Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (34 page)

The game continued 4-4 through the sixth and seventh innings. On the Yankee bench there was a sense of growing confidence. Page seemed untouchable. In the bottom of the eighth Stengel sent up both Bobby Brown and Cliff Mapes, left-handed pinch hitters, to face the right-handed Dobson. But Dobson handled them. The next man up was Lindell, a right-handed hitter. Stengel had the left-handed Charlie Keller on the bench. But Lindell already had two hits, and he had driven Williams back to the fence his first time up against Dobson; Stengel decided to stick with Lindell. Lindell was the team rogue. He was exuberant, generous, and crude, and his humor seemed to dominate the locker room. In order to avoid being snared by one of his gags, the others always checked to see where he was before they entered. Even the trainer’s table was not safe. A player lying down for treatment would often get whacked on the forehead by Lindell’s phallus, which was considered one of the wonders of the Yankee locker room. His favorite victims were Page and Rizzuto, but no one was spared. Coleman was christened “Sweets” because he was so good-looking and because once at a restaurant he had ordered crabmeat in an avocado instead of steak, which was preferred by the other ballplayers. “Isn’t that sweet,” said Lindell, and the nickname stuck.

Even DiMaggio was vulnerable. Once DiMaggio walked into the locker room in a beautiful and obviously expensive new Hawaiian sports shirt. Lindell immediately shouted out, “Hey, beautiful, where’d you get that sports shirt? You look pretty in it.” DiMaggio froze, his face reddened, and he never wore the shirt again. “We’ve got to keep the Dago honest,” said Lindell when the others looked at him quizzically.

His teasing was generally good-natured, however, and he was generous with the younger players. When the team arrived in New York, he would take them to his favorite
hangouts near the Stadium, including one where the specialty of the house was something called “The Lindell Bomber.” “Try one, you’re going to love it,” he told the young Charlie Silvera earlier that season. It turned out to be the biggest martini anyone had ever seen—as big as a birdbath. He was the bane of management because his off-field activities were so outrageous. He liked to boast about how much money George Weiss had spent putting private detectives on him.

Lindell was a low-ball hitter, so Dobson and Tebbetts decided to feed him high fastballs. The first pitch was a ball. Again Dobson came in with a fastball. The ball was both high and inside. Lindell knew he was not going to see anything low. But he got ready, and he crushed the next ball. The moment he hit it, everyone knew it was a home run. We went to the well once too often, Dobson thought to himself. I had probably lost just enough off my fastball, and he was ready for it.

Vic Raschi was thrilled; it meant that he was going to get a chance the next day at the biggest game of his life. The celebration in the clubhouse was almost out of control. Finally Joe DiMaggio decided to calm his teammates down. “Hey, we’ve got to win tomorrow,” he kept saying, “just don’t forget that. It’s not done yet.” But they had escaped a bullet, and it seemed inconceivable to them that they could come that close to defeat and not win the pennant. DiMaggio, they thought, was amazing. They knew he was desperately ill, but he had played the entire game and gotten two hits.

John Lindell III was ten years old that summer and he did not like living in New York. As far as he was concerned, home was Arcadia, California. Arcadia was where his friends were. In New York there were thousands and thousands of little boys who would have given anything to have a father playing for the Yankees, but young John Lindell was not one
of them. He had no interest in baseball, and when on occasion he went with his father to the locker room, he did so grudgingly.

Near the end of the season his parents had explained the immediate future to him: If the Yankees did not win the pennant, the family would return to Arcadia immediately, but if they did, then the family would stay on in New York for two more weeks. So it was on October 1 that when Johnny Lindell hit his dramatic home run, everyone in their Bronx neighborhood was happy and excited but little John Lindell. Hearing the news, he burst into tears because he was sure it meant staying in New York for an additional two weeks.

On October 2 the Yankees and Red Sox faced each other in the last game of the season with identical records. On that morning John Morley, a student at Manhattan College, rose at the unbearably early hour of five-thirty and dressed quickly for work. Morley, then eighteen, considered himself exceptionally lucky. He worked for Harry Stevens, the company that did the catering at Yankee Stadium. In the eyes of his neighborhood buddies and college friends, he was a privileged insider in a magic world. If he did not actually know Joe DiMaggio, he often saw him beautifully dressed in civilian clothes, and to Morley’s friends in the Bronx, the ability to spot a player in civilian clothes was the same as intimacy. Morley was able to report on how he treated the fans who waited after the game, and in the minds of Morley’s friends this also was something like true intimacy. Morley sometimes worked in the press box, so he was also able to tell his friends about serving such prominent sportswriters as Joe Trimble, Bob Considine, and Dan Parker. They were spiffy, well dressed, and wore straw hats (though they were not necessarily great tippers).

