Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (3 page)

When Dale Mitchell first advanced to the plate, Dodger broadcaster Vin Scully told his television audience that “no man in baseball history has come up in a more dramatic moment,” and
The New York Times
later called it the “greatest moment” in World Series history. But it is not enough to know that Don Larsen stood on the brink of a success that no other pitcher had enjoyed. An appreciation of Larsen’s performance—and how he came to that enviable position—requires an understanding of the other players who were on the field that day: their backgrounds, their skills, their hopes and fears, and, most especially, how and why they found themselves at Yankee Stadium for that fifth game of the 1956 World Series. Because this is not just a story about Don Larsen. This is also a story about eighteen other players who were an integral part of the drama that unfolded on that warm fall day.

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D
on Larsen’s mother could have watched on television when her son strode to the mound in Yankee Stadium shortly before one o’clock on that October afternoon for the fifth game of the 1956 World Series. But Charlotte Larsen, a sixty-one-year-old housekeeper for a retirement home in La Jolla, California, stayed away from the television and radio, afraid that her “presence” would somehow compromise her son’s performance. “I make it a rule never to watch Don when he pitches,” she later explained to a reporter. “Seems like every time I watch him, he loses. So I just don’t do it.” His father, James, a salesman in a Berkeley, California, department store, had separated from his wife many years earlier and had no such reservations. He watched the game on a television set at the local YMCA.

Seeing Don on television no doubt brought back fond memories of the days when the elder Larsen played catch with his young son in the basement of their home in Michigan City, Indiana, a small industrial town near the Michigan border. Even then, Don knew he wanted to be a major-league baseball player. “I didn’t pay much attention to it,” his mother later said, “because he didn’t seem to have any special talent for the game.”

His mother’s doubts did not deter Don from pursuing his dream of becoming a major-league baseball player. The irony was that the ambitious youngster—who had grown to more than six feet tall by the time he reached his teens—was more proficient at basketball than baseball, and when his family moved to San Diego, California, in 1944, he had no trouble making the basketball team at Point Loma High School and being selected for the Metro Conference team with an average of nineteen points per game. He also pitched for the school’s baseball team, where the coach concluded that the young athlete was “a better prospect as a hitter than as a pitcher.” But Don wanted to be a pitcher, and he was not discouraged by the coach’s sentiments. He pitched for a local American Legion baseball team and performed well enough to catch the eye of Art Schwartz, a scout for the American League’s St. Louis Browns.

When Don graduated from high school in 1947, Schwartz took the eighteen-year-old prospect and his father out to dinner and offered Don a contract to play with one of the Browns’ minor-league teams. Don had already been offered some college basketball scholarships, but they held no appeal for him. “I was never much with the studies,” he later explained, “and I didn’t really have an interest in going to college and studying my life away.” So he signed the contract proffered by Schwartz, which included an $850 bonus.

His introduction to professional baseball a few weeks later was less than auspicious. He was assigned to the Browns’ farm team in Ab erdeen, South Dakota, and he took a train in late June to join the team. No one met him at the train station, and, not knowing what to do, he went to one of the town’s few hotels. They had no rooms available, and so he spent the night sleeping in the lobby. The next day he traveled to the ballpark, only to learn that no one knew of him. Unable to get into the ballpark, he had to buy a ticket to the doubleheader that was being played that day. And not wanting to bother anyone, he took his seat along the first-base line, luggage in tow, trying to figure out what to do. After the first game, Larsen was able to catch the attention of one of the team’s players, who retrieved Don Heffner, the manager. Heffner explained that he had expected Larsen a few days earlier and for that reason had not made any arrangements for his later arrival.

It was smooth sailing from there. Larsen was able to move up the minor-league ladder and, along the way, develop new friendships. Bob Turley, who would later be Larsen’s teammate on the St. Louis Browns, the Baltimore Orioles, and then the New York Yankees, remembered their first meeting in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where the Browns’ minor-league teams would meet for spring training. Turley first spotted Larsen in the mess hall “beating the hell out of a pinball machine.” He was, said Turley, “a fun-loving guy” who “liked to go out and have a beer or two and talk to people in bars.”

The Korean War ignited shortly after the 1950 season began, and in due course Larsen received his draft notice. He spent two years in noncombat roles and, upon his discharge in 1953, he was promoted to the St. Louis Browns. The promotion was a mixed blessing in one respect: the Browns were a perennial losing team that had finished last or next-to-last twenty-two times. Still, it was not something to be turned aside. “I’ll never forget,” Larsen later said, “how excited I was when I found out I made the club.”

