Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (25 page)

Pitchers were, of course, the enemy, but those who understood the challenge immediately gained Williams’s respect. Eddie Lopat was one, because he threw so many different pitches with such varying speed and because his sequence was never predictable. He and Williams became friends, and they would stand around before games talking about hitting and pitching. Williams even lent Lopat some of his bats. To those pitchers on his own team who paid attention and wanted to learn, he gave brilliant advice. He would explain during a game what a given hitter was expecting, and then, based on his knowledge of the pitcher, project whether or not he was going to get it. He was invariably right.

Parnell, a left-hander, believed that Williams, as much as any man, forced him to become a better pitcher. Williams felt that he never saw enough left-handers when the Red Sox were at home, since most visiting managers were unwilling to let their lefties pitch in a park constructed for right-handed hitters. So he talked Parnell into coming out to the park early to throw special batting practice to him. Williams demanded that Parnell throw his best stuff. If it was helpful for Williams, then it was great for Parnell too,
for if he could pitch against Ted Williams, move the ball around on him and surprise him, then he could do it against anyone. There were, Parnell soon learned, no blind spots. If he made a perfect pitch, Williams still managed to get some of the bat on it, and if he was off just a little, then Williams was likely to kill it. But there was some reassurance in all this—if Williams could barely touch a pitch, then the chances were that a mere mortal batter would not be able to touch it at all.

He was forever giving tips to visiting players as well. When Detroit played Boston he would talk endlessly with young Al Kaline about hitting, giving him pointers. Finally Tom Yawkey, the Boston owner, asked him to stop because he was helping the opposition. “Come on, T.A.,” Williams answered, “the more hitters we have in this game, the better it is for the game. Listen, when you’re coming towards the park and you’re two blocks away, and you hear a tremendous cheer, that isn’t because someone has thrown a strike. That’s because someone has hit the ball.” In the end, Yawkey conceded that Williams was right and permitted him to continue his seminars with the opposition.

He was, thought his friend Curt Gowdy, the least bigoted man of his time. He could not comprehend judging a player by his color or background. Baseball, he thought, was a universe of its own—a better one, where talent was the only thing that mattered. Gowdy remembered him as the first person in baseball to predict the coming importance of black athletes in American sports. “Curt,” Williams had once said to him, “they’re the only kids in America who work that hard anymore. White kids drive cars, black kids walk or ride bikes. White kids go off to drive-ins or play tennis, and the black kids spend all their time on sandlots trying to get their fifty at-bats. You’ll see it show up in the majors soon enough—their bodies are stronger.” His speech in Cooperstown in July 1966, when he was elected to the Hall of Fame, is notable for its generosity to Willie Mays: “The
other day Willie Mays hit his five hundred twenty-second home run. He has gone past me and he’s pushing, and I say to him, ‘Go get ’em, Willie.’ Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel. Not just to be as good as anyone else, but to be better. This is the nature of man, and the name of the game. I hope someday Satchell Paige and Josh Gibson will be voted into the Hall of Fame as symbols of the great Negro players who are not here only because they were not given the chance ...”

Williams intellectualized the game far more than DiMaggio did. This is not to diminish DiMaggio’s own considerable powers of analysis, but a moment would come when he simply
played.
Williams never stopped thinking, analyzing. This methodological difference led to some practical differences—for instance, over the issue of whether to take certain pitches. Williams would never, no matter what the situation, go for a pitch that was even a shade outside the strike zone. DiMaggio was different: He believed that, as a power hitter on the team, he sometimes had an obligation to swing at imperfect pitches. On certain occasions a walk was not enough; it was a victory for the pitcher. Williams understood DiMaggio’s point, but felt that if, even under duress, he swung at what he thought was a bad ball, then it might cause deterioration of his batting eye. It was all or nothing. For him, to swing at any bad ball was a victory for the pitcher.

