Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (35 page)

Bob Wolff watches these events unfold from the press box with growing excitement. He knew from the moment he took over the radio broadcast in the fifth inning that Larsen was pitching a no-hitter. But he resolved that he would never use those words over the air unless and until Larsen actually completed the no-hitter. Part of that perspective was shaped by the mistake made by Dodger broadcaster Red Barber when he was covering Bill Bevens’ effort to pitch a no-hitter in the 1947 World Series. Barber kept reminding his listening audience that Bevens was on the verge of a no-hitter, and then—after Cookie Lavagetto crushed those expectations with a game-winning double in the ninth inning—a public outcry had ensued over Barber’s commentary.

Wolff is very much aware of Barber’s embarrassing experience. And more than that, he does not want to suck the drama out of the game. “If I keep saying it’s a no-hitter or it’s a perfect game,” he later told me, “what do you say at the end? You’re giving your punch line away too soon.” Wolff explained his perspective to Joe Nixon, the Gillette producer, right before he went on the air. “Joe,” Wolff said, “I’m going to let people know there’s a no-hitter in progress from this point on, but I’m not going to do it by using those words unless he does it at the end.” Nixon agreed. And so, after Slaughter catches Snider’s fly ball, Wolff tells his listening audience, “That’s twenty-one in a row retired by Don Larsen.”

As he walks off the mound, the Yankee pitcher now realizes what Wolff has suspected—that he might throw a no-hitter (although, as he later confessed, he did not know what a perfect game was). After reaching the dugout, Larsen ducks into the tunnel beneath the stands for a cigarette and, as he takes a drag, Mantle walks by. “Well, Mick,” the tall right-hander says to his teammate, “do you think I’ll make it?” The question violates the superstition among ballplayers that no reference should be made to the possibility of a no-hitter during the game. Mantle stares at Larsen for a moment, says nothing, and then walks away. He, for one, is not going to fool with tradition. Larsen understands, but he is not happy. “It was,” he later said, “like a big black shadow surrounded me and kept me apart from everyone else.”

14

A
haze hung over St. Louis’ Sportsman’s Park on that October afternoon in 1946. It was the bottom of the eighth inning, and Enos Slaughter stood on first base while more than thirty-six thousand fans watched every move on the field. The tension in the stands and on the diamond was almost palpable—and understandable. The Cardinals and the Red Sox had each won three games in the World Series, and Slaughter represented the winning run of the seventh game—and, ultimately, the world championship.

Slaughter’s mere presence on the field was nothing short of extraordinary. In the fifth game at Boston, he had been hit in the right elbow by a fastball. He stayed in the game, but the elbow soon became discolored and swelled considerably. The pain escalated quickly and precluded the thirty-year-old outfielder from getting any sleep on the train back to St. Louis. As soon as the train reached the city, Slaughter went to St. John’s Hospital for an X-ray and a conference with Dr. Robert F. Hyland, the team physician. Hyland explained that the pitch had inflicted a deep bone bruise. “I sure hate to tell you this,” Hyland told Slaughter, “but you just can’t play in the series any more.” Hyland added that he even might be forced to amputate the arm if it were re-injured in either of the next two games.

None of that mattered to Enos. The Cardinals had come too far to win the National League pennant by beating the Dodgers in the play-offs after trailing by seven and a half games in July. He could not leave now. The Cardinals were behind, and he had to be there to do whatever he could to change the situation. Somehow, some way, he would get through the sixth game and, if need be, the seventh game as well. (“As long as Enos Slaughter is in a game,” one sportswriter later said, “there is a chance that his extra smidgin of hustle will prove the deciding factor.”) And so the injured Cardinal rejected any suggestion that he sit on the bench. “I’m playing,” he defiantly told Hyland.

And play he did. Slaughter not only fielded balls and swung a bat in that sixth game without incident. He also hit a single to drive in one of the runs in the Cardinals’ 4-1 victory over the Red Sox. A seventh game was therefore necessary.

That last game at Sportsman’s Park was a seesaw affair. The Cardinals pulled ahead 3-1 in the fifth inning, but Red Sox center fielder Dom DiMaggio lined a double to right center field in the top of the eighth to drive in two runs and tie the score at 3-3. The Red Sox were ecstatic, but they paid a high price for that benefit. DiMaggio came up lame at second base with a pulled leg muscle. When Boston took the field in the bottom of the eighth, DiMaggio was replaced in center field by Leon Culberson, a Georgia native who lacked the throwing arm that DiMaggio possessed. It proved to be a critical difference.