Morely had worked for Stevens for three years and had slowly advanced to a privileged position: He was a gateman/beerman,
first working at the outside gates before the game selling scorecards, and then, the moment the game started, switching to a roving beer salesman. On a normal day during the season, he made, with his 10 percent commission, about $50 or $60 a game. On a big game like this, with every seat in the Stadium sold, he might make as much as $150. It was a long day of hard, backbreaking work, because refrigeration within the Stadium was primitive in those days. Therefore, almost all preparation had to be done on the day of the game. Because it was the weekend, someone had already gone to the Corn Exchange Bank at 170th and Jerome Avenue for the thousands of dollars in coins that would be needed for change during the weekend.

An old-timer named Tom Carmody ran the Stevens operation at the Stadium. He had been there for twenty-six years, since the day the Stadium opened, and he ruled with an iron hand. He was always the first one there, and the first thing he did was to make a large vat of coffee, the strongest and most vile Morley ever tasted, then or since. Then Carmody would turn into a nineteenth-century drill sergeant. The rules for the boys were exactly the same as they had been in 1923, when Carmody first came. They were simple: You were to show up exactly on time, never a minute late, never be flip, and always,
always
say “sir.” To Carmody the failure of even the lowliest Stevens worker was his own failure.

The hardest part of the day was the morning delivery of ice to the big cooler tubs throughout the Stadium. The young men had to cart three-hundred-pound blocks of ice. Then they would break up these giant slabs and place them over beds of beer bottles, which were lying on the bottom of the giant tubs. After the game they would run hoses from the tubs so that the water from the melted ice could run out through the drainage system. The only thing that cheered Morley while doing such exhausting work was the
knowledge that for every bottle of beer sold (at 35 cents), 3.5 cents would go toward his college education.

Like the other Stevens workers he hoped for a long game, because that meant more hot dogs, soda, and beer sold, and more money earned. But he was also a Yankee fan, and on this day he was as nervous as anyone else. This was the big game. They expected crowds so large that Stevens had sent over extra help from Ebbets Field. The regulars viewed them not as colleagues but as intruders. Obviously, the Dodgers were not as good a team as the Yankees, nor was their ball park as elegant.

That morning as he worked, Morley stole glances at the players coming out of the dugout for their early workouts. He was struck by how casual they seemed, as if this were just another day. Then, suddenly, the long slow morning was over. It was time to go out and sell programs.

It was a huge crowd, and it was arriving early. Many people had come the night before and camped out in their cars in the parking lot in order to buy bleacher tickets, which went on sale early in the morning. It was as large as a World Series crowd, but not as fancy, Morley immediately decided. The World Series drew a reserved-ticket crowd, the kind of people who were called swells in those days; the men wore sport jackets, and often came with women instead of other men. But today it was a baseball crowd, knowing and hard-edged; these people would be quick to complain if a vendor blocked their view, even momentarily. As the crowd crushed forward to get into the Stadium, Morley was struck most of all by the noise, and then by the excitement in the air.

Vic Raschi was confident that he was ready to pitch. His last few starts had been good, and he felt as if he had worked through his dry spot. He had won for the Yankees in the 152nd game, a game they absolutely had to win against the Athletics.

After the Yankees came from behind to beat Boston, Raschi was determined to stay calm. He never had trouble sleeping before a big game, and this one was no exception. He was up at eight, and he, Reynolds, and Lopat drove to the ball park early together. Their wives would come later. He was not nervous. The previous day he had been nervous because events were beyond his control. Now he was not bothered by the crowd and the thunderous noise. Even as the players were dressing in the locker room before noon, they could hear the crowd’s excitement. The key to pitching in this game, Raschi thought, was to concentrate, to cut out the crowd and noise, to think of only one thing: what to do on each pitch. Jim Turner, now his pitching coach, a few years earlier his manager in Portland, had taught him that at a critical juncture of his professional life.

