The Victory Season

by Robert Weintraub

  Newsom played for both Joe Cronin and Leo Durocher. He would chase Cro back to shortstop when the player-manager made visits to the mound. And he was the cause of a team revolt against Durocher in ’43, after Leo accused him of throwing a spitter that resulted in a wild pitch that cost the Dodgers a ball game.

  Marchildon’s sixteen losses in ’46 tied him for the most in the AL with teammates Dick Fowler and Lou Knerr.

  In 1947, Marchildon would win nineteen games for the seventy-eight-win A’s.

  The inside-the-park homer was one of Williams’s seven game-winning home runs of 1946.

  Doc Cramer was nicknamed “Flit,” the name of a popular insecticide, for his excellence at fielding fly balls—hence, he was “death to flies,” just like the bug killer. He led the AL in putouts in 1936 and 1938.

  The 1945 World Series was the progenitor of the so-called Billy Goat Curse that has prevented the Cubs from capturing a title. Bill Sianis, the owner of the Billy Goat Tavern and proud owner of a Capra aegagrus hircus, was booted from a Series game at Wrigley Field due to the foul odor emanating from his goat. “Them Cubs, they aren’t gonna win no more,” Sianis supposedly said on his way out. As of 2012, he has been proven correct.

  The year 1946 may have ended triumphantly for Hank Greenberg, but it was his last season in Detroit. Hank wanted to transition from the field into the executive offices and become the Tigers’ general manager, but owner Walter Briggs turned him down and, in a fit of pique, released him. Briggs convinced his fellow American League owners not to sign Greenberg. The slugger wasn’t hurting for money, however, as he married Caral Gimbel, the heiress to the Gimbels department store fortune, that winter. Rumor had it that Hank’s new in-laws were going to buy the Tigers from Briggs and install Greenberg as GM, but that never happened. Instead, Hank went to Pittsburgh, where he hit twenty-five homers and mentored the Pirates young slugger, Ralph Kiner, before calling it quits for good after 1947. He became GM in Cleveland and later with the Chicago White Sox.

  Chapter 32: Victoire

  Somehow, despite his numbers and historical significance, Robinson only finished fourth in the International League MVP vote. Eddie Robinson of Baltimore won the award. The two Robinsons had an encounter during the ’46 season—Eddie slammed hard into Jackie, breaking up a double play, and Jackie responded by holding the ball up to Eddie’s face and warning, “Next time I’ll put this right between your eyes.”

  Even as Robinson was ending his triumphant first season playing with whites, the National Football League was welcoming its first African-American player. Kenny Washington was a teammate of Robinson’s at UCLA, and his proximity to baseball’s first black player helped earn him a job with the L.A. Rams.

  Chapter 33: The Stretch Run

  Munger would go 2–2 with a 3.33 ERA in his ten starts upon returning from Germany, where he took over running the Third Army’s sports leagues from Harry Walker.

  Ed Stevens was held out of the service due to his recurring nightmares. He told the recruiting officer that he also was prone to sleepwalking, which was frowned upon on the front lines.

  The Joe Louis–Billy Conn fight of June 19, 1946, was of course a rematch of their famous first bout in 1941, when Conn was en route to upsetting Louis before the Brown Bomber caught up to Conn with a dramatic thirteenth-round knockout, thus fulfilling his pre-fight prophecy, “He can run, but he can’t hide.”

  The war and poor financial management had left Louis heavily in debt, so after besting Conn he was back in the ring to demolish Mariello a mere three months later. It was the last great performance of the Brown Bomber’s career.

  The previous record for longest scoreless tie was an eighteen-inning game back in 1909 between Detroit and Washington.

  The Dodgers won a replay of the scoreless tie on September 20, 5–3 over the Reds. Dixie Walker’s three-run homer off Johnny Vander Meer was the big blow.

  During the stretch run, Dyer’s native state of Louisiana bestowed an official colonelship upon the manager.

  Roy Rogers’s film slate in 1946 included My Pal Trigger, Heldorado, and the western state shoutouts Out California Way, Home in Oklahoma, Roll On Texas Moon, Rainbow over Texas, Under Nevada Skies, and Song of Arizona.

