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

by David Halberstam

  It was a sports promoter’s dream: the two great rivals playing two games at the very end of the season with the pennant in the balance. The pitching matchups were perfect—Reynolds against Parnell, and Raschi against Kinder. The great question was: Would DiMaggio be able to get back into the lineup? He had been sick with viral pneumonia for almost two weeks, during which time he had lost eighteen pounds. But he was determined to play. The first of those two games in the Stadium was, by chance, Joe DiMaggio Day. The Yankee star, drawn and emaciated, husbanding his energy, had been forced to stand in front of the huge crowd of 69,551 while receiving endless gifts. His mother had come east for the games (his father had died earlier in the year), and she was introduced to the crowd. She came on the field and, much to the amusement of the huge crowd, raced past Joe to greet Dominic in the Red Sox dugout—she had seen Joe the day before but had not yet seen Dom. Dominic came out of the Red Sox dugout to be a part of the ceremonies, and he could feel his brother leaning heavily on him. Dominic was wary of staying too long in Joe’s spotlight, and he quietly asked his brother if he should leave. Joe quickly said, “No, don’t go!” and Dominic understood that Joe needed him to lean on.

  Darnell was sure it was going to be a great game; he thought Allie Reynolds was a magnificent competitor. This was a great Yankee team, Parnell thought, far better than most people realized, with an exceptional blend of the old and the new: DiMaggio, Henrich, Berra, Bauer, and Woodling, and that great pitching staff; also a late-season pickup—Johnny Mize. No one should underrate a team that had Johnny Lindell and Johnny Mize on its bench. Maybe the 1927 Yankees had been as good, but Parnell was by no means sure.

  When he got up that morning Allie Reynolds felt strong and ready; it was one of those glorious days when he felt he could throw a ball through a battleship. Then he went out to the mound and his control simply evaporated. It was, he later decided, probably a case of overpitching, of trying too hard. The game started as a disaster for the Yankees. The Red Sox scored one run in the first—Dom DiMaggio singled, Williams singled, Reynolds threw a wild pitch that moved DiMaggio to third. Then Junior Stephens lined to left and Dom DiMaggio scored.

  In the Boston third Reynolds did himself in. It was clear to his infielders that he was unable to find his true rhythm. He got Dom DiMaggio out on a well-hit ball to right. But then he walked Pesky, Williams, and Stephens. Doerr sliced a ball just past Coleman, and Pesky scored. The Red Sox led 2-0 with the bases filled and only one out. Stengel immediately brought in Joe Page. It might be only the third inning, but there was no time to waste. If Stengel needed a relief pitcher the next day, he could always use Reynolds. But Page started disastrously. He walked Zarilla, forcing in a run. Then he walked Billy Goodman on four pitches. That made it 4-0. The Yankee bench was completely silent. Two runs walked in, and Birdie Tebbetts was at bat. On the bench, Gus Niarhos kept thinking to himself, The one hope we have with Page is his rising fastball. Probably no pitcher in the league, he thought, forced hitters to chase as many bad balls as Page. The ball left Page’s hand looking like it was going to be in the zone, but it kept rising, and the hitter could not control himself. Now, with one out and the bases loaded, Niarhos sensed that Page, wild though he was, might work himself out of it. Tebbetts seemed to want to end the game right then and there. Birdie swung away, trying to kill the ball; He jumped on three pitches, all of them, Niarhos thought, well out of the strike zone. Then Page struck out Parnell, a good hitter, again with pitches outside the strike zone. Maybe now Joe will settle down, Niarhos thought. But Boston had a 4-0 lead.

