Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (12 page)

Not everyone was prepared to take Alston at his word. Even before the Dodgers opened the season at Ebbets Field, there was, as one sportswriter explained, “an undercurrent of suspicion” that Amoros was being held back for reasons having nothing to do with his performance on the field. The team already had five black players, and some sportswriters speculated that “the Dodgers are reluctant to add another Negro to the squad.” Another reporter similarly surmised that the Dodgers may have reached “the saturation point” with black players.

The Dodgers, of course, denied that there was any such “saturation point” for black players. Still, when the season began, there was much discussion among the Dodger ranks and in the press about whether Amoros should be played or sent back to the minors. (“For some reason,” said one reporter, “the Dodgers treat Amoros as if he were a constitutional amendment. He can’t go in or out of the lineup without a referendum.”)

After struggling with the issue, Alston made the decision to send the young Cuban back to Montreal, where he once again did well, hitting .352, with fourteen home runs in only sixty-eight games. It was a record that could not be ignored and, with the Dodgers faltering in the pennant race, Amoros was called back to Ebbets Field after the All-Star break. Even Alston had to be satisfied. In only half a season, Amoros hit .274 with thirty-three extra-base hits, including nine home runs. And there could be no valid complaints about his fielding—as
The Sporting News
reported after the season, Amoros had “raced to the foul line or deep into left-center field and made catches on sheer speed of foot.”

It was a performance that seemed to make a difference when Amoros reported for spring training in 1955. There was no talk about sending him back to the minor leagues, and Alston played him frequently when the season began. Amoros responded to the show of confidence, hitting .341 through the end of July. But then he was overcome with a sore back that landed him in the hospital. He was placed on the disabled list for a few weeks, and, by the time he returned, his batting eye had lost its sparkle and Alston had regained his misgivings about Amoros’ value to the team. It was not, to say the least, a favorable combination. Amoros played only sporadically for the rest of the season and saw his batting average dip to .247.

Despite the accolades, the pivotal catch in the seventh game of the 1955 World Series did not give Amoros any security for his future. When he reached the Dodgers’ spring training camp in 1956, he learned that he would have to vie with several other players for the left-field position. The competition proved considerable, and, while the Dodgers kept him on the team, he again played only sporadically (although he was able to hit sixteen home runs in only 292 at bats).

It was the kind of roller-coaster year that had already marked Amoros’ short tenure in the majors. In one of the last games of the 1956 season—when the Dodgers were desperately trying to overtake the Milwaukee Braves in the pennant race—Amoros misplayed a fly ball in the sun in a game against the Philadelphia Phillies and then failed to charge a hard-hit single to left field, thus allowing the runner on first base to go to third. The Phillies won the game 7-3, and Dodger pitcher Don Newcombe slammed his glove against the wall on returning to the dugout after the first misplay, muttering to anyone who would listen, “Get him out of there if he can’t catch a ball.” Alston acknowledged that the young outfielder had “a bad day,” but added, “I’m keeping him in the lineup, and he may help us to win the games we must win from now on.”

Alston would not regret his decision. In the final season series with the Pittsburgh Pirates a few days later, Amoros hit two home runs in the first game of a doubleheader to assure pitcher Sal Maglie of a victory and the Dodgers of a chance at winning the pennant. And when the Dodgers did finally clinch the pennant the following day, Alston was quick to tell reporters that Amoros would be in the starting lineup for the World Series against the Yankees. “He’s a streak hitter,” the Dodger manager explained, “and he’s hot right now.”

 

Amoros is watching closely from the outfield as Maglie begins pitching to Yogi Berra in the bottom of the second inning of the fifth game of the 1956 World Series. After taking a called strike from Maglie, Berra swings at a curveball on the outside corner and lifts a high fly ball that starts to drift toward the left-field foul line. This ball is not hit as deep as the one in 1955, and, although he is running at full speed, Amoros can see that he will not get to the ball before it drops. Shortstop Pee Wee Reese knows that as well and is running toward the left-field foul line with his back to the plate. As the ball starts to fall, Reese makes what radio announcer Bob Neal calls “a fine catch” in which Reese “went almost out to the line and, with his back to the infield, reached up in the air and grabbed the ball.”

