Pinstripe Empire (51 page)

THE SUMMERLONG FOCUS on Mantle almost distracted from the pennant race and other accomplishments. Berra had a 30-homer season, Skowron and McDougald had .300 seasons, Ford was 19–6, and twenty-two-year-old
Johnny Kucks was 18–9. The Yanks were in first place all season and won by nine games. They were pleased that the Dodgers repeated in the National League; it was a chance to avenge the ’55 Series.

Autumn in New York: a Subway Series. This may have been baseball at its peak; it certainly felt that way to New Yorkers. But baseball in the fifties still featured just sixteen teams, drawing now from the pool of black and white players. And with ten future Hall of Fame players on the benches (plus both managers), it was a classic in the making.

In New York, it was a rite of autumn. From 1949 to 1958, there was a World Series in town every year. And if you consider the Brooklyn fans who remained loyal after the Dodgers moved west in ’58, the home-team streak extended to 1966: eighteen straight years.

The defending-champion Dodgers won the first two games at Ebbets Field, just as the Yanks had done the year before at Yankee Stadium.

Ford took the mound in game three and won a 5–3 decision, with Slaughter belting a three-run homer in the sixth. In the fourth game, it was the twenty-six-year-old sophomore right-hander Tom Sturdivant, a 16-game winner during the season, winning 6–2 to even the Series.

After the game, the devil-may-care Don Larsen went downtown with his sportswriter pal Arthur Richman of the
New York Mirror
to enjoy the city’s nightlife. Don enjoyed a good time and Arthur was a friend to ballplayers throughout his life as a St. Louis Browns fan, a sportswriter, and then an executive for both the Mets and Yankees.

Despite future stories extolling a wild night of drinking, the two had dinner and a couple of drinks, and Larsen was back at the Concourse Plaza Hotel before midnight. He gave Arthur a dollar so that Arthur’s mother could give it to her synagogue. He came to think of it later on as a good-luck move.

On Monday, October 8, 64,519 fans, including a sixteen-year-old Brooklyn kid named Joe Torre, made their way to Yankee Stadium for the game. In the Yankee clubhouse, just hours before game time, Casey Stengel gave the word to pitching coach Jim Turner: “Larsen.” Crosetti dropped a baseball into Larsen’s baseball shoe. That was how he knew he was pitching when he arrived at the park.

Was Larsen at his best that day? He was no champion of conditioning, no hero of early-to-bed training. He always gave a good effort. Lately, that effort included a no-windup delivery, encouraged by Turner as though he was pitching at all times with men on base. He had won four games in September with it.

Through the first three innings, Larsen and his opposite number Sal Maglie were both setting ’em down: no base runners for either team. The closest was a shot by Robinson off Carey’s glove in the second, but it deflected to McDougald, who threw him out at first. In the last of the fourth, the first runner proved to be Mantle, who homered just inside the foul pole in right field for a 1–0 lead.

Minutes later, Mantle raced far toward left field to pull in a long drive by Gil Hodges, a play that would become a part of history.

On they played. Bauer drove in a run in the sixth for a 2–0 lead. Now the game went to the seventh and the fans were into every pitch. They knew what was going on, but baseball superstition forbade speaking the words “no-hitter.” Even in the Yankee dugout, it wasn’t uttered.

In the seventh, Gilliam grounded out, Reese flied deep to center, and Duke Snider flied to left. Six outs to go.

In the eighth, Robinson grounded back to Larsen, Hodges lined to third, and Amoros flied to deep center.

Larsen led off the last of the eighth to a thunderous ovation, but Maglie struck him out, along with Bauer and Collins, to send the game to the ninth.

Newsreel cameras were rolling. Carl Furillo flied to Bauer in right. One down. Campanella grounded to Martin at second. Two down. Up came pinch hitter Dale Mitchell to bat for Maglie. Mitchell, a longtime Cleveland Indian and a fine hitter, was concluding his career with this Series. He stood between Larsen and immortality.

A ball, outside. The fans groaned. A called strike one! The fans cheered. Strike two swinging! One and two. A foul ball.
Ohhhhhhhh!
Still one and two.

Then came the ninety-seventh pitch. It was, according to home-plate umpire Babe Pinelli, a called strike three! In the radio booth, Bob Wolff shouted, “A no hitter! A perfect game for Don Larsen!”