  That looked like a very big lead for a team as good as Boston. Some of the Yankees thought a critical moment had taken place in the third inning. In the bottom of the third, when Rizzuto came up, Tebbetts began to needle him. With Rizzuto, Tebbetts usually concentrated on his Italian origins, his size, and his hitting ability: “You goddamn little Dago, you know you can’t hit the ball out of the infield. You know you should be out behind the Stadium playing in some kids’ game,” he would say. This time he went further. With Boston’s big lead, he couldn’t resist. Rizzuto fouled off a pitch, and while they were waiting to get a new ball, Tebbetts started in. “Hey Rizzuto,” he said, “tomorrow at this time we’ll be drinking champagne, and we’ll pitch the Yale kid against you guys. Think you can hit a kid from Yale, Rizzuto?” He was referring to Frank Quinn, the bonus-baby pitcher out of Yale who had pitched a total of twenty-two innings and had never started a game. (Tebbetts denies saying this, but the memory of it and Rizzuto’s reaction remain fresh with almost all the Yankees.)

  Rizzuto was stunned and then angered. He grounded out, and on the way back to the dugout he hurled his bat. Then he kicked the water cooler. “Do you know what that goddamn Tebbetts just said,” he shouted. “They’re going to pitch the kid from Yale against us tomorrow!” Rizzuto was normally mild-mannered and slow to anger. No one on the team had ever seen him like this before. The Yankee dugout, which had been silenced by Reynolds’s failure and the four-run Boston lead, began to come alive. Henrich remembered it as if the entire team had been slapped in the face. But Vic Raschi had a terrible feeling that the season was slipping away from them. He sat in the dugout squeezing a baseball with his right hand to control his nervous tension.

  By the fourth it was obvious to everyone in the Yankee dugout that Page was overpowering on this day. His ball was fast, and he had great movement on it. Vic Raschi, watching from the bench, decided that the Red Sox were not going to add to their lead, that now it was a matter of trying to chip away at it. On the Red Sox bench, Johnny Pesky, watching Page, was awed. This was a great pitcher at his best. This was pure power. Page was pitching without deception on this day. There were no curves, no change-ups. Every pitch was a challenge. It was as if he were taunting the Red Sox hitters: Hit me if you can. God, what a pitcher, Pesky thought. This game was not over.

  In the fourth Joe DiMaggio came up. He had told Stengel earlier that he would try and play three innings, but at the end of the third he held up five fingers, meaning he would go at least five innings. He had struck out in the first inning, but now in the fourth he lined a double to right field. Billy Johnson struck out, but Bauer singled DiMaggio home with a hard shot to left. Lindell hit another hard single to left, sending Bauer to third. Then Coleman hit a fly to Dom DiMaggio and Bauer scored. It was 4-2.

  As the Yankees began to come back, Raschi squeezed the ball harder and harder. In the fifth, Rizzuto singled. Henrich hit a ball past first base, sending Rizzuto to third. Then Berra singled and Rizzuto scored, with Henrich stopping at second. With DiMaggio up, McCarthy pulled Parnell and brought in Joe Dobson. DiMaggio hit a vicious line drive low and to the right of the pitcher. With perfect fielding it might have been a double play. But Dobson did not get around on it quickly; the ball bounced off his glove and rolled fifteen feet behind the mound. By the time Dobson recovered it the bases were loaded. Billy Johnson hit into a double play, but Henrich scored. It was 4-4 now.

  The game continued 4-4 through the sixth and seventh innings. On the Yankee bench there was a sense of growing confidence. Page seemed untouchable. In the bottom of the eighth Stengel sent up both Bobby Brown and Cliff Mapes, left-handed pinch hitters, to face the right-handed Dobson. But Dobson handled them. The next man up was Lindell, a right-handed hitter. Stengel had the left-handed Charlie Keller on the bench. But Lindell already had two hits, and he had driven Williams back to the fence his first time up against Dobson; Stengel decided to stick with Lindell. Lindell was the team rogue. He was exuberant, generous, and crude, and his humor seemed to dominate the locker room. In order to avoid being snared by one of his gags, the others always checked to see where he was before they entered. Even the trainer’s table was not safe. A player lying down for treatment would often get whacked on the forehead by Lindell’s phallus, which was considered one of the wonders of the Yankee locker room. His favorite victims were Page and Rizzuto, but no one was spared. Coleman was christened “Sweets” be
cause he was so good-looking and because once at a restaurant he had ordered crabmeat in an avocado instead of steak, which was preferred by the other ballplayers. “Isn’t that sweet,” said Lindell, and the nickname stuck.