The next batter is Enos Slaughter, a forty-year-old North Carolina native and a left-handed batter. He can pull the ball, but Amoros is playing him in straightaway left field (while Snider and Furillo have shifted toward the right-field foul line, leaving a large gap in left center field). Alston’s placement of the outfielders proves to be a good read. Slaughter hits an outside pitch to Amoros, who moves slightly to his right to catch it.

Yankee second baseman Billy Martin, a right-handed hitter, moves up to the plate. Although not a power hitter, Martin has already hit two home runs in the series, including one against Maglie in the first game. But Martin cannot duplicate the feat now. He strikes out swinging (although Campanella drops the ball and has to tag Martin out).

The Dodgers retreat to the dugout, and already Bob Neal is saying that the game is shaping up to be “a real pitchers’ battle between Sal Maglie and Don Larsen.”

5

F
ern Furillo, a petite brunette, sits in the stands with the other Dodgers’ wives as her husband, Carl, moves to the plate to face Don Larsen in the top of the third inning. She is proud of Carl. He is the team’s perennial right fielder and, standing six feet tall and weighing almost two hundred pounds, he conveys the impression of being the strong, silent type. Indeed, in his first days with the Dodgers in 1946, people took notice of that strength and began calling him the “Rock.”

Carl and Fern had grown up in Stony Creek Mills, a small town in the Pennsylvania Dutch Country near Reading, and she can no doubt remember the time when her brother Charlie had tried to protect her against the advances of this man who now stands waiting for Larsen’s first pitch. Fern Reichart had met Carl in the early 1940s, but then he was shipped overseas with the army to fight in the South Pacific. He carried her picture with him and contacted Fern upon his return. They started to see each other regularly, and he would usually pick her up in the large Studebaker that the Dodgers had given him in that spring of 1946. When he brought her home, Carl would often park the car in front of her house, and the time spent in the automobile did not go unnoticed in the Reichart household.

Fern was the youngest of thirteen children, and her brothers were very protective of her. “Who the hell’s that guy out there you’re with all the time?” her brother Charlie demanded at one point. Shy and not wanting to disclose her relationship with the young man who had achieved fame as one of the area’s first major-league ballplayers, Fern deflected the question. “Charlie,” she replied, “you don’t want to know who it is.” Her brother could not be turned aside. “Come on,” he persisted. “Who is it?” And if she didn’t tell him, said Charlie, “I’m going to grab him and rip him out of the car.” “Trust me,” Fern replied. “You don’t want to do that.” But Charlie would not accept that cryptic response, and Fern finally told him that her companion was Carl Furillo. Her brother was incredulous. “What the hell’s he doing dating you,” he rhetorically asked, “when he’s probably up in New York with all those high-society women?” And so, still not believing his sister, Charlie went out to the car one evening and pulled the car door open to see who was dating his sister. Out popped Carl Furillo—towering over Charlie and leaving no doubt that Charlie would be the loser in any physical confrontation.

It was an experience that Fern and Carl (as well as Charlie) would laugh about in later years. But it was not the only fond memory they would take from Stony Creek Mills. Their roots were there and, no matter where Carl’s career took him, he and Fern would always return to the small community that they called home.

In the early years, Carl could not have anticipated that he would someday find himself playing baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers. (When a school counselor asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, the young boy responded, “I would like to be an undertaker.”) He was the sixth child born to Michael and Philomena Furillo, who had migrated to the United States from a town near Naples, Italy. They eventually settled in Stony Creek Mills, where they were one of only a few Italian families. Life was not easy in the beginning, and it became that much more difficult after the Depression enveloped the country. But they were a tight-knit family who drew comfort from each other, and there was always food on the table, in part because they had some land to grow their own crops.

