Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (43 page)

Collins continued to play first base and wield a steady bat in 1954 (twelve home runs and a respectable .271 batting average in 130 games) before succumbing to the injured shoulder in 1955. And he continued to be the subject of trade rumors as the Yankees evaluated numerous candidates for the first-base position. But none of that affected Collins’ performance in the first game of the 1955 World Series. His two home runs off Dodger pitcher Don Newcombe made the difference in the Yankees’ 6-5 victory.

The press surrounded Collins’ locker after that first series game. They not only wanted him to recount the details of his home runs. They also wanted to know if he thought the Yankees, having seen his considerable contribution in the fall classic, should now abandon the never-ending discussions of a possible trade and play him more regularly. “It would be nice,” Joe told the sportswriters, “to play every day and not have to walk around feeling a sword was hanging over your head. But we’ve kept on winning, which counts most. So I have no squawks at all, and, after a long hard fight, I have to join the chorus and say I’m mighty lucky to be a Yankee.”

That may have been true in 1955, but Collins’ luck was starting to run out in 1956. His shoulder continued to bother him (so much so that, during the 1955 World Series, he had to pick up his glove hand with his other hand to catch the ball in the field). His batting average continued to fall in 1956, and he knew that the younger Skowron was deserving of more playing time. True, Skowron did not possess the same defensive skills that Collins had in the field. (“I was no gazelle around first base,” Moose later acknowledged to me. And so the team sent the former Purdue football player to Arthur Murray Dance Studios during his first spring training in 1954 in the hope that the agility learned on the dance floor could be applied on the baseball field.) But Skowron did wield a more potent bat than Collins. He batted .340 playing part-time in his rookie year of 1954 and .319 playing part-time in 1955. It was inevitable that Stengel would increase the younger player’s time in the ensuing years.

Collins did not begrudge the twenty-three-year-old Skowron his due. Quite the contrary. He welcomed him with open arms. “You know, Moose,” Collins said one day to Skowron during his first spring training, “you’re my competition. But I hope when I play, you’ll cheer for me. And when you play, I’ll cheer for you.” Skowron, accustomed to players who would do anything to squeeze out the competition, was taken aback by Collins’ comment. “I never forgot that,” he later remarked. And so Skowron would forevermore value the older player’s contribution to the club—even when Collins replaced him at first base during the 1956 World Series. “He was a great teammate,” Moose later said of Collins.

Unfortunately, that was not enough to guarantee Joe’s future with the club. There were moments of glory in 1956, but they were few and far between. One of them included a decision by Stengel to have Collins pinch-hit for Hank Bauer in the third inning of a scoreless game with the Cleveland Indians and with two Yankees on base. Joe responded to the show of confidence with a home run into the Yankee bullpen in right field, leading one sportswriter to say that “never should anyone attempt to outguess Casey Stengel.”

 

No one is second-guessing the Yankee manager as Don Larsen walks to the batter’s box in the bottom of the eighth inning of the fifth game of the 1956 World Series. The crowd is standing on its feet and, as Bob Wolff tells his audience, “The applause really rang out to the rafters here.”

Larsen’s appearance at the plate does not last long. He swings at the first pitch from Sal Maglie without connecting, takes a second strike, and then, after watching a pitch sail outside for a ball, swings wildly at another pitch for the third strike. But none of that matters to the crowd, which again gives him a roar of approval. (“It was,” Larsen later said, “the only time in my career when I was applauded by the crowd after I struck out.”)

Bauer does not fare any better than the Yankee pitcher. He fouls off one pitch, takes a ball, hits a ball that curves foul into the left-field seats, fouls off another pitch, and then strikes out when Roy Campanella holds on to a foul tip.

Collins goes into a crouch as he steps in the batter’s box. He understands the drama that is unfolding and is taking nothing for granted. And he is anything but relaxed. (Collins would later tell one of his sons that the fifth game of the 1956 World Series “was the most intense game he ever played in.”)

After taking two balls and then a strike, Collins hits two balls foul toward the Yankee dugout. He then steps out of the batter’s box, knocks the dirt off his spikes with his bat, and returns to the batter’s box. Maglie takes the sign from Campanella and fires another pitch to the Yankee first baseman. Collins’ hopes of adding to the Yankees’ lead evaporate as he swings without hitting the ball.

