Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (46 page)

Dale was proud of the deal, but he knew he could not disclose its existence to anyone, especially his coaches and friends at Cloud Chief High School. “I had to keep my Cleveland contract a secret,” he later remembered, “because it would have made me ineligible for high school or college sports.” Dale was willing to take the risk because Alexander had promised the high school student a monthly stipend of $500 until he graduated, and, with his father often unemployed or absent, his family “needed the money badly.”

There was, however, one complication. The contract that Dale’s parents signed made no mention of the monthly payments that Alexander had promised, and the first month came and went without a check. The ensuing months were no different, and the Mitchells’ inquiries about the promised checks went unanswered. When the Cleveland Indians began sending notices for him to report for spring training after high school ended, Dale tore them up as soon as he received them. He believed that a promise was a promise and told Alexander that he would do nothing for the Indians until they made good on the monthly payments. Try as he might, Alexander could not deliver, and Dale accepted a basketball scholarship from the University of Oklahoma instead of the invitation to join the Cleveland Indians.

None of that dampened Dale’s interest in baseball. He continued to play in the summer after high school for the semipro baseball team that was sponsored by the Natural Gas Company. It was there that he came under the tutelage of Roy Deal, a former major-league coach and someone who would have a profound impact on Dale’s batting style—and his later success in the major leagues. “I had a habit of stepping away from the plate and pulling the bat with my body,” Mitchell later told a sportswriter. “Deal taught me how to spread my stance and hit with my wrists. This enabled me to hit outside balls and thus bat better against southpaw pitching.”

Deal’s instruction was complemented by advice that Dale received when he started playing college baseball in 1941. “My coach at the University of Oklahoma,” Dale explained, “was a firm believer in meeting the ball rather than hitting it out of the park.” It was a perspective that Dale embraced with enthusiasm, and in later years he would resist pressure from his major-league managers to produce more home runs.

Unfortunately, questions of how to hit a pitched ball were soon eclipsed by other matters. By 1942 the country was at war, Dale had married his high school sweetheart, Margaret Ruth Emerson (much to the dismay of her father, who thought Dale Mitchell was from the wrong side of the tracks and, as one of Dale’s sons explained, “was never going to amount to anything”), and then he got drafted into the army. Dale became a quartermaster and spent twenty-six months in England and France. He saw little combat and returned to Oklahoma immediately after being discharged in December 1945.

With military experience now behind him, Dale resumed studies and varsity sports at Oklahoma University in January 1946. As he would later tell his sons, 1946 was his “big year” and one that would forever change the course of his life. He tore up the pitching in the Big 12 Conference that spring, batting a phenomenal .507 to establish a new school record. That success was a product of Dale’s unusual speed on the base paths and the earlier instruction to focus on getting hits rather than hitting home runs—although there were occasional displays of incredible power. (Arlen Specter, then a student and later the longtime United States senator from Pennsylvania, remembered the time he was walking down Lindsay Street just beyond the right-field fence of the school’s stadium when a baseball flew over the fence and hit him in the stomach, knocking him over. He struggled to his feet and called out to the outfielder, “Who hit that damn ball?” “Dale Mitchell,” came the response.)

By the end of the season, the Cleveland Indians were knocking on Dale’s door again, reminding him of the contract that he had signed many years ago. Dale had not abandoned his dream of becoming a major-league baseball player, but he was still smarting from the Indians’ failure to make those monthly payments. It was then that he learned that the Oklahoma City Indians, a minor-league team in the Texas League, had an agreement with the Indians. The proximity of the team to his home was appealing.

Mitchell took his tale of woe to Harold Pope and Jim Humphreys, the Oklahoma City Indians’ owners, and they agreed to have the young athlete assigned to their team. There were no regrets there. Dale won the Texas League batting championship with a .337 average.

