Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America

by David Halberstam

  For only part of the team’s success was due to Stengel; more than anything it had to do with George Weiss. The Keller-Henrich-DiMaggio team had represented the first flowering of the new farm system, which Weiss had built steadily even during the war, when most baseball executives had turned away from the long-range planning. By 1949 the team reflected Weiss’s careful stockpiling of talent. Coleman had emerged as a graceful second baseman; at third Bobby Brown was clearly a remarkable hitter. Berra, as a catcher, was showing signs that he could provide acceptable fielding skills to go with his hitting ability. Already the trademark of the Weiss era was emerging: The team was never to be allowed to grow old; sentiment was never to interfere with judgment. Each year there were to be three or four new players spliced into the team’s fabric.

  George Weiss was almost completely devoid of charm. But, along with Branch Rickey, Bill Veeck, and Larry MacPhail, he was one of the ablest baseball executives of his era. He might have loved baseball, but for him it was first and foremost a business. There was never any confusion over his objectives. He was ruthless and cold-blooded in contract negotiations; he had a God-given knack at contract time, one Yankee said, of turning healthy relationships into cold and bitter ones. Weiss firmly believed that a well-paid ballplayer was a lazy one. That gave him the philosophical justification to be penurious, but unbeknownst to the players he had a more basic motive: The lower the sum of all the players’ salaries, the greater the additional bonus he received from the owners. The owners gave Weiss a budget, say, $1 million a year. If Weiss kept the salaries down to, say, a total of $600,000 a year, he took home 10 percent of the remaining $400,000. It was not surprising, therefore, that in the fall of 1948 he strongly opposed paying DiMaggio $100,000. He did not want the base for the team’s best player to be that high, for it would become the goal that the other players would use. A few years later some of the players, including Lopat, discovered his side deal. Most of them hated him anyway. To discover that he had been secretly profiting by his own miserliness was almost too much.

  Weiss was immensely skillful at selling off players the Yankees did not need. A good minor-league ballplayer, he liked to say, was worth $40,000, and in most trades, since he was usually dealing from strength, he kept the pressure on until an extra ballplayer was thrown in by the other party. Then he would sell the player to some third club, keeping a significant percentage of the sale for himself.

  If the players resented Weiss, so did the writers, in part because they did not like the way he treated the players, and in part because they sensed his contempt for them. “I can buy any of these sons of bitches for a five-dollar steak,” he once told a friend, looking around a room filled with writers who were helping themselves to sandwiches and drinks in the Yankee clubhouse. He was, however, unusually sensitive to criticism, and he did not like it when Jimmy Cannon started calling him “Lonesome George” in print. When those columns appeared in the Post, Weiss came into Shor’s, put a bunch of them on the table, and started to complain about Cannon to Shor. “But what the hell, Toots,” he concluded, “who reads that guy anyway?” “You do, George,” Shor answered.

  His strength was attention to detail. Once during a Sunday doubleheader against the Indians with 60,000 people in the stands, Red Patterson was in the press box, and the phone rang. It was Weiss. He was checking the free-ticket list, and there was a name he did not recognize. It was, explained Patterson, the elevator operator from the Yankee office building. “The elevator operator from the office!!” Weiss exploded. He began an angry lecture about which games free tickets should be given to, and which they should not. Elevator operators went to day games against the Browns during the week. Patterson, overwhelmed with other work, blew up and quit on the spot.

  It was the way he always thought. At the team party celebrating the Yankees’ four-game sweep of the Phillies in the 1950 World Series, he managed to dampen the joyous occasion significantly by getting up and making a speech. He reminded the players that because the Series had lasted only four games, the owners had not made as much money as they should have; therefore, salaries would have to be held down in the coming year.

  Every day, Weiss liked to check in with people who worked for him, usually by calling them on the phone just before quitting time. He watched expense accounts like a hawk. He was convinced that his scouts were padding them, which they probably were because they were wretchedly paid. “Look,” he once said to Lee MacPhail, whose job it was to go over scouting expense accounts, “here he claims he drove three hundred miles and still saw a game that day. How can you do that?” MacPhail was new on the job, but he immediately knew that Weiss was telling him both that the scouts were not to be trusted, and that Weiss was watching him to see if he was tough enough to stay on. Years later Weiss was out in California going across the Golden Gate Bridge with one of his scouts. The toll was twenty-five cents. As they reached the other side, Weiss turned to the scout and said, “I just want you to know that you’ve been billing me fifty cents for each trip all these years.”