The other change for the Red Sox was the pitcher. Bob Klinger strode to the pitching mound, and the first batter he faced was Slaughter. Klinger had pitched for the Pittsburgh Pirates during Slaughter’s rookie season in 1938, and that familiarity may have proved helpful to the Cardinal outfielder. He eventually tagged the Red Sox hurler for a sharp single into center field. Still, Klinger seemed to have matters under control. The next two Cardinals were set down without difficulty, and with only one out left, Slaughter knew that aggressive action was required.

When Cardinal outfielder Harry Walker stepped into the batter’s box, Slaughter resolved to steal second base. And more than that, he committed himself to taking more than one base if the opportunity presented itself. It was not a friviolous decision. To be sure, with a weight of almost 190 pounds on a five-foot-nine-inch frame, Slaughter was not built for speed. But what he lacked in anatomy was balanced by determination. He had hit a triple in the first game of the series and had refrained from trying to score only because third-base coach Mike Gonzalez had held up his hands, signaling for Slaughter to remain at third. In retrospect, it may have made the difference. The Red Sox won the game 3-2 in the tenth inning, and, in the clubhouse afterward, Slaughter registered his complaint with Cardinal manager Eddie Dyer. “Skipper,” he said, “I could have scored on that triple if I hadn’t been held up.” The Cardinal manager understood Slaughter’s unflagging drive to win and gave him the freedom to do what he thought best.

The left-handed Walker worked the count to two balls and a strike. As Klinger threw the next pitch, Slaughter was already tearing toward second base with his head down. He heard the crack of Walker’s bat and saw a line drive that he knew would land safely for a single in left center field. Under ordinary circumstances, Slaughter could do no better than reach third base. But these were not ordinary circumstances. Culberson—not DiMaggio—would be fielding Walker’s hit. “I made up my mind,” Enos later said, “that I was going to score the go-ahead run on that play.”

Culberson knew nothing of Slaughter’s decision as he fielded Walker’s hit and casually tossed the ball back to Red Sox shortstop Johnny Pesky, who stood just outside the confines of the infield to take the throw. Pesky’s back was to home plate, but no matter. No one scores from first base on a single. “I never expected he’d try to score,” Pesky later explained. The other Red Sox infielders could see what was happening but inexplicably did not appear to make any effort to get the shortstop’s attention. Any attempt might have been in vain anyway. The noise from the screaming fans, who could see what was unfolding, was deafening.

With the ball in hand, Pesky turned around and began to trot back into the infield when, to his shock, he spotted Slaughter racing for home. But it was too late. By the time Pesky threw the ball to the catcher, Slaughter was sliding across home plate, leaning on his right hand, in a cloud of dust. (“You shudda seen that Slaughter slud home,” said former Cardinal pitcher Dizzy Dean.) It was, said
The New York Herald Tribune
, a “mad dash” in “as dramatic a game as the heart can stand.” And it made all the difference. The Cardinals won the game 4-3 and became the first team in baseball history to defeat the Red Sox in a World Series.

Slaughter’s feat was celebrated around the nation, and forevermore he would be associated with that “mad dash” home. It became a permanent part of baseball folklore that would be referenced in baseball histories, captured in old newsreels at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, and later memorialized in a bronze statue that sits outside Busch Stadium, the Cardinals’ new home. (And when one of Slaughter’s daughters took up sailing decades later near their North Carolina home, she named the boat “Mad Dash.”)

It was, to be sure, a proud moment in a long career. But Enos Slaughter wanted to make other contributions in other World Series, and ten years later, the forty-year-old veteran—now a member of the American League’s pennant-winning team—is delighted when Casey Stengel asks him to play left field in the 1956 World Series. Elston Howard, the Yankees’ other candidate for the position, has strep throat, and the former Cardinal wins the assignment through default.

Not that Stengel can be unhappy about the choice. Slaughter hit a three-run home run to win the third game at Ebbets Field, and, by the beginning of the fifth game at Yankee Stadium, he is the leading Yankee hitter in the series with seven hits.