He made his first appearance on April 18 in Detroit and soon established himself as one of the Browns’ brighter prospects, with a 7-12 won-lost record on a team that lost a hundred games and again finished last. The Browns also appreciated Larsen’s prowess as a hitter (having established a major-league record for pitchers by getting seven consecutive hits at one point in the season), and he was occasionally used as a pinch hitter. But all of that potential was compromised by Larsen’s inability to honor the midnight curfew established by manager Marty Marion. His mantra was “let the good times roll,” and years later he would say, “You give the best you can on the field. Who cares what you do afterwards as long as you show up and do well?”

It may have been an appropriate approach in Larsen’s mind, but Marion found it difficult to accept. The Browns’ manager finally took his frustrations to team owner Bill Veeck. “Look, Bill,” he said, “we have to teach this guy Larsen a lesson. I think if we send him down to [the Browns’ farm team in] San Antonio right now, it might throw a scare into him and get him straightened out.” Veeck—more concerned with victories than team discipline—disagreed. “There’s no sense in trying to reform him,” said the Browns’ owner. “I still think he’ll be a big winner someday, even though he winks at all the rules.”

Larsen’s social habits continued unchecked when the team relocated to Baltimore (as the Orioles) in 1954 (leading Jimmy Dykes, the new manager, to say that “the only thing Don fears is sleep”). But hopes for Larsen as a “big winner” in 1954 proved unduly optimistic. He won only three games and lost twenty-one. But that losing record had to be placed in context. The team scored only 483 runs that season—or about three runs per game—which made it difficult for any capable pitcher to succeed. And beyond that, two of Larsen’s victories came in well-pitched games against the New York Yankees.

Larsen’s success against the Yankees was not lost on manager Casey Stengel, and on November 18, 1954—after the season ended—it was announced that Larsen was part of a sixteen-player deal that would bring the young right-hander to New York (along with Orioles teammate Bob Turley). The Yankees—eager to strengthen a pitching staff that had lagged behind the pennant-winning Cleveland Indians—had high hopes for their new acquisitions. “With Turley and Larsen,” said Yankee general manager George Weiss, “we plug our major weakness. They are two of the finest and fastest right-handers in the game. Both are young and both figure to get better.”

Weiss’ hopes for Larsen proved to be premature. He arrived at spring training with a sore arm, and Stengel as well as some of the other Yankee players wondered whether he had the same drive to succeed that motivated them. “He had probably a hell of a lot more ability than ninety-nine percent of all the pitchers in baseball,” said one teammate. “He was a good hitter. He could run. He could field the ball. But he was a lazy type.” That concern grew when the 1955 season started. His pitching performances were not impressive, and Stengel decided that Don needed further conditioning with the Yankees’ farm team in Denver, which was managed by former Yankee catcher (and future Yankee manager) Ralph Houk. Larsen did not take the news of his demotion well. “I’m going to take my sweet time reporting,” he told his teammates, “and I don’t give a damn if I ever come back here.”

It proved to be nothing more than false bravado. Larsen did report to Houk at Denver and, to everyone’s delight, did remarkably well, compiling a 9-1 won-lost record in a couple of months. On July 28, Houk gave him the good news: the Yankees wanted him back.

Larsen started his first game on Sunday, July 31, and pitched the Yankees to a complete game victory over the Kansas City Athletics. It was a good omen. Larsen proved to be instrumental in the Yankees’ final pennant drive, winning key games (including a thirteen-inning outing against the Red Sox) and finishing the season with a 9-2 won-lost record and a respectable 3.06 earned run average. He also impressed Stengel with his hitting ability, and there were many times when the Yankee manager would bat Larsen seventh or eighth in the lineup instead of last, as was usually the case with pitchers. (There was the time, for example, when Stengel posted the lineup showing that Larsen would be batting seventh, second baseman Jerry Coleman eighth, and Billy Martin, assigned to third base, batting ninth. Martin stormed into Stengel’s office demanding to know why he was batting ninth. “Larsen should be hitting ahead of me,” Martin conceded, “but there’s no way you can have Jerry Coleman hitting in front of me!”)

Larsen was given the starting assignment in the fourth game of the 1955 World Series against the Dodgers, but it was not an experience to remember. He gave up five runs in four innings as the Yankees lost 5-3. While the Yankees went on to lose the series to the Dodgers, Larsen was proud of his accomplishment over the course of the 1955 season. “I had stretched beyond my childhood dreams by pitching for the Yankees and in the World Series,” he later said. “Even though we lost the championship to the Dodgers, I was thankful to have even been there in the first place.”

