Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (19 page)

Martin rose to the occasion again in the 1953 World Series, getting a record twelve hits in the six-game contest, which included a hit that drove in the winning run in the ninth inning of the sixth game. “The Yankees,” said one sportswriter in describing the scene after that hit, “bounded screaming from the dugout and mobbed the big-beaked kid who, more than anyone else, brought them the title and some $8,200 apiece in the lushest classic of all time.” The achievement brought Martin the coveted Babe Ruth award as the series’ Most Valuable Player and a baby-blue Cadillac from his friends in Berkeley.

None of those accomplishments could prevent the army from recalling Martin to active service, and he was forced to spend the entire 1954 season in uniform. For Stengel, Martin’s absence left a void that was difficult to fill. “Martin made himself the best second baseman in our league,” he told one sportswriter. “I know that some people will fight me on that statement. They don’t like Billy because he is so cocky. Well,” Stengel continued, “what’s wrong with being full of scrap, eager to take advantage of every opportunity?” Not surprisingly, the Yankee manager was delighted when Martin was discharged by the army and finally able to join the team for the pennant drive in September 1955. “Martin should help us, whether at short, or at second, or even just sitting on the bench,” he told
The Sporting News
. “He will help the spirit of this club.”

For his part, Martin was eager to fulfill Stengel’s expectations—not only for the sake of the club but for his as well. He had lost virtually all his money and most of his material possessions, including that baby-blue Cadillac. “I don’t know how hungry you guys are,” he told his teammates shortly after rejoining the club, “but I’m hungry. I need the money. I want to win this pennant real bad.” Inspired by their returning teammate—who hit .300 for the month (the only time in his career that he would reach that magic number)—the Yankees won the pennant and, as a reflection of their gratitude, voted Martin a full series share despite his absence for most of the season.

Martin should have had much to look forward to in 1956. But clouds were already beginning to form around his future as a Yankee. The club had a minor-league player—Bobby Richardson—who not only had considerable promise as a second baseman but, as a devout and nondrinking Christian, had more appeal to George Weiss than the volatile Martin. Although he had a respectable year in the field and at the plate in 1956 (with nine home runs and a .264 batting average), Martin understood that much of his vulnerability reflected Richardson’s availability, and the California veteran would periodically tease the newcomer’s wife about her husband’s future, saying, “I’ve written to the draft board, and I’m sure he’s going to be drafted pretty soon.”

 

Billy Martin, wearing the number 1 on the back of his uniform and with his mind obviously focused only on the game, is leaning over, his hands on his knees, waiting for Don Larsen’s first pitch in the top of the fourth inning of the fifth game of the 1956 World Series. Larsen hurls a slider to Junior Gilliam, and the Dodger second baseman sends a grounder to Martin’s left. It is nothing compared to the grounders Stengel hit to him on that tryout many years ago in the Oaks’ park, and Martin fields the ball easily for the first out.

Pee Wee Reese steps into the batter’s box, and Larsen throws him a low slider. The Dodger shortstop tries to check his swing, but the bat makes contact with the ball and sends another slow grounder toward Martin. The Yankee second baseman fields this one with ease as well, and there are now two outs.

After falling behind Duke Snider with two balls, Larsen—eager to get a strike—throws a “mediocre” fastball that, as Larsen later recalled, must have looked to Snider like “a beautiful present on Christmas day.” Snider swings and, from the crack of the bat, Yankee fans know it can be trouble. The ball flies in a high arc toward the upper deck in right field. Radio announcer Bob Neal’s voice rises with excitement as he describes the ball being hit “deep into right field. It is going in the upper deck . . . foul.” It was, however, extremely close. As first-base umpire Ed Runge later said, the ball was foul only “by six inches.”

Larsen is now feeling vulnerable and wondering whether he can survive the inning. “I had dodged a bullet,” he later said, “but I knew Duke would now be even more determined to beat me.” But it was not to be. After a called strike and two foul balls, Larsen slips a slider past Snider for a called third strike.

