Read an Excerpt
Bottom of the Ninth
Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball from Itself
By Michael Shapiro Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 2009 Michael Shapiro
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-5227-9
CHAPTER 1
FALL 1958
OCTOBER: Lamentations
Warren Spahn was shutting out the Yankees, and all Casey Stengel could do by the bottom of the eighth inning of Game Four of the World Series was march up and down his dugout barking, "Let's go. Let's go." He might just as well have saved himself the exertion. The Yankees were going quietly, as they had all afternoon — strikeout, pop to second, strikeout, the last by Norm Siebern, who had lost four fly balls in the sun in left field, making gifts of two of Milwaukee's three runs. Mickey Mantle's grounder to short an inning later brought the day to a close and the Braves to within a victory of repeating as world champions.
Nothing had gone right for Stengel all week, with the exception of Game Three at Yankee Stadium, his team's only victory, when all the cruel things that had happened in Games One and Two in Milwaukee seemed forgotten, and Stengel was back in chatty form. "Now let me ask ya why I shouldn't be glad," he said. He spoke as he studied himself in front of a mirror, adjusting his ten-gallon hat. "We win a game and I'm glad, which is what I'd rather be than nervous, which is what I was after they win the first two games."
He had not helped himself strategically, and his players knew it — and for once said so. Hank Bauer had opened Game One by singling against Spahn, and Stengel, never one to leave things solely to the discretion and talents of his men, promptly called for a hit-and-run. Spahn possessed one of the finest pickoff moves in the game and caught Bauer leaning. "When they gave me the sign I had to go," Bauer later said, "even though I didn't agree with the old man." The writers picked up where Bauer left off, questioning Stengel's decision in the eighth to pitch to a power hitter, Wes Covington, with a man on third and one out, rather than walking him and setting up a potential double play. Covington's fly ball scored Eddie Matthews, tying the game, which Milwaukee won in the tenth. Game Two was a 13–5 drubbing in which Stengel's primary function was to make six trips to the mound to change pitchers. "This could be a shambles," said the former Dodgers and Giants manager Leo Durocher, who stopped by the press box after the rout to offer his views. Durocher may have been between teams but was never shy about his opinions. "You can see the signs."
What do you see, Leo? someone asked.
"It's not just the two defeats," he replied. "The Yankees are playing lousy baseball."
A writer shared Durocher's diagnosis with Stengel, who snapped, "Hell, you're telling me? Ain't I been saying that for a month and a half?"
He'd been saying that, and more. He had berated his players publicly. After losing three out of four at Fenway Park in mid-August he first locked his men in their clubhouse for a heated forty-five-minute lecture and then docked them a rare off-day by holding a two-hour practice, even though they were in first place by eleven and a half games. He was seeing too many mistakes and insisted that his men needed drilling on the fundamentals rather than a day of rest after playing thirty games in twenty-eight days. His players rebelled, cautiously, grousing to the beat reporters but insisting that their names not appear: "He just wants to flaunt his authority" and "Is he going to give his brain a workout, too?" and "I never seen him get on guys as bad as he's been lately." Stengel did not much care. "If they don't like it they can read their contracts," he said. "I'm the manager and as long as I'm here they'll do what I tell them to do."
But Stengel had been unable to roust the Yankees from their torpor; they finished the season by going 17–18 in their last thirty-five games, and their rowdiness off the field had prompted management to hire private detectives to tail them. Even clinching the American League pennant came with a cloud: on the train back from Kansas City, Ralph Houk, a coach, and reliever Ryne Duren got into a nasty fistfight. The game had gone late and the players had already begun to celebrate by the time they arrived at the station. Duren, who could be a mean drunk, smashed Houk's unlit cigar into his mouth and ended up kicking another pitcher, Don Larsen, in the mouth when his teammates tried to get him into his berth. "You get whiskey drunk and then you fight with your own," snapped Stengel as he stormed into the car. Houk, ten years Duren's senior, was judged the winner, leaving Duren with a gash over his right eye.
Still, the oddsmakers favored the Yankees to win the World Series against the Braves, a choice that reflected the powerful tug of nostalgia rather than a cool assessment of the prospects: never mind that Milwaukee had dethroned the Yankees in the 1957 series; New York owned so many other Octobers. Then came the first two games, which brought a change of heart among the bookmakers. The Yankees returned to the Bronx from Milwaukee talking comeback, as they had done in 1956, when they dropped the first two games in Brooklyn, only to win in seven. But Stengel seemed oblivious to good omens and silver linings. A television crew approached as the Yankees took their warm-ups, and the reporter, apparently unschooled in the lexicon of the game, made the grievous mistake of asking Stengel to assess his players' mettle by invoking the word most damning to an athlete's soul.
"Is your team choking?" he asked.
"Do you choke on the fucking microphone?" said Stengel. He turned and scratched his behind for the camera.
