The Victory Season

by Robert Weintraub

  Brissie at last found a doctor to operate rather than amputate, and his long journey back to baseball began. A metal plate was inserted in his leg, and he was apparently the first patient in the Mediterranean Theater to be administered penicillin. Connie Mack, the same A’s majordomo who brought Phil Marchildon back to the game, assured Brissie he would get a crack in Philadelphia. Brissie was outstanding in the low minors in 1947 and was given his promised crack at the majors on September 28, 1947. It was Babe Ruth Day at Yankee Stadium. Brissie lost to the Bombers 5–3 but was solid enough to warrant a look in 1948. He was given the honor of starting on opening day, a doubleheader in Boston. The other A’s starter that day was Marchildon. Brissie won fourteen games in 1948, and sixteen more in 1949, despite pitching in pain on every occasion.

  Chapter 16: Montreal

  Eddie Robinson, a longtime major league player and executive, was a Baltimore Oriole in 1946—he won the International League MVP Award over Jackie, who needless to say was no relation. Eddie didn’t remember any untoward treatment of Jackie in Baltimore, but conceded “that was only on the field.”

  When asked in 2012 what she and Jackie were talking about on that first plane trip to Montreal back in 1946, unsurprisingly Rachel Robinson didn’t remember.

  Delorimier Stadium is one word, while Rue de Lorimier is two words.

  A plaque now commemorates the Robinsons’ home in the Villeray District of Montreal.

  Robinson biographer Jules Tygiel believes Rickey purposefully stacked the 1946 Royals with his best prospects to ease pressure on Jackie. Six Royals made the International League All-Star team. Still, there is no evidence Rickey did anything but advance players through the Dodgers chain as he ordinarily would.

  Chapter 17: The Brat

  Though few remember it today, the Cubs and Dodgers were bitter enemies through the 1930s and ’40s. Fights between the teams, while not usually rising to the violence of the ’46 brannigans, were commonplace. Once, in the early ’40s, Cubs pitchers knocked down an incredible fifteen straight Brooklyn hitters.

  Babe Herman was dealt to Boston on June 15, 1946.

  While the Walker brothers in some respects lived out an extraordinary dream, they also both suffered the unspeakable tragedy of losing a child.

  Chapter 18: Paralysis

  During the railroad strike, the Browns “rained out” their game with the Indians and Bob Feller because they wanted the gate from the resulting doubleheader. Had the Cards not made it to Cincy in time to play, the Reds would have taken the forfeit, preferring the win to the gate. It was up to the home team.

  One of Max Lanier’s sons, Hal, played ten years in the majors, mostly in San Francisco. Hal was later Manager of the Year in Houston in 1986.

  Lanier lost almost the entirety of his $30,000 bonus investing in a restaurant, Max Lanier’s Diamond Club in St. Petersburg.

  Murry Dickson’s first start didn’t come until June 20, when he bested Philly in his initial outing, going all the way in a 9–1 win. He wouldn’t lose a start until late July, and finished 15–6.

  Lanier was cut off from any pension plan thanks to jumping to Mexico, and lived out his days subsisting on Social Security.

  Lanier got back to the majors, pitching in the early 1950s for Bill Veeck in St. Louis. This was a dreadful franchise. In ’53 the team lost eight straight when Veeck decided to hold a champagne-drenched pennant party to loosen up the guys. “We went out the next day, all nice and loose,” recalled Lanier, “and lost our ninth straight.”

  Chapter 19: Finito

  Larry MacPhail hired Ruth to be a coach on the Dodgers, mostly as a PR move. But the Babe took it as a prelude to managing the club. When his old enemy Durocher was hired instead, Ruth was especially anguished.

  Mexico’s version of Pearl Harbor came in May 1942, when German U-boats sunk a pair of crude oil transports, Faja de Oro and Potrero del Llano. Mexico declared war on June 1. Mexican pilots fought bravely during the liberation of the Philippines, among other action her countrymen saw. But Mexico’s main contribution to the war effort came from the roughly three hundred thousand of her citizens who crossed the border to work in US factories churning out matériel.

  Estimates of the average Mexican League player salaries don’t factor in the large bonuses the Pasquels paid.

  The eight teams in La Liga included the Mexico City Diablos Rojos, the Vera Cruz Azules, the Puebla Ángeles, the San Luis Potosi Tuneros, the Monterrey Industriales, the Nuevo Laredo Tecolotes, the Tampico Alijadores, and the Torreon Algodoneros.

