Pinstripe Empire (42 page)

On October 11, 1946, the Yankees traded Gordon to Cleveland straight-up for right-hander Allie Reynolds. This was a blockbuster by any measure, a one-for-one deal involving two All-Star-caliber players. Both were thought to be twenty-eight, although it later turned out that Reynolds was really thirty. Gordon had played in exactly 1,000 games for the Yankees and recorded exactly 1,000 hits.

(The move shifted Stirnweiss back to second, where he set records by playing seventy-one straight errorless games and handling 382 consecutive errorless chances.)

Gordon and Reynolds were both coming off poor seasons. Both were vulnerable, and the deal freshened both of their careers. It was DiMaggio who told MacPhail to get Reynolds rather than Red Embree, who Cleveland owner Bill Veeck was dangling. “He’s their best, outside of Feller,” said Joe.

Reynolds was one-quarter Creek Indian, which of course led to his being called “the Big Chief.” He was the son of a Nazarene evangelist minister and had a strict conservative upbringing, even forced to wear long-sleeved sweatshirts and sweatpants for his high school basketball games. Born in
Bethany, Oklahoma, he went to Oklahoma A&M (renamed Oklahoma State in 1957), where he played baseball for Hank Iba, the school’s great basketball coach who went on to win two NCAA titles. To that point, Allie had not played anything more than fraternity-house baseball. Iba turned him into a pro prospect, and he signed with the Indians in 1939, reaching the majors in ’42.

With the Yankees, he would emerge as the leader of a new starting rotation that would include Vic Raschi and, a year later, Eddie Lopat. Reynolds, whose best pitch was a rising fastball (“Today you’d call it a cutter,” said Berra), would go 19–8 in his first Yankee season, but by completing only 17 of his 30 starts, he came to be paired in people’s minds with the hard-drinking Joe Page, who handled the primary relief role on the team and who would emerge as a star in his fourth season.

“[Page] has 18 suits … and owns 11 pairs of shoes,” wrote Milton Gross. “His shirts are made to order … His rayon undershorts are loud. He has five wristwatches. He is always immaculately groomed. He could pass for a man of distinction.”

Page’s entrances to games became rituals. He’d hurdle the low right-field bullpen fence and, jacket over shoulder, walk to the mound, glancing over his shoulder to get the game situation from the new auxiliary scoreboard, tossing the jacket to the waiting batboy and taking his warm-ups. There was no musical accompaniment, but the fans loved the show.

In Reynolds’s eight Yankee seasons, he would start 209 games and relieve in 86, easily adapting to whatever the situation called for.

Raschi, from Springfield, Massachusetts, and nicknamed “the Springfield Rifle,” played basketball at Springfield College, where Dr. James Naismith invented the game. After three years at the school he was signed by scout Gene McCann, who had been watching him play baseball since high school. (He would earn a B.S. degree from the College of William and Mary in offseasons.) His move up the ladder was halted by Army Air Corps service, and in ’46 he split the season between Binghamton, Newark, and the Yankees. He made the big-league club full-time in July of ’47.

He arrived at the same time that the veteran Bobo Newsom joined the team. The colorful Newsom, thirty-nine, had debuted in 1929 and had changed teams thirteen times—with more to come before he retired at forty-five.

Not only did they both win as surprise starters in a doubleheader, but they found themselves in the middle of a nineteen-game winning streak,
the longest in the American League in forty-one years. Raschi’s win was number fourteen in the streak. He would go 7–2 for the season.

In January 1947, the Yankees also signed free agent George McQuinn to play first base after his release by the Athletics. McQuinn, thirty-seven, had originally come up through the Yankee organization but spent most of his career with the Browns, including during their their ’44 championship. Despite a chronically bad back that even made sleeping difficult, he hit .304 in ’47, bettered only by DiMaggio’s .315, making it a brilliant acquisition by Weiss.

LARRY BERRA WAS interchangeably known as Larry and Yogi for the first few years of his career, but “Yogi” was so unique that it eventually won out. (He even wound up signing an anniversary card to his wife, Carmen, “Love, Yogi Berra.”)

Some of the stories about Yogi were made up by his childhood neighbor Joe Garagiola, who also grew up on Elizabeth Avenue on “the Hill” in St. Louis and became a big leaguer.

