Opening Day

by Jonathan Eig

  “You fellas can win the pennant in spite of me,” he’d told them at the start of the season, with typical honesty. “Don’t be afraid of me as manager. I cannot possibly hurt you.” Now they knew what he meant.

  The better the Dodgers played in 1947, the more Shotton tried to shrink from the spotlight. “Put Burt on a bench in Central Park, give him a bag of peanuts for vagrant pigeons,” wrote the Brooklyn Eagle, and he’d pass for the statesman and financier Bernard Baruch. But as the team began its march toward the pennant, Shotton would not be able to remain anonymous for long. Durocher, after eight years with the Dodgers, knew that managing a baseball team required two distinct sets of skills—managing the action on the field and managing the men at the center of that action. Durocher was especially good at getting the most out of each man on his roster. He understood that a manager closing in on a pennant needs to fine-tune his lineup. He has to rest certain players and test others. He has to help define players’ roles so they’ll know when and how they’ll be expected to perform. He has to get the team to play with a combination of urgency and calm. He has to build confidence among those who have played poorly and award playing time to the bit players who might be asked to pinch hit or pitch in relief under the spotlight of the World Series. For Shotton, there were specific concerns to be addressed as well. He needed to nurse Pete Reiser back to health, keep Walker from breaking down, and figure out how to restore Hugh Casey to the form that had made him so effective in 1946.

  The Dodgers, for all their success through July, remained an imperfect team, with weak pitching and not a single power hitter. Branca had emerged as a bona fide ace. Joe Hatten, in only his second year, was pitching almost as sharply as Branca, although he seemed to falter when facing the league’s most talented teams. And Harry Taylor, fresh up from the minors, mixed a smoking fastball with a beguiling curve to give the team yet another reliable starter. Great defense—especially by Reese and Stanky—helped calm the younger pitchers. In 1947, the average shortstop and second baseman in the league combined to make 9.85 outs per game. Reese and Stanky combined to make 10.41 outs per game. For the Dodger pitchers, that difference was huge because it meant they didn’t need strikeouts to escape trouble. Pee Wee and the Brat were behind them, gobbling up balls that other players would never have reached.

  But the two players most critical to the Dodgers’ success were Robinson and Walker. Robinson by now ranked among the league’s leaders in hits and runs scored, and he was tops in stolen bases. He was electricity. He made things go. Hitters throughout the Dodger lineup were getting better pitches when Robinson got on base. Walker, in particular, was having one of his finest seasons even as he approached his thirty-seventh birthday. Playing every day on creaky knees, he was no longer a great outfielder, but he remained a cunning hitter. Statistically, the most interesting thing about Walker’s season was his on-base percentage, which would increase from .391 to .415 between 1946 and 1947. He and Reiser, the two men hitting behind Robinson, were both drawing more walks in 1947 than at any time in their respective careers. Walker grasped the game’s nuances well enough to understand why. When Robinson got on base, pitchers got jumpy and made bad pitches. And when Robinson stole second, pitchers often walked the team’s heavy hitters in order to set up a force play in the infield. That made it easier for Walker and others batting behind Robinson to drive in runs. With the end of his career fast approaching, Walker received a great gift from Robinson in 1947, a gift that would prove to be worth thousands of dollars the following winter when it came time to negotiate his next contract.

  • • •

  If Walker failed to appreciate all that Robinson had done for him in 1947, he was hardly alone. For his thirteenth birthday that summer, Myron Uhlberg received two tickets to see the Dodgers play at Ebbets Field. Myron had grown up a Dodgers fan the way some kids grow up farm boys or redheads: It had never seemed like a choice. The only thing different about Myron was that both his parents were deaf, which meant they found it difficult to follow the team and to cheer along with their son. When the Dodgers played important games, Myron would translate the Red Barber broadcasts into sign language for his parents, Louis and Sarah Uhlberg. Still, Myron felt he was missing something. He loved his father, but he longed to bond with him through baseball as so many of his friends did with their fathers.

  The Uhlbergs lived in a third-floor apartment at 1648 West Ninth Street in Bensonhurst (“Bensonhoist,” many residents called it). The only black people Myron ever saw were on the beach at Coney Island. But Louis Uhlberg took an unusually strong interest in Jackie Robinson in the summer of 1947. He felt a kinship with him because Louis, too, was an outcast, made to play without complaint by another society’s rules. Jackie was called “nigger.” Louis was called “dummy.”

