Carl soon returned to the States, but his wartime experience was not a subject for family discussion. He would not talk with Fern very much about those years in the army, and when his two sons later pestered him with questions about his service, Furillo at first turned a deaf ear. When his sons would not let the subject drop, he allowed each of them to ask one—but only one—question. Carl Jr. asked the question that had troubled him the most: did his father kill any Japanese soldiers? His father nodded. Yes, he had killed some Japanese soldiers. Furillo’s other son, Jon, was overwhelmed by the response and decided not to use the one question allotted to him. He was not interested in hearing any more. But Carl Jr. was, and he asked his father the second question: Did that bother him? To which Furillo had another simple response: “Yes. Very much.” And that was the end of the discussion.
Within weeks of returning home from the service in January 1946, Furillo was in Sanford, Florida, for a special instructional school that the Dodgers had decided to hold for returning veterans. Now twenty-four years old, Furillo was hoping that he could rejoin the Montreal Royals, and he worked hard to get himself in shape. The dedication paid dividends, and in April, manager Leo Durocher told Furillo that he was not being sent to Montreal—he was going to be brought up to the parent club. Carl could not have been more excited. As he later told a reporter after he had arrived in Brooklyn, “I can’t believe it yet. It’s all a dream. I went to Sanford this spring figuring I’d be the luckiest guy in the world if I stuck with the Royals—and here I’ve wound up on the Dodgers themselves. It’s out of Ripley.”
There was, however, one disappointment in joining the Dodgers: the salary. Durocher had explained to Carl when they arrived in Brooklyn that he would be given a contract for $3,750. “I can’t even survive on that,” the young player told his manager. Take it or leave it, Durocher replied. It was not a response designed to endear the rookie to his manager. “I hated his guts from that day on,” Furillo said.
Whatever his feelings toward Durocher, Furillo did not let it interfere with his performance. He played left field and then, when center fielder Pete Reiser slammed into a wall chasing a fly ball at Ebbets Field, the Stony Creek Mills rookie was moved to center. His batting was certainly respectable (.284 in 117 games), although he did not display the power that would later be a trademark (hitting only three home runs).
Hitting was only part of the story. Seasoned observers took note of Furillo’s throwing capabilities, and as early as April, sportswriters were referring to his “rifle arm.” The more they watched, the more the reporters were impressed—at one point asking the Dodger manager whether he had ever seen “another guy with an arm like that?” Before long the sportswriters were calling Furillo the “Reading Rifle,” and opposing players were proceeding more cautiously on the base paths, knowing that a throw from Furillo could reach the infield more quickly than a player might otherwise suspect. (There was the time in later years when Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Mel Queen had been heckled by the Dodgers because of his failure to get a hit, and then, when he came to bat in a game in which Ralph Branca was pitching a no-hitter, Queen surprised everyone by lining what appeared to be a single to right field where Furillo was then playing. As he ran to first, Queen turned his head toward the Dodger dugout with a smirk of satisfaction, only to turn back and see that Furillo had picked the ball up on one hop and thrown him out at first. Branca ultimately finished the game with giving up only one hit, and Dick Young of the
New York Daily News
reported the next day that “the strong Sicilian arms of Ralph Branca and Carl Furillo threw a one-hitter against the Pittsburgh Pirates at Ebbets Field yesterday.”)
Although he could draw much satisfaction from his first year, Furillo could not know for sure what the future would hold for him when he reported for spring training in 1947. But his fortunes did not command as much attention as those of another player: Jackie Robinson. All the players (except Robinson) were housed in a converted army barracks in Cuba, and Furillo could hear some of the players from the South talking among themselves at night about the prospects of having a black man on the team. “They were talking about Jackie coming up,” Furillo later remembered, “and the Southern boys didn’t want this in the worst way.” For his part, Furillo was more concerned about his own status. And so, when Bobby Bragan, one of the Southern players, asked him how he would feel if Robinson “came after your job,” Furillo had a quick response: “I’d cut his legs off.” It was, he later acknowledged, “a stupid remark,” but Furillo later said that he had no interest in signing the petition that Dixie Walker circulated among the team to say that they did want to play with Robinson. Having grown up in a small community where Italians were a distinct minority, Furillo knew that ethnic and racial discrimination was not confined to blacks.