  Even DiMaggio was vulnerable. Once DiMaggio walked into the locker room in a beautiful and obviously expensive new Hawaiian sports shirt. Lindell immediately shouted out, “Hey, beautiful, where’d you get that sports shirt? You look pretty in it.” DiMaggio froze, his face reddened, and he never wore the shirt again. “We’ve got to keep the Dago honest,” said Lindell when the others looked at him quizzically.

  His teasing was generally good-natured, however, and he was generous with the younger players. When the team arrived in New York, he would take them to his favorite hangouts near the Stadium, including one where the specialty of the house was something called “The Lindell Bomber.” “Try one, you’re going to love it,” he told the young Charlie Silvera earlier that season. It turned out to be the biggest martini anyone had ever seen—as big as a birdbath. He was the bane of management because his off-field activities were so outrageous. He liked to boast about how much money George Weiss had spent putting private detectives on him.

  Lindell was a low-ball hitter, so Dobson and Tebbetts decided to feed him high fastballs. The first pitch was a ball. Again Dobson came in with a fastball. The ball was both high and inside. Lindell knew he was not going to see anything low. But he got ready, and he crushed the next ball. The moment he hit it, everyone knew it was a home run. We went to the well once too often, Dobson thought to himself. I had probably lost just enough off my fastball, and he was ready for it.

  Vic Raschi was thrilled; it meant that he was going to get a chance the next day at the biggest game of his life. The celebration in the clubhouse was almost out of control. Finally Joe DiMaggio decided to calm his teammates down. “Hey, we’ve got to win tomorrow,” he kept saying, “just don’t forget that. It’s not done yet.” But they had escaped a bullet, and it seemed inconceivable to them that they could come that close to defeat and not win the pennant. DiMaggio, they thought, was amazing. They knew he was desperately ill, but he had played the entire game and gotten two hits.

  John Lindell III was ten years old that summer and he did not like living in New York. As far as he was concerned, home was Arcadia, California. Arcadia was where his friends were. In New York there were thousands and thousands of little boys who would have given anything to have a father playing for the Yankees, but young John Lindell was not one of them. He had no interest in baseball, and when on occasion he went with his father to the locker room, he did so grudgingly.

  Near the end of the season his parents had explained the immediate future to him: If the Yankees did not win the pennant, the family would return to Arcadia immediately, but if they did, then the family would stay on in New York for two more weeks. So it was on October 1 that when Johnny Lindell hit his dramatic home run, everyone in their Bronx neighborhood was happy and excited but little John Lindell. Hearing the news, he burst into tears because he was sure it meant staying in New York for an additional two weeks.

  On October 2 the Yankees and Red Sox faced each other in the last game of the season with identical records. On that morning John Morley, a student at Manhattan College, rose at the unbearably early hour of five-thirty and dressed quickly for work. Morley, then eighteen, considered himself exceptionally lucky. He worked for Harry Stevens, the company that did the catering at Yankee Stadium. In the eyes of his neighborhood buddies and college friends, he was a privileged insider in a magic world. If he did not actually know Joe DiMaggio, he often saw him beautifully dressed in civilian clothes, and to Morley’s friends in the Bronx, the ability to spot a player in civilian clothes was the same as intimacy. Morley was able to report on how he treated the fans who waited after the game, and in the minds of Morley’s friends this also was something like true intimacy. Morley sometimes worked in the press box, so he was also able to tell his friends about serving such prominent sportswriters as Joe Trimble, Bob Considine, and Dan Parker. They were spiffy, well dressed, and wore straw hats (though they were not necessarily great tippers).

  Morely had worked for Stevens for three years and had slowly advanced to a privileged position: He was a gateman/beerman, first working at the outside gates before the game selling scorecards, and then, the moment the game started, switching to a roving beer salesman. On a normal day during the season, he made, with his 10 percent commission, about $50 or $60 a game. On a big game like this, with every seat in the Stadium sold, he might make as much as $150. It was a long day of hard, backbreaking work, because refrigeration within the Stadium was primitive in those days. Therefore, almost all preparation had to be done on the day of the game. Because it was the weekend, someone had already gone to the Corn Exchange Bank at 170th and Jerome Avenue for the thousands of dollars in coins that would be needed for change during the weekend.