  Chapter 34: The First Playoff

  Ralph Branca sports an 0–3 record in tiebreaker playoff games, losing Games One and Three in 1951 along with Game One in 1946.

  Branca pitched twelve times in the first four months of the 1946 season, with no decisions and a 7.12 ERA. In August and September, he pitched eleven times, going 3–0 with a 1.55 ERA.

  Those premature World Series programs are probably worth a fortune today, if anyone has them.

  Cookie Lavagetto would become famous the following season, when his pinch-hit double in Game Four of the World Series against the Yankees simultaneously broke up Bill Bevens’s no-hit bid and drove in the two winning runs in a breathless 3–2 Dodgers win. Lavagetto was hitting for Eddie Stanky. The Yanks won the Series in seven games, however.

  Lavagetto missed four full seasons to the war. Although he was classified 3-A, and could have put off enlistment for at least a year, Cookie joined up with his brother right after Pearl Harbor. He served as a navy air machinist for the duration, albeit never overseas. When he at last returned to baseball, he wasn’t nearly the same player. Cookie hit but .236 with three homers in nearly three hundred at bats in 1946, and the 1947 Series was his final hurrah—he retired after the season.

  Pollet would go 5–2, 2.30 against the Brooks.

  Cronin by default would have won the AL version of the Manager of the Year, unless Boudreau got it for the shift brainstorm.

  Sadly, a Boston–Brooklyn World Series never happened—that would have been exceptionally fun, regardless of the results.

  Clyde Kluttz is not to be confused as a relative of Mickey Klutts, who was an infielder with the Yankees and A’s in the 1970s and ’80s. Nevertheless, both men overcame the handicap of their surname to make the majors. Clyde was also a longtime scout, including a stint as scouting director with the Yankees in the mid-1970s.

  Chapter 35: Splintered

  Earl Johnson’s brother, Chet Johnson, was one of baseball’s foremost characters. A St. Louis Brown for all of five games in 1946, Chet mostly toiled in the minors, including a stint with the Hollywood Stars of the Pacific Coast League, where his comedic act went over like gangbusters. He would throw blooped, “eephus”-like pitches, use underhanded deliveries and triple-windups, and talk to the ball, à la Mark Fidrych, only thirty years earlier. During warm-ups, he would soft toss the ball to his catcher, who would return it harder and harder. On the final return, Johnson would scream in pain, yanking off his glove to reveal a (fake) bloody thumb. He took the mound wearing oversized glasses, coonskin caps, fake mustaches. Former PCL pitcher Bud Watkins described one of Johnson’s classic bits to minorleaguebaseball.com: “He would pretend to not be able to see the catcher’s sign. So he would creep in closer and closer and squint and shake his head until he finally was right in front of home plate, which is pretty funny in and of itself.

  “Then he would get down on all fours and stare at the catcher’s crotch for a couple seconds, then stand up and shout ‘Eureka! I got it!’ and run back to the mound. OK, very funny, right? But Chet’s topper was the classic. He would then take his position on the rubber and, very seriously and deliberately, shake off the sign. If you weren’t laughing by then, you weren’t human.” Comedians like the Marx Brothers, Jack Benny, and George Burns were regulars during Johnson’s stint with the Stars. “About the only thing he kept up on a wall of his home was a fan letter from Groucho Marx, in which Groucho complimented Chet on his routines,” said Earl. “That’s like Babe Ruth complimenting you on your hitting, don’t you think?”

  DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak warrants his 1941 MVP Award over Williams, in the same manner that you can’t argue that the Houston Rockets erred badly by picking (H)akeem Olajuwon in the 1984 NBA Draft in
stead of Michael Jordan. Houston and Hakeem won two titles, after all. But the 1942 vote is a shonda. Williams went .356/36/137 to Gordon’s .322/18/103, and his OPS was .247 points higher, 1.147 to .900. Gordon had a career year on a pennant-winning Yankees team, but clearly the writers did Williams a disservice. Still, that was not as great a screw job as was 1947, when an (unnamed) writer left Ted completely off his ballot. Williams thus lost the award to DiMaggio, 202–201.