Maglie has struck out the side and, as Wolff intones, is “giving a great pitching demonstration this afternoon.” But it pales beside the performance of Larsen, who is sweating profusely in the Yankee dugout. As the Dodgers leave the field, the Yankee hurler picks up his glove and trudges out to the pitching mound—now completely draped in shadows—for the top of the ninth inning. He knows that three outs stand between him and baseball immortality.

17

A
s Don Larsen hurls warm-up pitches to Yogi Berra, Joe Collins is throwing the other infielders practice ground balls. The infielders had, as Joe Collins later remembered, “a little huddle” in the dugout before they ran out onto the field. They all understood the significance of the moment. “Nothing gets through,” said Billy Martin. If there was a hard-hit ground ball, the infielder would have to block it with his body to preserve the play at first base.

Hank Bauer is in right field, tossing practice fly balls back and forth with Mickey Mantle. An ex-marine, Bauer stands six feet tall and weighs more than 190 pounds. He has the reputation of being a hard-nosed character. (He was, said Mantle, “the toughest and strongest player I ever saw.”) More than that, Bauer has the look of a man who can weather any situation. Comedian Jan Murray likened Bauer’s face—with its rugged features—to a “clenched fist,” and one sportswriter described that face as “a permanent, granite carving of belligerence, aggression and determination.”

Maybe so. But in this case, appearances are deceiving. Hank Bauer, one of the Yankees’ most fearless competitors, is a victim of the pervasive tension. Like the rest of his teammates, he does not want the ignominy of making a miscue that will ruin Larsen’s performance and cost the Yankees the game. That fear engulfs him as Dodger right fielder Carl Furillo makes his way to the batter’s box. “Don’t hit the ball to me,” Bauer says to himself. “Whatever you do, don’t hit it to me.” Not that Bauer is incapable of playing well under pressure. He has proved that point on more than one occasion, and none are more remarkable than those moments in the sixth game of the 1951 World Series at Yankee Stadium.

The Yankees were leading the New York Giants in games by a 3-2 edge, and the two teams were locked in a 1-1 tie when the twenty-nine-year-old Bauer stepped up to the plate in the bottom of the sixth inning with Yogi Berra, Joe DiMaggio, and Johnny Mize—three future Hall of Fame players—on the bases. Dave Koslo, a left-handed pitcher, was on the mound. Bauer had never faced Koslo before the series, and he did not know that the Giant hurler had a knuckleball in his repertoire. On a count of two balls and two strikes, Koslo threw a knuckleball that fluttered over the middle of the plate while Bauer stood motionless. “I didn’t
think
it was a strike,” Bauer recalled many years later. “I
know
it was a strike. I’m out—no doubt about it.” But the umpire called the pitch a ball. (“Oh, boy,” Bauer said to himself. “That’s a nice present.”) With the count now full, Koslo delivered a fastball and Bauer swung hard. (“I could feel the bat bend a little when I made contact,” he remembered.) The ball sailed over the head of Giant left fielder Monte Irvin and hit the 402-foot mark on the left center-field wall for a triple. All three Yankees scored and Bauer’s team pulled ahead with a score of 4-1.

The Giants were discouraged but not beaten. They scored two runs in the top of the ninth and had the tying run on second base when Giant manager Leo Durocher called upon twenty-seven-year-old Sal Yvars to pinch-hit for Hank Thompson. Yvars saw little play during the season. But Yankee southpaw Bob Kuzava was on the mound, and Yvars had good success against Kuzava when they played in the minor leagues.

As Yvars had hoped, Kazava came in with a fastball. The Giant catcher was ready. “I hit that son of a bitch solidly,” Yvars later recalled, “a line drive over Jerry Coleman’s head at second. A base hit for sure.” If it proved to be a hit, the runner on second would score the tying run, and the Giants would have the winning run on base.

Bauer watched the ball emerge from the shadows and believed—at first—that he would have no trouble catching it. “But the ball started to fall away from me,” he remembered. “And I’m thinking, ‘Holy shit. I’m going to have to dive for this.’”