Game Three's 4–0 Yankees victory brought a day's respite. But Spahn held the Yankees to two hits in Game Four, and afterward Jimmy Cannon of the New York Post wrote as if he were preparing the earth to receive the remains for the team he used to know: "They have lost what they once had alone and they won't be the Yankees until they get it back. It will take a long time because this team has to be torn apart and put together again."
Cannon had known and admired the Yankees of Charlie Keller, Tommy Henrich, Bill Dickey, and above all, Joe DiMaggio. "They were the greatest hitting teams in all the seasons of baseball," he wrote. And then he offered his grim conclusion. "This is the end of something all right. And you have the feeling it isn't temporary."
It was fitting that the first drafting of the Yankees' obituary should fall to Cannon; of all the men then writing sports columns in New York, he was the most romantic, especially about his town and the way it used to be. The world, he suggested none too subtly, had been a better place when it was defined by certain immutable truths: the best song ever recorded was Bing Crosby's rendition of "Stardust"; the best strawberry cake could be found at Sid Allen's; and the best baseball in the world was played in the Bronx.
Cannon had been a protégé of Damon Runyon, though the two parted on the question of drink — Runyon was a legendary boozer and Cannon saw the wisdom in not trying to keep up; he drank coffee to excess. Nor did Cannon subscribe to Runyon's ordering of the universe: greatest fighter, Jack Dempsey; greatest ballplayer, Christy Mathewson. He had found his own favorites — Joe Louis in the prize ring and, on the ball field, his pal DiMaggio. But now Louis had been bludgeoned into retirement by Rocky Marciano, and DiMaggio, divorced and lonely, was no longer available to spend his nights driving around town with Cannon and the gossip columnist Walter Winchell. Runyon was gone, and Ring Lardner, too, and, as if overnight, the press box was filling up with young men whom Cannon dismissed as "the chipmunks" for all their annoying chatter. Everywhere Cannon looked he saw a New York filled ever more with cynics and clever men who did not appreciate his city as it had been when he was young.
"People in this town seemed to be enjoying what happened to the Yankees in the first two games of the World Series," Cannon wrote before Game Three. "Their embarrassment of the Yankees in the second game entertained them. ... It is as if nothing can impress them anymore and they have lost their faith in the old traditions. ... Their snide comments followed me across town as though they had collaborated to declaim a nasty monologue."
He was angry at the Yankees, too, for taking their pennant for granted. The players now found themselves in a hole from which there was, in his view, only one escape that mattered. "The prize this year isn't only the winner's end of the take," Cannon concluded. "They must fight to get their town back. ... It is not enough for the Yankees to win a pennant. They must also be champions of baseball if they hope to perpetuate their myth. This is expected of them."
What was unexpected was what came next. Milwaukee's Lew Burdette, hero of the '57 series — three victories, two by shutouts — would be on the mound to pitch the clincher in Game Five. The Yankees were underdogs. They were about to become something even Jimmy Cannon had never witnessed: lovable.
It started with pity, for the team and for Casey. It appeared in, of all places, the New York Times and under the byline of its august Washington correspondent James Reston. It came in the form of parody, "a plea for the relief of poor Casey," addressed to Dag Hammarskjöld, the secretary-general of the United Nations. Dreadful acts, Reston wrote, had been perpetrated upon the New Yorkers by the cruel legions from the west. "I have been instructed by the leader of the defenders, Prime Minister Charles Dillon Stengel, to bring these alarming events to the attention of the United Nations." And so on, for laughs, for everyone but Casey, who alone understood that it was not merely the series at stake, but perhaps his job as well.
Stengel called on Bob Turley to face Burdette in Game Five. Turley had enjoyed his best season in the big leagues, winning twenty-one games and losing only seven. He typically threw very hard and with little artistry, and so it was especially surprising for the Milwaukee batters to watch him work. He struck out eight through the first six innings, punching most of them out on his big sweeping curve. Gil McDougald, the Yankees' second baseman, staked Turley to a 1–0 lead with a homer in the third, a cheap one, 301 feet down the right-field line, where it caught the foul-pole netting. Hardly an omen for what was about to happen in the bottom of the sixth.
With the top of the order up for the Yankees, Hank Bauer opened with a single. Jerry Lumpe muffed on his first two attempts to sacrifice and Stengel, eager to score any way he could, ordered him to try again. Lumpe bunted foul — one out. But Mickey Mantle was up, and he promptly singled. Yogi Berra doubled, scoring Bauer, and Braves manager Fred Haney ordered Elston Howard walked, loading the bases for Bill Skowron, who singled in the second run. The bases were still loaded when Haney emerged from the dugout to inform Burdette that his day was over. Juan Pizzaro came on to face McDougald, who lofted a drive to left.