As Larsen walks off the mound to the security of the Yankee dugout, Neal is telling his listening audience that “the first twelve Dodgers to face Don Larsen have been retired in order.”

8

A
s he trots out to the vast expanse of center field in the bottom of the fourth inning, Duke Snider can no doubt remember his first visit to Yankee Stadium as a player. It was the first game of the 1949 World Series, and he was twenty-three years old. He had just completed his first full season with the Dodgers, but that experience had not prepared him for the emotions of that first encounter. Perhaps it was the aura of the stadium’s history—which was well-known to him from listening to baseball games on the radio as a boy. Or perhaps it was seeing the preserved lockers of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in the clubhouse—especially because he had always regarded Gehrig as his favorite player.

Whatever the reason, Snider’s knees “felt like rubber” when he was introduced over the public address system in that first World Series game and had to run out to the third-base line to stand with his teammates. But all of that anxiety disappeared when the late-afternoon sun threw its rays directly into center field in the middle of the game, and, not having any sunglasses, he was forced to ask Joe DiMaggio if he could borrow his. And then, as he watched the play from center field with the famous Yankee center fielder’s lenses, he could not help but say to himself, “I’ve come a long way.”

Indeed he had. Not that his father would have been surprised. Ward Snider, a semipro baseball player himself, had high hopes for his only child. That perspective was epitomized by the nickname Ward gave his son. When he came home from kindergarten one day, five-year-old Edwin Donald Snider heard his father say, “Here comes His Majesty, the Duke.” It may have been a playful gesture, but it was the name his father would always use and by which the young boy became known as he progressed through school—his mother, Florence, being the only exception, continuing to call him Edwin.

Home in those early days was a small apartment behind a grocery store in Boyle Heights, a working-class section of Los Angeles. Ward had a job with Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, and he would come home from work with hands covered by blisters from the hot molding equipment. But none of that would prevent him from taking his young son outside in the early evening and on the weekends to teach him the fundamentals of baseball. Although Duke was right-handed, Ward made his son learn to swing a bat left-handed. First base was a few steps closer, the father explained, if you batted left-handed. And, he added, most parks were better suited for left-handed hitters, with shorter distances to the fences in right field.

Duke could not have had any regrets about his father’s instruction—by the time he matured as a player, few could hit a baseball as well as Duke Snider. “He could swing harder than anybody,” recalled Gene Mauch, one of his high school friends (and later a big-league player and manager himself). “And he had such a graceful swing. He looked better striking out than any of us did hitting a triple.”

To be sure, the young athlete had a natural affinity for the game. But his skill at the plate was also a product of incessant practice. His parents insisted that he fulfill certain obligations—drying the dishes after dinner, mowing the lawn, and taking care of other household chores—but decided that he need not get a job. Instead, Duke could spend his spare time practicing athletics. That was no small sacrifice for the Snid ers, because money was always tight (and would lead his mother to do whatever she could to preserve what they had—such as stuffing cardboard in her son’s sneakers to make them last longer).

For his part, young Duke made the most of his parents’ generosity. “While lots of other kids in the neighborhood spent their spare time at the beach,” he remembered, “I was getting my suntan playing softball.” The focus on softball was not accidental. There was no Little League in his community and thus no opportunity to play baseball until the local playground organized a baseball league when he was ten years old. Most of those early summers (even after the creation of the playground’s baseball league) were spent on the softball field, and Duke was able to lead his team to three championships.

Duke had no difficulty in making the transition to baseball when he entered high school in 1942. Reflecting on his high school career in sports many years later, he would say, “I never knew what failure was.” He could not only hit and play center field but could pitch as well (hurling a no-hitter with fifteen strikeouts against Beverly Hills High School in his first game). Duke had a similar proficiency in playing football and basketball. Pete Rozelle, Snider’s high school classmate and later the first commissioner of the National Football League, said that “the most amazing football game” he had ever seen—which included more than thirty years of watching professional teams—was the high school game in which a young tailback named Duke Snider threw a sixty-three-yard pass in the closing seconds to beat a rival team.