He had good reason to be hopeful for the future. He had proven—despite the World Series loss—that he was a tough competitor who could come through in high-pressure situations. That was no small matter. The Yankees were, to a man, a fiercely competitive group, and they did not tolerate a teammate who seemed to be giving less than everything he had. (The unyielding drive to win was perhaps captured best when Eddie Lopat, one of the Yankees’ premier pitchers of the early 1950s, confronted Mickey Mantle in the dugout during Mantle’s rookie year in 1951 when the nineteen-year-old player failed to get a jump on a ball hit to the outfield because he was still moping about a strikeout his last time at bat. Lopat had been pitching, and he did not hesitate to convey his displeasure. “You want to play?” Lopat demanded of Mantle. “If not, get your ass the hell out of here. We don’t need guys like you. We want to win.”)

In addition to his talent, Larsen had an affable manner that made him easy to like. Indeed, said Turley, “everybody liked him.” They also recognized his interest in entertainment after the game. Although there were many occasions when Don would drift out of the clubhouse after a game to socialize with someone other than his teammates, they had enough contact to realize that Don had a startling capacity for liquor. “Larsen was easily the greatest drinker I’ve known,” Mantle later observed, “and I’ve known some pretty good ones in my time.” Larsen also had a penchant for diversity when it came to drinking. “He’d never drink the same thing twice,” said first baseman Joe Collins. “If he had five drinks, he’d have five different drinks.” His teammates would tease him good-naturedly about his drinking habits, but, as Collins remembered, they were also prepared “to accept him for what he was.”

Stengel was also prepared to accept Larsen for who he was, and that became evident when Larsen wrapped his brand-new Oldsmobile around a telephone pole at five o’clock in the morning in St. Petersburg, Florida, shortly after spring training had commenced for the 1956 season. Larsen admitted to Stengel that he had been frequenting some “waterholes” earlier in the evening and that he had fallen asleep at the wheel (and fortunately escaped any major injury). Although he made much in team meetings about honoring his curfew, Stengel—an avid drinker himself—was prepared to tolerate a player’s deviations from his policy as long as it did not affect the player’s performance. And so, when reporters later confronted him about Larsen’s accident and whether he had violated the team curfew, Stengel was nonchalant. I’m not sure what to do, he told the reporters, because “Larsen was either out too late or up too early.”

Stengel used Larsen interchangeably during the 1956 season as a starter and a reliever, and by season’s end, he had pitched in thirty-eight games and compiled a respectable 3.26 earned run average in 180 innings. Larsen had also adjusted to life as a Yankee in New York City, living a seemingly carefree existence that did not leave any room for savings on his $12,000 annual salary. On the morning of the fifth game of the World Series—after he had learned that he would be the starting pitcher—Larsen approached Bill McCorry, the Yankees’ traveling secretary, and asked for a $200 advance on his series earnings. “I’ve gotta get home to California when this thing is over,” he explained to McCorry, “and I don’t have a nickel.” “Win today,” McCorry replied, “and I’ll see that you get your money.”

As Larsen was told later that day—and as he should have already known—he was not the only one in need of an advance on his World Series earnings. As far as his teammates knew, Larsen was a bachelor (with one reporter referring to Larsen shortly before the 1956 World Series as “a devil-may-care playboy”). But those perceptions changed quickly when word got out on the morning of October 8, 1956, that Larsen was in fact married and that his wife had filed a complaint with a New York court because of his failure to make support payments for her and their fourteen-month-old daughter. “While this baseball hero is enjoying the luxuries of life and the plaudits of the public,” Mrs. Larsen’s attorney told the press, “he is subjecting his fourteen-month-old baby girl and his wife to the pleasures of a starvation existence.” Vivian Larsen, it turned out, had met the Yankee pitcher in 1954 when she was a twenty-seven-year-old operator for a Baltimore telephone company and Don was a pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles. Larsen thought they had parted company after the season was over, but Vivian called him in California to let him know that she was pregnant. Abortions were illegal, and at first he suggested that Vivian put the baby up for adoption. That was out of the question, Vivian told him. So Larsen decided that the only honorable course of action was to get married (which was accomplished in April 1955). But Larsen made it clear to Vivian that the marriage had to be kept secret, that the union was only “for the sake of the child,” and that “he was not ready settle down and preferred to live a life of free and easy existence.” They never lived together, but Vivian migrated to the Bronx near Yankee Stadium, and there she stayed with their daughter, expecting $60 a week in support money from her husband.