  Here is the final result of the 1946 balloting:

  Williams 224 points

  Newhouser 197

  Doerr 158

  Pesky 141

  Vernon 134

  Feller 105

  Ferriss 94

  Greenberg 91

  Dom DiMaggio 56

  Boudreau 37

  York finished eleventh, Hughson thirteenth, and Hal Wagner mysteriously received a single vote. Joe DiMaggio got six, and Phil Marchildon five.

  The NL balloting:

  Musial 319

  Dixie Walker 159

  Slaughter 144

  Pollet 116

  Sain 95

  Reese 79

  Stanky 67

  Del Ennis (PHIL) 61

  Reiser 58

  Cavarretta 49

  Ol’ Hig was fifteenth, Harry the Hat Walker twenty-second. Carl Furillo received a single vote.

  Chapter 36: The World Series

  In understanding the trauma of the national beef shortage, it’s important to remember that this was still a time when food, including meat, was mostly seasonal. Beef, especially steak, was considered “fall food,” coming off a spring and summer of livestock grazing on the plains, fattening for slaughter. The food industrial complex and globalization of the dinner table was only just being conceptualized. So for autumn to arrive without steak was more upsetting than it might otherwise have been.

  Days after the Series ended, Truman removed price controls on meat, and the steak shortage eased.

  Pinky Higgins was in his last year as a player in 1946, after a long career whose highlight was twelve consecutive hits in 1938, the AL record (since tied by Walt Dropo). He would later become the Red Sox manager from 1955–1962. As the years went by and the Sox failed to integrate, Higgins, a well-known racist, became the team’s totemic figure. At one point writer Clif Keane opined that he thought Cuban-born outfielder Minnie Minoso was the league’s best player, and Higgins replied that Keane was “nothing but a fucking nigger-lover.” After he was fired, Higgins was driving while drunk in Louisiana and struck and killed a highway worker. He got four years in prison for that. Days after his parole, he died of a heart attack at fifty-nine.

  Game One of the ’46 Series was the first extra-inning contest to begin a Series since 1924.

  The interference play at third base continued a recent tradition of important doings at the Hot Corner for the Redbirds in the World Series. In the 1942 Classic, Slaughter threw out a runner, Tuck Stainback, in the ninth inning of Game Two against the Yankees to ice a win for St. Louis. They would go on to win in five games. The next year, in the rematch between the two teams, New York’s Johnny Lindell ran over Kurowski to force an error, which started a decisive five-run rally in the eighth inning of Game Three. The Yanks got revenge, winning in five games as well.

  Few historians give the Magda Goebbels/Hitler affair much credence, but the papers reported the fact that Frau Meissner told the tale, including, notably, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and most subscribers to the Associated Press.

  The first NBA game was played on November 1, 1946. The Toronto Huskies beat the New York Knicks 68–66 at Maple Leaf Gardens.

  In a ghoulish twist, Rice died while attending a benefit dinner in his honor, in Garden Grove, California, in 1983. He was sixty.

  Doc Blanchard was Army’s “Mr. Inside” to Glenn Davis’s “Mr. Outside.” Blanchard won the Heisman Trophy in 1945, and Davis won it in 1946. In ’46 Army won its third consecutive national championship under coach Earl “Red” Blaik. The Black Knights were 27–0–1 in the span.

  The Joe Dimaggio–for–Ted Williams trade talks would be revived that winter, with a deal reportedly made one drunken evening between MacPhail and Yawkey. But when they sobered up, Mac squawked over including a promising catching prospect, Yogi Berra, in the deal, and it fell apart.

  The 1946 midterm elections were a historic rout in favor of the Republicans, and a repudiation of President Truman. The meat shortage played a large role in the erosion of support for the Democrats, as did the yearlong labor crisis. Among those elected to Congress for the first time were a senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy, and a California representative named Richard Nixon.

  Chapter 37: The Series Comes to the Hub

  Ralph Slater wrote the classic hypnotist’s guide, Hypnotism and Self Hypnosis. His real name was Joseph Bolsky, and he ran afoul of the FDA for selling a phonograph that promised to cure insomnia. On it was his voice over catchy tunes, which was deemed by one expert as “too close to Frank Sinatra’s music to put anyone to sleep.” He had more luck with his stage performances, regularly selling out Carnegie Hall and putting audience members, often ex-GIs or nubile young women, under hypnosis. He had a lively stage career until 1952, when a young girl he hypnotized in London fell and broke her ankle. Stage hypnosis was swiftly banned in the United Kingdom, and the United States, Canada, and Australia followed suit. Slater’s career was abruptly over.

