Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (32 page)

Carey played well in his freshman year and expected to spend four years at St. Mary’s. But the school dropped its baseball program, and the young student’s perspective on college suddenly changed. He spent the summer of 1950 playing with a semipro baseball team in Weiser, Idaho. Andy hit over .400, and by the end of the summer, as he recalled, “I don’t think there was a team that
wasn’t
interested in me.”

That increased interest coincided with a change in the bonus rule that eliminated the $6,000 threshold. As Ken had hoped, that proved beneficial to his stepson, and the offers now being presented to Andy far exceeded the offers he had received when he had graduated high school. On the morning of February 5, 1951, Ken and his stepson met with Joe Devine in a San Francisco hotel to sign a contract to play for the Yankees’ Kansas City farm team with a bonus of $60,000.

After they signed the contract, Devine told his new prospect to travel to Phoenix, Arizona, where Stengel would convene a special instructional camp. Andy was, of course, anxious to make the trip and, unlike many players his age, could do so without fear of receiving a notice to join the military service. The local draft board had decided that Andy Carey—who now stood at his full height of six feet, weighed about 180 pounds, and had the skill to play professional baseball—was unfit for military service.

The problem first surfaced when Andy slid hard into second base while playing for St. Mary’s team. “For whatever reason,” Carey later recalled, “it created this imbalance in my legs. One leg was two inches shorter than the other one.” X-rays showed that cartilage was missing from his lower spine and that the vertebrae were not properly joined to the pelvic bone. Some doctors suggested surgery to correct the defect, but Andy and his family were skeptical. They finally accepted the advice of a physician who proposed using Novocain to relax the muscles and exercise to restore strength to the shorter leg. (“I worked my ass off,” Carey remembered, “trying to get myself in shape again.”) And so, while he would experience back pain from time to time during his baseball career, Carey never needed surgery to correct the ailment. Nor did the back injury handicap the Alameda native at the Yankees’ instructional camp in Phoenix. He performed well, and Stengel invited him to join the club in a preseason exhibition tour. (“Imagine how I felt,” Carey later said, “appearing before Bay Area fans in the uniform of the world champions.”) Still, Stengel decided that Carey needed the benefit of regular play in the minor leagues. When the exhibition tour ended, Andy found himself in Kansas City.

The first half of the season with Kansas City was not what the nineteen-year-old player would have wanted. “My first showing with Kansas City was not good,” he later admitted. His batting average was below .250, and, more than that, he failed to display the enthusiasm required for any player to make the grade.

The breaking point came in an away game. Andy dropped a pop fly with the bases loaded, which led to his team’s loss. When the club returned to Kansas City, manager George Selkirk called the young third baseman into his office for a chat. “You big, strong son of a bitch,” Selkirk began. And for the next hour, as Carey recalled, “he chewed me out unmercifully.” Not that Carey could disagree with his manager. “I was getting nonchalant,” he remembered. Unaccustomed to a prolonged tongue-lashing for inferior play, Carey began to cry. And then he became angry—with himself. “I left the room with a new slant on baseball,” he later told a sportswriter. “I became a hustling, fighting ball player.”

The results of Selkirk’s lecture were immediate—and dramatic. Andy went on a tear at the plate, getting eighteen hits in his next twenty-two at bats and finishing the season with fourteen home runs (only one of which was hit during the first half of the season). The lesson was not lost on Stengel (who undoubtedly received a report on the bonus player from Selkirk). For the entire time he was with the Yankees, Carey would be the subject of periodic taunts from a manager eager to motivate his third baseman. (Stengel “knew if he made me mad I’d play better,” Carey later said. And so, as he recalled, the Yankee manager was “constantly getting me mad.”)

Carey failed to appreciate his manager’s approach when he came to the Yankees’ spring training camp in 1952. But understanding Casey Stengel was a challenge to many players and observers, and the prospect from Alameda was no exception. He even had a difficult time in grasping much of what his manager said. (“Sometimes,” said sportswriter Robert Creamer of Stengel, “when he tried to explain something precisely, his efforts to enhance his listeners’ knowledge would get hopelessly tangled. . . . If you had a general idea of what he was talking about, it wasn’t always that hard to follow him, but at times he could be very confusing.”)