The Indians called Mitchell up to the parent club in early September. But Pope and Humphreys were not about to leave Mitchell’s fate to chance. They knew they had a major-league prospect on their hands. So they personally accompanied the young athlete to Cleveland and told Bill Veeck, the Indians’ legendary owner, about the team’s failure to make those monthly payments and, more important, the need to give Dale a real chance to play. The plea from Pope and Humphreys could not have hurt. Mitchell later said that Veeck “made amends” for the team’s failure to make the monthly payments (Veeck saying that he “couldn’t let the world’s record for determination go unrewarded”). More than that, the Indians’ owner gave Dale that chance to play. Veeck was not disappointed. In eleven games, Mitchell batted .432.

It was enough to make the Indians believe that Mitchell could succeed in the major leagues, and one sportswriter said during spring training in 1947 that Mitchell “is the outstanding candidate for the starting job in center field.” But the promise faded quickly after the season began. The Oklahoma native went hitless in the first two games, and manager Lou Boudreau used the inexperienced player only sparingly. Still, all was not lost. By midseason, Boudreau’s choice for left field, Pat Seerey, was not performing well. A replacement was needed, and Dale Mitchell was available. He was inserted in the lineup on July 3.

Dale did not squander the opportunity. (“I’ll make good if I have a chance,” he had earlier told the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
.) The result: a twenty-two-game hitting streak that represented the longest hitting streak by any American League player in 1947.

By the time the season had ended, Mitchell had mustered a .316 batting average—the highest on the team, the highest among major-league rookies (which included Jackie Robinson), and the sixth-highest in the league. His 156 hits included sixteen doubles and ten triples but only one home run (a prodigious shot that, according to one sportswriter, “astonished” the fans at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium when it hit the facade of the upper deck in the right-field stands).

There was no sophomore jinx for Mitchell. In 1948 he batted .336—third in the league—with 204 hits, only three behind the league leader. Mitchell also had the pleasure that year of playing in what
The New York Times
called “one of the most thrilling pennant races in major league history.” The Indians and the Red Sox finished with identical records, forcing a play-off game at Boston’s Fenway Park on October 4 to decide the American League pennant winner. Powered by the two home runs and spectacular play by Boudreau, the Indians crushed the Red Sox 8-3, and Mitchell later remembered that game as “the biggest thing I’ve been involved in.” The play-off victory was followed by a World Series triumph over the National League’s Boston Braves, and Dale Mitchell had a $7,000 World Series check to go with his $7,000 salary.

Mitchell had reason to be proud of his accomplishments, but he never took his success for granted. “In this game,” he once told a reporter, “you never know enough.” So he was receptive to Boudreau’s proposal that he take some fielding instruction from Tris Speaker, one of the most celebrated players of baseball in the early twentieth century (with a .345 batting average over the course of twenty-two seasons with the Red Sox and the Indians). It was not a casual suggestion. Boudreau was hoping to move the fleet-footed Mitchell to center field, and few players had handled that position as well as Speaker. (Later, a grateful Mitchell would say that “Spoke helped me a lot with my fielding”—although in time Mitchell would be moved back to left field.)

However much he wanted to improve his fielding, Dale was far more interested in hitting (and Speaker himself would say of Mitchell that “the man has one of the best batting eyes in baseball” and that he “may become one of those rare birds—a .400 hitter”). That focus on the science of hitting also helped explain Mitchell’s close relationship with Ted Williams—in Mitchell’s view, a player with no equal when it came to consistently hitting the ball hard. For his part, Mitchell would study the pitcher’s movements, the spin of the ball, and the use of the batter’s hands in making contact—all in an effort to sharpen his success at the plate. (After he retired from baseball, Mitchell wanted to impart all he had learned to his young sons, who would later enter professional baseball themselves. At one point Mitchell told Bo that he was going to teach his younger son how to hit the top of the baseball and then the bottom of the baseball—to which Bo replied, “You know, Dad, we’re going to have a little trouble with that, because I can barely see the ball.”)