But Yogi was an American original and, in fact, maybe the Great American Success Story. He was a genius in his field. Even in his eighties, he could see a different game from the rest of us, subtle points that would escape even baseball insiders.

He became one of the best-known figures to emerge from American sports, appearing in TV commercials beginning in the early fifties and still going in the 2010s. He knew the core American values of family and hard work, instilled by his Italian-immigrant parents. Paulina and Pietro Berra were married in Italy, but their five children were born in St. Louis. Larry left school in eighth grade to earn money for the family, a common occurrence during the Depression.

He loved to play ball as a kid and had a habit of sitting in a yoga position on the ground while his team was at bat. His friend Bobby Hofman (later a major league infielder, and the Yanks’ director of scouting and player development in the eighties) called him “Yogi,” and when the story emerged, that became his nickname. It was his ticket to national fame.

His malapropisms became treasured, even landing him in
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.
Arguably the best known were “It ain’t over till it’s over,” “It’s déjà vu all over again,” and “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” There was always logic to what he said, but you had to ponder it yourself.

A good and decent man, Yogi would be in a separate room at the Hall of Fame for baseball saints if such a thing were created. (He even seemed to perform miracles: snagging his second chance at a Ted Williams foul pop to save an Allie Reynolds no-hitter, coaching the 1969 Miracle Mets, delivering the Yanks a long-missing pennant when he returned as a coach, having George Steinbrenner apologize to him after a long falling-out, and seeing David Cone pitch a perfect game on Yogi Berra Day after he borrowed Joe Girardi’s catcher’s mitt for the first-pitch ceremony.)

When Ted Williams first saw him crouching behind the plate, he said, “What the hell is this, your shin guards are up to here, your mask is down to there, you’re a ballplayer?” When he first reported to the Yankees’ clubhouse, still in his naval uniform, Pete Sheehy said, “He didn’t even look like a sailor!”

Yogi signed with the Yankees in 1943 when his hometown Cardinals, whom he loved, wouldn’t give him the same deal they gave Garagiola. It was a matter of pride, something that Yogi never compromised. He had pride and he had integrity, and no one ever had better instincts for life decisions. It was always said that if Yogi canceled a plane reservation, you didn’t want to take that flight.

Berra’s stock seemed to rise with the Yankees when Mel Ott, managing the Giants, offered MacPhail $50,000 for him. MacPhail summoned Yogi to his office at 745 Fifth. He was expecting more than a five-foot-seven bow-legged figure. He told others that he looked like the “bottom of an unemployed acrobatic team.”

Yogi hit .314 at Newark in 1946 and was called up to the parent club for the final weeks of the season, just as Dickey was turning the team over to Neun. Dickey may not have been there to bring him along—then—but he would be back in spring training to make a special student out of him, to “learn him” the finer points of catching, as Yogi was still moving between the outfield and the catching positions, finding his way.

In spring training, Berra impressed people with his play in left, enabling Henrich to move to first. But on May 6, with Aaron Robinson nursing a sore back, Yogi caught Reynolds and essentially began his eighteen-season Yankee career, during which he would make the All-Star team every year from 1948 to 1962. He would play more World Series games than any player in history, and would come to be seen as the team’s “assistant manager,” even while still a young player. There came a time when almost every
other team in the league was using a catcher developed by the Yankees, unable to unseat Yogi. Gus Triandos, Sherm Lollar, Clint Courtney, Lou Berberet, Darrell Johnson, Hal Smith, and Gus Niarhos had all wound up playing elsewhere. It was a testament to the quality of Berra’s play and the strength of the Yankee lineup.

One day at his museum, Yogi showed me how his glove manufacturer would remove the web in his catcher’s mitt and replace it with heavy-gauge shoelaces so he could better view pop fouls. “Yogi, you had every advantage going for you, and you had to add to them?” I asked. But he was never one to miss a trick. He was believed to be the first to put his index finger outside the catcher’s mitt for extra protection, and the first to pad the center of his mitt with a woman’s falsie.

MEANWHILE, MACPHAIL WAS a tempest in a teapot, so unlike the staid Yankees of recent vintage.

New baseball commissioner Happy Chandler convened a hearing in late March of ’47 to sort through assorted disputes between the Yankees and Dodgers. The press called it the “Battle of the Century.”

