by Marty Appel
And so Yogi’s eighteen-year Yankee playing career drew to a close. Three MVP awards, more World Series games and hits than anyone, the home run record for catchers with 358, and a certain Hall of Fame plaque. Was he better than his mentor, Dickey? Dickey outhit Berra .313 to .285, but in many ways they were fairly equal. When it came time to retire Yogi’s number 8, it was decided that Dickey, having worn it earlier, should get equal recognition. So the two 8s retired by the Yankees is unique in baseball. (In May 1965 Yogi would “unretire” and play four games for the Mets, a decision he later regretted.)
THE YANKEES OPENED the ’64 season without Harry M. Stevens as the stadium concessionaire, a relationship that went back to 1903. Stevens was replaced by National Concessions Service, a division of Automatic Canteen Company, the company Art Friedland had brought Topping and Webb into some years before. It had grown into a full-service ballpark concessionaire, and the stadium menu was augmented by new items like shrimp rolls, pizza, fish sandwiches, and milkshakes. Automatic Canteen evolved into Centerplate, which handled Yankee Stadium until it closed in 2008, at which time the Yankees entered into a new company with the Dallas Cowboys called Legends Hospitality. A joint video with Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and George Steinbrenner, released October 20, 2008, would be the last business announcement Steinbrenner would be personally involved with. (In 1994, Aramark acquired the Harry M. Stevens name.)
THINGS DID NOT go smoothly for Yogi at first. Third in the standings in mid-August, the Yankees got a lifeline in Stottlemyre, called up from Richmond, a move reminiscent of Ford’s debut fourteen years earlier.
Mel, a tall, poker-faced right-hander from Washington State whose best pitch was a sinker, started against Chicago on Wednesday afternoon, August 12, and won 7–3. He was aided by one of the longest home runs of Mantle’s career. It was, in fact, the longest measured homer in Yankee Stadium, 502 feet, soaring over the twenty-two-foot screen in the batter’s eye in dead center, a screen that would occasionally be removed to seat people in that bleacher section in the days before batter safety was taken more seriously.
Mel went 9–3 in 12 starts for the Yanks with a 2.06 ERA. Downing won just 13 but also struck out 217, the most on the team since Chesbro in 1904. Ford, doubling as pitching coach, was 17–6 with eight shutouts, and Bouton led the staff with 18 wins. The bullpen, though, needed shoring up. Pete Mikkelsen joined Reniff and Steve Hamilton, but the trio was no sure thing.
To many, a turning point in the season came in Chicago after a 5–0 loss to the White Sox, the team’s fourth straight. Now they were in third place, four and a half out, and sinking.
On the bus to the airport, where the code of baseball called for contemplative silence following a loss, Phil Linz pulled out a new Hohner harmonica he’d been learning and began to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” It was a silly moment, but it infuriated the old guard at the front of the bus—including Berra, whose nerves were frayed anyway.
“Shut that thing up,” he yelled.
“What did he say?” asked Linz.
Mantle, not capturing the seriousness of the moment, responded to Linz: “He said play it louder.” And Linz did.
That felt like defiance to the manager. Perhaps goaded by Crosetti, who called it “the worst thing I’ve seen in 33 years with the team,” Yogi walked to the back of the bus and knocked it out of Linz’s hands.
“I said put it away! You’d think we just won four games.”
The writers, who traveled with the team in those days, witnessed the activity from their front seats. “Why are you getting on me?” said Linz. “I give 100 percent on the field. I try to win. I should be able to do what I want off the field.”
Grumbling under his breath, Yogi returned to his seat and the team headed for Boston. Linz was fined $200, but would wind up on the back cover of the Yankee yearbook in ’65, posing for an ad by Hohner. Did the show of managerial power snap this veteran team to attention? Did it turn things around?
That became the conventional wisdom. In fact, the Yankees lost their next two in Boston to run the losing streak to six. But then they began to play better. They won seven of their next nine. They won eleven straight in September. From the harmonica “incident” to the end of the season, they were 30–13.