Turner was a marvelous teacher, Raschi thought. He knew when to teach and when not to. If a pitcher threw the wrong pitch and lost a game, Turner did not intrude at the height of the pitcher’s pain and anguish. Rather, he waited a day or two. Then he would make the pitcher himself talk his way through the situation—what had happened and why. Every game, Turner said, could be broken down, hitter by hitter, pitch by pitch. Each pitch was connected to the next pitch, Turner thought, for the strength of a pitcher lay partly in his ability to set up a batter for the next pitch.

Raschi had come to him desperate to learn—he was proud of his skills, and deeply wounded by the failure of Yankee management in the spring of 1947 to see his career as he did. Turner immediately saw Raschi’s talent. But there were too many lapses—moments when he was pitching but not thinking. In an early Portland game, Raschi had a lead in the third inning. With two outs, two men on base, and the pitcher up, Raschi had allowed the pitcher to get a hit, and that had cost him the game. Turner waited a day and then took Raschi aside. “When you have a situation like a weak hitter up, you
crucify
him. You never let a pitcher beat you,
Vic. Never!” Raschi’s ability to concentrate improved immediately.

Turner taught him not just to study the hitters but also to prevail over them. “Vic—those hitters are your enemy. If they get their way, you’re out of baseball,” he would say. “I’ve seen pitchers with talent who might have made the major leagues, but they didn’t hate hitters enough.” Raschi proceeded to do well with Portland, winning 9 and losing 2, and in mid-season the Yankees brought him back to New York. He won two games during their extraordinary 19-game winning streak.

Raschi had a good fastball to start with, though perhaps not quite as good as Reynolds’s, but he lacked a curve, or Aunt Susie, as the other pitchers called it. He worked on it with Turner, and in 1948 it began to work—a change more than a curve, actually. He had great stamina, far more than Reynolds, the other power pitcher. It was an article of faith among the Yankee players that if you were going to beat Vic Raschi, you had to do it early because he got stronger as the game wore on. If given a lead, he simply refused to lose. In the last innings he wanted to throw nothing but fastballs. “From now on just give me one sign,” he would say to his catcher as they entered the seventh inning. Once, during a game with the Red Sox, Raschi had the lead but seemed to be struggling in the seventh inning. With Walt Dropo up, Stengel sent Jim Turner out to talk to Raschi. The resentment in Raschi’s face was visible from the dugout. Turner quickly returned to the bench. “What did you say?” asked Stengel. “I asked him how he was going to pitch to Dropo,” answered Turner. “And what did he answer?” Stengel asked. “Hard,” said Turner.

Now nothing was to interfere with Raschi’s concentration. He sat in front of his locker, cutting out all else around him, thinking only of what he wanted to do. If his teammates tried to come near him to exchange a pleasantry, he waved them away. He did not like photographers to take
his picture on game days, and that was more than mere superstition. Photographers in those days still used flash attachments, and Raschi hated the fact that for five or six minutes after each pop he could not see properly. He tried to warn them off, but if they did not listen he would spray their shoes with tobacco juice. He had a reputation among the writers as the hardest man on the team to interview.

With Ellis Kinder, the knowledge that the Sunday game might be the biggest in his life did not deter him in the least. He started partying hard on Saturday night. Joe Dobson, who was rooming with Kinder that year, was awakened at about four
A.M.
by a knock on the door. There was Kinder, quite drunk, with a lady friend whom Dobson had never seen before. Dobson went back to sleep and then got up and left the room around nine
A.M. AS
he departed he heard Kinder’s whiskey-roughened voice speaking into the phone: “Room service, get some coffee up here.”

Charlie Silvera, the backup catcher, lived on Gerard Avenue, about a block from the Stadium. To his amazement, the noise from the crowd started late Saturday afternoon and grew through the evening as fans gathered in the parking lot and formed a line waiting for bleacher seats. Throughout the night, as game time approached, the noise grew steadily louder. Curt Gowdy was equally impressed by the noise of the crowd. He thought of it as a war of fans—the Yankee fans cheering wildly, then their noise answered by deafening volleys from the many Red Sox fans who had driven down from New England. Gowdy’s job was to help Mel Allen, for this was Mel’s game. Gowdy was impressed at how calm Allen was, as if he had been broadcasting games like this all his life. “We’ve been so full of tension all year long, that honest-to-goodness today I’m just forgetting about everything,” Allen told his audience at the beginning of the game. “Whatever happens, happens.
Something’s gotta happen today. That’s just the way it’s going to be. The Yankees have done an out-of-this-world job this year, and the Red Sox have just been magnificent.”