by Marty Appel
With two out in the ninth, Reynolds had to retire Ted Williams. Ted swung on an 0-and-1 pitch and hit a pop-up behind home plate. That would be it—except Yogi became disoriented under the pop-up, began to lose his footing, dropped the ball, and fell down. The great Williams would be given a second chance. Yogi wanted to crawl into a hole.
The crowd of 39,038 sighed as one. They commiserated with the popular catcher; they didn’t boo. He was Yogi, and he was beloved: He would win his first of three MVP awards in 1951. Reynolds helped him to his feet and patted his rump. It would be okay, he assured him.
Remarkably, Reynolds induced Williams into hitting another pop foul. It seemed like a miracle. This one was near the Yankee dugout, and Yogi caught it and clutched it tightly. It was both a second no-hitter for Reynolds and an eighteenth pennant for the Yanks. It was also a moment frozen in time for all who saw it in person or on TV.
The Dodgers and Giants tied for first in the National League, forcing a three-game playoff; they split the first two. That led to the decisive game at the Polo Grounds on October 3, and Berra was among a group of Yankees who went to the game to scout the teams in preparation for the World Series.
It was perhaps the most famous game in baseball history, as Bobby Thomson hit the “shot heard round the world” in the last of the ninth, turning a loss to a win, as the Giants won the pennant. As for Yogi, who would become famous for saying “It ain’t over til it’s over”: He left early to beat the traffic.
The World Series featured a matchup of rival rookie stars as Mantle and Mays opposed each other for the first time. The Series, however, ended early for Mantle. In the fifth inning of game two, Mays flied to right center and Mick badly injured his knee, coming to a sudden stop and then falling as his foot hit a year-old sprinkler-system drain, with DiMaggio calling him off the play.
The torn ACL was severe and would change Mantle’s career. He didn’t have it repaired for two years, playing on it for two full seasons before finally undergoing surgery in ’53. His rookie season was the only year he played at relatively full strength. He would always have a little bit of a limp; he would never be the Mantle he might have been. His blazing speed was diminished. It was the start of a host of injuries that would plague him. This one forced him to play with his leg wrapped tightly in Ace bandages for every game for the rest of his career.
In the fourth game, DiMaggio hit the final home run of his career in a 6–2 Yankee win that evened the Series at 2–2. McDougald’s grand slam in game five helped the Yanks to a 3–2 edge, and in game six, reliever Bob Kuzava induced pinch hitter Sal Yvers to line out to Bauer in right with two runners on, Bauer catching it while sliding on the seat of his pants.
The Yankees won the game 4–3 for Casey’s third consecutive world championship, and the Yankees’ fourteenth.
DIMAGGIO WAITED UNTIL December 11 to make his plans public. Similar to what Ruth had done after his last Yankee season, he toured Japan and Korea with a traveling U.S. team. But when Red Patterson alerted the New York press to come to the team’s Fifth Avenue office in the middle of the Christmas shopping season, they knew this was the day that Joe would retire.
“I’ve played my last game of ball,” he said.
Joe never wanted to be embarrassed on the field, and hitting .263 with 12 homers on a painful heel was not a DiMaggio season to be proud of. His mother had died in June. The two scouts who had arranged for the Yankees to acquire him, Joe Devine and Bill Essick, had died twenty days apart in the fall. A magazine had published a scouting report on Joe that said he’d become very ordinary in some areas. He exited on his own terms, dignity intact. He probably wished he had quit a year earlier.
DiMaggio played only thirteen seasons, having lost three to the war. In ten of them, the Yanks played in the World Series. He hit .325 lifetime, but the rest of his lifetime stats reflected just thirteen years of play, not the long career he could have had. It didn’t matter to people who loved the game and knew perfection when they saw it. He would be the standard of on-field excellence for a generation.
The “retirement” of a player was rare; most got released when it was time to go. Before the breakdown of baseball’s Reserve Clause in 1976, a retirement created the oddity of a player still bound for life to a team. Had DiMaggio chosen, say, to come back at age forty-four seven years later as a pinch hitter for the San Francisco Giants, he would have found that the Yankees still controlled him. Over the years, the Yankees’ list of “retired players” was small, but technically they held lifetime control over anyone who left that way—like Reynolds, Brown, Coleman, McDougald, Collins, Kubek, Richardson, and Mantle, plus a few lesser names.