On September 5 (too late to be eligible for World Series play), the Yankees traded Terry and Daley to the Indians for the veteran Pedro Ramos.
Ramos, master of the “Cuban palmball” (a spitter?), was a flamboyant character who wore a cowboy hat and boots, smoked Cuban cigars, and was forever challenging Mantle to a race, which the Yankees strictly forbade. A starting pitcher for most of his ten-year career, Ramos responded to his bullpen assignment with a win and eight saves in 13 appearances. He was an overnight hit with the fans and his teammates.
(He was also the last Cuban on the Yankees until Luis Tiant in 1979. Steinbrenner would try to take his team to Cuba in 1977 to open relations there and perhaps find a way to sign Cuban players, but Commissioner Bowie Kuhn stopped him, saying only an All-Star team could go. Steinbrenner made a later trip with Ford and took in a game with Fidel Castro, but couldn’t open up the process in the Yankees’ favor.)
THE YANKS WON their twenty-ninth pennant by just one game. It was their fifth in a row (under three managers), and a triumph for the rookie manager and the rookie general manager. But it was a close call.
Mantle had rebounded from his injury-riddled ’63 with a .303/35/111 season, his last big year and his fourth 100-RBI campaign. Pepitone hit 28 homers and drove in 100. But the winds were shifting. Brooks Robinson of the Orioles won the MVP Award. The Yanks were starting to play “old.”
The Cardinals, managed by Johnny Keane, won on the last day in the National League, when the Phillies collapsed. The Cardinals were a terrific team, though, and Berra was going to get to manage in his hometown against the team he grew up rooting for.
The Yanks didn’t have Ramos, who sat in the stands in his cowboy gear. Ford, ailing, lost game one 9–5. Kubek, out with a sprained wrist, was replaced by Linz at short. Stottlemyre beat Bob Gibson in game two with Linz homering. The Series moved to New York.
In game three, the score was tied 1–1 going to the last of the ninth. Knuckleballer Barney Schultz came in to pitch, with Mantle leading off.
“I’m gonna hit one outta here,” Mickey said to no one in particular. He was mostly talking to himself, although Bouton, who had tossed a six-hitter, heard it clearly.
And he did. He sent the first pitch into the upper right-field seats for a walk-off Yankee victory. He had 13 walk-off homers in his career, including this one: They were rare because he tended to get walked a lot in such situations. The drama of this, winning a World Series game, would become his “greatest moment” whenever asked (although Mick sometimes playfully recounted a few ribald non-baseball stories as his “greatest moment.”)
The homer was his 16th in World Series play, breaking Ruth’s record. Mantle would hit two more in that Series to finish with 18, a record unlikely to be broken. (It became common to lump “postseason home runs” together on television graphics once playoff baseball began in 1969.)
Another win by Bouton in game six tied it up and set up a game seven at Busch Stadium, the rookie Stottlemyre against the great Gibson. Linz got another homer off Gibby, as did Clete Boyer, but Gibson was able to tough it out and hold on to a 7–5 win and a Cardinals championship. For the second year in a row, the Yanks had lost the World Series, although this one was no blowout. The last time they had lost back-to-back World Series was 1921–22, their final years in the Polo Grounds.
IN THE SUMMER of ’64, Lehman Brothers told Topping and Webb that this was not a good time to consider a public sale. “Baseball is in a down period,” they were told, according to Dan Topping Jr., who was working as Houk’s assistant. “If you can find a private buyer, you should do that.”
Topping, being a man about town, knew William S. Paley, the chairman of the Columbia Broadcasting System, and began
discussing a sale of the team with him. CBS was expanding beyond television and radio. They had purchased a toy company. They owned Columbia Records. They owned guitar-maker Fender. They invested in the Broadway show My Fair Lady.
In truth, CBS actually tried to buy the Yankees’ tenants, the football Giants. They already had broadcast rights to the NFL. The Giants had been playing at Yankee Stadium since 1956, and with CBS televising their games, they had a close relationship. But the NFL did not permit corporate ownership, and Paley turned to the Yankees.