Still, Furillo’s response to Bragan circulated among the players, and Robinson himself was led to believe that Furillo had been part of Walker’s cabal. And so, when a movie about Robinson’s life was produced a few years later, it included a scene in which Branch Rickey asks a young Italian player on the team who supported the petition how he would feel if he had been the object of ethnic or racial discrimination. When he heard about the scene, Furillo assumed that the Italian player was intended to be him, and he was angry at being falsely accused of supporting the petition. “They pushed the blame on me,” he told Fern, “and the sons of bitches were those Southern kids.” But Furillo was not one to confront Robinson or anyone else with the truth as he knew it. He kept his silence, and years later Robinson would say in his autobiography that Furillo was one of the “ringleaders” of the Walker petition.
There is evidence to support Furillo’s later explanation that he was not one of the petition’s “ringleaders.” Bavasi told me that Furillo had come to him shortly after the petition had been circulated and said, “I can’t sign this.” Robinson’s comment was nonetheless accepted by his subsequent biographers, and they too would point to Furillo as one of the players who had “circulated” the petition or who had “backed the revolt.”
None of the controversy, however, had any impact on Furillo’s value to the team. He continued to play left field until Reiser again collided with the center-field wall in Ebbets Field, and Furillo was once again shifted to center field. His batting during the season showed some improvement (.295 in 124 games with eight home runs), and he produced the highest batting average (.353) of all the regulars in the World Series against the Yankees.
Carl was a man of few words, and he was certainly no match for the long-winded Branch Rickey when the Dodger outfielder was summoned to Brooklyn in the early spring of 1948 to sign a contract for the forthcoming season. Furillo was well aware of Rickey’s parsimony when it came to paying his players. (As former Dodger and sometime movie actor Chuck Connors later observed, Rickey “had players and money, and he didn’t like to see the two of them mix.”) So Furillo was prepared to wait out the Brooklyn general manager until he got something close to the salary he wanted. Rickey talked to Furillo for almost four hours, explaining his theory of baseball management and why the Dodgers’ contract offer was reasonable. “I couldn’t even say beans,” Furillo later recalled. But he left without accepting Rickey’s terms—prompting Rickey to call a friend afterward and say, “Why, you can’t even talk to Furillo. He’s so stubborn.” But the two men ultimately did reach agreement, and for Furillo, the 1948 season proved to be a pivotal one.
On July 15, 1948, Durocher left to become the manager of the Giants, and Burt Shotton, the new manager, decided to move Furillo from center field to right field. Given Furillo’s throwing capabilities, the decision made eminent sense. Having Furillo in right—where the distance to second and third base from the outfield was the greatest—would minimize the opportunities for opposing batters to take the extra base on a hit. The challenge confronting Furillo, however, was the structure of the right-field wall at Ebbets Field.
The wall sloped upward at an angle away from the field for about fifteen feet, then straightened out at an angle perpendicular to the field for about another fifteen feet. A twenty-eight-foot wire-mesh fence sat on top of the wall, and in the middle of the wall was the scoreboard with a large Bulova clock sitting on top. Trying to anticipate how the ball would respond after hitting the wall was no easy task. “A fly ball or a ball bouncing once or twice before it hit the wall,” remembered one loyal fan, “would ricochet off that wall in the weirdest direction you ever saw. It never seemed to go the same way twice.”
Furillo knew all about the trickery of the right-field wall, and he meant to master it. “He was a workman,” teammate Carl Erskine later said of Furillo. “I studied every angle of that fucking wall,” Furillo later explained. He would have teammates hit him flies so that he could see how the ball responded to different situations. In time, he knew every quirk. When a sportswriter later asked him how he learned to play the wall so well, he had a simple response: “I worked. That’s fucking how.”
Furillo’s dedication not only helped the Dodgers win ball games. That effort also benefited Abe Stark. A sign on the right-field wall in Ebbets Field promoted Stark’s clothing business: HIT SIGN, WIN SUIT. In all the years Furillo played right field, Stark never had to give away a single suit. (When Buzzie Bavasi’s son later established a minor-league team in Everett, Washington, he checked with his father about Abe Stark’s promotional sign, and Bavasi explained that Stark never had to give away a suit. So Bavasi’s son sold a similar sign to a local clothier, and when Bavasi went to Everett for the opening game of the season, the first batter hit the sign and won a suit. Bavasi’s angry son came up to him after the game, yelling, “I thought you said you never gave a suit away!” “We never did,” the father replied. “But we had Furillo.”)
