Opening Day

by Jonathan Eig

  The next day, rain splattered the ballpark, making puddles in the outfield. The bad weather compelled some fans to stay home. Only 15,685 passed through the turnstiles. But even that small crowd was enough to put the Dodgers past the one-million mark for home attendance in 1947. Though their park was puny, they were drawing more fans than any other team in the league. What’s more, they were becoming popular across the country, even in cities where big-league baseball was not played. Thirteen radio stations around the country, as far as Miami and San Diego, picked up coverage of the second game of their series with the Cardinals. With the Yankees running away with the American League, fans turned to Brooklyn for their fill of baseball drama. What’s more, black fans around the country had made the Dodgers their team of choice.

  “I live in a small all negro town,” a woman named Bernice Franklin of Tyronza, Arkansas, wrote to Robinson. “We go to Memphis for all our amusements, but there is no greater thrill than a broadcast of the Dodgers’ ball game. . . . I own and operate a rural general store, and right now the farmers are gathering for your game.”

  If they happened to be listening to his game on July 19, they heard a lot of sloppy baseball. Robinson misplayed a throw in the first inning, helping the Cards get two quick runs. He made up for it, however, in the bottom half of the inning by lining a sizzling double down the left-field line. He went to third on a sacrifice fly and watched Dixie Walker draw a walk. Howie Pollet, a lefty, was on the mound for the Cards. As he went into his windup, Walker and Robinson attempted one of the game’s most daring and thrilling maneuvers, the double steal of second and home. As Pollet threw, Walker took off for second. When the catcher, Del Rice, threw down to second, Robinson dashed for home. Red Schoendienst, the second baseman, saw Robinson going and decided to let Walker take second. He wanted to nail Robinson at home. So he stepped in front of second base to catch Rice’s throw and, with his body moving toward the plate, threw it back to Rice. Rice leaped to grab the high throw as Robinson slid under his feet. By the time the catcher landed, Robinson was brushing home plate with his right leg. Umpire Beans Reardon spread his arms like airplane wings to signal safe. Robinson, with an assist from Walker, had his second steal of home. He added a single and a run batted in that afternoon, raising his batting average to .312. Still, the Dodgers lost, 7–5.

  The third and deciding game of the series was one of the season’s strangest. The Cardinals took a 2–0 lead in the second inning and held it until the ninth. In the top of the ninth, with two outs, Ron Northey hit a long fly ball to deepest center field. The ball hit the top of the concrete wall, bounced high in the air, and plopped back down onto the outfield grass. The umpire waved his arm to signal a home run, and Northey slowed from a sprint to a trot. Dixie Walker, meanwhile, ran over from right field, picked up the ball, and threw it back to the infield, where Stanky caught it and threw home. Northey saw the ball coming and began running hard again, not sure if he’d hit a home run or not. The throw beat him to the plate and Northey was called out. A rumpus followed, with Eddie Dyer complaining that his team had been robbed. If not for the ump’s signal, he said, Northey would have run all the way and beaten the throw.

  The extra run mattered, because the Dodgers rallied for three in the bottom of the ninth. Reiser doubled, Walker doubled, Reese singled, Eddie Miksis singled, and the Dodgers hustled off the field, laughing.

  After the game, Dyer and the Cardinals lodged a protest with Ford Frick. Five days later, Frick overturned the result of the game, giving Northey the home run and ordering the teams to replay the game. But in a sense, the victory had already gone to the Dodgers. They believed they had won the series, and for five days the newspapers all showed that their lead over the Cards had grown by a game. They were beginning to believe that they had luck on their side this time.

  • • •

  A day after the conclusion of their series with the Cardinals, the Dodgers took off on another long road trip. For all the reporters who had so far failed to update their readers on the progress of Branch Rickey’s great experiment in integration, here was another opportunity. There were no great controversies to write about, and Robinson had nothing but time to sit and chat as the team’s train rolled out of New York. Yet no one interviewed him.