  “It’s not even baseball I’m interested in,” he told his son, using sign language to explain why he decided to take his son to a game for the first time. “It’s Jackie Robinson.”

  Myron was embarrassed at times by his father, who worked as a printer for the Daily News. But Myron, baseball glove in hand, felt no shame about stepping into Ebbets Field with his father one afternoon in July. Father and son walked through the marble rotunda, under the enormous chandelier, and out toward the bright green diamond, which was the most perfect thing Myron had ever seen. They found their seats on the first-base line. Myron was startled at first by the number of black people in the stands, particularly along the left-field line and in the bleachers. He had never seen so many in one place. Everyone at the ballpark dressed well—the men all in hats; the women in dresses. But the black men and women seemed even better dressed than the white. Myron asked his father why. His father said it was for the same reason that he dressed better than the other printers at work, and why his mother put on a nice dress to go to the supermarket. They had to overcome expectations.

  The game began, and Myron soaked in its details: Robinson’s dark skin contrasting with his white uniform; his dour expression; his roundhouse swing; his odd stride, which seemed to Myron slightly effeminate. As he watched, the boy came to think that his father wasn’t following the action all that well. Nothing in the Daily News or in the sign-language evocations of Red Barber’s broadcasts had prepared Louis for the action on the field. There were so many subtle movements, so many vivid sights. When Jackie Robinson came to bat, Myron used sign language to tell his father that most of the fans were cheering, but that there were a few hecklers, too. When his father asked what the hecklers were saying, Myron spelled out the word “coon.”

  That’s when Louis Uhlberg got up from his seat and started shouting. Whenever he tried to speak, Louis’s words were a jumble, as if his tongue and mouth were on opposite teams. Now Jackie came out as “Ah-gee!” Over and over he shouted: “Ah-Gee! Ah-Gee!”

  Even by ballpark standards he was very loud. Nearby fans stared. Myron looked at his shoes. But over time, Myron got used to his father’s shouting. And over even more time, Myron discovered that his father taught him an important lesson that afternoon. “It’s not fair that hearing people discriminate against me just because I’m deaf,” Louis Uhlberg told his son once. “It doesn’t matter to me, though. I show them every day I am as good as they are.” Many years later, Myron decided to write a children’s book about his day at the ballpark. He called it Dad, Jackie and Me.

  Robinson had maintained all summer that his success depended on his ability to play ball. If he hadn’t played well enough, he knew, he would have wound up on the bench, like Larry Doby, playing only on occasion, and he would have remained largely invisible to the American public. Formally, the integration of the big leagues would have been achieved, yet in practice not much would have changed. By hanging on to his spot in the starting lineup, Robinson assured that people would see him every day, and that meant people would confront the reality of integration, not just the concept. Each time he played, tens of thousands came together to witness and participate in the reshaping of America. Somet
imes the effects were as loud and clear as the roar of a crowd. At other times, however, they were so subtle as to go unnoticed until many years later.

  On July 29 in St. Louis, he stepped to the plate for the 451st time as a big-leaguer. As he dug his right foot into the dirt beside home plate, thrust out his chest, and cocked his bat in anticipation of the first pitch, a smattering of racist cries fell around him. He ignored it, as usual.

  It wasn’t surprising, really, especially at Sportsman’s Park, where black and white spectators had been segregated until 1944, that a few cranks in the cheap seats would holler angrily at baseball’s leading black man. The surprising thing was what happened next. Slowly at first, then with a sudden burst, men and women began to stand and applaud for Robinson. Black fans started the spontaneous display of support, but white ones soon joined in, and the cheering and whistling grew louder and louder until it rolled across the crowded grandstand, squashing the voices of those who’d been booing a few seconds earlier. Robinson hit a routine fly to center field and returned to the dugout.

  At another point in the same game, a couple of white men with standing-room-only tickets wandered into Section B of the grandstand, hoping to find a place to sit, and complained loudly that it seemed a shame to see so many good seats occupied by black men and women. That would never happen back in Tennessee, one of the men announced. A white man seated in the section looked up and said that if the Tennesseans missed home so much they should start walking in that direction. The Dodgers cruised to an easy win that day behind Harry Taylor’s three-hit shutout, widening their lead over the Cardinals to an imposing eight games. Robinson’s personal triumphs, however, were entirely symbolic: He went 0-for-5.