It was generally acknowledged that there was no worse place to play left field in the major leagues than at Yankee Stadium on a sunny afternoon. The "sun field," as it was known, had made a goat of poor Norm Siebern in Game Four, and was now playing havoc on the eyesight and self-esteem of the Braves' Wes Covington, who was trying very hard to locate the ball in the bright sky. He turned. And then he turned again. He appeared to spot it, only to lose it. The ball, meanwhile, was sinking fast and caught the earth at Covington's feet with enough bounce to send it hopping over the bullpen fence, a ground-rule double that scored two. Turley, a feeble hitter even by pitchers' standards, completed the scoring with a single to left.
Turley would strike out ten that afternoon and would limit the Braves to five singles. The Yankees were alive, barely.
Stengel could not decide on a pitcher for Game Six in Milwaukee and shared his ruminations with the press. He could go with Don Larsen but suspected that he needed more rest given the parlous state of his arm. Art Ditmar was a possibility, and so was Johnny Kucks. And then there was Whitey Ford, who had been Stengel's best and most reliable pitcher and who had started Games One and Four. But Ford had spent much of the season nursing a sore arm, and Stengel was not inclined to use him on a mere two days' rest. But Ford wanted in, and Stengel, operating without a net, had no man better in a big game.
Haney had no such worries. He would go with Spahn, the great lefthander. It did not much matter that Spahn was thirty-seven years old and had had only two days to recover from the nine innings he had thrown in Game Four. Haney, unlike Stengel, did not like playing an unfamiliar hand. He had Burdette and he had Spahn and he was a game away from another championship.
Spahn spent the afternoon making his manager look like a sage. Bauer nicked him for a run on a homer in the first, but Milwaukee evened things in the bottom of the inning on a run-scoring single by Henry Aaron. Spahn was not as sharp as he had been in Game Four, but even when he missed he didn't miss by much. Ford, meanwhile, was not nearly so fortunate. In the bottom of the second he was facing the sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-place hitters, quick work for Ford on a good day. But with one out, Covington singled, as did Andy Pafko. Spahn was next, and Ford lost his chance to escape untouched when he surrendered yet another single and a run. He walked Johnny Logan to load the bases, and Stengel called for Ditmar.
Johnny Logan drove Ditmar's first pitch to left, and as the ball sailed over the infield it appeared that two more runs would score, which could well give the Braves the series. Elston Howard, a catcher by trade but playing left field today, drew a quick bead on the ball and set off in a sprint. Still, it was unclear whether he would arrive before the ball hit the turf. He made the catch at full extension, and the Braves' third-base coach, Billy Herman, sent Pafko home.
The prudent call would have been to have Pafko tag up, then hold up and return to third, drawing the throw and leaving matters to the next batter, Eddie Matthews. But Matthews was having a dreadful series, striking out with alarming frequency. Besides, Howard had had a similar chance to throw a man out at home in Game Two and had lofted a throw so off the mark it appeared headed for Green Bay.
Off went Pafko. Berra waited for him at home. He took Howard's throw and could have had a coffee and a Danish, given all the time he had to station himself in front of the plate, ball in hand. Pafko arrived headfirst, a dead duck. Double play, side retired, and the bases-loaded threat a memory.
Ditmar kept Milwaukee at bay through the sixth inning, when the Yankees tied things at two apiece on a couple of singles and a sacrifice fly. Duren relieved him and was flawless but for a single by Covington. The teams remained tied at the end of nine, and though Spahn's pitch count was rising, Haney sent him back out for the tenth. McDougald led off, and Spahn threw him a fastball that looked like a good pitch when it left his hand, only to become something altogether different as it approached the plate. McDougald caught it flush and drove it over the wall in left center, and the crowd at County Stadium suddenly got very quiet. Spahn dispatched Bauer on a fly to center and Mantle on a grounder to second, but he surrendered singles to Howard and Berra. Haney, feeling terrible for what he was about to do, finally came to fetch him. Don McMahon arrived from the bullpen to surrender another run on a single by Skowron. New York now led 4–2.
Milwaukee would bat last, and Duren applied his foot to the Braves' throats, retiring Red Schoendienst and Eddie Matthews. But in between he sandwiched a walk to Logan, who took second and then scored on a single by Aaron. Joe Adcock followed with another single, putting the Braves a base hit away from tying the game. Stengel trudged to the mound and, in his customary defiance of conventional wisdom, called for Bob Turley, who had pitched a complete game two days before. Haney countered by sending Frank Torre in to bat for Del Crandell. He appeared to be the wiser man when Torre looped a soft liner over second base. But as the ball drifted over the infield it assumed the sorry aspect of a deflating balloon, losing altitude and speed and falling not to the ground but into the outstretched mitt of Gil McDougald. The series was tied.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bottom of the Ninth by Michael Shapiro. Copyright © 2009 Michael Shapiro. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