  Most of the ballplayers were on good terms with the men who wrote about them. They were not quite friends, but they were friendly. On occasion, a writer and his wife might go out for dinner or to the theater with a ballplayer and his wife. But the writers knew they would never join the inner circle. They accepted their status just as they accepted the unwritten rule that prevented them from writing about the private lives of the men they chronicled every day. As a result of that rule, newspaper readers in 1947 had no clue that pitcher Kirby Higbe’s trade to Pittsburgh had been hastened by hard drinking, carousing, and his malicious attitude toward Robinson. Nor did they have any hint that Hugh Casey, the overworked relief pitcher, drank and caroused just as much as Higbe did, and that he, too, had treated Robinson harshly in spring training. Only Dixie Walker had been fingered as an enemy of Robinson, but once the season got underway and it became clear that Walker and Robinson would have to coexist, the sportswriters never again mentioned the rift or explored its effect on the team.

  They accentuated the positive in large part because they were conditioned to do so. The Dodgers were their meal ticket, not to mention their hotel ticket and their train ticket. The team picked up the full tab for the writers’ travel expenses and plied them with lots of free booze on top of that. There was no contract stipulating that the journalists would treat the team kindly in exchange for services rendered, but the quid pro quo was clear: Don’t bite the hand that pours your cocktails.

  Most of the reporters covering the Dodgers were old-timers, men who’d been around since the days of Ruth and Gehrig. Baseball beats were cherished prizes, and reporters did not let go of them easily. But one young man who had broken into the ranks was beginning to change the way the old men approached the game. He was Dick Young of the Daily News. He came along at about the same time as Jackie Robinson, and while his contributions were more subtle, he, too, was something of a revolutionary. If anyone covering the Dodgers was equipped to pierce the fog and produce a story that went beyond balls and strikes, it was Young.

  • • •

  New York City had dozens of newspapers in 1947. It had papers for Italians, Jews, Germans, blacks, and Chinese. It had papers for Bronxites, Brooklynites, and Staten Islanders, for Republicans, Democrats, communists, working stiffs, and bluebloods. It had morning papers and afternoon papers. It had tabloids and broadsheets. A man stopping at his favorite newsstand might pick up Il Progresso and the Post, or maybe the Jewish Daily Forward and the Times. But there was only one newspaper that appealed to all corners of the city and every sort of person. There was only one paper that came close to claiming universal appeal, and that was Dick Young’s Daily News. With a circulation of 2.4 million on weekdays and 4.7 million on Sundays, the News was far and away the best-read newspaper in the country. It was also one of the most fun. The saucy tabloid had grown up with Babe Ruth. The News recognized before most of its competitors that baseball players, covered in news ink, could become bigger-than-life heroes. It recognized, too, that sports went beyond politics, race, or religion. It united the city like nothing else and therefore sold papers like nothing else. The paper’s blue-collar readers may have hated the News’ Truman-bashing editorials, but they couldn’t live without its sports section.

  The News was the only New York City newspaper to pay its reporters’ expenses on the road, in order to establish their independence and objectivity. Young was the paper’s rising star. He was a city kid, born in Washington Heights, and full of New York’s distinctive brand of arrogance. When he was very young, his parents divorced, and his father lit out for California. Young stayed in New York. Like Robinson, he was raised single-handedly by his mother, and, like Robinson, was taught to be ambitious, if not always poli
te. Though he wanted to go to college, he lacked the money. That was 1936, “the asshole of the Depression,” as he called it, and he settled instead for the Civilian Conservation Corps, where he helped build a beach on Upper Cayuga Lake in upstate New York. One day his mother clipped an item from the Daily News and sent it to him. It said the newspaper would pay fifteen dollars a week to college graduates who wanted to be copyboys. The paper was swamped by applicants. Young wrote three times to the paper’s managing editor, but he was rejected three times because he didn’t have a college degree. On his fourth try, he was offered a job as a messenger, a job even lower in rank than copyboy. He took it.

  Once the Daily News let him through the front door, Young knew what to do. He began sending wisecracks and tidbits to Jimmy Powers, the sports editor and columnist, who used them without giving the kid credit. Once, Young wrote a whole column on stickball and Powers ran it word for word under his own byline. Young didn’t mind. He was collecting markers. Soon he got married and had a child. When some of the young copyboys got drafted, jobs opened up, and Young (deferred from military service because he had a family) began inching his way up the ladder of the sports department. In 1946, when the Dodgers beat writer left the paper to go to work for Branch Rickey (not an uncommon occurrence), Young got his big break.