Branch Rickey was angered that MacPhail had signed two of his coaches, Dressen and Red Corriden, who had been under contract to Brooklyn.

On March 10, the Dodgers left Havana after two games with the Yankees, with MacPhail claiming they had pledged to stay for a third.

MacPhail’s flirtation with Durocher as manager (or was it the other way around?) seemed to be in violation of a contract.

Durocher was in trouble for palling around with gamblers, but MacPhail was seen in the company of Memphis Engelberg and Connie Immerman, both alleged gamblers, during one of the Havana games.

There was no love lost between Rickey and MacPhail, and these were two of baseball’s glamour franchises. So Chandler hauled them all in.

Six days before the start of the regular season, the Yankees and the Dodgers were fined $2,000 each, Dressen was suspended for thirty days of the regular season, and Durocher was suspended for the full season, Jackie Robinson’s historic rookie year.

Chandler found that the alleged gamblers in Havana were not guests of MacPhail.

Twice during the year, MacPhail had to report to Chandler’s office in
Cincinnati to explain why he was breaking a pledge of silence not to discuss the charges and the discipline.

FRED LOGAN DIED on February 8 at sixty-seven, leaving Pete Sheehy in charge of the home clubhouse at Yankee Stadium for the next forty years. Logan was the last employee to go back to the origins of the team, the first season at Hilltop Park. He gave them forty-four seasons.

The Yankees began TV broadcasts in 1947, receiving $75,000 from WABD (Dumont Television) to cover all seventy-seven home games plus eleven selected games from Washington, Boston, and Philadelphia, with Bill Slater as the sole announcer. Mel Allen and Russ Hodges handled the radio on WINS, which still had a much bigger audience.

APRIL 27, A Sunday, was declared Babe Ruth Day by Commissioner Chandler. Fifty-eight thousand packed Yankee Stadium to see Babe in person, while fans in other ballparks heard the ceremonies via radio over their PA systems. It was a rare appearance for the Babe, who was showing the effects of a battle with throat cancer. Chandler’s office said it was the first national commemorative day for a baseball figure since founding father Harry Wright had one in 1896.

Chandler was widely booed by Yankee fans, and even MacPhail instructed Mel Allen, the field announcer, to emphasize that “this is Babe Ruth Day, with other personalities on the program entitled to respect as well.” Five thousand dollars of the day’s proceeds was presented to Ruth, who turned it over to the Ford Foundation for a program sponsoring kids. Many in the press admired not only the way Chandler took the booing, but that his first words were “This is Albert B. Chandler.”

Ruth required assistance to climb the dugout steps. He wore his now familiar camel hair coat, and removed his matching hat before speaking. He was coughing quite steadily, but managed to say,

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen … you know how bad my voice sounds. Well, it feels just as bad. You know this baseball game of ours comes up from the youth. That means the boys. And after you’re a boy, and grow up to know how to play ball, then
you come to the boys you see representing themselves today in your national pastime.

The only real game, I think, in the world is baseball. As a rule, some people think if you give them a football or baseball or something like that, naturally, they’re athletes right away. But you can’t do that in baseball. You’ve gotta start from way down the bottom, when you’re six or seven years of age.

You can’t wait until you’re fifteen or sixteen. You’ve gotta let it grow up with you, and if you’re successful and try hard enough, you’re bound to come out on top, just like these boys have come to the top now. [He pointed to the current Yankees, kneeling on the field.]

There’s been so many lovely things said about me, I’m glad I had the opportunity to thank everybody.

There weren’t many dry eyes in the house. Ed Barrow, who had retired as a director in December, sat in a mezzanine box and wouldn’t go down on the field. “I never did like to cry in public,” he told Dan Daniel.

Babe was just fifty-two, but he seemed eighty. It was apparent that he was gravely ill, and indeed he had had throat surgery at Memorial Hospital in New York. “His health,” wrote Shirley Povich in the
Washington Post
, “has been of national concern for weeks.”

Every appearance from then on seemed it could be his last.

THE REGULAR SEASON started slowly but the Yanks took over first place on June 15 and never lost it, their nineteen-game winning streak essentially putting an end to any pennant race. They won by twelve games. Harris must have thought he’d died (three years in Buffalo) and then ascended to heaven (where he was handed the Yankees’ managing job).