Aaron does not have the dramatic flair of Willie Mays or the oversized press buildup of Mickey Mantle.
The AP continued the drumbeat, comparing him to white stars like Hall of Famers Paul Waner and Joe Medwick (so what if the comparison to Ducky was a tad backhanded, ripping Henry for his Medwick-like ability to stretch the strike zone from his ankles to his forehead and points north). Best of all, there was the bus ride back north to Milwaukee and the start of the campaign, when Bob Wolf, the Journal beat man who was moonlighting for The Sporting News, sat with Grimm for what must have been hours. Grimm believed the Braves were going to win the pennant, and he told Wolf just how they were going to do it, how despite Conley’s fragile arm, the pitching would be better than ever and that pitching was how championships were won. Grimm chewed Wolf’s ear about how the Braves young guns were going to be a threat for years, well into the 1960s, sizzling past the Dodgers, the Reds, the Cardinals, all of them. But his most melodic tones were saved for his twenty-two-year-old right fielder.
“Aaron,” Charlie Grimm said. “Aaron, of course, is the prize.”
GRIMM BELIEVED and the Braves believed, but when opening day neared, the scribes weren’t sold. Maybe they didn’t want to get burned again (the year before, the writers had said the Braves had arrived, only to eat crow after the first week of the season). The New York hold on the World Series, at least in the minds of the writers, wasn’t going to be broken in 1956, with the fierce-swinging Henry or without him.
DODGERS, YANKS PICKED TO WIN75 FLAGS BY
FOUR OF EVERY FIVE WRITERS IN POLL
The vote of 109 writers who “experted” the pennant races for The Associated Press was so lopsided it was almost no contest…. The Yanks had eighty-eight firsts and Brooklyn had eighty-six. A similar poll of 110 writers a year ago predicted pennants for the Cleveland Indians and Milwaukee Braves.
THE 1956 CURTAIN went up on a drizzly afternoon, April 17, and Henry immediately set about his business. The first victim was Bob Rush of the Chicago Cubs. Aaron drove in the game’s first run in the fourth and then broke Rush in the sixth. Rush had appeared to be breezing toward the seventh: two quick outs and a 1–0 lead. Aaron took a strike and then roped a long homer to make it 2–0. Shaken, Rush fell apart. Thomson singled. Adcock hit another homer to make it 3–0, and Bruton tripled. Rush headed to the showers and the Braves cruised to a 6–0 win.
The Braves swept the Cubs three straight, and it seemed that maybe Charlie had a better handle on his team than Perini thought. Grimm’s charges won nine out of twelve, but everything seemed just a bit off. Rain wiped out a week of games, and every hot start was followed by a sputter. The Braves were 13–7 after twenty games, in first place, during which time the Dodgers couldn’t get out of their own way. But instead of building on the lead, the Braves fell back, getting demolished in a doubleheader by the Pirates (Pittsburgh again) 5–0 and 13–8.
In the opener of a Memorial Day weekend doubleheader at Wrigley, the Braves tied a big-league record by hitting three consecutive home runs in the first inning. Mathews hit a two-out homer off the short-fused former Dodger Russ Meyer. Henry followed with another and Bobby Thomson yanked yet another over the left-field fence. Meyer, now breathing fire, guaranteed his next pitch would stay in the park by throwing a strike off Bruton’s right cheekbone. Bruton crumpled. After a moment, he steadied himself with his bat, took a few wobbly steps toward first base, then raced toward Meyer. Bruton dropped the bat and caught Meyer with a left to the body. Grimm raced from the third-base coaching box and corralled Meyer by the neck. As the benches cleared, Meyer and Bruton kicked each other at the bottom of the pile. The Chicago Defender would call the brawl a “near riot.” Aaron, years later, would call it the worst fight he’d ever seen. The Sporting News said Meyer and Bruton fought to a “split decision” but that the big loser was battered and bruised Charlie Grimm, who paid the price for trying to make the peace.
Nothing could awaken the Braves like a good fight. They hit five homers that night but lost the game 10–9. The next night, Thomson hit two more and Henry exploded with a homer, a double, three RBIs, and three runs scored in an 11–9 demolition of the Cubs.