DiMaggio would replace Dizzy Dean on Yankee pregame telecasts, looking awkward in the process, and in 1954 would marry Marilyn Monroe for 274 days, sealing his place in American history as not just a baseball star but as an iconic figure in American culture. Ernest Hemingway would write about him in The Old Man and the Sea. Gay Talese wrote a landmark piece about him for Esquire magazine. Paul Simon would use his five-syllable name in “Mrs. Robinson.” He attended all but one Old-Timers’ Day for the rest of his life, which lasted forty-eight more years. (After 1988, he ceased wearing a uniform at those gatherings; he took his last at-bat in 1975.) His Yankee association always trumped any other commitment; he loved the connection and still loved hearing the roar of the crowd. Though some believed he could be difficult, he understood his place in American lore, and when all was said and done, there was only one Joe DiMaggio.
Joe was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1955 (with Home Run Baker) in his third year of eligibility. First-round elections were rare in the days when the Hall was still young and still catching up with a half century of elections never held. Also, while there was no formal five-year waiting period (as enacted in 1954 but waived for Joe), electors seemed not to want to vote for newly retired players, something that helped bring about the five-year rule. DiMaggio, in fact, was only the fifth, and the last, player (besides Ruth, Hubbell, Hornsby, and Ott) elected in fewer than five years after retirement. (Gehrig was a special selection and the waiting period was waived for Roberto Clemente.)
ANOTHER DEPARTURE IN 1951 was that of Commissioner Happy Chandler. Chandler always felt that Del Webb was behind his ouster. He had begun an investigation of whether Webb held a financial interest in Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo casino in Las Vegas. The plain-talking Chandler wrote, “My abortive investigation of Webb’s reported Las Vegas connections, of course, turned him flatly against me. In the end, he teamed up with [Lou] Perini, [Fred] Saigh, and other skunks to put me on the skids before I could get them.”
“It took me about 48 hours to get enough votes to throw him out,” said Webb. “It was the best thing that ever happened to baseball.”
Chandler’s successor was Ford Frick, the National League president who had covered the Yankees and who was among those who had been a ghostwriter for Babe Ruth.
IN THE YANKS’ fiftieth season, 1952, Bell Telephone assigned a new phone number to Yankee Stadium—CYpress 3-4300—but calls for tickets were dropping. Despite the success, attendance fell by more than three hundred thousand in 1952, with more homes owning television sets and DiMaggio gone. (That number would still be in place when the Yankees moved into their new home in 2009.)
The Yankees would go after a fourth straight world championship that year, a quest to equal their all-time record. Most of the twelve players who were part of this run of championship clubs felt that the ’52 team was the best of the five.
Martin had been drafted into the army in 1951, but after successfully applying for a hardship discharge (to care for his new wife and ailing stepfather), he had spent most of the season on the Yankee bench, and most of the evenings forming a friendship with Mantle. On April 30, 1952, Coleman was called off for military duty in Korea, and second base was Billy’s. Two early-season brawls—one under the stands with Boston’s Jimmy Piersall and one on the field after he broke Clint Courtney’s glasses
with a tag—quickly established Billy’s reputation as a hot-tempered player. Although a product of Berkeley, California, Billy was like an Old West gunslinger, and his image evolved over the years into that of a Texan—and one you better not mess with. Mantle would say, “He was the only guy I ever met who could hear somebody give him the finger.”
Billy had played in the Arizona-Texas League in 1947, and perhaps his self-image had been shaped there. He didn’t reappear in Texas until he managed the Rangers in 1973, but by then he was all cowboy and would have been repelled by the liberal thinkers from Berkeley. He didn’t even like tennis players, because to him tennis wasn’t a manly sport. He even opened a Western-wear shop in New York.
Of course, Billy had his vulnerable side, too, something the fans seemed to realize. He was the skinny kid taking on the big fellows and doing his damnedest to succeed. These dueling personas—the sympathy-inducing Billy and the take-on-all-challengers Billy—would define his Yankee career for the next forty years, with time-outs for periodic exiles.
