did take home a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, and three battle citations from the war. “His life really was the classic American story,” said his son Richard upon Dick’s death in 2003.

  As was Carl Furillo’s, in a different way. The son of poor immigrants from southern Italy, Furillo used baseball to escape the mines of his Pennsylvania hometown. Carl was from Reading, and he had a howitzer for an arm, so he simply had to be called the “Reading Rifle.”

  Like Whitman, Furillo was on the cusp of the bigs when he was called up to fight in the Pacific, with the 77th Infantry Division. He saw plenty of combat during his three-plus years in the service, and he was wounded in a mortar attack as the Allies closed in on the Japanese Home Islands.

  Unlike his fellow outfield greenhorns, Furillo, whose sloth on the base paths earned him the nickname “Skoonj” that spring (short for scungilli, Italian for snail), hated Durocher. Rickey had offered a mere $3,750 for the season, and when Furillo went to Leo to gripe, the manager told him to “take it or fucking leave it.” Furillo was young and idealistic, but he could hold a grudge, and he never forgave Durocher for his brusqueness.

  Still, all three rookies were in camp and looking good to make the Dodgers, even with Reiser and star outfielder Dixie Walker around. “When I see these kids run, throw and hit for extra bases the way Whitman, Furillo and Hermanski have done,” said Durocher, “I don’t care if they’ve got famous names or none at all.” Still, to most onlookers, the infusion of so many kids spelled a rebuilding season for Brooklyn. “The Durocher-Rickey Youth Movement involves employment of green hands who are going to commit errors of commission and crimes of judgement before they hit a major league stride,” thought Red Smith in the New York Herald Tribune.

  Brooklyn’s pitchers weren’t famous names, and that was the residue of Durocher’s design. No manager was more flexible with his roster, and in particular, none was as adept at using his entire staff. Durocher was a pioneer in using the entirety of his bullpen, often in a single game. He thought nothing of using five or six hurlers to win one ball game, or matching lefty pitchers against lefty hitters long before that was de rigueur. Once he brought in a pitcher to throw a fastball, then removed him for a reliever whose task was to throw a curve. “I just get a feeling,” he would say of his hunch plays. In the coming season, Leo would use 223 relievers over the 154 games, far and away the most exhaustive use of a bullpen in the league.

  Aside from Higbe, the staff was fronted by a kid who had pitched decently against wartime mediocrities, lefty Vic Lombardi; relief ace Hugh Casey, who was best known either for throwing a spitter that catcher Mickey Owen missed on strike three, a play that turned Game Four of the ’41 World Series in the Yankees’ favor, or for brawling with Ernest Hemingway one spring in Cuba; and a promising newcomer, Joe Hatten, who was earning comparisons to Dizzy Dean with his sidearm delivery. Hatten was the subject of some tall tales around the dugout campfire. One went that while in the minors, Hatten had deliberately walked the bases full while leading by one run in the ninth, just to see if he could escape the damage. He then struck out the side.

  Familiar hurlers from the “Boys of Summer” staff—Don Newcombe, Carl Erskine, Johnny Podres, Clem Labine—were not yet on the club in 1946. The most recognizable name two generations later belongs to Ralph Branca, who had been a spot starter the year before. Only twenty years old, Branca was a good prospect, but like so many other players that year, he chafed at the puny dollars he was supposed to make for entertaining millions of fans. Rickey offered Branca the same $3,300 he had made in ’45. Ralph sent the contract back unsigned, then told the Daily News about the inequity of it all, how the owners were living in a 1941 world when the war had changed everything.

  News columnist Jimmy Powers went off on Rickey, coining the moniker “El Cheapo” for the Dodgers’ majordomo. Rickey was embarrassed into upping the offer to five grand. Branca signed the contract b
ut remained unenthused. Rickey wasn’t happy either, and he ordered Durocher to pin Branca to the bench. So baseball’s master of the pitching change held one of his better hurlers to just five starts and twelve appearances before circumstances changed in August.

  In most other training camps, the salary haggles would command most of the attention of the writers and fans. But not in Daytona. All eyes were trained not on the business office but on the satellite diamonds. There, the minor leaguers were drilling, hopes of one day making the big club oozing from their pores like sweat. One in particular, wearing number 9 down at second base, stood out, not because of his powerful build or pigeon-toed gait but because of his skin color.

  Chapter 7

  “The Right Man for This Test”

  It may have happened while he absentmindedly threw lit matches into wastebaskets in his office, one of his more perilous habits. It may have happened while on the long daily subway commute between his home in Forest Hills, Queens, and his office in Brooklyn. It may have happened while at twenty thousand feet, at the controls of his Beechcraft plane that he flew around the country, scouting the next generation of Dodgers.

  Wherever it happened is lost to history, but at some point at the end of the war, Branch Rickey decided the time was right to integrate baseball.

  An entire separate book would be required to parse the precise motives behind Rickey’s decision. Certainly there was some altruism in his soul, along with his Christian sense of right and wrong. But there was also a considerable financial benefit should Negro players do as he expected and vault the Dodgers to the top of the National League. Signing black players was a gaping market inefficiency waiting to be exploited. Between the huge number of new fans—of both colors—and the projected boost from playing more meaningful late-season games, there was a clear profit motive pushing Rickey to sign a black ballplayer. In this case the revolution could be monetized, though that hardly detracts from the courage it took to be the first one out of that particular foxhole.