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

by David Halberstam

  That day Parnell felt comfortable. He was pleased with his speed and with the movement of the ball. He did not need to overthrow. He stayed in front of the hitters all day long. Four hits and three walks—that was all he gave up. Jim Turner graded him high: “Good fastball and curve. Very good control. Keeps curve low. Good in clutch. Outstanding pitcher this year.” It was his twenty-fifth win of the season.

  There were 6 games to play for both teams, and after 148 games they were dead even.

  Never was Phil Rizzuto more important to the Yankees. McCarthy had been known to say, “We don’t win on power, we win on defense.” The key to that defense was Rizzuto. “You want to know the key to our team,” Billy Johnson, the third baseman, once told Ted Williams, “it’s that little guy there. Without him we’re just another team. You have to be with us to know, because what you see once in a while we see every day.” To Johnny Pesky, his opposite number on the Red Sox, he was in those years “the best shortstop I’d ever seen. He was so quick, with extraordinarily quick feet, he could always make the plays. He was the best shortstop of the era—he held that team together the way Pee Wee Reese held the Dodgers together.”

  The Yankee regulars were very much aware of Rizzuto’s value. It was understood that since he was small and physically vulnerable, Rizzuto had to be protected. If any opposing player went into second hard at him, the Yankee players would immediately retaliate against the opposing infielders and the Yankee pitchers would throw at the offending player. Earlier that year, Pesky had taken Rizzuto out in a play at second. The next time DiMaggio was up he singled. DiMaggio turned at first, never hesitating, and raced for second, though it was obvious he had no chance. He laid a savage block on Doerr as revenge.

  To the Yankee pitchers there was something special about Rizzuto’s ability to anticipate the ball and make the play. He had come up to the majors eight years earlier, and he was in his prime in 1949. Those who watched the Yankees and Boston every day thought him the most-valuable player in the American League. (He came in second in the voting. Ted Williams won while he and Joe Page split the ostensible Yankee vote and came in second and third. The next year he did win the award.) No one valued Rizzuto more than the Yankee pitchers, off whose earned-run averages he was saving a half-run or more. “I remember when I first came up for the Yankees and in my first inning someone hit a shot which went right by me which was going out over second like a rocket,” said Frank Shea. “I thought ‘base hit,’ and never even followed the ball. Then I heard the crowd roar and I looked around and saw that Rizzuto had made the play quite easily, and I thought to myself, ‘Welcome to the big leagues, Spec.’ ” Vic Raschi admired the suppleness with which Rizzuto seemed to make every play. His arm was not very strong—in fact, it was almost weak—so he had to play in rather than deep, which meant giving up the angles. Even so, his throws to first had a unique softness. A typical Rizzuto play, Raschi thought, was always close at first, the ball reaching the first baseman’s glove just a split second before the runner touched the bag. This was true not just on hard plays, but on the easy ones as well. Raschi could usually hear the pop of the ball entering the glove, and then a split second later the slightly softer sound of the runner hitting the bag. Always a cliff-hanger, Raschi thought, and yet he always makes the play. For Whitey Ford, the ball going to first seemed to travel so slowly that it looked like a parachute opening.

  Some of the first basemen, of course, hated that style; they were sure they were going to be spiked. They were always complaining about the lateness of the throws. That was about his only liability, other than the fact that he could not jump very well.

  “Phil, you’ve got to jump,” Coleman would tell him after a close play at second.

  Rizzuto would answer, “Jerry, I did jump.”

  When Rizzuto finished high school in Brooklyn he had been a good enough all-around athlete to earn college scholarships at both Columbia and Fordham. These were not just for baseball but for football as well. Rizzuto, a high school quarterback who weighed 135 pounds, took one look at the Fordham linemen and decided to end his football career. There were three baseball tryouts in New York: Bill Terry of the Giants took one look at his size and didn’t even let him go up to bat; Casey Stengel of the Dodgers told him to go get a shoe-shine box, a remark neither forgotten nor forgiven; then the Yankees, with Paul Krichell, the famous scout, in attendance, offered him a minor-league contract for $65 a month. Rizzuto, never much given to holdouts, asked for a little more. The Yankees held a meeting and decided to sweeten it to $75. With that he chose baseball.