  The next day, the Dodgers and Cardinals played before another sellout crowd at Sportsman’s Park. It may have been the best game of the season. It was certainly the wildest. And it went a long way toward convincing the Dodgers that luck was truly on their side for a change.

  The Dodgers jumped to a 10–0 lead through four innings. It looked like Branca would coast to his seventeenth win of the season. But in the sixth inning, with two men out, the scorching sun sapped his strength, and he gave up four runs. Hank Behrman came on to pitch and held the Cardinals scoreless until the ninth. Again, it looked like a game the Dodgers couldn’t lose. When Behrman got two outs to start the inning, fans all through the grandstand started making for the exits. But then the Cardinals managed four softly hit singles in a row. Hugh Casey came on in relief of Behrman and, as had been his habit of late, he made things worse. A pair of solid singles by Marty Marion and Del Wilber tied the score.

  Down by ten, the Cardinals had fought back to tie it up. But in the top of the tenth, the Dodgers answered right back, regaining the lead with a Hermanski double and a Reese single. In the bottom of the tenth, Clyde King got three quick outs to secure the victory. The next day, with Branch Rickey watching the action, Brooklyn completed the three-game sweep. They were out in front of the National League pack now by ten games.

  “But anyhow,” the poet Langston Hughes wrote in his newspaper column, “this summer of our Lord 1947, the Dodgers are doing right well with Jackie Robinson at first. . . . And maybe if the Dodgers win the pennant, a hundred years from now history will still be grinning.”

  NINETEEN

  THE FOOTSTEPS OF ENOS “COUNTRY” SLAUGHTER

  Lawrence Douglas Wilder lived in Richmond, Virginia, in a two-story frame house with chickens, geese, and homing pigeons in the yard. He was poor, but poverty felt to him like a mild affliction. His family always had food on the table and flowers in the vases. If his parents had any trouble keeping the family housed and clothed, Doug, as everyone called him, didn’t notice. In the summer of 1947, the St. Louis Cardinals were his biggest worry.

  He was a huge fan. When he heard that some of the men who worked and loitered in the neighborhood barber shop were planning a trip to see the Cards and Dodgers play at Ebbets Field, he invited himself along. The others going were grown men who might have had good reason not to take along a kid, but Doug was persuasive—“the arguingest little man I ever saw,” as one barbershop patron later recalled. Those powers of persuasion would take him a long way. In 1990, he would stand in front of the Virginia state capitol building and take the oath of office as governor, the first black man in America elected governor of a state. But at this moment, at age sixteen, he was low man on the barber pole. His arguments won him a seat in the car—the middle seat in the back of Dick Reid’s shiny black Buick. The four men and the teenager departed early in the evening on a Tuesday, August 19, for the 330-mile drive to New York City.

  Doug Wilder was the grandson of slaves, the seventh of eight children, named (with allowances for spelling) after the black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and the nineteenth-century political figure Frederick Douglass. His father sold policies for Southern Aid Insurance, the nation’s oldest black-owned insurance company. His mother raised the children. Black families in Richmond had their own schools, churches, rest rooms, drinking fountains, libraries, and playgrounds. Yet Doug had not given much thought to segregation—to how it would limit his options for college, how it would affect the friends he made, or how it might restrict his career opportunities. The other men in the car were making the trip to see Robinson—to be witnesses to history—but Doug was interested only in watching his beloved Cardinals claw their way back into the pennant race. The Buick rolled into Harlem at daybreak, past Sugar Ray Robinson’s famous night club, where the boxer’s fuchsia-colored Cadillac sat spectacularly by the curb. “Wow!” said the kid in the backseat. After a stop for breakfast, it was on to Brooklyn.

  Just when the Dodgers thought they had locked up the pennant, the Cardinals went on a terrific run, closing the gap. Their sluggers Enos “Country” Slaughter and Stan Musial were slugging again. The pitching remained shaky, but not as shaky as it had been earlier. The Cardinals came to Brooklyn saying they needed to win at least three of four, and Shotton agreed. “They have to beat us,” he reminded everyone before the doubleheader that opened the series. “We don’t have to beat them.”