Yogi Berra is the first batter to face Sal Maglie in the bottom of the seventh inning, and he lofts an easy pop fly to the left side of third base which Jackie Robinson catches in foul territory. Slaughter now steps into the batter’s box, no doubt believing that he can add to the Yankees’ 2-0 lead.

It is a self-confidence born from a childhood in rural North Carolina. Home was a ninety-acre farm in Allensville, a small town just south of the Virginia border. Lonnie Gentry’s and Zadok Slaughter’s ancestors had been farming the land in North Carolina for generations, and, by the time Enos was born in April 1916, he already had three older brothers (who would soon be joined by a sister and another brother).

Unity was the guiding principle of family life. Each family member had chores to perform—whether milking cows, slaughtering hogs, or planting tobacco, wheat, and corn. It was hard work, but farm life ensured the availability of food on the table and, in the process, taught Enos not to take anything for granted. “When you’re a farm boy,” he later said, “you learn to appreciate life.”

Hunting and fishing were also family affairs, sometimes involving excursions by covered wagon to remote locations. On other occasions, young Enos would travel to nearby woods with his father and brothers to hunt rabbits. “There wasn’t enough money to buy me a gun,” Enos explained, so he would kill the rabbits by throwing rocks at them. Years later he would say that his throwing arm in baseball was developed by throwing rocks at rabbits.

Although hunting and fishing may have been leisure activities to some, there was nothing casual about the way Enos Slaughter pursued those activities. There was eternal enthusiasm and always boundless energy. And it did not change with age. “He saves a lot of wear and tear on the hound dogs,” said Joe Garagiola, who would sometimes hunt with Slaughter when they were teammates in St. Louis. “We let Enos be the retriever. The minute we hit something—bang!—there goes Enos. Through mud and briar bushes and swamp.”

It was the kind of attitude young Enos exuded when he participated in sports. That too was a family affair. However much they wanted their children to work the farm, Zadok and Lonnie recognized the need for some respite. During each spring, all work would cease on Saturday at noon, and the family would travel—sometimes by horse and buggy and at other times in the family’s 1927 Ford Model T—to a local field where everyone would play baseball.

No one in the family was more excited about those trips than Zadok and Lonnie’s fourth child. “I just loved baseball, period,” he later said. Although he wrote and did almost everything else right-handed, young Enos found it more comfortable to chop wood left-handed and, not surprisingly, he decided to bat from the left side of the plate. Still, he threw right-handed and was able to become the regular second baseman for Bethel Hill High School in his senior year.

Enos’ proficiency at football and baseball was enough to attract a scholarship offer from a local college, but higher education held no allure for the young athlete. “My mind was set,” he later said, “on going to work for the mill and continuing to play second base for the company team.”

Enos was especially pleased when the sports editor for the
Durham Morning Herald
recommended to Oliver French, the owner of the Cardinals’ farm team in nearby Greensboro, that the young player be given a tryout. The eighteen-year-old Enos made the trip in September 1934 with two friends and was elated when Billy Southworth, the Greensboro manager, invited the young player to return for another tryout the following spring—but not as a second baseman. Southworth concluded that the Bethel High School star looked “clumsy” at second base and decided that he had the arm to be an outfielder. With that, Enos Slaughter became—and forever remained—an outfielder.

The Cardinal prospect returned to the family farm and married Hulo Powell, his high school sweetheart. It was not a marriage made in heaven. They were not only young. They also had different visions of their future. “She was in love with Enos Slaughter the farm boy,” Enos later said, “not Enos Slaughter the professional baseball player, and the life in that sport would ultimately lead to the end of that marriage.” Still, Hulo was with Enos when he traveled to Asheville, North Carolina, the following spring for another tryout with the Cardinal farm team.

It did not start out well. Southworth decided that the young prospect was too slow afoot to become a professional baseball player. But all was not lost. “Did you know,” Southworth asked Slaughter one day, “that you’ve been running flat-footed? Why don’t you try running on your toes?” Eager to succeed, Slaughter took the suggestion to heart and spent the next three days trying to change his running style. The results were dramatic. He was now a much faster runner on the base paths—and the recipient of a contract paying him $75 a month to play with the Martinsville Redbirds. (“Those three days,” he later said, “saved a long baseball career.”)