  Ray Dandridge was one of the very few Negro stars to live somewhat large in Mexico. He earned a salary of $9,000, lived in a six-room apartment, rent free, and had both a maid and a tutor for his children, who came gratis, thanks to Señor Pasquel. Still, given his excellence and what the American jumpers were getting, Dandridge was underpaid.

  In one incident, Pasquel offered $1,000 to any player in the league who threw a no-hitter. But when a hurler named Adrián Zabala appeared to accomplish the feat, Pasquel ordered an error ruled a hit and didn’t pay Zabala.

  Chapter 20: Strike Out

  The man Ty Cobb beat up in the stands had no hands. When informed of that fact, Cobb yelled, “I don’t care if he has no feet!”

  The replacement team the Tigers used after the Ty Cobb sympathy strike lost 24–2 to Connie Mack’s Philadelphia A’s. Mack played most of his starters for the full nine innings.

  The American Federation of Labor merged with the Congress of International Organizations in 1955.

  Jimmy Brown was a solid leadoff hitter for the Cardinals before the war, finishing sixth in the MVP voting in 1939. He joined the Army Air Force in 1943 and played baseball for the 4th Ferrying Group Globetrotters. He was released by the Pirates after the 1946 season and went into coaching.

  Sewell did pitch the day before the proposed strike, on June 6, the original strike date. So that is probably where the confusion lay when he talked about his brief speech in the Pittsburgh clubhouse to William Marshall for the Chandler Oral History Project in 1979. Brooklyn was the opponent, and the Dodgers scored nine runs in the fifth to saddle Sewell with a 13–8 loss.

  Sewell expounded on his antiunion stance to William Marshall—“Unions are where they belong like coal mines and truck driving and people that can’t help themselves, but in the sports it’s a competitive competition, and if everybody is going to be created the same way, give them all twenty thousand dollars a year and say, ‘Go out and play.’ There’s no incentive for a fella to go on up and be a top hero, like Musial and Slaughter, Ruth, Gehrig, Foxx. These great ball players, there’s no incentive to go any farther. If you going to have a union just go to the Soviet Union and then pay them all the same thing.”

  The history of players, especially star players, speaking out against abolishment of the Reserve Clause is a long one. Ty Cobb himself lamented those who played only for the money and not for the love of the game, as he had, way back at the turn of the century. In the 1960s, when Curt Flood challenged the Reserve Clause in court, Willie Mays and Carl Yastrzemski campaigned against him, and Joe Garagiola testified against him. Henry Aaron signed a three-year, $200,000 contract in 1971, then said free agency would “destroy” baseball.

  The lack of a standardized schedule, which left owners free to move individual games around at the last moment to maximize profits, was a major complaint of the players, but one that wouldn’t be addressed right away.

  Bing Crosby, a minority member of the syndicate that bought the Pirates from Benswanger, would often shower in the Pittsburgh clubhouse. He would sing as he did, giving free shows to the players.

  Chapter 21: Here Comes “The Man”

  Dick Sisler fizzled as a wunderkind in St. Louis, but he managed to earn a place in baseball history as a Philadelphia Phillie in 1950. He hit a three-run, opposite-field home run in the tenth inning of a game at Ebbets Field to win the “Whiz Kid” Phils the pennant. The dramatic blow was overshadowed historicall
y when Bobby Thomson hit his “Shot Heard ’Round the World” the very next season.

  Musial played at Donora High School with Buddy Griffey, the father of future player Ken Griffey and the grandfather of future Hall of Famer Ken Griffey Jr.

  In 1948, the worst recorded air pollution accident in US history took place in Donora. Twenty died and hundreds were seriously affected by fluoride leaks from the Donora Zinc Works, owned by US Steel. The “Donora Death Fog” spawned numerous lawsuits and calls for legislation to protect the public from industry’s fouling of the air.

  The failure of the Cardinals to bring up Musial earlier in 1941 cannot be blamed on “starting his arbitration clock,” which is a huge factor in such decisions today. Teams often delay bringing up prospects to the big club in order to put off the date the player is eligible for arbitration of his salary, which happens after three years of service. Obviously, this was not part of the calculus in Musial’s day.

  Musial finished his career with 475 home runs and 1,951 RBIs.

  The stat that perhaps best defines Musial is that he played in 3,026 games as a major leaguer and was never ejected once.