“I had to say no-hitter first,” he explained later. “A lot of people were watching who weren’t hardcore baseball fans. There hadn’t been a perfect game in the major leagues in thirty-four years. Not everyone knew what it meant.”

Berra, who called the game with equal perfection, couldn’t contain himself. He ran out and leaped into Larsen’s arms like a child. It was bedlam in the Bronx!

All the reporters crowded into the Yankee locker room to begin writing the game story of their lives. Dick Young of the
Daily News
whispered a lead to beat writer Joe Trimble, who typed, “The imperfect man pitched
a perfect game yesterday.” Shirley Povich, in the
Washington Post-Times and Herald
, wrote, “The million-to-one shot came in. Hell froze over.”

Even Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley came into the clubhouse to get an autographed baseball.

And that night, Don went out and celebrated. It was okay.

Don Larsen was no immortal. He wasn’t going to go to the Hall of Fame. He would have an 81–91 career record and never win more than the 10 he won the following season. But he had pitched a game that could never be bettered—the greatest game, by most measures, ever pitched. Roy Halladay pitched the second no-hitter in postseason history fifty-four years later, but it wasn’t perfect and it wasn’t a World Series. Larsen stood alone. For the rest of his life, on every milestone anniversary of the game, he was the centerpiece of Old-Timers’ Day.

THE DODGERS CAME back the following day as Clem Labine beat Turley 1–0 in ten innings, Robinson hitting a walk-off single to score Gilliam. So it was game seven again, just as in ’55, and this time, Johnny Kucks found the baseball waiting in his shoe when he got to the clubhouse. Kucks, just twenty-two, bucktoothed and raw, was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, which many historians consider the birthplace of baseball.
¹⁴
Winner of 18 games in just his second season, Kucks had pitched twice in relief in this Series and was a surprise starter, with Ford having had three days off.

Don Newcombe, so often brutalized by the Yanks (and particularly Berra), fell behind 4–0 after three and left the game. It was all Yankees from there. Skowron hit a grand-slam homer in the seventh to make it 9–0 and that’s how it ended, with the Yankees back on top of the baseball world as champions, the Brooklyn Dodgers making their final World Series appearance, and Jackie Robinson striking out to end the game, and his career.

SEVENTEEN GAMES INTO THE ’57 season, Cleveland was the fourth stop of a five-city road trip for the Yanks, and they arrived at cavernous Municipal Stadium on Tuesday, May 7, for a night game with the Indians.

There were 18,386 on hand, which as usual made the huge ballpark feel almost empty. If anything, this was a good crowd for the Indians, since the Yankees were always a good draw, and the Tribe’s ace, Herb Score, would be pitching.

Score, a handsome twenty-three-year-old southpaw born in Queens, burst onto the scene in ’55 and came through with a 16–10 Rookie of the Year season followed by 20–9 in ’56. In both years he led the league in strikeouts, with 245 and 263 respectively. He was the talk of baseball, the latest overnight phenom in the game’s history of love affairs with flamethrowers. The Red Sox had reportedly offered $1 million for him after the ’56 season, an offer the Indians rejected.

He would be making his fifth start of the year, his first against the Yanks, against whom he had been 3–1 in nine career starts with two shutouts.

He took the mound in the first inning, got Bauer on a ground ball, and then faced the shortstop, McDougald. The fans had barely settled into their seats when Gil hit a line drive right back at the mound. It got Score square in his right eye, and he dropped to the ground. A silence fell over the ballpark as the ball was retrieved by third baseman Al Smith, who threw to first for the out.

Score’s nose was shattered and the hemorrhaging in his eye was frightening.

Gus Mauch, the Yankee trainer, rushed to the mound along with the Indians’ medical team as the public-address announcer pleaded, “If there is a doctor in the stands, will he please report to the playing field.” Within a minute, six physicians were headed for the field, clustered around the mound. Score never lost consciousness as he was taken off on a stretcher.

“He was the fastest pitcher I ever saw,” said McDougald to author Dom Forker. “I just flicked my bat at the ball. The ball shot back at him. Herb didn’t have time to get into his follow-through, because the ball hit him on the wrong eye. I saw the blood spurt. I didn’t know whether to run to first or run to the mound. After the game I made a statement to the press, ‘If anything happens to Herb, I don’t want to play anymore.’ The press blew it up. But that’s the way I felt. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. He’s such a beautiful person. C.I. Thomas, his doctor, called me in every town that I traveled to, to let me know Herb’s condition. His mother called me the next day and said, ‘Gil, you had no control over what happened. Don’t ever think of quitting.’ When people are that nice to you, you say, ‘Hell!’ But it took the starch out of me.”