  No one was ever perfect; everyone, it was clear, always let him down a little, and therefore everyone else should be on the defensive. Once Weiss visited the Newark ball park. Parke Carroll, the general manager, knew Weiss was a perfectionist and decided that this time the park would be in perfect shape. Even Weiss would not be able to complain. Never had the field looked so good, never had the seats, freshly painted, seemed to shine so. When the visit was over Carroll was beaming, until Weiss took him aside. “Parke,” he said, “I have to tell you that on the way down the ramp I stopped in a pay phone and the windows on it were dusty. I have to tell you that I’m disappointed, very disappointed.” On another occasion when Lee MacPhail was running the Kansas City farm team, Weiss had driven over during spring training to the minor-league park at Lake Wales, Florida. For MacPhail it was a big day because he was finally going to learn which players the parent club was going to give him for the season. It was also a beautiful day, although attendance at Lake Wales was never very high. MacPhail sat in the stands watching the game, listening to Weiss, when suddenly Weiss noticed two young kids climbing over a fence in right field. These kids were going to watch a Yankee farm team play in spring training for free! All other business stopped. “Lee, this sort of thing really must stop at once! We’ve got to stop kids from doing things like that,” he said.

  His obsessiveness was very difficult for those around him. When in 1960 the Yankees let him go, for a brief time he was unemployed. He was not at all easy for his wife, Hazel, to deal with then. “I married George,” she said of those days, “for better and for worse, but not for lunch.”

  But no one could question the success of Weiss’s scouting system. It made his reputation in the early thirties. Colonel Ruppert was tired of paying a lot of money for older ballplayers, and he brought in Weiss to create a farm system, modeled on what Rickey had done in St. Louis. Weiss put together a network of great scouts. He did not pay them well, but he left them alone. He accepted the idea that scouts were, as a breed, eccentric. He might hear from them only when they felt like it, and if they went off on a tear once in a while, he learned to live with that. But he listened to those scouts, and if they said to take a chance, he took that chance.

  He wanted, he made it clear, a Yankee type. A Yankee type was first of all a good ballplayer, but he should also be a gent and look like a Yankee. Yogi Berra or no, there was a Yankee look. If at all possible, he was physically big. At one meeting Paul Krichell started to describe a prospect: “You’re going to love him—good hitter, good fielder, great jaw—he really looks like a Yankee.” Weiss also wanted players who did not cause problems. Vic Power might have been the most talented first-base prospect in the Yankee organization, an almost sure bet to be the team’s first black player. In 1952 Power had hit .331 and driven in 109 runs at Kansas City. But he was flashy on the field and flashy off the field. (“I’m the original showboat hotdog,” he once noted.) He was said to be fond of white
women. But there was no denying his talent, or the fact that the Yankees were slower than almost any other major-league club in bringing up a black. Fan expectations had been building, in no small part because of Power’s minor-league credentials. The first thing management had to do was discredit Power. It moved, of course, through the writers. Typically, they planted a story with Dan Daniel, who was, as ever, accommodating. “Power is major-league material right up to his Adam’s apple,” Daniel wrote. “North of that location he is not extraordinary. He is said to be not too quick on the trigger mentally.” That was it for Power, who was returned to Kansas City in 1953, and soon traded out of the organization. He was not a Yankee type.

  It was generally made clear, anyway, that a black player was not a Yankee type. The prejudice that existed in the nation at large extended to sports. Prejudice was merely perceived as the norm: Segregation existed but it did not exist, because it was not seen and not written about. That generation of players was white, and the Yankees and the Red Sox were to remain the whitest in professional baseball, among the last to integrate black players—the Yankees brought Elston Howard up in 1955 and Boston brought Pumpsie Green up in 1959. The top people in both organizations were, despite Jackie Robinson’s wildly successful debut in 1947, disdainful of black talent.