  Arch McDonald was actually nicknamed “the Old Pine Tree” for his signature call. It was from a country song, recorded by Gene Autry, among others: “They cut down the old pine tree, and they hauled it away to the mill / To make a coffin of pine, for that sweetheart of mine.”

  The three Cardinals with four hits were joined by Sox right fielder Wally Moses, who had four singles of his own. But he neither scored nor drove in a run in the contest.

  Gutteridge was voted a half-share of the Series profits for his efforts, which Yawkey sweetened with a bonus that made up the other half.

  Ferriss’s shutout in Game Three was the third in Sox Series history. Future umpire Bill Dineen blanked the Pirates twice in 1903, and Babe Ruth shut out Chicago in Game One of the 1918 Series.

  The photo of Williams slumped against the left field wall during the Game Four pitching change evokes a similar shot of his successor, Carl Yastrzemski, doing much the same during the “Boston Massacre” of 1978, when the Yankees bombarded the Sox in a four-game series at Fenway that keyed the Bombers’ rally to win the AL East and, ultimately, the World Series.

  Munger had an interesting post-baseball career, as a private investigator with the Pinkerton Detective Agency in Houston.

  One of the Boston pitchers tattooed by the Cards in Game Four was Mace Brown. He is most famous for surrendering the fabled “Homer in the Gloamin’” to Gabby Hartnett in 1938, while pitching for Pittsburgh. Hartnett’s homer at Wrigley Field, with darkness fast approaching, won a critical late-season game for the Cubs and propelled them to the pennant.

  It should be remembered when considering Schmidt’s account of his exchanges with Pollet and Dyer that Freddy disliked his manager, feeling Dyer buried him in the bullpen. So his memories tend to have an anti-Eddie tinge. It doesn’t seem likely that Pollet, who was very close to Dyer, would have an intermediary tell his friend and manager that he felt poorly, but it is possible—certainly Pollet would be loath to let Dyer down and may not have felt up to telling him the truth about his condition.

  Dobson went 13–7 with a 3.24 ERA in 1946.

  Beazley pitched a scoreless inning in Game Five, although he told the team in September he wanted to quit, as he was exhausted. Dyer talked him into staying on to see the season through.

  Chapter 38: Cat Scratch Fever

  The tough-as-nails talk from Country Slaughter on the eve of Game Six may need to be taken with a grain or two of salt, as it was “reported” by Arthur Daley of the Times, an unabashed Slaughter worshipper.

  The meager shares came to $3,742.33 for the winners, $2,140.
89 for the losers. By contrast, the shares from the year before, when Detroit and Chicago tangled, were $6,443.34 and $3,930.22, respectively. In 1947 the shares would go back up to $5,830.03 and $4,081.19. That the Series shares were so low after a season in which attendance went through the roof was a bitter irony.

  The pension plan would be formally ratified in February, and put into place on April 1, 1947. It called for retired players with five years in the bigs to get $50 per month, and those with ten years to get $100 per month. Today, players become vested after a mere forty-three days of big league service, which earns each one $34,000 annually and a lifetime health plan. Ten years in the show means $100,000 annually.

  Game Six wasn’t the first time Cronin made an unusual pitching decision that cost him. In the 1933 World Series, while player-manager of the Senators, Cro tried to pull a fast one. Instead of aces Earl Whitehill or Alvin Crowder, both twenty-game winners, his Game One starter was Walter Stewart, who was solid but much less highly regarded. The New York Giants pounded Stewart for four runs in two innings, and they went on to win in five games.

  Chapter 39: The Mad Dash

  Stivers told the Los Angeles Times he had stayed silent about his complicity in Goering’s suicide for six decades because he feared (probably correctly) that he would be charged in the matter by the US Army.

  Other theories on the manner by which Goering managed to cheat the hangman included a cyanide capsule in a filling, bribed guards, and a “kiss of death” from his wife, Emmy, on her final visit, supposedly passing some form of poison from mouth to mouth.