News broke on August 13 that Topping and Webb were selling 80 percent of the team to CBS for $11.2 million. The deal would become effective on November 2. CBS had an option to buy the remaining 20 percent for $2.8 million, making the total value of the team $14 million. Topping would remain president until such time as he sold off his shares. Webb would sell off his 10 percent by February of ’65.
No one knew for certain what this corporate ownership would mean for the Yankees. The first thought was that games would be shown on WCBS-TV, not the long-standing WPIX. But they weren’t going to preempt their prime-time lineup for baseball.
There were objections from other owners about the sale, some thinking that this would infuse so much money into the operation of the Yankees that the divide between them and the rest of the teams would become insurmountable. As an owner, CBS would have the ability to know how network negotiations were progressing with the Commissioner’s Office, learning too much about rivals NBC and ABC in the process. There was general unease throughout the game.
Judge Roy Hofheinz, owner of the Houston Colt .45s (later the Astros), called it the “blackest day for baseball since the Black Sox scandal.”
Topping and Webb agreed to a league meeting in Boston on September 9 to hear the arguments against the sale. But the five-hour meeting resulted in an 8–2 approval vote, and the deal was on.
ON OCTOBER 15, as soon as game seven was wrapping up in St. Louis, Bob Fishel placed a long-distance call to the Savoy Hilton. “Warm up the coffee, we have a press conference tomorrow.”
Just twenty-four hours after losing a seven-game World Series, the Yankees were going to fire Berra as manager. He thought he was being called into the office to be given a raise, but Houk told him he was out.
At the same time, in St. Louis, the winning manager, Johnny Keane, was sticking it to his bosses and quitting his job. He’d been second-guessed all season, and when it appeared the Phillies were going to win the pennant, he figured he would be fired. Now he was being proactive.
Yogi didn’t attend his press conference, even though he was being “moved” to a position as “special field consultant” at $25,000 a year for two years. Houk and Topping were present, and Houk said, “Losing the World Series had nothing to do with [this]. The decision was made before the World Series.” He also said the decision was his and Topping’s, and that CBS was consulted but played no part in it.
Berra, playing golf with friends in New Jersey, was stunned. In addition, it had to sting that the man who had been his third-string catcher a decade before, when Yogi was racking up MVPs and world championships, was firing him.
Yogi didn’t express any of that to reporters. “I feel pretty good. I suppose I’ll be doing some scouting. If another offer turns up, I’m free to take it. And hey, we won the pennant and it took seven games to beat us in the Series.”
Years later, he told sportswriter Bill Madden, “The way I looked at it, the Yankees had given me a job they wouldn’t even trust Babe Ruth with.” He said he smoothed things over with Houk “through the years.”
Houk told Madden, “Worst thing I ever had to do … Every time I’d see him at some public function, I felt awful.”
Fans were in shock, and adding to it was the hiring of Keane the very next day. Everyone sensed this had all been in the works for weeks, with Yogi the only one not in on the plan. Keane was coming aboard at a moment of triumph, but to the fans he was an unknown, whereas Yogi had always been an enormously popular figure. And sure enough, within a month, the Mets offered Berra a coaching job and he took it. He’d be back in uniform, and back with Stengel for 1965, paying two tolls to drive to Shea Stadium instead of just one to Yankee Stadium.
IF THE FIRING of Stengel in 1960 had been a little sloppy, and the firing of Berra in 1964 a little cold, the firing of Mel Allen was just … empty.
On September 21, Mel was called up to Topping’s twenty-ninth-floor office in the Squibb Building and told he wouldn’t be offered a new contract for 1965. The news was devastating to Mel, a lifelong bachelor whose whole adulthood had been the Yankees. Still just fifty-one years old, he was the Voice of the Yankees, and those who understood marketing knew that the right announcer could be bigger than the players, bigger than the owners, perhaps the most talked-about man in town.
Maybe that was the problem.
Mel was never given a reason. Suddenly his friendships and allies on the team weren’t there.
He wasn’t the same announcer he had been in his heyday. He had begun to ramble on air; his stories became too long, too predictible. He was more short-tempered.