  The Yankees thought of themselves as the elite team of baseball. They felt they did not need black players (as the Dodgers, a poorer cousin in Brooklyn, did) because their teams were already so good, their farm system so well stocked, and their overall operation so profitable. The whites-only policy reflected the attitudes of men, born around or before the turn of the century, who felt the use of black players tainted their operation. They were the snobs of baseball. Once during the thirties, Ed Barrow had noticed a well-dressed young woman in the grandstand smoking a cigarette. He sent an assistant to tell her to put it out. This kind of behavior—a woman smoking—was not tolerated at Yankee games. The same attitude existed about black players. They would, management believed, draw black fans, who would in turn scare away the good middle-class white fans. When the question of blacks, or Negroes, as they were then called, arose, the Yankee answer was that they would sign one when they found one worthy of being a Yankee.

  With the Red Sox, it was a less-refined sort of racism. The top management of the Red Sox was mostly Irish, the most powerful group in Boston. They had established their own ethnic pecking order, which in essence regarded Wasps with respect and grudging admiration for being where they already were; Jews with both admiration and suspicion for being smart, perhaps a little too smart; and Italians by and large with disdain for being immigrants and Catholic and yet failing to be Irish. Blacks were well below the Italians.

  In 1949, both the Red Sox and the Yankees, despite the recommendations of their scouts, failed to sign one of the ablest if not the ablest black player of the coming era: Willie Mays, who was playing for the Birmingham Black Barons.

  The Yankees sent Bill McCorry, who was a Southerner, to scout him. As the head office obviously knew, McCorry did not want any blacks to play for the Yankees. He reported back that Mays could not hit the curveball. For years afterward John Drebinger of the Times would tease McCorry, who was also a Yankee road secretary, whenever Mays hit a home run. “Do you think it was by any chance a curve, Bill?” he would ask. “I don’t care what he did today or any other day,” McCorry would say, as quoted by Peter Golenbock. “I got no use for him or any of them. I wouldn’t want any of them on the club I was with. I wouldn’t arrange a berth on the train for any of them.”

  Boston’s lapse regarding Mays was even worse. Since the white Birmingham Barons were a Red Sox farm club, it was assumed Boston had an edge on picking up black players in the Birmingham area. Eddie Glennon, the white Barons’ general manager, had seen Mays play and called Joe Cronin. But at first Cronin failed even to send a scout to see Mays.

  George Digby, the Red Sox scout in the area, heard about Mays from Glennon, and the next time he was in Birmingham he stayed over when the white Barons left to watch Mays play a Sunday doubleheader. Digby was thirty-one, a former minor-league player. He saw immediately that Mays was going to be a great player. Not just a good player, but a great player. Mays was still in high school, but the speed was already there, and his arm was better than most major leaguers’. But the most surprising thing was that he hit the ball with such incredible power for so skinny a kid. Mays seemed to be joyous, full of enthusiasm for the game. Everyone who knew him said he was sweet, and God knows he was poor, which further appealed to Digby.

  If Digby as a scout had a prejudice, it was not about color, it was about economics. He always looked for poor boys, kids who were from the cotton fields or the melon fields or the tobacco fields and who never wanted to go back to them. That guaranteed a good attitude. Scouts, Digby knew, were supposed to project, to look at the bodies of boys and see the bodies of men, and he did that with Mays and was impressed.

  “Is he as good as I said?” asked Glennon. Digby said he was right, that Mays was every bit as good as he claimed. Glennon suggested they call Joe Cronin at his home that afternoon. When the Red Sox general manager came on the phone, it was clear to Digby that Glennon had talked often and enthusiastically to him about Mays in the past. Glennon spoke first and told Cronin, “Here’s Digby—he’ll tell you whether I’m right or not and whether this kid is a great prospect.” Digby took the phone. “He’s the best-looking kid I’ve seen all year,” Digby began. He knew from Glennon that he could buy the rights to Mays for $5,000 from Tom Hayes, the black Memphis undertaker who owned the Black Barons. But Digby sensed an immediate coolness in place of the usual enthusiasm he got from Cronin. The more he talked, the more he could feel Cronin pulling back. “Do you want me to follow up on him and watch him some more?” Digby asked. It was, after all, his territory, and this was a great prospect. “No,” Cronin answered, “no need for that. We’ll send someone in.”