In addition to mastering the right-field wall, Furillo also worked on his hitting, and the results of that effort were there to see as well. Between 1948 and 1951, he never hit lower than .295 (reaching .322 in 1949), and he learned to take advantage of the short left-field wall in Ebbets Field, hitting eighteen home runs in 1949 and 1950 and driving in 106 runs in each of those two years (which was all the more remarkable because Furillo was often the leadoff hitter in the lineup). But then his practice of sliding headfirst into bases took its toll. Grit became embedded in his eyes, and it started to bother him, especially when he was batting. He would sometimes see spots and was often unable to focus on the ball that was coming toward him at speeds approaching a hundred miles per hour. The results were reflected in his batting performance in 1952—an average of .247 with only eight home runs (half of what he had produced the year before). The team’s trainer was unable to correct the situation and, believing that he had no other option, Furillo had an operation on both eyes in a New York City hospital in January 1953.
The operation proved to be a wise move. The earlier difficulties with his eyes disappeared, and now, as he later explained, the baseballs coming toward him in the batter’s box “looked like balloons.” His hitting improved dramatically, and by September, he had reached new heights. His batting average was close to .340 and he had already belted a career-high twenty-one home runs. But none of those achievements could guarantee what would happen when the Dodgers opened a series at the Polo Grounds against the Giants on September 5. The pressure was always considerable when the two New York teams played each other, and the tension was particularly evident whenever Furillo came to bat.
The first game did nothing to ease the friction between the two teams. Furillo had four hits in leading the Dodgers to a 16-7 rout of their New York rivals (increasing his batting average to a league-leading .345). So there was no love lost between Furillo and his former manager, Leo Durocher, when the Dodger right fielder came to bat in the next day’s game. In his second time at the plate against Ruben Gomez, the Giants’ rookie pitcher from Puerto Rico, Furillo saw Durocher yelling at him from the Giant dugout. Furillo thought he heard the Giant manager say, “Stick it in his ear,” just before Gomez hit Furillo on the left wrist. As he trotted down to first base, Durocher was, as Furillo remembered, “yapping at me” and motioning to come get him if he wanted to fight. Furillo could take it no longer and, as he recalled, “I went after him.” He raced into the Giants’ dugout, jumped on Durocher, and put an armlock around his neck. With his baseball cap having been knocked off, people could see the top of Durocher’s bald head start to turn purple. The two men fell to the ground, and players from both teams tried to pull them apart. In the course of the struggle, the pinkie on Furillo’s left hand was broken.
The broken pinkie signaled the end of the season for Carl Furillo. Still, he was able to win the National League batting champion with a .344 average and return in time for the World Series with the Yankees (where he batted .333 with a home run and two doubles in the losing effort).
The Dodgers could take much satisfaction from Furillo’s performance in 1953 and his stature after eight seasons with the club. He was a superb fielder, a keen hitter, and a fierce competitor. But he was not really one of the boys when the game was over. He was, said Duke Snider, “one guy on the club we didn’t pal around with much.” Furillo himself would agree. “I don’t ever recall them saying,” he later said of his teammates, “‘Carl, we’re having a get-together. Why don’t you come over?’” And when later asked about the Dodger wives with whom she socialized, Fern Furillo simply said, “I didn’t.”
To some extent, the social gap was a matter of happenstance. Many of the players with whom Furillo was closest on the field—Snider, Reese, and Erskine, among others—lived in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, and Furillo lived much farther away in Flushing. Players from Bay Ridge would carpool to Ebbets Field and then ride home together afterward, all of which made it that much easier for them to make social plans together. But part of Furillo’s social isolation from the other players was a matter of personality. Even Erskine—one of Furillo’s closest friends on the club—would later say that his teammate “was rough around the edges.” (There was the time, for example, when Furillo was rooming on the road with Tommy Brown, a six foot-one-inch utility fielder, and he asked Brown to turn the light off so he could go to sleep. Brown resisted, words were exchanged, and the next morning Harold Parrott, the Dodgers’ traveling secretary, was forced to tell the press that Brown had been taken to the hospital because of an altercation with some unidentified men who had encountered him in a parked car with one of the men’s girlfriends—when in fact Furillo had simply become infuriated by Brown’s nasty responses.)