Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (38 page)

“The hell you will,” said Reynolds.

“Why not?” asked Stengel.

“Because I can’t make the money,” answered Reynolds. “Relief pitchers never make as much as starters.”

“If I can get you just as good money, would you do it?” asked Stengel.

“Sure,” answered Reynolds, “that’s all I play for anyway, money.”

So Stengel called over Dan Topping and Del Webb, the two owners, and asked if Reynolds could have the same amount of money plus an annual raise if he did well relieving. They said he could, and it appeared the deal was done. Reynolds understood Stengel’s thinking: Page was too erratic, a good year followed by a bad year; Reynolds himself was frequently shaky in later innings as a starter, but very tough as a reliever in spot situations.

But the Yankees remained short one starter. Frank Shea and Bob Porterfield were never to pitch well again, and Reynolds’s switch to the bullpen did not take place for some time. Nonetheless, Reynolds was impressed. There was no other manager in that era who was willing to take an ace from his starting rotation, convert him into a bullpen pitcher, and pay good money to do it. Stengel, he thought, was the first to see the game change as far as the coming of the relief pitcher as an ace in his own right. Reynolds was pleased that the idea had been abandoned, and a year later during spring training a photographer came over to him and asked him to pose for a photograph with Joe Page. Reynolds immediately assumed that this was another attempt to get him in the bullpen, and he refused to be a part of the picture.

After the 1949 season Reynolds knew that despite his 17-6 record he was going to have trouble with George Weiss. He had finished only four games, and he knew Weiss was going to use that against him in contract negotiations. Sure enough, Weiss said, “Allie, you didn’t finish many games last year, but I’m not going to cut you.”

“I know you’re not, George,” Reynolds said. “That’s the one thing we both can be sure of.”

Jerry Coleman had a magnificent rookie year. The Associated Press named him American League Rookie of the
Year. At last he felt confident and, for the moment, rich. The World Series share was $5,400, of which he was able to keep almost all. Coleman knew exactly what he wanted to do—he wanted to buy a brand-new car. He had never owned a car before, so he went out and bought a green Pontiac for $1,700. He walked into the showroom and plunked the money down. Forty years later he could still see it: the perfect car, in a glorious shade of green with a light interior.

Because he felt quite rich, he did not work as hard in the off-season selling men’s clothes, and by the time spring rolled around and it was time to leave for Florida, he was broke again. He was forced to borrow three hundred dollars from his mother-in-law to make the trip.

Vic Raschi became one of the great stars of the Yankee pitching staff, a critical ingredient in the team that won five pennants and five World Series in a row. He had a record of 21-10 in 1949, and went on to win 71 and lose only 30 in the next four years. Even more remarkable, in those five years he started 160 games and completed 73 of them. And he did this despite terrible physical pain. He hurt his knee in 1950 when Luke Easter of the Indians lined a ball off his leg, but he did not have an operation for two years because he was afraid it might cost him part of a season. He could barely run and could hardly field his position. That he was virtually a cripple was known among the Yankees, but in the curious code of the day none of those who were traded to other teams told their new teammates of his vulnerability. If they had, he might have been quickly driven out of the league by his opponents bunting on him.

Raschi’s relations with George Weiss, the general manager, were extremely bitter. Raschi was proud, almost violently so. He gave everything of himself as a player, and expected respect for his accomplishments, particularly from the people he worked for. Besides, he understood that because
both he and Reynolds were power pitchers, they had to assume that their time in the majors was limited. They had to maximize their earning capacity in their best years. But he never gained real respect from Weiss.

Raschi soon came not so much to dislike Weiss as to loathe him. It was as if Weiss were trying to withhold not merely Raschi’s money but his dignity as well. Weiss never looked him in the eye, but instead looked down at the floor, out the window, or off to the side. He would say after an exceptionally successful season, “Prove to me why you deserve a raise.” Raschi, more than anyone else on the team, stood his ground. After all, he was a winning, dependable starting pitcher for a great team, and starting pitchers were always hard to come by. His only leverage was the possibility of retirement.