In the finale, a 15–8 win the next afternoon, the Braves led 14–0 after four innings and, in a ten-inning span over the two-game onslaught, hit seven homers off one guy, sad-sack Cubs hurler Warren Hacker. In the three games, the Braves hit fourteen home runs, incited the Cubs to fisticuffs, and had their best record of the season at 19–10. They were in first place, with six fewer losses than the Dodgers. A power display, plus wins, and punching out the other team added up to the sort of weekend that provided the best kind of energy boost for a club. Plus, the Braves were coming home for fifteen games against lowly Pittsburgh, the Dodgers (a chance for an early knockout, perhaps?), Mays and the Giants, and the hard-luck Phillies.
But in the opener, Spahn took a 1–0 lead into the eighth against the Pirates and gave up four runs in a 4–1 loss. Something was wrong with the meal ticket. He had started the season 3–0 and was now 3–4. “You didn’t even worry about Spahn,”76 recalled Gene Conley. “Even before spring training began, you penciled him in for his twenty wins, because he was doing the same thing. To see him not win, you had to wonder a little bit.” Pittsburgh beat Conley the following day and then split a doubleheader the next to take three of four.
Then came the Dodgers, who were 20–19, the defending champs standing in place. These were the games where great teams both revealed themselves and could use the emotional currency of winning to deflate their opponents in future meetings. In the opener, in front of a buzzing, nervous 27,788 souls, Sal Maglie led Burdette 1–0 in the eighth before Lew gave up homers to Pee Wee Reese and Gil Hodges, while Maglie walked away with a complete-game, three-hit shutout. Perini stood and smoldered as the home folks who were good for complimentary dry cleaning booed his team. The catcalls increased the next day, when Roger Craig beat Spahn 6–1 on a two-hitter. Spahn had collected just one out in the second inning and was gone. He was now 3–5, but the guy whom fans wanted to see with an apple in his mouth was Grimm. When Newcombe beat Conley 5–2, the Braves were 1–6 on the home stand and suddenly in fourth place.
Expectations had swallowed them whole, and under the weight of having to perform, the Braves were disintegrating. Spahn told writers that the team was under “terrible tension.” Charlie Root, the Braves pitching coach, who had played for Grimm’s pennant winners with the Cubs in 1932 and 1935, the man who went back decades with Grimm, said the skipper was “jittery” and that he had been able to feel the tension on the club since joining the team before spring training. Following a 7–2 loss against the Giants—when Adcock and Logan made errors in a four-run third—John Quinn told Grimm he wanted to talk to the team. Like a dad scolding his little kid, Quinn made Grimm sit in the clubhouse and listen while he let the Braves have it. They weren’t hustling, Quinn said. Quinn looked around the room—at Aaron and Mathews, Burdette and Spahn and the rest—frothing that they were “letting down the fans” and “letting down the club as well.”
When Quinn finished setting fire to their tail feathers, a somber Grimm closed the door and told his boys, “I may not be here much longer, but as long as I am, nobody is going to tell you fellas anything like that. You are hustling. You’re hustling so much that you’re pressing. I know darn well that you want to win as much as anybody.”
Against the Giants, Spahn lost again, 3–1 to Johnny Antonelli, the man traded for the plummeting Thomson. Playing left, Henry committed an error and, representing the tying run, flied out to left to end the game. Before the final game of the home stand, Grimm composed himself, confronted Quinn, and told him he’d had no right to dress down his team. That was Charlie’s way. Quinn and Perini had never played the game at the big-league level and, as far as he was concerned, they didn’t know how hard it was. He was the manager, but the player in Charlie Grimm always ruled. In the meeting, Grimm was fired up, and he decided he wanted ans
wers. He wanted to know where he stood as the manager, not just on that day but in the future. He wanted an assurance that Quinn would leave his team alone and let him manage. What he got instead was a phone call from Perini, who said coldly, “We’re going to discuss your case when you get to New York.”
Spahn finished the home stand by striking out ten in a 5–2 win over the Giants to snap the losing streak and save face. Willie went three for three with a homer, but the Braves had finally won a game. Even so, the Milwaukee fans didn’t bring milk and cheese to the yard, but more boos. In losing ten of the fifteen games of the home stand, Milwaukee scored forty-one runs. In those three games against the Cubs alone, the Braves had scored thirty-five. They may have been only two games out after the carnage, but the Braves had come home in first place and now left for the longest road trip of the year in fifth, officially in the second division behind Cincinnati, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and the Dodgers. The Braves hit the road with a record of 24–20. The first stop—and the last for Charlie Grimm—was Brooklyn.
