Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (26 page)

Shortly after the interleague series, Neal asked the young athlete whether he would be interested in joining the Colonels. On the one hand, Pee Wee was excited about the prospect of playing for a professional baseball team. On the other hand, he was concerned that success might lead to his elevation to the Brooklyn Dodgers—with whom the Colonels had a working arrangement at the time. Pee Wee knew all about the Dodgers’ history, and, however much he wanted to progress to the big leagues, he did not want to play for that team. The club had not had a winning record in years (which had inspired a sportswriter for a local paper to call them “Bums,” a label perpetuated by the paper’s cartoonist with an appropriate caricature of a tramp who had an unshaven beard, a dilapidated hat, and a smile that lacked a few teeth). Beyond that, the Brooklyn team seemed to attract eccentric players whose mental lapses were legendary. (There was that memorable game when Dodger second baseman Babe Herman slammed a line drive into right field with the bases loaded. It had all the earmarks of a triple that would drive in all three runners. Instead, only one run scored and the other three Dodgers—including Herman—found themselves at third base, giving the opposing team an easy double play to end the inning. The incident sparked numerous jokes, including one about the ticket agent who leaves Ebbets Field for a cigarette break and, when asked by a cabdriver how the Dodgers are doing, says, “They have three men on base.” To which the cabdriver responds, “Which base?”)

Still, it was a chance to play professional baseball, and Neal was offering more money than Pee Wee was then making as a cable splicer with the telephone company. Reese’s boss did not think that was enough to abandon a job that had considerable security. “Pee Wee,” the telephone supervisor said, “I think you’re making a mistake by quitting your job and going on to play baseball.” Reese did not agree. He had dreams, and they did not include a lifetime job at the telephone company. “I’m young,” he responded. “I may as well give it a shot.” And so, as he later recalled, “I couldn’t get my name on that contract fast enough.”

It proved to be a smart decision. In that first year, Reese—now standing five feet, ten inches and weighing about 160 pounds—established himself as one of the best shortstops in the American Association. By the beginning of the 1939 season, the press was reporting that Reese “has fielded and hit sensationally” and that “scouts from everywhere” were “swarming on the youngster’s trail.”

Cap Neal told anyone who asked that he would demand at least $50,000 for his star shortstop, and many clubs were interested—the Chicago Cubs, the Cincinnati Reds, and the New York Giants. But the acquisition was ultimately made by Larry MacPhail—the Dodgers’ volatile, hard-drinking, and often savvy general manager. Reese, MacPhail, told the press, was part of his plan to rebuild the Dodgers into a competitive team, because he was “the most instinctive base runner I’ve ever seen.” Reese did not share MacPhail’s excitement. (“Oh, no,” he moaned when reporters told him of the trade. “Not Brooklyn.”)

His distress did not last long. Indeed, looking back many years later, he acknowledged that the move to Brooklyn “was the best thing that ever happened to me.” A key reason was the Dodgers’ new manager—Leo Durocher. A fiery player who had started his career with the New York Yankees in the 1920s (with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig as teammates), Durocher had a reputation as a slick-fielding shortstop who commanded little respect as a hitter but someone who could inspire a team with his ferocious spirit. It was the same quality that drove teams to hire Billy Martin in later years, and, like those later general managers who pursued Martin, MacPhail decided that Durocher could give the Brooklyn Bums a lift that they sorely needed. And so the thirty-four-year-old Durocher was hired to play shortstop and manage the Brooklyn team for the 1939 season.

Despite the high expectations that surrounded his arrival, Reese was, as he recalled, “scared to death” when he went to spring training in Daytona, Florida, in February 1940. He was, after all, only twenty-one years old and, as one sportswriter explained, with “his pale, thin features and slender build,” he looked “more like a choirboy than a professional ballplayer.” (When a sportswriter first encountered the smooth-cheeked youth at spring training camp, he asked Reese if he brought a razor with him. “I shave about once a week,” Pee Wee explained with a grin.)