IN THEIR FIFTIETH season, the Yanks won a close pennant race with Cleveland, clinching when they won fourteen of fifteen in the final weeks of the season. The big game in that run came on Sunday, September 14, when 73,608 jammed Municipal Stadium to see Lopat beat 20-game winner Mike Garcia 7–1 with a 3⅔-inning save from Reynolds and a homer and a double from Mantle. The win put the Yanks two and a half games ahead instead of just half a game. The Indians would have no opportunity to narrow the lead head-to-head, and the Yanks kept rolling.
Berra, who set a catcher’s record with 30 home runs, won his second MVP Award and was now in a remarkable streak of ten consecutive seasons in which he finished no worse than fourth in MVP voting.
THE ’52 WORLD Series pitted the Yanks against Brooklyn for the fourth time, and this time the Flock (a nickname used by New York writers who recalled the Dodgers’ days as the Robins) had become what author Roger Kahn would come to call the Boys of Summer.
With the Series knotted at 2–2, Stengel made a decision to start sidearmer Ewell Blackwell in game five. Blackwell, often called one of the toughest pitchers in the National League during his career with Cincinnati, had pitched in only five games for the Yankees since coming over from the Reds on August 28. Carl Erskine outpitched him, but the game went into extra innings, with the Dodgers winning 6–5 in the eleventh. Raschi, with a save from Reynolds, then won game six 3–2, and the tight series went down to a seventh game at Ebbets Field.
This game, preserved on a kinescope, is the oldest surviving full game known to exist on film.
Mantle, still just twenty years old, broke a 2–2 tie in the sixth with a home run and drove in another run in the seventh for a 4–2 Yankee lead.
In the last of the seventh, the Dodgers loaded the bases. As in ’51, Stengel brought in Kuzava. This time, facing Jackie Robinson, Kuzava induced a high pop-up between the mound and first base. Collins, the first baseman, seemed to lose it in the October sun, and it appeared as though it might drop and score the tying runs. Suddenly, Martin raced in from second to catch the ball knee-high, saving the day for the Yankees. It was a quick-thinking, athletic play, a rare feat that showcased Martin’s talents.
Kuzava got the last six outs for the second year in a row as the Yankees took their fourth straight world championship, equaling the feat of the 1936–39 teams. Mize, with homers in three consecutive games and a .400 average, was the hitting star for the Yankees, and Raschi and Reynolds each won two games.
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WITH FIFTY YANKEE seasons having passed, Arthur Daley chose an all-time Yankee team for a lengthy New York Times magazine feature. He selected Gehrig, Lazzeri, Rizzuto, and Rolfe in the infield; Dickey catching; Ruth, DiMaggio, and Meusel in the outfield; and Gomez and Ruffing as the lefty and righty pitchers. The Yankees also asked all their regular sportswriters to vote, and the results were the same, adding Crosetti as a utility man, Murphy as a relief pitcher, and Pennock in a tie with Gomez as the left-handed starter.
WHITEY FORD WAS back in ’53 from two lost years in the service, making 1953 the only full season in which Raschi-Reynolds-Lopat-Ford were together, although Reynolds was now spending more time in relief. Whitey, 18–6, led the staff in victories; Sain’s 14–7 mark (19 starts, 21 relief appearances) was a pleasant surprise from the thirty-five-year-old; and Kuzava pitched the game of his life when he no-hit Chicago for eight innings before a 68,529-strong Ladies’ Day crowd in August.
While not a regular, another player of note on the ’53 Yankees was Willy Miranda of Cuba, purchased from the Browns in June. Miranda would be the first postwar Latino player on the team. (His brother Fausto was an important sports editor both in Cuba and the U.S.)
Also worthy of note in 1953 was the briefest of brief Yankee careers. Frank Verdi, who would later manage the team’s triple-A clubs, made his debut on May 10, playing shortstop for one inning after Collins hit for Rizzuto. He handled no chances. But when Boston changed pitchers with Verdi due to hit, Casey summoned him back to the dugout and sent up Bill Renna. That would be Verdi’s entire big-league career. Casey’s platoon system could be cruel.