Carey’s first clubhouse meetings with the Yankee manager were nothing short of startling. “I wish I’d have had one of those tiny recorders,” Carey said with amusement many years later. “He would rant and rave. A lot of times he’d give some guys names. It took me about a year to decipher who in the hell he was talking about half the time.” And then there was the time when Stengel walked into the clubhouse bathroom just as Andy was about to take a shave. “Kid,” said the manager, “I want to talk with you.” So Carey followed Stengel out of the bathroom with his face full of shaving lather and sat down to hear what his manager had to say. “And I’m sitting there and listening,” said Carey, “and he goes on and on, and when he went away, I didn’t remember what the hell he said.” In the meantime, the lather had evaporated, and so Carey had to return to the bathroom to start his shave from the beginning. (In later years, Carey would realize the futility of understanding Stengel’s long-winded monologues in clubhouse meetings and would often start reading a newspaper. This would only infuriate the Yankee manager, who would eventually yell to his third baseman, “Pay attention!”)

While his remarks may have been incomprehensible on occasion, Stengel had no trouble in communicating his satisfaction with Carey’s exploits in that 1952 spring training camp. “It is much too early to make definite statements about new players,” Casey told one sportswriter toward the end of March. “But I would be telling you an untruth if I did not admit that Carey has me ga-ga.” Not that anyone should have been surprised. Carey came to spring training with the confidence of a seasoned player. “Go ahead, assert yourself,” Selkirk had told his protégé before the camp began. “Let them know who you are.” The twenty-year-old prospect took those words to heart, and, in one of the first camp games, he drew a line in the infield dirt between third base and shortstop. “What are you doing there?” shortstop Phil Rizzuto asked. “I want you to know,” said the brash youth, “this is my side here. You stay off my side. This is my territory.”

That self-confidence was also evident at the plate. Carey started off the camp by hitting better than any other Yankee player and had a very respectable .324 average by the end of March. That hitting—coupled with fielding described as “brilliant” by one sportswriter—was enough to impress managers of other teams. “I have seen Carey play only one game,” said Philadelphia Phillies’ manager Eddie Stanky, “but he does everything right. He has everything to make him a great player.” Sportswriters drew similar conclusions. “He has size and strength,”
The Sporting News
opined in early April, “can run, is endowed with a strong arm, and he can hit. Andy makes plays which third basemen master only after several years’ experience in the majors, and which too many never do achieve.” And
The New York Times
labeled Carey as “the No. 1 rookie of the Grapefruit League” who “seems a cinch to open the regular season with the world champions.”

Carey’s chances of making the club were enhanced by Jerry Coleman’s anticipated departure for the military and an injury to Billy Martin that eliminated virtually all competition for the third-base position. (“Carey is confronted,” said one sportswriter, “with one of the most remarkable opportunities a kid has faced on the Yankees.”) But the opportunity never materialized. Coleman did join the military service, but Martin recovered from his injury and, after sporadic play at the beginning of the season, Stengel decided that the young athlete needed some further experience in the minor leagues. So Andy returned to Kansas City, where he again performed well (hitting .284 with sixteen home runs in only eighty-two games).

Carey had reason to believe that he might be able to stay with the club for the 1953 season. Those hopes should have been buoyed by the Yankees’ announcement after the 1952 season that Carey would be groomed to be the club’s new shortstop. It was not an idle suggestion. Stengel cherished versatility in his players, and almost all of them could play more than one position. Beyond that, there was the question of Rizzuto’s health. The Yankee shortstop had suffered from a bleeding ulcer at the end of the 1952 season, and sportswriters (as well as Yankee management) began to speculate whether the thirty-five-year-old veteran was nearing the end of his career.

The logic of the proposal may have been compelling in Stengel’s mind, but Carey had a different perspective. He wanted to hone his skills at only one position. He did not want the added burden of trying to master two positions. “I’d rather be a good third baseman,” he later told Stengel, “than a mediocre shortstop.” And so he told his manager to find someone else to replace Rizzuto.