At the end of a negotiation in which Weiss magnanimously agreed to a $5,000 raise as a reward for the 19- or 20-game season, he closed the meeting by turning to Raschi and saying, “Don’t have a losing season.” Those words would hang in the air for weeks and months. Raschi knew that because he had fought back so hard, the moment he showed any sign of slipping Weiss would turn the screw on him. The top salary he made after all those great seasons was $40,000.

In 1953, still bothered by injuries, he won 13, lost 6, and started only 26 games instead of his usual 33 or 34. Raschi, who was thirty-four, had a sense that the end was near. When he received his contract from Weiss, it called for a 25 percent pay cut. He sent it back with a note to Weiss saying he had made a cripple of himself in the Yankee cause. He knew he was gone. That winter the Yankees sold him to the Cardinals. They did not notify him personally, and he learned of the deal only through newsmen. One of them called Raschi at his home for his reaction. Proud to the end, he said in what was a virtual epitaph for baseball management
of that entire era, “Mr. George Weiss has a very short memory.”

The Cardinals, like the Yankees, trained in St. Petersburg the following spring. Some of Raschi’s old teammates tried to get together with him for dinner, but he wanted no part of the Yankees. He pitched well on a bad St. Louis team, and that year the Yankees lost the pennant to Cleveland, which had an almost perfect season, winning 111 games. Still, his former Yankee teammates believed that if Raschi had not been traded, the Yankees might have won.

In his last year, 1954, Allie Reynolds saw that the world of baseball as he knew it was changing. He was 13-4, but his back hurt, and he was angry about the way the Yankees had treated Raschi. He had wanted to quit the year before but stayed on only because there had been the chance at a sixth pennant. The constant arguments with George Weiss took some of the fun out of playing, and he had never particularly liked New York. When he had first come to the city, he and a group of other players had gone to Greenwich Village. They had ended up in a gay bar, a rare thing indeed in the late forties. For Allie Reynolds, a Nazarene minister’s son, it was all too much. He felt alien in a world he did not know, and did not want to know. As far as he was concerned, when the Indians had sold Manhattan to the white man for twenty-four dollars, they had gotten a damn good deal.

By the mid-fifties, Reynolds sensed less discipline on the part of many of the younger players. In his last year in spring training, he encountered a young pitcher whose mechanics were off. Feeling generous, Reynolds went over to talk to him. He started explaining what the flaw was. The player looked at him and said, “Don’t pop off at me, old man.” That had stunned him; the idea that he might have talked to Spud Chandler that way was inconceivable. His generation had been reverential about the great Yankee past,
he thought. After he had started winning for the Yankees, he had asked Bill Dickey, the old Yankee catcher, “Bill, do you think I could have made those great Yankee teams of the twenties and thirties?” “Yeah, Allie, you would have been just fine,” Dickey had answered, and Reynolds had felt like a real Yankee. Now the younger players told him to pop off. Old man, he thought to himself, it’s time to get out of here.

Charlie Keller knew that his career was coming to an end. He had never really recovered from a back injury suffered in 1947, and his resilience was diminishing as a new generation of Yankee stars, primed by the farm system, was arriving. There was no doubt in his mind that Bauer and Woodling and perhaps Mapes were the stars of the future. The last few months of the 1949 season had been particularly hard. It was as if Stengel was avoiding all eye contact in the dugout. I am becoming a man who does not exist, Keller realized. That was hard after so many years of being a key player on a team that was always in a pennant race, always in the World Series.

Keller had absolutely no regrets. Well, there was one regret: that they had changed him into a pull hitter to go with the Stadium confines—he and his Yankee teammates were sure that had cost him thirty points on his batting average. But aside from that he felt that he was lucky to have come so far and played for so long. When the 1949 season was over, George Weiss called Charlie Keller to give him his release. Keller, who had played for Weiss at Newark and who had been a great star for him, was actually fond of Weiss. In the last two years, though Keller’s performance had deteriorated significantly, Weiss had tried not to cut his salary. Theirs was clearly a special relationship; now, as Weiss handed over Keller’s release, he burst into tears.