Once in Brooklyn, the end came quickly. In the opener, Friday night, June 15, Perini watched from the Ebbets Field press box during the game and was pelted with questions by the blood-smelling reporters.
“Are you prepared to say that Grimm77 is your manager for the rest of the year?”
“I am prepared to say nothing.”
“Are you thinking about making a change?”
“I’m not prepared to say anything about that, either.”
BURDETTE STONED THE Dodgers for seven innings, up 4–2 in the eighth. But with one out, Rocky Nelson (batting average, .208) homered and Hodges walked. Grimm sent for Dave Jolly, who walked Campanella and gave up the game-tying single to Furillo. In the bottom of the ninth, Lou Sleater got Pee Wee Reese, but Duke Snider doubled. Randy Jackson was walked intentionally and Nelson grounded out.
If Perini was still unsure what to do with his manager, what happened next sealed the fate of Charlie Grimm. With Snider on third and Jackson on second and two out in a tie game, Grimm ordered Charlie Root out to the mound to replace Sleater with Ernie Johnson. With forty-one years in the game, Grimm’s logic was sound: Campanella followed Hodges, and the left-handed Sleater would not face the right-handed Campanella.
Except that Rube Walker, the lefty, had already replaced Campanella in the top of the inning. Now, with the losing run on third, Grimm had put himself in the disadvantageous position, his right-handed pitcher facing the lefty Walker. Root was halfway to the pitching mound and Johnson had left the bull pen when Grimm pulled the fire alarm, yelling frantically for Root to get back to the dugout. But the switch had already been signaled to home plate umpire Artie Gore. Grimm caught a lucky break when Gore allowed him to rescind the switch, leaving the lefty Sleater to face the lefty Walker. The Dodger manager, Walter Alston, went ballistic, telling Gore he was playing the game under protest. But it didn’t matter. Lefty or righty, protest or not, brain cramp forgiven, fate still had other plans for Charlie Grimm. Sleater threw a first-pitch fastball, which Walker ripped for the game-winning base hit. The Braves lost anyway, 5–4.
After the game, Perini left the press box, muttering, “We’re not getting as much out of this club as we should.”
The denouement came the next afternoon, with Roger Craig shutting Milwaukee down again, 2–0 in the eighth. Adcock banged a pinch homer to make it 2–1 and Mathews singled to tie it. The Dodgers did it again in the bottom of the inning when Snider homered off Ernie Johnson. The Braves put two on in the top of the ninth, but Bruton grounded out to second to end it. In the span of two weeks, the Braves had lost twelve out of seventeen, and against their rivals, the Dodgers, the team they knew they had to beat in order to be considered big-league, championship-level, Milwaukee was 1–5.
When the game ended, Perini invited the Milwaukee writers to his suite at the Commodore Hotel for a drink. Shortly after they arrived, Grimm walked in and told the group he was finished. “I’ve decided to give someone else a crack at this job.”
He was out. It wasn’t Durocher, however, who walked through the clubhouse door the next night, but one of his old disciples, white-haired, five-foot-five-inch Fred Haney. Haney had joined the Braves as a coach to start the season, after having managed the Pirates the previous three years, the same Pirate team whose success against the Braves in 1955 had cost them the pennant. Haney was now the boss.
As for Perini, he lamented how his little mom-and-pop baseball operation had succumbed to the sudden hunger of the fans and a flash flood of expectations.
“I can’t understand the people,” he said. “We get two or three games behind and they want Charlie to be fired or they want him to resign. I think it’s a terrible thing.”
The truth, as always, was quite different. The fans wanted Grimm’s scalp, in no small part because it was Perini who had whipped up the expectations in the first place. It was Perini who had told anyone who would listen that these Braves were nothing less than pennant winners.