Carl went to school in those early years, but education was considered a luxury in the Furillo home. He dropped out after the eighth grade. “At that time,” he later explained, “things were a little hard.” The family needed money, and young Carl was asked to spend his time picking fruit for $5 a day or working in the local cotton mill instead of sitting in a classroom. In later years, the lack of education often created a handicap as well as some comical moments. There was the time, for example, when Carl was asked to complete a questionnaire for the Dodgers which inquired about the “state of his health”—to which Furillo responded, “Pennsylvania.” But Carl was smart enough to know what he had missed. “He always thought,” said his older son, “that an education was the best thing in the world.”

Carl Furillo may not have had the education he wanted, but he did have one remarkable talent—the ability to throw a baseball harder and farther than most of his peers. When he played the outfield, he could fire the ball back to the infield and prevent the batter from taking an extra base or, better yet, catch him trying to take that extra base. Josh Haring, a scout for the St. Louis Cardinals, took note of that talent as he watched Carl play softball games in the Stony Creek Mills sandlots and on baseball teams for local organizations. “How much you getting in the dye house?” Haring asked an eighteen-year-old Furillo in 1940. When the teenager with the short dark hair and the angular face said $18 a week, Haring had a quick response. “I can get you a job, a good one—baseball,” the scout explained. “With Pocomoke City in the Eastern Shore League. Pays $80 a month, and I think you’ll wind up a big-league ballplayer.”

For Furillo, there was no question whether he would accept the offer—not so much because he loved baseball but because his family needed the money and he knew there was no future in the mills. So Carl Furillo became a professional baseball player. But always—even long after he had become the All-Star right fielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers—he would regard baseball as a place to work. And so, when Carl Jr. asked his father whether he was scared when he first came up to the Dodgers in 1946, Furillo had an easy answer: “No. It was my job.”

He did well when he joined the Pocomoke club that summer. Eager to take advantage of his strong throwing arm, the manager initially tried to have Carl pitch every five days and play the other four days in the outfield. But Furillo had little control as a pitcher and, beyond that, he found it to be a “rough grind” to be constantly switching positions. So he was ultimately confined to the outfield, and the continuity proved to be to his liking. He wound up hitting .319 and stroking nine home runs in only seventy-one games.

He was promoted to the Cardinals’ farm team in Reading, where he caught the Dodgers’ attention. When their efforts to buy his contract failed, the Dodgers pursued the only alternative they had left—they bought the whole Reading club for $5,000. As Buzzie Bavasi, the Dodgers’ point man on the deal, later recalled, the purchase netted the Dodgers “thirty uniforms, a bus, and Carl Furillo.”

The Dodgers assigned Furillo to their top farm team in Montreal for the 1942 season, but his climb to the major leagues was disrupted when he received his draft notice. Carl joined the 77th Infantry Division of the army and spent the first eighteen months of his service in the States and Hawaii. But then the division was sent overseas to become part of the force that invaded Guam, the Philippines, and ultimately Okinawa. Carl was eventually transferred to the quartermaster unit, which required him to provide supplies and brought him that much closer to the combat front. At one point Furillo was hit by a Japanese mortar—an experience he would not soon forget. “I thought my whole face was ripped,” he later remembered, with “blood pouring.” But the wound was not life-threatening and Furillo—mindful of the deaths and serious injuries incurred by his comrades—refused the medic’s offer to submit his name for a Purple Heart, which was awarded to almost every soldier wounded in action.

By July 1945, Carl had been brought back with his unit to the Philippines to plan for the invasion of Japan. It was to involve thousands upon thousands of servicemen, who would depend on untold quantities of various supplies. The chances of success were high, but the expected cost in lives was staggering. Furillo and the rest of his unit had been told that “the first three waves would be wiped out going into Japan.” It was not something that could give the young soldiers in his division hope—because they were to be part of the third wave. And then President Harry S Truman decided to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6. The surrender of Japan shortly afterward could not have come too quickly for Furillo and the other members of his division.