Summers were now spent with much older players on the Monte bello Merchants, a local semipro baseball team. “I wasn’t excelling,” Snider remembered, “but I was holding my own.” Recognition of that talent no doubt led the manager to give Duke a chance to play third base, but the change in positions did not suit the young player. “I wasn’t so hot,” Snider later recalled. “The balls came down the line too fast.” He soon returned to the security of the outfield, and even there he was slow to field ground balls that made it through the infield. (When Dodger teammate Pee Wee Reese complained to him many years later about that shortcoming, Duke traced the problem back to those days in high school. “I had been an infielder,” he explained, “and I hated those ground balls. And I still hate them.”)

That deficiency in fielding ground balls was of no moment to Bill Schliebaum, the Compton High School baseball coach. After discussing the matter with Duke, he responded to a letter he had received in June 1943 from Branch Rickey, the new general manager for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The letter was identical to ones that Rickey had sent to high school coaches throughout the country in search of talent. For his part, Schliebaum was delighted to tell Mr. Rickey about “Edwin Duke Snider.” Schliebaum explained that the young athlete “is definitely not interested in going to college and wishes only to make a success of baseball.” Although Duke was only a sixteen-year-old junior at the time, Schliebaum expressed confidence that his young protégé would succeed as a professional player. Duke Snider, he told Rickey, “is one of the finest baseball prospects I have ever seen.”

Rickey was impressed, and in September, Snider received an invitation from Brooklyn scout Tom Downey to attend a tryout in Long Beach, California. Downey liked what he saw, and shortly after Duke graduated from high school in February 1944, Downey showed up at the Snider apartment with a typewriter. When the high school graduate asked about the typewriter, Downey had a simple response: “You’re going to sign today.” Downey offered the teenager a $1,000 bonus and a $200 monthly salary or a $750 bonus and a $250 salary. Ward was with the navy in the Pacific Theater somewhere, and Florence was forced to make the decision with her seventeen-year-old son. “It didn’t take long to figure out that one,” Snider later remembered. And so he signed a contract for the higher salary and made plans to travel to the Dodgers’ spring training camp in Bear Mountain, New York, near the West Point Military Academy (because wartime travel restrictions foreclosed the use of Florida).

Although scouts from the Cincinnati Reds and St. Louis Cardinals had also pursued Snider, they were not as quick to offer a contract, all of which was to the young athlete’s liking. Duke had been a Dodger fan for several years and wanted nothing more than to play with the Brooklyn team. Ironically, his love for the Dodgers had emerged from the team’s failure to win the 1941 World Series against the Yankees. Duke had already been attracted to the Dodgers because of Pete Reiser, the team’s twenty-two-year-old center fielder, and Pee Wee Reese, the team’s twenty-three-year-old shortstop. It was not only their accomplishments that appealed to the high school hopeful. “The way they played baseball was very exciting to me,” he later explained.

In the fourth game of that 1941 series, the Dodgers were one out away from winning the game by a score of 4-3 when catcher Mickey Owen let a third strike against Yankee outfielder Tommy Henrich get by him. Henrich made it to first base, and the next Yankee batters exploded for hits that resulted in more Yankee runs and another Dodger loss. “It broke my heart,” Duke later said, “when they got beat the way they did.”

There was no heartache, however, when Duke made it to the Dodgers’ spring training camp in the spring of 1944—only excitement. The young athlete arrived in time to see snow for the first time in his life and to experience the joy of playing with major-league players (getting his first hit off of a Yankee pitcher in an exhibition game). But he was not yet ready for the big leagues, and, when the season began, Rickey dispatched him to the team’s Class B farm club in Newport News, Virginia.

Living in the South was a new cultural experience for the California native. He quickly learned about the different social mores of the region when he got on a city bus for the first time. “I put my money in the little slot,” he remembered. “I walk to the back of the bus, and I sit down.” It was not something that endeared him to the other people on the bus. “I got dirty looks from some of the black people,” Duke remembered. “I got dirty looks from some of the white people.” Perplexed at first, he looked up and saw the sign that said “colored section.” And that was the last time he sat in the back of the bus in the South.