That first season was an unimaginable roller-coaster ride. Durocher gave Reese ample opportunity to play at short and made it clear that the rookie was to be the manager’s substitute on the field. “I want you to run this team as I would if I were still out there,” he told his young protégé. “You’re my holler guy.” It was enough to give any new player confidence, and Reese appeared to be on his way. Then, at an afternoon game in Chicago’s Wrigley Field in the beginning of June, Cubs pitcher Jake Mooty threw a curveball to the right-handed Reese. Reese lost track of the ball against the white shirts of the fans in center field, and it hit him in the head. (“I never saw it,” Reese later said.) He slumped to the ground immediately, unconscious and, as the doctors later determined at the hospital, suffering from a concussion. (“They hurt my boy today,” Durocher bitterly told his wife afterward.)

After a short stay in the hospital, Reese was sent home to Louisville to recuperate before rejoining the team at the end of June. He brought back with him a determination never to be beaned again—and thus became the first player in the major leagues to wear a batting helmet (which would not be required for all players until the 1950s). Reese also returned with a habit that would later prove to be his undoing: cigarettes. “He started smoking cigarettes,” his son, Mark, later recalled, “because he had nothing to do while he was lying in the hospital.”

Still, it did not affect his performance when he returned to the Dodgers. Newspapers touted the skills and accomplishments of Reese, calling him the “Boy Wonder” and an “amazing” rookie. For his part, Durocher called Reese “the best leadoff hitter in the National League” and “tops” among shortstops in the last fifteen years. Chicago Cubs manager Gabby Hartnett, a Hall of Fame catcher in his time, agreed, calling Reese “one of the best ballplayers in the major leagues.” Pittsburgh Pirates manager Frankie Frisch, who had compiled a sterling record as a National League second baseman, joined the chorus, saying that it was “a delight to watch a kid like that” who was “a great fielder with a great arm” and had “a natural genius for base running.”

And then disaster struck again. In a game against the Philadelphia Phillies on August 15, Reese slid hard into second base in order to avoid a force-out on a ground ball. His spikes caught the edge of the canvas base, twisted his leg, and resulted in a fractured heel that prematurely ended his season. Still, in eighty-four games with the Dodgers, he had been able to bat .272, with five home runs and twenty-eight runs batted in—statistics that were all the more impressive in light of his slow start. But more than that, Reese was pleased by his place on the team. “I felt,” he said, “that I belonged, that I could play.” Which was no small achievement, because the Brooklyn Dodgers of 1940 were a rough-and-tumble group whose players were almost always ready to fight and never willing to give any quarter to opposing teams—or even their own teammates—in the effort to win games. (“We didn’t have too many guys who were afraid,” Reese later said of his teammates in those early years. “If you were afraid, you didn’t stay on the club.”)

Reese assumed that his performance would be rewarded by a new contract for the 1941 season with an increase in his salary. But he was only twenty-two years old, had no experience in negotiating contracts, and was “scared to death” of General Manager Larry MacPhail (who was described by one sportswriter as “a part-time drinker and a full-time lunatic”). When he met with MacPhail in the winter at the Dodgers’ offices in Brooklyn, Reese decided the best strategy was to be honest. “Mr. MacPhail,” he began, “I’d like your advice. How much money do you think I should get?” MacPhail was not interested in giving advice. He slammed his fist on the desk, which only made the young player that much more nervous. “Young man,” he scolded Reese, “I’ve got a job to do and so do you.” With that, he handed Reese a contract with the same salary he had made in 1940. “I was so frightened,” Reese recalled, “I signed it on the spot.”

Pee Wee did not have to endure the same tension on the field when he later reported for spring training. Unlike MacPhail, Leo Durocher was eager to do whatever he could to make his new shortstop feel comfortable. (Durocher reminded Reese early in the season that he was always there to help if needed. “If you have any questions,” he said, “don’t hesitate. Come up and ask me.” A few weeks later, Reese sheepishly approached the manager—an ever-dapper dresser off the field who consorted with gamblers, actresses, and others integral to New York’s high life. “What is it, kid?” the manager inquired. “Mr. Durocher,” Reese said, “where do you buy your clothes?”)

Durocher’s interest in Reese’s development was matched by his patience. He believed that Reese would only improve with experience, and even as he was singing Reese’s praise to reporters in his rookie season, Durocher was also telling them that “Pee Wee will get better.”