Bold words from a rookie trying to make the club. But Andy had not forgotten Selkirk’s admonition to assert himself. Still, it was not a response that would endear Carey to the Yankee manager. Nor was it easily forgotten. Whenever the subject came up in a conversation in the clubhouse or with a sportswriter, Stengel was apt to comment on Carey’s stubborn refusal to play more than one position. (“Andy is a one-job man,” the manager would tell the press.) Stengel was equally quick to criticize his third baseman if he was not performing well—or sometimes if the team was not performing well. “I was his scapegoat,” Carey would later say of his relationship with Stengel. “Whenever he wanted to get on anybody else, he’d always chew me out.”

All of which may have explained why Carey found it difficult to break into the lineup in that 1953 season. Martin played almost every game at second base, Rizzuto was well enough to play 133 games at short, and the ever-versatile Gil McDougald started most of the games at third. Andy was forced to spend some time with minor-league teams in Kansas City and Syracuse and saw action in only fifty-one Yankees games (usually for defensive purposes in the late innings). By the end of the year, he had been given only eighty-one at bats (although he did hit .321 and had four home runs in that limited opportunity).

Still, he played enough to be impressed by the camaraderie on the team. “They were always encouraging,” he remembered years later. He understood the depth of that team spirit in a game against the Cleveland Indians when he came to bat with a runner on first base and broke his bat hitting a ground ball that resulted in his being thrown out at first but allowing the runner to move to second base. Carey returned to the dugout with disappointment, only to find—much to his surprise—teammates congratulating him for advancing the runner. “Nice going, Carey,” they said. “They had their little cliques,” Carey observed many years later. “But, to a man, there was nothing like being a Yankee.”

Carey’s situation changed dramatically in the 1954 season. Martin was in the army, and Stengel now needed another infielder. A torn muscle kept Carey on the bench for the first fifteen games of the season, but he was the regular third baseman when the injury healed, playing 120 games at third and batting .302—the second-highest average on the club. “Andy Carey,” said one sportswriter in June, “truly is one of the story book players of the 1954 season.”

Carey should have been pleased with his performance, but he had hit only eight home runs, and he could not resist the temptation to hit more. “I should be able to hit more homers and triples,” he told Dan Daniel of
The Sporting News
during spring training in 1955. “I have the strength and the weight to put behind a ball to drive those four baggers into the left-field stand in the Stadium.” The reasoning may have been sound, but the reality was far less satisfying. By the middle of May he was hitting .240 with only two home runs, and Stengel urged his third baseman to hit to all fields instead of trying to pull the ball. Carey finally yielded to the pressure. He changed his batting stance and tried to just meet the ball.

The change provided little satisfaction. Carey could not lift his season batting average above .257 (although he did hit eleven triples to tie Mickey Mantle for the league lead). “It was a very hard adjustment for me,” he later explained, “but you try to do what they tell you to do.” Even more troubling was the inability to regain his earlier—and more satisfying—batting form. “I was screwed up for about two or three years,” he said, and had considerable regret that he had succumbed to the pressure. “I look back now,” he said many years later, “and I was foolish to have changed. Because if I hit that well being a pull hitter, why change?”

Although his reputation as a pull hitter may have been tarnished, Carey had no difficulty in retaining his stature as the Yankee player with the biggest appetite. “I’ve always been a heavy eater,” he remarked many years later. “No one ever beat me.”

The Yankees learned of Carey’s almost insatiable appetite at the 1951 instructional camp in Phoenix. “How much can you eat here?” the nineteen-year-old Californian asked other players when he first arrived. When told that there was no limit, Andy began placing double orders of everything and astounding his teammates with his capacity to eat. (“They never talked about what I did on the baseball field,” Carey later remembered of that first spring training experience. “They always talked about my appetite.”) Yankee management was not happy to receive restaurant bills for $50 for one player’s meal. (Joe Devine, a big cigar in hand, walked over to the youngster at one point and said with some annoyance, “What are you trying to do here?”) After one week of receiving bills for Carey’s meals, Bill McCorry, the Yankees’ traveling secretary, informed the players that they would no longer have an open check but would instead be given only a certain amount of money to cover their meals.