  So Cronin sent in Larry Woodall, their pitching coach, a former major-league catcher and a Southerner. Woodall, not surprisingly, reported that Mays was not the Red Sox type. They signed instead a much older player, Lorenzo (Piper) Davis, the player-manager of the team. Davis was thirty-three, though his baseball age, to buy him some more playing time, was thirty-one.

  Racism, in fact, ran rampant through the Red Sox organization. Clif Keane was stunned once when, as a sport-writer covering the Red Sox, he watched the great Minnie Minoso, a black Cuban ballplayer, work out in pregame drills during the fifties. He said almost innocently to Mike Higgins, the Red Sox manager at the time, “You know, that’s probably the best all-around player in the league.” Higgins turned angrily on him. “You’re nothing but a fucking nigger lover,” Higgins said.

  For the moment the failure to sign black players did not hurt either the Yankees or the Red Sox. Both were strong teams with strong farm systems. But the Red Sox had lost the chance to have Willie Mays play alongside Ted Williams for a decade; and the Yankees, although Mickey Mantle brought them a decade of excellence, came on hard times in the mid-sixties because they had missed out on the great black players of the time.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE RED SOX WERE in desperate shape. The losses in the doubleheader put them twelve games back. There were rumors in the Boston press that McCarthy would be fired before the week was out. But on July 5, still playing in Yankee Stadium, they began to turn things around—thanks to a rookie. The rookie was Maurice McDermott. With 60,000 fans in the Stadium, he held the Yankees to 4 hits and 2 runs, while striking out 7, and beat them 4-2. It was his third victory with the Red Sox.

  In June McCarthy had asked for and gotten Mickey McDermott from Louisville. McDermott was six feet two and seemed even taller because he was so skinny. Blessed with remarkable natural talent, he had a whip for an arm, the scouting reports said, and had shown his talent at such a young age that Boston had originally signed him when he was fourteen. He was too young, so the contract was invalid. Boston resigned him two yea
rs later. In 1946 he posted a record of 16-6 in Louisville. Every year he showed up at spring training and dazzled management and veterans with his talent, his wildness, and his capacity for flakiness.

  McDermott was nothing if not cocky. He had hoped to make the club in 1948, and had been furious when he was sent down to the minors. At Scranton he simply overpowered the hitters he faced. Soon Johnny Murphy, the head of the Red Sox farm system, dropped by to see him in Scranton. “Kid,” he said, “I hear you’re getting that control. Keep it up and you’ll be back in the big leagues soon for good.” Most rookies would have been thrilled with that prophecy. Not McDermott. He reached for Murphy’s tie. “Kid,” he said, “your tie is too small. I thought I gave you the word once already. Here, let me fix it for you.” He untied the tie of the farm director, and retied it in a Windsor knot. Murphy soon departed. “You know,” McDermott told a group of sportswriters, “that Murphy, he’ll never learn.”

  In 1949, he struck out 117 men in only 77 innings in Louisville. He had been sure he was going to the big club and had told reporters, “Last year I wasn’t ready. I was so nervous that I couldn’t find the plate. I realized I needed time in the minors. I’m ready now. I’ve quit trying to throw too hard. Control is the thing, and I think I have it.” Not everyone agreed, particularly those who batted against him. In Louisville, for the first time, he seemed to master his wildness. In one game he struck out twenty men. When he came up from the minors he was only twenty years old and probably had more natural talent than any pitcher on the staff, including Parnell.

  In June, with Boston playing its worst baseball of the year, McDermott became a member of the regular rotation. He was all ears and elbows; years later he would look at his photo in Life magazine and say, “There, there it is, see for yourself, no wonder I could never get laid.” He drove McCarthy crazy. “Maurice,” the old man had told him in spring training, “all you have to do is aim for the middle of the plate and they’ll all jump in the barrel for you.” But he took no advice. “Maurice, can I tell you a few things?” Mel Parnell once said to him that year. “Not a few things, just one thing,” McDermott answered. “Maurice,” Parnell said, “I don’t think the world is ready for you yet.” McDermott wanted to throw the ball past anyone he faced, in his own words, “Hard, harder, hardest.”