  Before Young, the locker room had always been considered sacred, a place where ballplayers could be themselves, where they could say and do as they pleased without fear of reading about their behavior in the papers. Reporters watched the game, filed their stories, then joined the ballplayers for dinner at the hotel. Young changed that. He went into the clubhouse for interviews after the game. While that might seem like a modest reform, it proved groundbreaking. Suddenly, ballplayers were discussing in detail their hits and errors. Suddenly, they had voices. Suddenly, they were expected to be people, not just players, with opinions, feelings, and personalities.

  Young wasn’t afraid to offend the players, either. He drank with them at night, and while doing so picked up small details that enlivened his stories. He also added a bit of editorial comment to his stories, letting readers know when he thought someone had pulled a boneheaded play or no longer belonged in the majors. And he was never afraid to show his face in the clubhouse even after he’d written something inflammatory. The athletes were doing their jobs, he was doing his, and he expected everyone to be grown up about it. It didn’t always work out like that. When Young described pitcher Clem Labine as gutless, Labine challenged the writer to a fight, offering to tie one hand behind his back. Young fled. “The ballplayers called him Poison Pen,” recalled Jack Lang, who covered the Dodgers that year for the Long Island Press, “because he didn’t hold back.”

  The differences between a Dick Young game story and another reporter’s were subtle, but readers in the 1940s were connoisseurs of news ink. They appreciated Young’s snappy verbs, his concise summary of key plays, and his perfect instinct for where a particular contest had turned. His stories conveyed a self-awareness and a dry sense of humor. After one game in which the Dodgers suffered a brutal defeat, he began by writing, “This story belongs on page three with the rest of the axe murders.” After another game, he wrote: “Waldon Westlake, which is a baseball player and not a Summer resort, spent a good part of the afternoon clearing things up at Ebbets Field yesterday. In the first frame, he cleared the bases with a double.”

  A few years later, writers following in Young’s footsteps would take his approach several steps further, becoming more snide, more confrontational, and more interested in showing off their stylish writing than in describing for readers what actually happened in the ballgames they watched. Not Young. “I’m not a writer, I’m a reporter,” he used to say. In truth he was both. He covered his beat with dogged determination, but he also wrote with panache. Yet, somehow, day after day in the summer of 1947, he muffed what should have been the biggest and best story of his career. The road trip in July was but one example.

  In 1946, the Dodgers had played less than smashingly away from Ebbets Field, finishing with a record of 40–38 on the road. Through the first half of the 1947 season, they were playing even worse on the road, with a record of 17–21. Given that the second half of their schedule was heavily weighted with away games, the pattern did not bode well for their pennant hopes. Yet on this road trip, the team played brilliantly, and no player was more brilliant than Robinson.

  On July 22 in Cincinnati, the Dodgers and Reds were tied at one in the sixth inning when Robinson knocked a triple off the fence in left. After that, pitcher Red Lively of the Reds fell apart, and the Dodgers rolled to an easy win. The headline in the Daily News went not to Robinson, however, but to Branca, who notched his sixteenth win of the season. The next day, Robinson singled, doubled, and scored a run in a 5–2 victory, but Young decided to make pitcher Hank Behrman the focus of his story. And so it went for twelve days and nights, as the team put together a thirteen-game winning streak. Robinson in that stretch scored sixteen runs (a whopping 21 percent of the team’s total), banged thirteen hits, walked nine times, and hit two home runs, yet his name never appeared in a Daily News headline or in the first paragraph of a story. Some of this had to do with his style of play. He was the grease, not the gear, that made the team work. Some of it had to do with his personality, too. He never sought the spotlight. Nor was he an outgoing figure in the clubhouse.