  Another—Musial struck out three times in a game only once in his twenty-two years in the game. It happened during that final season, 1963, on July 28 against the Cubs at Wrigley Field. The Chicago faithful probably disbelieved their eyes, as Stan had hit .317 with 67 homers and 286 RBIs against the Cubs in his career.

  The automatic pinspotter was invented by Fred Schmidt (not to be confused with Cards pitcher Freddy Schmidt), who brought it to American Machine and Foundry, better known as AMF. Brunswick had been dominating the bowling industry until it rejected Schmidt’s patent. AMF surpassed Brunswick as a result.

  Musial’s love of bowling had a bitter moment when he was sued by his partner in Red Bird Lanes—Joe Garagiola. The suit alleged that Musial’s son Dick was being paid $750 a month without Garagiola’s knowledge. It was settled with undisclosed terms, but the two players had a bitter falling out over the suit, to the point that Musial refused to throw out the first pitch of Game Four of the 2006 World Series when he discovered Garagiola was on hand to catch it. He tossed out the pitch for Game Five instead.

  The Cardinals’ official address was at 3623 Dodier; the Browns were at 2911 North Grand, around the corner.

  Chris von der Ahe was a character deserving his own book. He combined elements of Larry MacPhail and Bill Veeck, turning Browns games into public spectacles. He would have his players gather in full uniform at his saloon and lead them in a parade to Sportsman’s Park, wearing a silk top hat and flanked by his greyhounds, Snoozer and Schnauzer. After the inevitable victory (his Browns dominated the 1880s), von der Ahe would lead another parade back to his saloon, where the drinks flowed. The Browns’ fortunes changed in the “Gay Nineties” as von der Ahe got more involved with team affairs. The “Boss President” ran through a dozen managers between 1894 and 1896, including eight in 1895. Von der Ahe fancied himself a Rickeyesque judge of talent, but when confronted with a young John McGraw, who was trying out for the Browns, the boss ran the “Little Napoleon” off the field, suggesting he become a jockey instead. The innkeeper pioneered use of a Stadium Club decades before MacPhail, giving over a shaded area under the grandstand to his best consumers of ale and food. He also installed a water slide in center field, hired a Wild West show (one that included the legendary Sioux chief Sitting Bull) to perform before games, and built a racetrack inside the park. He eventually went bankrupt, was thrown in debtor’s prison, and died of cirrhosis in 1913.

  Sportsman’s Park and its nearby right field fence (and screen) were catnip for lefty sluggers with an uppercut stroke. Babe Ruth in particular loved hitting there, slamming 58 homers, the most of any visiting player.

  Perhaps Dr. Hyland’s greatest feat was his cryogenic preservation of Musial’s appendix in 1947. Musial was sick with appendicitis that summer, but Hyland was reluctant to operate, which meant losing the team’s superstar for at least a month. So he froze the appendix with applied ice packs, a controversial treatment and one difficult to make effective. Musial sat for a week, then played the rest of the season, having the surgery afterward. He managed to hit .312, and called it a “lousy year.”

  Musial switched back and forth between first and the outfield several times in his career. Overall he would start 989 games at first base, 868 in left, 681 in right, and 351 in center. In 1947, ’57, and ’58, Musial played only at first, and he ended his career by sticking to the outfield. Otherwise, he shuttled to and fro as the team needed him.

  Musial would lead the National League in doubles and triples in 1946 by a wide margin (50 doubles, 20 triples). Part of that was lethal hitting, and part was the fact that Musial ran very hard right out of the box.

  The “Triple-Double-Inverted-Whammy” is as follows: The thumb, index finger, and pinky point outward, with the other fingers fisted and the hands stacked facing one another.

  Chapter 22: “Bullseye!”

  Fred Hutchinson appears in newsreel footage (along with Bob Feller) as he enlists in the navy in the movie A League of Their Own. Unlike Feller, Hutch joined Gene Tunney’s physical fitness instruction detail and avoided combat.

  Williams’s epic homer was long estimated to travel roughly 450 feet, but in the mid-’80s the Red Sox used new technology to measure the blast at 502 feet, making it the longest home run in Sox history, one foot farther than a blast Manny Ramirez clubbed off a light tower in 2001.