“George,” Keller said, “I know what it’s all about. Just write your name on that ticket and hand it over to me. I
had some marvelous years and I’ve got no regrets, none at all.” He took the release and was glad it was all over.

As much as any player, Tommy Henrich had carried the Yankees that year. Often playing in great pain, he came back from his serious back injury early, despite the warnings of doctors that it might hurt his career. In addition, his knees had always been vulnerable. So he constantly lived with the possibility that his career might be over at any minute.

In 1950 the Yankees played an early-season series against Boston and a young sportswriter named Leonard Koppett talked with Henrich before the first game. He asked about the condition of his knee. “I think I’m all right,” Henrich said. “I think I can play the whole season just as long as I don’t hit too many triples. They’re just too hard on my knees.” That day he hit two triples, which seemed to set the tone for the season. He would injure himself, rest, come back, and then his knees would betray him again. Henrich had no illusions. This season, he knew, was his last. He played in only 73 games and came to bat only 151 times, but he managed to hit 8 triples and 6 home runs, and knock in 34 runs. This showed that even if he could not play regularly, he could help the team, pinch-hit, and play some first base.

But just before the 1950 World Series, George Weiss told Henrich that the Yankees were not going to place him on their World Series eligible list. He was stunned and wounded. The coldness and ruthlessness had been directed toward others in the past. Now it was his turn. To have come this far and not be eligible for the World Series was shocking. He knew that he could help the team. Instead, the Yankees planned to list Johnny Hopp, a late-season pickup from Pittsburgh. After the season Weiss suggested that Henrich have another knee operation. But he had suffered through enough knee operations—there was precious
little left to operate on. He refused and asked for his voluntary retirement.

In the ensuing years, Tommy Henrich, a man of old-fashioned values, watched as the balance of power between management and players shifted dramatically. There were many things about the new relationships with which he was not comfortable, but he never doubted for a moment that the owners had brought it all on themselves.

Joe DiMaggio too knew that his time as an athlete was limited. In 1950 he returned for a full season and hit well, knocking in 122 runs and 32 home runs. Astonishingly enough, he led the league in slugging average that year with .585. But he could feel the decline of his skills. He was beginning to struggle. Pitchers whom he had once hit with ease could now get him out. He could not get around on the ball as he once had. Sometimes he would see a ball, the kind he had once jumped on and been able to pull, and could still connect, but the ball would go to right field. He was still strong enough to drive some of these over the fence for home runs. “Piss homers,” he called them. Once, with first base open, Bob Feller walked Berra to pitch to DiMaggio. The Yankee slugger responded with a triple, but Feller’s decision was one more sign of decline. In 1950 Stengel moved DiMaggio to first base for one game and occasionally batted him fifth in the order behind Johnny Mize.

In 1950 DiMaggio told Gene Woodling, who played left field alongside him, that Woodling was a good outfielder, a damn good one, and that he should take more responsibility on balls hit to left center, balls that in the past had been his. Now he could manage only one strong throw a game. In addition, he was having problems with the slider, and the opposing pitchers knew it, and he knew they knew it. He sustained a series of irritating minor injuries. He was unhappy with himself and often sulked, turning angrily on old
friends in the press when they wrote even gently of his decline. He accused them of being in a rush to bury him.

Occasionally he would talk to his teammates of those moments when he had first come up and he had hit balls down the third baseline so hard that he had handcuffed the third baseman—meaning the third baseman did not have time to move his hands and make the play. At times he would turn to one of his teammates and ask if he was swinging all right. The teammate would reassure him that he was. Such conversations merely served to emphasize that here was a new and more mortal DiMaggio.

At the same time, the Yankees were grooming their new superstar, Mickey Mantle, to replace him. In 1951, Mantle’s first year, DiMaggio decided to call it quits. The Yankees wanted him to stay on, and offered him another year at $100,000, but he was proud to the end. He told Ernie Sisto, a friend of his who was a photographer for
The New York Times,
of the offer and that he was going to retire. Sisto asked why. “Because I don’t want them [the fans] to remember me struggling,” he said.