  An old-timer named Tom Carmody ran the Stevens operation at the Stadium. He had been there for twenty-six years, since the day the Stadium opened, and he ruled with an iron hand. He was always the first one there, and the first thing he did was to make a large vat of coffee, the strongest and most vile Morley ever tasted, then or since. Then Carmody would turn into a nineteenth-century drill sergeant. The rules for the boys were exactly the same as they had been in 1923, when Carmody first came. They were simple: You were to show up exactly on time, never a minute late, never be flip, and always, always say “sir.” To Carmody the failure of even the lowliest Stevens worker was his own failure.

  The hardest part of the day was the morning delivery of ice to the big cooler tubs throughout the Stadium. The young men had to cart three-hundred-pound blocks of ice. Then they would break up these giant slabs and place them over beds of beer bottles, which were lying on the bottom of the giant tubs. After the game they would run hoses from the tubs so that the water from the melted ice could run out through the drainage system. The only thing that cheered Morley while doing such exhausting work was the knowledge that for every bottle of beer sold (at 35 cents), 3.5 cents would go toward his college education.

  Like the other Stevens workers he hoped for a long game, because that meant more hot dogs, soda, and beer sold, and more money earned. But he was also a Yankee fan, and on this day he was as nervous as anyone else. This was the big game. They expected crowds so large that Stevens had sent over extra help from Ebbets Field. The regulars viewed them not as colleagues but as intruders. Obviously, the Dodgers were not as good a team as the Yankees, nor was their ball park as elegant.

  That morning as he worked, Morley stole glances at the players coming out of the dugout for their early workouts. He was struck by how casual they seemed, as if this were just another day. Then, suddenly, the long slow morning was over. It was time to go out and sell programs.

  It was a huge crowd, and it was arriving early. Many people had come the night before and camped out in their cars in the parking lot in order to buy bleacher tickets, which went on sale early in the morning. It was as large as a World Series crowd, but not as fancy, Morley immediately decided. The World Series drew a reserved-ticket crowd, the kind of people who were called swells in those days; the men wore sport jackets, and often came with women instead of other men. But today it was a baseball crowd, knowing and hard-edged; these people would be quick to complain if a vendor blocked their view, even momentarily. As the crowd crushed forward to get into the Stadium, Morley was struck most of all by the noise, and then by the excitement in the air.

  Vic Raschi was confident that he was ready to pitch. His last few starts had been good, and he felt as if he had worked through his dry spot. He had won for the Yankees in the 152nd game, a game they absolutely had to win against the Athletics.

  After the Yankees came from behind to beat Boston, Raschi was determined to stay calm. He never had trouble sleeping before a big game, and this one was no exception. He was up at eight, and he, Reynolds, and Lopat drove to the ball park
early together. Their wives would come later. He was not nervous. The previous day he had been nervous because events were beyond his control. Now he was not bothered by the crowd and the thunderous noise. Even as the players were dressing in the locker room before noon, they could hear the crowd’s excitement. The key to pitching in this game, Raschi thought, was to concentrate, to cut out the crowd and noise, to think of only one thing: what to do on each pitch. Jim Turner, now his pitching coach, a few years earlier his manager in Portland, had taught him that at a critical juncture of his professional life.

  Turner was a marvelous teacher, Raschi thought. He knew when to teach and when not to. If a pitcher threw the wrong pitch and lost a game, Turner did not intrude at the height of the pitcher’s pain and anguish. Rather, he waited a day or two. Then he would make the pitcher himself talk his way through the situation—what had happened and why. Every game, Turner said, could be broken down, hitter by hitter, pitch by pitch. Each pitch was connected to the next pitch, Turner thought, for the strength of a pitcher lay partly in his ability to set up a batter for the next pitch.