He was brutal to his young stat guy, Bill Kane, unforgiving of errors large and small.
A lot of people who used to enjoy his company would cross the street if they saw him coming.
There was even a problem with Ballantine, the team’s principal sponsor. Business was bad. As the fees to advertise increased, sales were decreasing with the coming of national brands like Budweiser and Miller and their big ad budgets.
“They were being marketed as ‘premium’ beers,” explained Tom Villante, the former batboy who became head of the Schaefer account at the BBDO ad agency. “They weren’t really—the consumer was being asked to pay more for them to cover the cost of trucking them around the country. The consumer thought a higher price meant a premium flavor, and those brewers were happy to go along. Local beers like Ballantine, Rheingold, and Schaefer were feeling the pinch.”
Ballantine, which had been sold since 1840, would hang in there with the Yankees until 1966, but then the brand faded from the marketplace. If Mel had still been there, it would have been very hard to attract a new beer sponsor, with Mel’s voice so identified with Ballantine.
There were other bad marks on Mel’s ledger. In 1961 he’d referred Mickey Mantle to his doctor for a “cure-all” injection, ultimately resulting in the infection that caused him to miss games in that fateful September home run chase.
In ’63, he had lost his voice during the World Series telecast, and some thought that psychologically he was losing it—he couldn’t bear to see the Yankees get swept, and had lost his instrument. There were also whispers of excess drinking and homosexuality, but they were nothing more than rumors.
There really was no single reason ever given to Mel or to the fans, and none ever materialized over the years. Mel had apparently just gotten annoying, and maybe too expensive, to the people who employed him.
The Yankees told NBC that Rizzuto should broadcast the ’64 World Series, which broke Mel’s heart, even though he knew by then he was done. That was a big deal, and began a series of news stories suggesting he might be gone. But the Yankees didn’t formally announce his firing until December 17.
“There is no point in going into any details as to why we made the change,” said Houk. “We just thought that a change would be beneficial.”
Mel’s replacement was Joe Garagiola, Yogi’s childhood pal who worked the ’64 Series with Rizzuto, who was a familiar face on the Today show and the author of the hit book Baseball Is a Funny Game. It was a wise choice because Garagiola was well liked and didn’t suffer from comparisons to Mel. When Joe left after three seasons, Frank Messer came up from Baltimore and brought a fine, no-frills professional style with him, suffering not at all from Mel Allen comparisons thanks to the Garagiola span between them.
But for more than a decade, the most asked question among fans was always, “Why was Mel Allen fired?” And
no one ever stood up with an answer.
Mel remained a somewhat saddened figure for the rest of his life. The Yankees meant the world to him. “I carry my heart on my sleeve,” he’d tell people. He had a second act as the voice of This Week in Baseball. The Yankees even brought him back as a cable broadcaster in 1978, and he called Dave Righetti’s no-hitter in 1983. When I was the WPIX producer, I had him do a few innings in 1990 so that he could be a “seven-decade announcer,” and I had him record our opening so that each telecast began with his signature, “Hello there, everybody, this is Mel Allen …” But he died an unhappy figure in 1996 despite a plaque in monument park and lifetime ownership of the title “Voice of the Yankees,” and as the first broadcaster (with Red Barber) to win the Ford Frick Award, presented in Cooperstown on induction day. But he had lost his great love at age fifty-one and it was never the same.
So in one eventful year, the Yankees changed ownership, fired Berra, and fired Allen. Ballantine was on the way out. Anyone who believed in curses had plenty to work with.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
IN JUNE 1965, A YOUNG FAN WROTE a letter to the editor of the Sporting News, saying, “Why is everyone giving up on the Yankees? They always come through in the end. They will be fine.”
I know because I was that fan.
The letter writer was wrong. Johnny Keane had arrived at what would be a turning point in Yankee history. When he was handed the key to the manager’s office, he couldn’t have known that the dynasty was over. The team had collapsed, and would spend the next decade trying to rebuild itself for the first time since Babe Ruth arrived.