Reese put Durocher’s faith to the test. His play on the field in 1941 lacked some of the finesse that he had shown earlier, and the errors occurred with an uncomfortable frequency. Still, nothing could shake Durocher’s confidence in his new shortstop. At one point Reese asked the manager to bench him after he had made some errors in the field. “Pee Wee,” Durocher snapped, “if you think I’m going in there to bail you out, you’re nuts. You’re playing even if you make twelve errors a day.” In later recounting the story, Durocher would proudly say, “You know what happened then? Pee Wee didn’t just play a good game. He played the game of the century. That’s right. The kid played the fucking game of the century.”

In time, that kind of superior performance would be Reese’s trademark throughout every season. But not in 1941. Reese batted only .229 and led the league’s shortstops in errors. (“In spite of me,” Reese would later say, “we won the pennant.”) Still, he and Pete Reiser, the twenty-two-year-old outfielder who led the National League in batting with a .343 average, were soon being referred to by sportswriters as the “Gold Dust Twins” because of the inspiration they provided to the Brooklyn club.

The World Series against the Yankees was an exciting venture for Reese, and he did have three singles in the first game of that five-game series. But, like the rest of the team, his hopes for victory collapsed when Dodger catcher Mickey Owen failed to hold on to the third strike against Yankee right fielder Tommy Henrich in that critical fourth game. “It looks like we’re going to get our ass beat,” Reese said to himself as he watched events unfold from the infield. But there was always next year.

Baseball in 1942 was overshadowed by the war that raged in Europe and the Pacific. But not for Pee Wee Reese. He reported to spring training at Daytona in February, but his thoughts were preoccupied by Dorothy Walton, a nineteen-year-old girl with long dark hair, a broad smile, and bright eyes. Pee Wee had met her three years earlier in the backyard of his older sister’s home in Louisville. “I saw her on the back porch drying her hair,” Reese later explained. “That is the moment I decided: That’s the girl for me.”

The two began spending time together, and the conversations eventually focused on plans for marriage. It was not something that pleased Dottie’s parents. They did not like the idea of their daughter becoming entangled with a baseball player, and they were even more disturbed when their nineteen-year-old daughter decided to visit her boyfriend at the Dodgers’ spring training camp in Daytona in March 1942. But Dottie had her own ideas as well as an invitation from the wife of Billy Herman, the Dodgers’ second baseman.

The trip took an unexpected twist shortly after Dottie arrived at Daytona. She and Pee Wee went out to dinner one night with outfielder Dixie Walker and his wife, Stelle. The Florida night was warm, the mood was gay, and Stelle did not understand why Pee Wee and Dottie wanted to wait until the fall to get married. “Why don’t you two get married now?” she asked. Spontaneity overwhelmed the couple, and they agreed to get married that Sunday, with Dixie Walker as the best man.

The news was not well received in Louisville. “It was not accepted by my mother-in-law,” Reese later said with some understatement, “and you could hardly blame her.” Not that Pee Wee and Dottie would change anything. The newly married couple found an apartment in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn for the season, and soon enough sportswriters were knocking on the door for an interview with the new Mrs. Reese. And she was willing to talk about her new life with the Dodgers’ shortstop. Pee Wee, she said, was not one “to talk shop a lot” when he came home after a game, but he was “a wonderful dancer. Like most men,” she added, “Pee Wee likes to eat at home,” and she was only too happy to oblige, frequently making him steak dinners or Southern-fried chicken.

Dottie and Pee Wee may have been comfortable with their marriage, but Larry MacPhail was not. In the general manager’s view, marriage compromised a young man’s competitive zeal. “Well,” he told Reese, “there goes the pennant.”

MacPhail’s prediction proved to be accurate, but no one could blame it on Pee Wee’s marriage. The club won 104 games in 1942—four more than they had won in 1941 and enough in most years to take the flag—but the St. Louis Cardinals won 106 games and finished first.

Reese was an integral part of the Dodgers’ improved performance. The twenty-three-year-old shortstop raised his batting average to .255, reduced his errors in the field, led the league’s shortstops in the number of plays handled, and, perhaps most important, was named to the National League’s All-Star team. The statistics, however, failed to capture the intangible qualities that Reese brought to the game. With his growing self-confidence, his calm demeanor, and his unyielding determination to win, he became the glue that often held the team together. “Experience and poise, added to his great natural ability,” said one sportswriter during the middle of the season, “make Reese the standout shortstop in the league.” Another sportswriter said later in the season that “the most valuable Dodger this year is Pee Wee Reese.”