Thus began Bauer’s mad scramble to catch up to the ball as it descended. While 61,711 fans watched in almost total silence, Bauer raced to reach the ball before it hit the grass. “Rushing in,” said one sportswriter in later describing the scene, “Bauer lunged, stumbled, fell to his knees, slid a good ten feet, and stuck out his glove.” It was only a matter of inches. But there the ball was—in his glove. “Then,” continued the sportswriter, “like a gladiator displaying the sawed-off head of his enemy, he triumphantly held the glove high in the air to show everyone the ball nestled snugly in the pocket.”

The stadium erupted in a deafening roar of applause and cheers as everyone realized that the game—and the series—had concluded with a Yankee victory. “You would have to go back a long way in the history of World Series between the Yankees and the Giants,” said one sportswriter the next day, “to find one that, from a dramatic approach, rivaled that which was concluded at the Stadium yesterday.” Not surprisingly, Bauer later called the catch his “greatest thrill” in baseball. But it was not his greatest achievement. Not by a long shot. For Hank Bauer, making it out of East St. Louis after the Depression far surpassed the feat of making a shoestring catch during a World Series.

John and Mary Bauer came to the Illinois city from Germany, and they had eight children before Hank arrived in 1922. John had no real skills, and, after suffering an accident with a pickax in the aluminum mill where he worked, had only one leg. The injury forced him to change jobs, and he became a bartender at one of the local saloons. It was not enough to feed a family of eleven. And so, as Hank later remembered, “My oldest sisters used to bring home support.”

What the family lacked in money was made up in cohesion. They all looked out for one another—and few family members received as much attention as the youngest child. It was not by happenstance. By junior high school Hank was smoking cigarettes and already displaying the fighting spirit that would become his trademark as a baseball player. “He was a real dead-end kid,” said his older brother Joe. “Always going around with a bloody nose.” His mother tried to get him to stop smoking by pointing out that he weighed only about a hundred pounds. “That’s the reason you’re not growing,” she would tell her youngest child. But Hank was a teenager and unresponsive to the pleas of a mother who just did not understand. (He did, however, honor his father’s command to be home by nine o’clock every evening. “They had a whistle in town that blew at nine o’clock,” Hank later recalled. “When that thing started blowing, I started running.”)

Hank did, of course, play baseball, but he wasn’t very good. He could run, and he could throw a ball with speed and accuracy. (“I learned how to run and throw,” he later explained, “throwing rocks.”) But the rest was something he had to learn by hard work. “I wasn’t blessed with natural ability,” he confessed to Peter Golenbock after he had retired. “I had to work like hell.” And the effort to preserve his skills never ceased. “Baseball has never been easy for me,” Bauer told one sportswriter after he had been playing with the Yankees for almost ten years. “I’m not a natural hitter and have to sweat out every pitch.”

Mastering the techniques of hitting and fielding, however, was not enough. Hank knew that success required a commitment that knew no bounds. He had learned that much from the St. Louis Cardinals—his favorite team while growing up. “The only guy I ever saw who hustled more than Bauer,” Joe DiMaggio later said of his teammate, “was Enos Slaughter.” It was a trait later recognized by opposing players as well. “When Hank came down that base path,” said Boston shortstop Johnny Pesky, “the whole earth trembled.” Not surprisingly, that competitive spirit endeared Bauer to Casey Stengel, who managed the Yankees during Hank’s entire tenure with the team. “He’s the hardest-running thirty-six-year-old I’ve ever seen,” Stengel commented during the 1958 season, “and he gives you every ounce of his energy for nine full innings every game.”

As a teenager growing up in East St. Louis, Hank used his talent and drive to secure a place on the Central Catholic High School’s varsity baseball team and later on the local American Legion team. But no major-league scout was knocking on his door when he graduated from high school in 1940. College was not an option, and his father told him that he should learn a trade. So Hank accepted a job repairing furnaces in a beer-bottling plant. And there he might have stayed if his older brother Herman had not intervened.

Herman (who would later be killed in action during World War II) was a catcher, and he had the natural skills that Hank lacked. (Years later, Bauer would tell Yogi Berra, “You wouldn’t have been able to wipe my brother’s ass as a catcher.”) Herman had won the Most Valuable Player award in 1940 while playing for the Chicago White Sox’s minor-league team in Grand Forks, North Dakota. With that stature, the older Bauer was able to engineer a tryout for his youngest brother in the spring of 1941.