  Throughout his career Rizzuto loved to play the ingenue. When he had played in the minors in Kansas City, his teammates took him, in the great Southern tradition, on a snipe hunt. They went into a field at night and left him there with a giant sack. He was to hold it open and catch the snipes that they would drive into the field. Then, of course, they took off. It was the oldest gag in the book.

  He was the primary victim of the Yankees’ locker-room jokes. The pranks on Rizzuto were not unlike those played at a prep school, and indeed Rizzuto knew what was expected of him by his teammates, and he played to it. Because he was afraid of practically anything that moved, gags often involved some live animal being hidden in his clothes or belongings. It could be simple: Frank Shea putting a live snake in a handsome gift-wrapped box that looked like it contained jewelry and was addressed, “To my sports idol, from Jenny”; or Shea chasing him on the field with a live lobster. Or it could be more complicated: a group of players filling his bunk on the train with five crabs. The entire team would wait up for his screams as he came tearing down the aisle in his pajamas. Once Lindell, knowing that Rizzuto was particularly afraid of birds, got hold of a live bird and tied it to the inside of a drawer where Rizzuto put his valuables every day when he dressed for the game. When Rizzuto put his hand in the drawer, the bird moved and Rizzuto not only fled the room but refused to put his things in the drawer for three days.

  Once the Yankees were in Detroit and it rained heavily, forcing a delay. Finally the sun came out and the game was played. During the fifth inning, as the Yankees came in from the outfield, Lindell beckoned to Bobby Brown, the third baseman. “You won’t believe what I’ve got here.” He pulled some thirty nightcrawlers out of his back pocket. They had been coming to the surface after the rain, and he had dutifully collected them. In those days, when the players left the field to bat, they left their gloves on the field. Lindell managed to get Rizzuto’s glove and stuffed the fingers with his enormous worm collection. The other players were onto the gag and held Rizzuto up for a minute as the Yankees went back out on the field. That way he would be a little late getting back to his position and the explosion would come in full view of the crowd. Everyone was ready as Rizzuto got to shortstop. On came the glove. It was like someone had given him an electric shock. He threw the glove high into the air and did what looked like an Indian war dance. Both teams were incapacitated with laughter.

  This role in some part was a protective device; he played along with their gags because they symbolized not just his role but also his acceptance. When he had first joined the Yankees he had been called Little Dago to DiMaggio’s Dago or Big Dago. The only time he resented being called Dago was when Leo Durocher used the phrase in a harsh way. Rizzuto knew that baseball was the first great American opportunity for the Italian immigrants. He had been an eighteen-year-old high school kid when DiMaggio had become the first Italian superstar. Rizzuto could remember going to the Stadium and sitting in the bleachers, which were filled with Italian immigrants. Most of them could not speak English and barely understood the rules of baseball. But they would wave flags and unfurl banners they had smuggled in.

  When Rizzuto joined the Yankees himself, he thought that the Italian-American players were still feeling their way. The tone of a baseball locker room was still set by rural Southern boys who had their own language, and habits. It did not occur to them that they might be different, or that other
Americans had different habits. But in that atmosphere, the Italians were different—they did not hunt or fish or chew tobacco. Most had grown up in homes where their parents did not speak English. In a generation or two that would change, but for the moment the Italian players mostly kept to themselves and spoke on the one subject about which they were sure—baseball. That was one reason why Rizzuto enjoyed the teasing. It meant that he was not just a baseball player but a full-fledged American.

  Rizzuto played in all but one game that season. He became the leader, and yet he was also the kid. If a few of the players went out to speak on behalf of the Yankees and they were given $50 apiece, he would say (for part of his role was that he was scared of Cora, his wife), “Now, I’m not going to tell Cora about this.”

  They also continued to tease him about his glove. It was practically a museum piece. He had bought it for ten dollars when he first broke in. By 1949 it was perilously close to having terminal rot. Every year Harry Latina, who was the Rawlings glove man, repaired it. In addition, a shoemaker near the Stadium worked on it two or three times a year. It was a relic from an era when ballplayers used much smaller gloves, barely bigger than their hands. It had not only been filled with worms, but also bugs and chewing tobacco, the last mostly by Pete Suder and Nellie Fox, prominent Rizzuto tormentors from other teams. The clubhouse gag was that it should have gone to Cooperstown in 1918, the year Rizzuto was born. But Rizzuto loved it. Part of its appeal was superstition, because he had gotten it when he came to the major leagues. But also the glove felt right. Because it was so small, he could dig the ball out quickly. Once Bobby Brown lent him a newer and bigger glove, and, to the applause of his teammates, he even tried it. But then someone hit a grounder right to him and he could not get the glove down in time. He immediately called time, walked back to the dugout, and got his own glove.