  While on the road in July, Young did find time to bang out a couple of feature stories, one of them about the contenders in the National League for the Rookie of the Year award. Even then, he managed to slight Robinson, rating his teammate Spider Jorgensen as the top candidate. “His legs are agile, his hands sure, and his bat has been cracking a crisp .300 or thereabouts all season,” Young wrote of Jorgensen. As for Robinson, he continued, “The Negro star’s batting average is more than adequate [it was also a crisp .300 or thereabouts, although Young didn’t mention it], but he is still learning his way around first base.”

  Did Young really believe Jorgensen was more valuable than Robinson to the Dodgers, or was some other factor at work? Many years later, Robinson said in an unpublished interview with Carl Rowan, his biographer, that he always felt Young was a bigot. A few years later, when writing about Roberto Clemente, Young developed a habit of quoting the slugger in phonetic English: “Eef I have my good arm, thee ball gets there a leetle quicker than he gets there.” Others who knew the reporter said that while Young was ornery and opinionated, and never took much of a liking to Robinson, it was nonetheless a mistake to attribute his combativeness to racism. These two stubborn men, with more in common than they may have cared to admit, did not hit it off. “I am positive,” Robinson said once, “that Dick wrote the way he did because he didn’t particularly like me.”

  Young never revealed his feelings, but all season long he avoided writing meaningfully about Robinson. In his piece on Opening Day, he mentioned the rookie’s bunting and base-running, but not his color. He explained the decision later by saying the first baseman hadn’t done anything to merit special attention in his first game, which is like saying Neil Armstrong did nothing but plant a flag and collect rocks when he landed on the moon. In May, when the story broke that some of the Cardinals were threatening to sit out rather than play against Robinson, Daily News readers must have been stunned to see that Young didn’t provide his version of events. Instead, they read a wire service account. When police said they were investigating death threats against Robinson, one of Young’s colleagues, Hy Turkin, covered the story. The next day, in a big Sunday feature, Young weighed in with a long article on Pete Reiser’s tendency to collide with outfield walls and the various merits and demerits of the cinder warning tracks that some teams were laying at the edges of their outfields.

  He kept his eye on the action and, by and large, tried to treat Robinson the same way he treated the other Dodgers. In this case, unfortunately, that constituted a huge failure. History doesn’t tell us what Young was thinking, only what he did,
and he clearly didn’t do enough, even by the standards of the 1940s, when sports writing seldom delved deeply into social commentary. He was too smart a baseball man not to know that Robinson was a better player than Jorgensen, and it seems too great a coincidence that he missed every important racially themed story over the course of the season. Whether the cause was racism or simple stubbornness, Young, for all his intelligence and for all his skills as a reporter, wasn’t able to see past the events on the baseball diamond and make sense of them for his readers.

  Fortunately, the events on the diamond were compelling. The Dodgers, though utterly exhausted and quite banged up, finished their road trip with twelve wins against six losses and a four-game lead over the Cardinals in the race for the pennant. The Giants and Braves were not far behind, but Brooklyn was in firm control, with a long stretch of home games ahead. Meanwhile, over in the American League, the Yankees were cruising to the pennant. If everything fell into place, New York City would have a subway series, Brooklyn versus the Bronx, the puttering, sputtering, underpaid Bums versus the high-powered, high-priced Yanks.

  For Young, that was the whole story.

  SEVENTEEN

  THE UNBEATABLE YANKS

  The 1947 Yankees had less muscle and less mystique than earlier editions. Outside of DiMaggio, the team possessed no stars of serious luminosity, and even DiMaggio was not playing with his usual shine. The war had left him weak and frail, like certain European countries, and suddenly vulnerable.

  He’d had his worst season in 1946, hitting .290, with twenty-five home runs, as the Yankees finished in third place, a whopping seventeen games in back of the Red Sox. The doctors told DiMaggio he’d need surgery on his heel during the off-season, but the Yankee superstar kept putting it off, hoping the pain would go away. Some wondered if he would ever be the DiMaggio of old. The outlook was so bleak that Larry MacPhail, the Yankees’ boss, offered DiMaggio to the woeful Washington Senators in a trade for Mickey Vernon. And if that weren’t enough of a blow to DiMaggio’s psyche, this must have been: The Senators declined.