(Ironically, in August 1955 Bob Cerv hit McDougald with a line drive during batting practice. It ultimately cost McDougald his hearing, forcing him to resign from his postcareer job coaching baseball at Fordham. A cochlear implant in 1994 would restore his hearing.)

The game went on as if in a fog. The Indians won 2–1. Score would return the following season but was never again a star pitcher. He was 19–27 over the next six seasons before retiring to a long career as a Cleveland broadcaster.

The game was not televised, and no film or video existed of the play to be forever replayed. But for years, any drive up the middle that made contact with the pitcher would recall for many the night McDougald’s liner hit Herb Score.

ABOUT A WEEK later, Thursday, May 16, after Turley beat the Athletics in New York, a group of Yankees and their wives went out to celebrate Billy Martin’s twenty-ninth birthday. Joining Billy were former Yankees Irv Noren and Bob Cerv, now with Kansas City, plus Mantle, Berra, Ford, Bauer, Kucks, and their wives. They had dinner at Danny’s Hideaway, then went to the
Waldorf-Astoria for another round and to see singer Johnny Ray’s show at 10:30. As Cerv and Noren said good-night, the remaining group headed for the Copa, New York’s premier nightclub, to see Sammy Davis Jr. perform the 2:00 A.M. show.

The nightclub was full, but the maître d’ opened a special table at the front and seated the party of eleven. After all, this was New York royalty.

At a nearby table, members of a party of nineteen from a bowling league were celebrating, and probably resented this new table being unfolded in front of them. As Davis began to perform, taunts arose from the bowlers’ table, seemingly racial, and in any case disruptive.

“One thing about Yogi,” said Carmen. “He never stood for heckling; he always wanted respect shown for entertainers.”

Bauer gave the bowlers a stern “shut up” in expletive terms.

The hostility found its way to the men’s room, where one of the hecklers, Edwin Jones, was found unconscious on the floor. What would a Billy Martin party be without someone unconscious on the floor?

New York Post
columnist Leonard Lyons led the players out of the club, and the next day, Bauer was charged with felonious assault. He maintained that he never hit anyone and that in fact Kucks and Berra were holding his arms. The charges were eventually dropped, but the Yankees fined each player $1,000, and Kucks, whose salary was much smaller, $500. The Copa brawl put the Yankees on the front pages of the city’s tabloids.

Martin had a feeling the Yankees were running out of patience with him. They had his replacement ready in Bobby Richardson. Richardson and Tony Kubek had come up together from Denver as a second baseman–and–shortstop combo. Martin could see the writing on the wall and felt he was doomed after the Copa incident, even though no one accused him of hitting the fallen bowler.

“I’m gone, pard,” he said to Mantle the next day.

MAY TURNED INTO a momentous June for the Yankees as they faltered, then regained their lead in the standings. On June 4, their chief scout Paul Krichell, who had been recruited from Boston by Ed Barrow in 1920, died at his home in the Bronx at seventy-four.

The same day, the Yankees obtained third baseman Clete Boyer from Kansas City to complete a deal that began in February when pitchers Art Ditmar and Bobby Shantz went to New York, with Tom Morgan and Noren
going to the A’s. Shantz, just five foot six, had been an Athletics mainstay since 1949 and the league’s MVP in ’52, when he went 24–7 for a 79–75 team. Boyer’s brother Ken was an All-Star player on the Cardinals.

On June 13 in Chicago, Ditmar was facing the White Sox when he knocked down Larry Doby with a tight pitch. Words were exchanged, both benches emptied, and a lot of punches were thrown. Enos Slaughter, not even in the game, practically had his jersey ripped off his body in the fracas. With peace seemingly restored, Martin yelled something more at Doby and another fight broke out, this time settled by the Chicago police, who had to escort Martin off the grounds. Doby, Slaughter, and Martin were all fined $150, Ditmar $100. Topping said he would pay the Yankees’ fines, but when league president Will Harridge threatened him with a $5,000 fine, he backed off.

“The pitch I threw to him was a foot over his head,” said Ditmar. “Since it got past my catcher, I had to cover home. When I got there, Doby said to me, ‘If you ever do that again, I’ll put a knife in you.’ “