Bob Wolf pecked out his column for The Sporting News, and concluded that Grimm had never been able to overcome his banjo-playing, roll ’em out and let’s drink image. He was too close to his players. They wanted to laugh with Charlie and drink with him, feel safe with him, win or lose. But camaraderie was one thing. Not being able to beat the Dodgers had proven something else: With a pot of gold in the middle of the table, the Braves didn’t know how to collect. The Dodgers had been dizzy, reeling, and instead of a kayo, six games against the Braves were what had gotten them straight. The Braves had Burdette and Spahn and Mathews and Adcock and Aaron, Wolf wrote, and still didn’t know how to reach across the table and bring the money home.
Why did Grimm fail to produce the pennant winner Perini and the fans of Milwaukee thought they should have had? The consensus is that his easy-going manner got the best of him, just as it apparently had in his two terms with the Cubs. The club appeared to lack the competitive spark.
For the papers, Charlie gave Milwaukee one last smile. Sporting a polka-dot shirt and cream-colored blazer, a cigarette in his left hand, Charlie mugged for the cameras, shaking Fred Haney’s hand with his right.
ALTHOUGH FRED HANEY knew a Cadillac when he saw one, he knew he wouldn’t have it for long if he didn’t learn how to drive, and fast. Haney had been around the Braves enough to know his wasn’t a 24–22 team. His first act as commandant was to crush the element on the Braves that preferred barmaids to first place. Over the first weeks of his tenure, Haney would manage quite differently from the way Grimm had. Haney called frequent meetings, if for no reason other than to give the drinkers on the club something to think about. He promised to deal with the “two or three playboys” on the club. One, of course, was Mathews, but he wasn’t going anywhere. Mathews had trouble even when he wasn’t exactly involved. Take the night of May 12, when he hit his fourth homer of the year in a 10–6 loss at Cincinnati. Mathews showed up at the ballpark for a doubleheader the next day sporting cuts on each side of his face. It turned out that a woman had thrown a glass in his direction and shards of glass were now deeply lodged into his face. No matter, Mathews went four for eight in sweeping two from the Redlegs, but too many times the edge the Braves needed was being left in the bar.
Jim Pendleton, the versatile utility man who was also Henry’s roommate, was another story. Pendleton, who possessed a big appetite for long legs and drink but couldn’t hit his weight, was sent out to Wichita the day Haney was hired. Felix Mantilla, the infielder from Puerto Rico who had been Henry’s teammate in Jacksonville, was called up. The two would room together.
There was something else about Haney that differed dramatically from Grimm. Haney had no problem pointing out a player’s mistakes in front of the whole team. He was, after all, a Durocher man, and he knew the value of peer pressure, of being embarrassed in front of the club. Mental mistakes would not be tolerated. A ball getting by or a throw coming in low was one thing, but not knowing how many outs there were or not taking the e
xtra base was quite another. Under Fred Haney these types of errors would definitely cost players money. The difference was that Durocher was a better psychologist than Haney. Durocher knew that he needed Willie Mays to win and never embarrassed Willie. To do so would have sent Mays retreating into his shell. On the Braves, Henry was the rising star. Even at this juncture in his career it was clear he possessed the most all-around talent.
Yet Haney had no problem criticizing Henry. Or anybody.
In the Braves first test under Haney, a doubleheader at Ebbets, Adcock won it in the ninth with a home run that went over the roof. The New York Times photo caption said it was the first time anyone had hit a ball out of Ebbets. In the nightcap, Adcock hit another, this time off Don Newcombe, and the Braves had not only swept the day, 3–1, but done something they hadn’t done all season. They’d beaten the Dodgers in consecutive games.
And so it went for Fred Haney, two months of rolling sevens. As they headed into Forbes Field for four games, it wasn’t lost on any of the Braves that no team gave them more trouble than the Pirates, but Haney handled his former club. Spahn and Burdette won the first two games, and the Braves broke the Pirates for a five-run fifth in winning the third, and Henry’s first-inning triple started a rout in the finale for a four-game sweep. The Braves went back to New York for four with the Giants in Harlem, and it was more of the same. Mathews bombed a home run to win the opener. The Braves rallied for two in the ninth to win the second and swept a doubleheader for their tenth win in a row. In Philadelphia the next night, Pakfo started a three-run eighth with a bunt single and the Braves won 8–5.
The streak ended the next day in Philadelphia, but after Grimm was fired, the Braves had catapulted four teams in the standings, suddenly playing .600 ball and leading the league over an upstart Cincinnati club as well as the Dodgers.
The Last Hero Page 16