  In the first game, the Cards sent Howie Pollet to the mound. They’d been resting the lefty for almost two weeks, hoping he’d be strong. But Pollet may have rested too much, because he had trouble with his control. His first three pitches were fastballs—high and outside, low and outside, high and outside. When Stanky finally saw a fastball on the inside half of the plate, he smacked it deep to left, about as deep as he was capable of smacking one. If not for a spectacular catch by Slaughter, who threw his body at the unpadded left-field wall to make the grab, Stanky probably would have had a triple. Robinson stepped next to the plate and hit a high fastball where even Slaughter couldn’t catch it: into the left-field bleachers, for his ninth homer of the season. Later in the first inning Bruce Edwards’s triple drove in the second run. The Cardinals came back with two runs in the second and two more in the third. In the fifth, Pollet once again lost connection with the strike zone, walking Stanky and Robinson to open the inning. The Dodgers scored five runs and cruised to the win.

  The only other highlight came in the seventh inning, when the Cardinals put a man on base with one out and summoned Joe “Ducky” Medwick to pinch hit. Medwick, the gruff former Dodger, grounded to short and ran hard to first, trying to beat out the double play. He did beat the throw, but he also stepped hard on Robinson’s left foot in the process. All season long, Robinson had struggled with his footwork around first base. Opponents complained that if he didn’t learn to keep his foot off the middle of the bag he was going to get hurt. He was lucky this time to escape injury, and no one accused Medwick of trying to hurt the Dodger first baseman.

  The Dodgers won the second game that night. The next day, though, the Cardinals clobbered Joe Hatten. Now they needed to win the final game of the series, played on Wednesday, August 20, if they wanted to get out of Brooklyn in no worse shape than they’d arrived. Each team sent its best pitcher to the moun
d: Harry “The Cat” Brecheen for the Cardinals, and big Ralph Branca for the Dodgers. Branca was throwing more innings than any Dodger, striking out more batters, and winning more games, on his way to becoming only the eighth player in the twentieth century to win twenty games by age twenty-one. If it had not been for Jackie Robinson’s domination of Dodger news, Branca might have been the toast of New York City in 1947. He was young, smart, funny, tough . . . and seemingly cursed with bad luck.

  Leo Durocher had picked Branca to start the opening game of the playoff series with the Cardinals in 1946. It was the first time in the history of the major leagues that a playoff had been needed to settle the pennant. A dozen photographers and fifty writers covered that game at Sportsman’s Park, an entire nation watching, waiting to see which team would represent the National League in the first postwar World Series. Branca lasted less than three innings, undone by little more than bloop hits and walks, as the Dodgers lost it, 4–2. Ever since, Branca had been pitching like a man hell-bent on redemption, going deep into games, offering his service as a relief pitcher between starts, giving himself over entirely to the cause of getting another chance. He paid no attention to the long-term risks attached to such a heavy workload.

  After a forty-five-minute delay for rain, Branca came out throwing gas, roughly one curve for every three fastballs, just enough slow stuff to keep the Cardinal batters guessing. The Dodgers scored first when Robinson ripped at a curveball and sent it flying for a double off the wall in left, scoring Stanky. Through seven innings, Branca threw no-hit ball. It was the second time in five weeks that he had held the Cards hitless for seven innings or more. While the big righty had a habit of throwing unhittable stuff for seven or eight innings, he also had a habit of getting clobbered in the late innings when his velocity slipped. The problem was that he relied almost entirely on his fastball, and when he lost a few miles per hour on his pitches, or when batters got used to seeing him and began better timing their swings, he got in trouble. Still, reporters blamed the trouble not on his arm, despite the fact he was pitching a ridiculous number of innings, but on his head. “He just thinks too much,” wrote Dick Young, “and when he thinks he presses.” Branca may have been thinking too much when he finally gave up a hit to Whitey Kurowski in the seventh, but he got out of the inning with no further damage and went into the top of the ninth inning with a 2–0 lead. At last, when Branca walked two men and fell behind on a third, Burt Shotton signaled for Hugh Casey to enter in relief. Once again, Casey failed to close the deal. Ron Northey singled on a ground ball past the mound to drive in a run. Then Kurowski bounced a high grounder to Jorgensen, who misplayed the ball and let the tying run score. To extra innings they went.