  With only six games left for each team, they met again in the Stadium. It was a sloppy game, and there were two critical plays that decided it. Boston drove Tommy Byrne out before he got a man out in the first. Then the Yankees came back and rallied for six runs. They went into the eighth leading 6-3. Stengel had brought Page in during the fifth inning. But then in the eighth, he faltered. Tebbetts singled to right. Lou Stringer walked. With runners on first and second and no outs, and the count 3-and-2, Dominic DiMaggio hit a sharp line drive right at Rizzuto. Both runners were off and running, and the ball was hit like a bullet. Triple play! Rizzuto thought, timing his jump perfectly. He speared the ball and got ready to make the throw to second, warning himself not to rush it. But he looked over and the runners were still moving, not scurrying backward to their bases. That’s really dumb baserunning, he thought. He reached for the ball and it was not there. It had torn through the webbing of his glove. Boston tied the score at 6-6. Now, with only one out, Pesky was on third and Williams was on first with Doerr at bat. Doerr suddenly dropped an almost perfect squeeze bunt. Tommy Henrich, back in the lineup but playing with a corset, seemed to anticipate it. He made a perfect play, firing home to Ralph Houk, who was catching. The throw appeared to beat Pesky by several yards. But Bill Grieve, the plate umpire, called Pesky safe. Houk charged Grieve, Stengel charged him, and the Yankee bench charged him. But safe Pesky remained. At first Pesky thought he might have slipped by the tag, but later, when he saw a sequence of photos, there was no doubt in his mind that he was out. (Much later, when Houk was managing Boston, and Pesky was one of his coaches, one of the Red Sox players found the old sequence of photos. He pinned them up in the locker room with a note saying, “Ralph, was he really out?”) But the play counted, and Cliff Mapes was fined for yelling at Grieve, “How much did you have bet on the game?” Henrich was disgusted. After the game a reporter asked him if Pesky had scored. “Only a mole could have scored on that play,” he answered. The Red Sox won 7-6. Ellis Kinder had pitched the last two innings of shutout relief to secure the victory. With five games left, the Red Sox were in first place. No one joked about Phil Rizzuto’s glove in the locker room that night.

  The win gave the Red Sox their first lead of the season. Of the five games left for the Red Sox, three were against Washington in Washington and two were in the Stadium. If they were nearly invincible at home, then going on the road was another story; they might be 61-16 in Fenway, but as they set out for Washington, their record on the road was 33-39. Still, Boston had a chance to lock the pennant up in Washington, for the Senators were not just a bad team, they were practically patsies for the Red Sox, having won only three of the previous nineteen matchups. Boston won the first game 6-4. Then came what many of the Red Sox would remember for years to come—the one they called the Scarborough game.

  Ray Scarborough was a very good Washington pitcher, perhaps their best, and also Boston’s nemesis. He had beaten Boston three times in the 1948 season, including a critical game at the end of the season. Scarborough was a right-handed pitcher, and he was nothing if not smart and crafty. Not only did he give the Boston right-handers a difficult time, but he was poison to their best left-handed hitter, Ted Williams. Scarborough could decoy Williams better than any other pitcher in the league. It was not just a matter of his selection of pitches, it was his motion as well. He would show fastball and then at the last minute go to his curve. Forty years later Williams paid Scarborough the ultimate accolade: He said that he probably chased more balls out of the strike zone with Ray Scarborough than with any other pitcher in the American League.