(Verdi fared better than some Yankees, lost to history, who were called up and never got into a game. This happened with regularity when catchers had weekend army reserve duty and an emergency triple-A player was called up—just in case.)12
Mickey Mantle ‘s reputation as one of the great sluggers of all time really took shape on April 17, 1953, when he hit a Chuck Stobbs pitch out of Griffith Stadium in Washington, leading to the invention of the term “tape-measure home run.”
The clout, accomplished right-handed with a borrowed Loren Babe model bat, left the ballpark after grazing the small scoreboard at the rear of the left-field bleachers. Everyone who saw the blast was in awe—no one thought they had ever seen its like.
Red Patterson knew a good story when he saw one. According to accounts of the time, Red left the press box, left the ballpark, and tracked down young Donald Dunaway on 434 Oakland Place, who was holding the ball. Dunaway showed Patterson where it landed, and gave him the ball in exchange for some cash.
Red would later tell me that he walked it off with his size-eleven shoes to determine the distance, each step being twelve inches. Reports said he’d used a tape measure. Red returned to the press box and reported that the ball traveled 565 feet. It became part of baseball legend.
In researching her 2010 biography of Mantle, Jane Leavy found the frail sixty-nine-year-old Dunaway. Dunaway told Leavy that he watched the home run from the bleachers, and then left the park to retrieve the ball. He returned to the park to give the ball to Mantle, and was escorted by an usher to the visitor’s clubhouse. There he ran into Patterson, who never left Griffith Stadium.
The ball didn’t get anywhere near the backyard of 434 Oakland that Patterson described, and was probably more like 505–515 feet. Still, Mantle’s legend as the tape-measure home run king was made.
THE ’53 YANKS coasted to their twentieth American League pennant by winning 99 games and finishing eight and a half games ahead of Cleveland. The season was effectively over on June 14 when the Yanks ran their winning streak to a club-record eighteen, completing a four-game sweep of the Indians and taking a ten-and-a-half-game lead. Lopat and Ford each won four during the winning streak, a streak that lost a little of its luster when the Yanks proceeded to drop nine straight to narrow the lead to five.
The Yankees won the World Series over Brooklyn in six games, Mantle hitting a grand slam in game five, then wrapping it up the next day behind Ford and Reynolds when Martin singled home Bauer in the last of the ninth for a 4–3 win over reliever Clem Labine. It was Martin’s twelfth hit of the series and gave him a .500 average (with two homers and eight RBI), as Billy once again answered the call in October with a memorable performance.
This was the Yankees’ fifth consecutive world championship, a feat unprecedented in baseball. More than a half century later and counting, no team
has managed to win even four straight.
“You would think we would have had one of those ticker-tape parades after all those years,” said Ford. “But we never had a single one. People just expected us to win, and we did, and then it was on to next year. We had our victory celebrations, we got our rings, but there was never a parade. It would have been fun! I would have liked to have been in at least one!”
IN NOVEMBER, THE Yankees made their way to the United States Supreme Court in the case of George Earl Toolson vs. New York Yankees et al. The case was a test of baseball’s reserve system, and the structure of organized baseball was on trial. The Yankees were named because Toolson had been a Yankee pitcher at Newark in 1949 and believed he had major league abilities (he was 26-26 in triple-A), but because of the Reserve Clause he was being held back in the minors, unable to find a major league job on his own. When Newark dissolved, he was transferred to Binghamton and placed on the ineligible list when he refused to report. That was when he decided to sue.
By a 7–2 vote, the court ruled that any change in the system could not come from them but from Congress, although it was the court that had granted baseball its antitrust exemption in 1922.
IN DECEMBER, THE Yankees and Athletics completed an eleven-player deal, the Yanks giving up Vic Power, the American Association’s batting champ at .349. “Power was the key player,” said Weiss. “The Athletics mentioned his name and then wouldn’t hear of anybody else. Apparently they are going to make a bid for Negro fans and figure Power will help them at the gate.” The key additions to New York were pitcher Harry Byrd, who had been Rookie of the Year in ’52 with 15 victories (but 11–20 in 1953), and Eddie Robinson, a slugging first baseman. The A’s, who were desperate to stave off bankruptcy, happily took $25,000 in cash as part of the deal.