Williams’s brain was like a computer. What a pitcher threw in a given situation would be entered permanently into his memory, to be recalled in comparable situations against the same pitcher. His teammates loved watching him take his revenge. In the early fifties he played in an exhibition game with the White Sox. A pitcher named Bob Keegan, pitching against Williams for the first time, got him to hit a giant pop-up off a slider. The Red Sox players watching the scene were amused. They knew that Keegan thought he could now handle Williams with a slider, and that Williams
would be waiting for it. Sure enough, a few weeks later in Chicago, Williams faced Keegan again. That day Williams hit three home runs off him. Even as Keegan let go of the ball the last time, he realized he had grooved it and yelled out, “Oh, shit!”

Williams hated for a pitcher to show him up. It was one thing to get him out, but another to embarrass him. Once when Bobby Shantz, the great relief pitcher, was playing for Kansas City, he struck Williams out on a big, fat slow curve. That had happened with the score tied in the ninth inning. Williams did not like being fooled by a slow curve, and he came back to the dugout in a rage. “Hold them until the eleventh,” he told his teammates. “I want one more at bat.” The score remained tied, and when he did get up again, Williams hit a ball off Shantz so hard that as it whistled past the mound it seemed likely to kill the pitcher.

On another occasion he was batting against Hal Newhouser of Detroit. Newhouser, who liked to come over the top, had two strikes on him. He came in sidearm with a cheap curve for strike three. Williams was enraged. Newhouser was a great power pitcher, but Williams felt that this time he had struck him out by cheating. It was a matter of pride, as if he had ruined a no-hitter of Newhouser’s by bunting. “A dinky nickel curve,” he said coming back to the bench. “I’ll bet any son of a bitch on this bench I hit one off him today.” It was a bet that no one cared to take. Inevitably, his next time up he hit a home run.

Williams wanted no interruptions to his concentration on hitting. His marriages always suffered because his real love was baseball. He preferred living in hotels in Boston because it was simpler, and less time was wasted. He never stopped talking about being the best. “Tex,” he would say one day to his friend Tex Hughson, “don’t you think I’m the greatest hitter in baseball?” “Damn right, you are, Ted,” Hughson would answer. But the next day the question would be asked again, this time to Parnell. “Mel, who’s the greatest
hitter in baseball?” There was, Parnell knew, only one answer.

In those years there was a photographer in Boston whom Williams liked named Fred Kaplan. Once Kaplan’s two-year-old son said he wanted to go to the ball park. “Why?” his father asked. “I want to see Teddy,” the little boy said. “Teddy who?” the father asked. “Teddy Ballgame,” the little boy said. That was it, the perfect nickname, just how Williams thought of himself, and he adopted it for his own—Teddy Ballgame.

CHAPTER 10

G
RADUALLY THE VETERAN YANKEE
players were coming to know Stengel. He was shrewd, talkative, and theatrical. He could be arbitrary, and sometimes he seemed a bit odd. When a player swung too hard on a given pitch and missed, he would suddenly jump up, swing an imaginary bat, and yell, “Not too hard, and not too easy. Just butcher boy.” But there was a growing, somewhat reluctant admiration for his instincts. It was not long before the sportswriters started to notice in print how well Casey Stengel handled his team in the face of constant injuries, and how brilliantly he platooned his players, changing the nature of contemporary baseball by ending the set lineup, in which every day the same eight players played and batted in the same order.

In the outfield Stengel platooned Bauer and Woodling, close friends. Both were constantly at war with the manager because each wanted to play every day. Bauer smashed water coolers when Stengel pulled him for a pinch hitter. Woodling on occasion muttered darkly that you had to wear a cross on a chain to play regularly, an allusion to the idea that Stengel favored Catholics. Woodling, a marvelous natural hitter, was sure that if he played more often he would hit even better. He called Stengel “that crooked-legged old bastard.”