  On this day Scarborough was going for his thirteenth victory against only eleven defeats, a considerable achievement on so weak a team. He was at his best that day, holding the Red Sox to only four hits. But Chuck Stobbs was equally sharp, and he took a one-run Boston lead into the ninth. McCarthy had both Parnell and Kinder throwing in the bullpen. In the bottom of the ninth, with Boston leading 1-0, Roberto Ortiz led off for the Senators with a short single to left. Gil Coan, an exceptional base runner, ran for him. Ed Stewart sacrificed Coan to second. Ed Robinson hit a slow roller to Doerr, which Doerr fielded cleanly, but which Robinson beat out. Now there were runners on first and third with one out. Al Kozar then singled between third and short to score Coan and tie the game. Robinson went to second base. In came Kinder to pitch to Sam Dente. Dente singled cleanly to right field. In right Al Zarilla charged the ball, holding Robinson at third. That loaded the bases. Buddy Lewis was sent up to pinch-hit. McCarthy waved Parnell in from the bullpen. Some of the Boston players were ready for a squeeze attempt. On Parnell’s third pitch Robinson broke for the plate. But Tebbetts picked up the play, moved over to make the tag, and Parnell threw a perfect pitch for him to handle. Robinson was easily out. Two outs. But Kozar moved to third. Parnell had Lewis l-and-2, and on his next pitch he simply put too much on it. It might have been a great pitch, but it broke too much. It was low and bounced wide of the plate. Tebbetts stabbed at it, but it was past him. Washington won 2-1. Ted Williams had gone hitless. A year later, largely at the urging of Ted Williams, it was said, the Red Sox traded for Ray Scarborough, by then thirty-five. But it was too late for him, and too late for them. He lasted a little more than one season before moving on.

  CHAPTER 14

  WHILE THE RED SOX played with the Senators, the Yankees took on the Athletics, winning two of three. The Red Sox came into the Stadium with a one-game lead, with two games left to play. All they had to do was to win one of two against the Yankees. Had the Red Sox won the Scarborough game, they would have had a virtual lock on the pennant, a two-game lead. The Yankees would have been forced to win both games, and then there would have been a one-game playoff—meaning the Yankees would have had to win three in a row. Most of the Yankee players had waited in the Yankee locker room to listen to Mel Allen’s re-creation of that key Boston-Washington game, and the tension had been enormous. Jerry Coleman was too nervous to listen with the others, so he had gone to his apartment a few blocks away on Gerard Avenue. The moment the game was over, his friend Charlie Silvera called him. “Did you hear?” Silvera asked. “Yes,�
�� Coleman said. “We’re still alive, Jerry,” Silvera said.

  Now the door was open just a little again. The Yankee veterans were confident that they would win. Fred Sanford, new to the team, new to the idea of winning, asked a few of his teammates whether, if the Yankees won the pennant, they got any money even if they lost in the World Series. The moment the words were out of his mouth, he realized he had made a terrible mistake. No one said anything to him, but the looks he got were very cold. These were the Yankees, he realized, and if you were a Yankee you never thought of losing, and you certainly did not talk about it. You expected to win and you won.

  The Boston writers coming to the Stadium early before the next-to-last game found out the same thing. Joe Cashman of the Record stopped to talk to Tommy Henrich. “Tommy, how do you feel—it must be hard to be behind after leading for most of the season?” What struck Cashman was how confident Henrich was. “Well, Joe,” he said, “we would have liked to have wrapped it up earlier, and maybe we should have, but we’re glad to be in this situation,” Henrich said. “We don’t have to depend on anyone winning it for us—we can do it ourselves. All we have to do is win two games. That’s fair enough.” These guys, Cashman thought, have played in so many games like this that they really do have an advantage.

  Tom Yawkey was equally confident. Wives had not accompanied the Boston players to New York, but Yawkey sent out word that every wife was to have her things packed. The moment the Red Sox clinched the pennant, a special train would leave for New York for a great celebration.

  Ted Williams, though, thought the Yankees had the advantage. It was their ball park, and it tilted away from most of the Red Sox lineup. The Yankee pitchers were not going to give him, the one left-handed power hitter, anything good to hit. He was right. The Yankees were convinced that they could handle Junior Stephens in the Stadium. His Fenway homers would become easy outs. But not so with Williams. Years later Allie Reynolds was at an All-Star Game when he suddenly felt a pair of immensely powerful arms wrap around him. He thought he was in a vise. “When are you going to give me a decent pitch to hit, you Indian SOB?” the voice belonging to the arms of Ted Williams asked. “Not as long as Junior’s hitting behind you,” laughed Reynolds. Williams normally liked to hit in the Stadium, but he hated it near the end of the season when the shadows were long. That made hitting much tougher. He thought the Yankee management should turn the lights on during day games at this time of the year, but he knew why they didn’t—it was an advantage to the Yankee pitchers, and New York’s strength was its pitchers, not its hitters. The Yankee hitters were accustomed to the shadows. But Williams, purist that he was, thought that anything that diminished a hitter’s ability subtracted from the game.