  Wally Moses was scouted by the New York Giants after he had been, according to legend, discovered by Ty Cobb after the Georgia Peach stumbled upon a sandlot game and took over as umpire. Moses impressed the scout, who had been dispatched mainly because John McGraw thought the kid was Jewish, and John J. was forever on the lookout for a Hebrew Hitter he could parlay into big box office in New York City. When Moses told the scout he was Scotch-Irish and not Jewish, the scout grumbled “ah, hell,” and left without offering Moses a contract.

  When Dickey took over as player-manager, he became the first Yankees skipper to wear a number on his uniform while managing. His number 8 would be retired after Yogi Berra sported it for eighteen memorable seasons.

  Berra saw action in seven games in 1946, hitting .364 with a pair of homers in twenty-two at bats.

  There have been two other seasons that saw three different men manage the Yankees: 1978 (Billy Martin, Dick Howser, and Bob Lemon) and 1982 (Lemon, Gene Michael, and Clyde King).

  Dickey was upset in large part because MacPhail had hired journeyman manager Bucky Harris for a front-office position, with the rather apparent subtext being that Harris was ready to step in if Dickey made any waves about his contract. Already not liking MacPhail, and stung by the maneuver, Dickey quit, and Harris took over as skipper in 1947, winning the World Series in his initial season. Despite that success, Harris was a mediocrity as a manager, the ultimate retread who was a safe but unexciting hire. He lasted twenty-five seasons that way, with a .493 winning percentage. After the Yanks came in third in 1948, Harris was dumped in favor of Casey Stengel.

  Joe DiMaggio would later lament the time he spent away from baseball, telling the New York Daily News, “It’s obvious I was not the same player after the war. All you have to do is look at the record.”

  Chapter 23: All Things Eephus

  Musial would become an All-Star Game fixture, making twenty overall and eighteen consecutive Midsummer Classics. He was even named a starter in 1957, when Cincinnati Reds fans infamously stuffed the ballot boxes for their players. Seven starters were Reds, but first base belonged to Stan the Man.

  Williams would be named to seventeen All-Star Games. One assumes he would have been part of the four he missed due to service in World War II and Korea.

  Other versions of the eephus pitch have been foisted on batters over the years. Boston’s Bill “Spaceman” Lee threw an homage to Sewell’s lob called the “Leephus” in Game Seven of the 1975 World Series. Tony Perez of the Reds gol
fed a towering two-run homer at Fenway Park that evoked Williams’s 1946 blast, and the Reds beat the Sox 4–3 to win the championship.

  Other floaters include Dave LaRoche’s “LaLob,” Vicente Padilla’s “Soap Bubble,” Dave Stieb’s “Dead Fish,” Casey Fossum’s “Fossum Flip,” and Steve Hamilton’s “Folly Floater.”

  An exaggerated version of the Williams Shift was seen during an exhibition game Boston played in Dallas before the 1947 season. The Texas team put every fielder but the catcher into the right field stands when Ted came up to hit.

  Bill Veeck differed from MacPhail in that he was more of a pure entrepreneur, while Mac was a forward-thinker and restless mind. Both had grand visions, but Veeck’s were more of the retail variety. He wanted to reach every individual fan and better his or her ball-game experience. MacPhail was more interested in leaving his mark on the game.

  Gaedel’s first appearance featured him popping out of a cake that marked the party Veeck was throwing for the American League’s fiftieth birthday. He then came to bat as a pinch hitter for Frank Saucier. Jim Delsing ran for Gaedel after he walked. Gaedel patted Delsing in the rear in his best baseball fashion on his way to the dugout. Three weeks later, Gaedel was arrested for disorderly conduct, a brush with the law that presaged his later problems in life. In June 1961, with his health in terrible shape, he was beaten and robbed, and died later that night. After the funeral, a con man showed up at Gaedel’s mother’s home, pretending to be from the Hall of Fame and asking for the bat and uniform Gaedel wore back in 1951. The man took the equipment and was never seen again.

  Veeck staged a match race in August to determine the AL speed title. Cleveland’s George Washington Case raced Senators rookie Gil Coan over one hundred yards on a soggy turf in full uniform. Case won, sprinting the distance in ten seconds flat, just six-tenths off the world record held by Jesse Owens. That earned Case a race with the man himself. Owens came to Cleveland in September to face Case. The Olympic great (there had not been an Olympiad since Berlin ’36 due to the war, so Owens was still defending champion in the sprints and long jump) donned a baseball uniform and spikes, and blew Case away in 9.9 seconds.