In 1949 Woodling and Bauer, between them, batted .271
with 15 home runs and 99 runs batted in; in effect they gave the Yankees, in an injury-filled season, a composite all-star outfielder. Theirs was a constant competition, however. One time a right-hander was pitching, and Woodling, the left-handed hitter, was sure he was going to play. But Stengel went with Bauer, which enraged Woodling. “Hey Gene, you caddy for me today,” Bauer said. Bauer got three hits, but late in the game the other team went to a left-hander. At that point Stengel pulled Bauer and went with Woodling, which enraged Bauer. He returned to the dugout, throwing his bats and screaming at the goddamn old man who would do this kind of thing. When the game was over Stengel said that he wanted to see Bauer and Woodling. Both of them were still steaming when they filed into his office. He turned first to Bauer. “I don’t give a good goddamn what you call me—you can call me a crazy old man, and maybe I am. But it’s my team and I’m going to run it my way. Now I’m going to tell you why I pulled you. You got your three hits, right? So let me tell you something, Mr. Bauer. You’re not a one-thousand hitter. And you’re not a five-hundred hitter. In fact, Mr. Bauer, you’re not even a three-thirty-three hitter. So you had your three hits for the day and that’s all it was going to be. That was your quota. I didn’t think you had any more hits in you. And you,” turning to Woodling, “the same goes for you. So forget all this old-man crap and play your position and do whatever the hell I tell you.” For Bauer, part of the frustration with Stengel’s platooning was his desire to play every day, and part of it was the fact that George Weiss and Roy Harney, his deputy at contract time, exploited the way Stengel was using him. As Bauer’s career progressed, he found himself constantly engaged in battles with Weiss. Bauer would ask for a sizable raise, and Weiss would tell him that no, he could not really give him a major raise, because, sad to say,
Bauer was not a regular.
Bauer would then cite his considerable
contributions to the Yankee success and Weiss would answer, Yes, Hank, I know, but you’re not a regular.

For only part of the team’s success was due to Stengel; more than anything it had to do with George Weiss. The Keller-Henrich-DiMaggio team had represented the first flowering of the new farm system, which Weiss had built steadily even during the war, when most baseball executives had turned away from the long-range planning. By 1949 the team reflected Weiss’s careful stockpiling of talent. Coleman had emerged as a graceful second baseman; at third Bobby Brown was clearly a remarkable hitter. Berra, as a catcher, was showing signs that he could provide acceptable fielding skills to go with his hitting ability. Already the trademark of the Weiss era was emerging: The team was never to be allowed to grow old; sentiment was never to interfere with judgment. Each year there were to be three or four new players spliced into the team’s fabric.

George Weiss was almost completely devoid of charm. But, along with Branch Rickey, Bill Veeck, and Larry MacPhail, he was one of the ablest baseball executives of his era. He might have loved baseball, but for him it was first and foremost a business. There was never any confusion over his objectives. He was ruthless and cold-blooded in contract negotiations; he had a God-given knack at contract time, one Yankee said, of turning healthy relationships into cold and bitter ones. Weiss firmly believed that a well-paid ballplayer was a lazy one. That gave him the philosophical justification to be penurious, but unbeknownst to the players he had a more basic motive: The lower the sum of all the players’ salaries, the greater the additional bonus he received from the owners. The owners gave Weiss a budget, say, $1 million a year. If Weiss kept the salaries down to, say, a total of $600,000 a year, he took home 10 percent of the remaining $400,000. It was not surprising, therefore, that in the fall of 1948 he strongly opposed paying DiMaggio $100,000. He did not want the base for the team’s
best player to be that high, for it would become the goal that the other players would use. A few years later some of the players, including Lopat, discovered his side deal. Most of them hated him anyway. To discover that he had been secretly profiting by his own miserliness was almost too much.

Weiss was immensely skillful at selling off players the Yankees did not need. A good minor-league ballplayer, he liked to say, was worth $40,000, and in most trades, since he was usually dealing from strength, he kept the pressure on until an extra ballplayer was thrown in by the other party. Then he would sell the player to some third club, keeping a significant percentage of the sale for himself.

If the players resented Weiss, so did the writers, in part because they did not like the way he treated the players, and in part because they sensed his contempt for them. “I can buy any of these sons of bitches for a five-dollar steak,” he once told a friend, looking around a room filled with writers who were helping themselves to sandwiches and drinks in the Yankee clubhouse. He was, however, unusually sensitive to criticism, and he did not like it when Jimmy Cannon started calling him “Lonesome George” in print. When those columns appeared in the
Post,
Weiss came into Shor’s, put a bunch of them on the table, and started to complain about Cannon to Shor. “But what the hell, Toots,” he concluded, “who reads that guy anyway?” “You do, George,” Shor answered.