There was, however, more to professional baseball for Mitchell than fielding and hitting. The Cleveland Indians encompassed a camaraderie that added an important dimension to the experience. The players would spend time in the clubhouse after the games, smoking cigarettes (or, for Dale, his ever-present black pipe), drinking beer, and recounting the events of the game. If it was a day game, they would often retreat en masse with their families to a restaurant (a local Italian eatery being a favorite). During the summers, the clubhouse would be filled with the players’ young sons—although, as Dale Jr. remembered, “When the Yankees came to town there were no kids allowed in the clubhouse. It was a whole different feel. It was serious.”

Despite the pleasures and success of being with the Indians, the seeds of discontent were germinating almost as soon as Mitchell arrived in Cleveland. True, he had the best batting average among all Indians as a rookie in 1947, but many people—including Boudreau—complained that too many of Mitchell’s hits were soft-liners to left field, a reflection of Mitchell’s inclination to slap the ball to the opposite field. A man of Mitchell’s size and skill, they said, should have more home runs. And, from watching that one titanic home run in 1947, they knew he could do it—if he tried.

Always eager to please, Mitchell tried to increase his power numbers, telling a reporter at one point during the 1948 season that he had studied the pitchers and now had the confidence to “mash anybody.” The statistics seemed to support his confidence—at least to a certain point. He hit four home runs in 1948 along with thirty doubles and eight triples (as well as one of only four home runs that the Indians hit in the 1948 World Series against the Boston Braves), and in 1949 he led the league with twenty-three triples—only three shy of the American League record. In addition to the triples, there was much in Mitchell’s performance to satisfy the Indians—a .317 batting average (fourth in the league) with 203 hits (tops in the league). But his home-run production dipped to three in 1949, and the criticism intensified when Hank Greenberg—the power-hitting star of the Detroit Tigers in the 1930s and 1940s—became the Indians’ general manager in 1950.

A six-foot-four-inch slugger who had come close to surpassing Babe Ruth’s then-record of sixty home runs (with fifty-eight in 1938), Greenberg believed that the Indians needed power to overtake the Yankees in the pennant race. And from Greenberg’s perspective, Dale Mitchell should have been doing more to fill the void.

Mitchell’s performance in 1950 was certainly respectable—a .308 batting average (marking the fifth consecutive year in which he had batted over .300). But his home-run total was a meager three, and the pressure to hit the long ball intensified when Al Lopez assumed the Indians’ managerial reins for the 1951 season. He pushed Mitchell relentlessly to pull the ball to right field instead of slapping at it. (“Swish the bat, Mitch,” the manager would repeatedly say when Dale came to the plate. “Use your power.”) Mitchell responded by hitting eleven home runs (a respectable level in a season when the league leader hit only thirty-three). But his batting average dropped to .290—an acceptable record for many, but not for the Oklahoma native. Mitchell returned to his earlier batting form in 1952 and was able to raise his batting average to .323, only four points below the league leader. But the home run total dropped to five, and the Indians finished two games behind the Yankees in second place.

Mitchell’s higher batting average may have pleased some people, but not Greenberg. He resumed the quest for more home runs, and his displeasure was made known not only to Mitchell but routinely reported in the press. It was not something that endeared Mitchell to the team’s general manager. “Greenberg put a lot of pressure on him,” one of Mitchell’s sons remembered, “and he did not like Greenberg.” In the spring of 1953, there was talk about Mitchell quitting after the end of the season, but his performance seemed to make that unnecessary. He hit a career-high thirteen home runs that year while batting an even .300, and before the season was over Mitchell was assuring reporters that he was not about to leave baseball when he was having his best season. “And next year,” he promised, “I plan to swing for distance even more.”

Sadly, Mitchell never got the opportunity to fulfill that promise. Greenberg remained dissatisfied, and in the beginning of the 1954 season, Mitchell learned that a lifetime batting average of .315 over more than seven full seasons was not enough to keep his position in left field. Instead, the job was given to Al Smith, a younger player who seemed to have the ability to hit more home runs (although that proved to be a false hope, as Smith would hit only eleven home runs in 1954, two fewer than Mitchell had hit the previous season).

In the meantime, Mitchell was relegated almost entirely to pinch-hitting duty, appearing in only fifty-three games and having only sixty at bats with just one home run—ironically, a blast in September that won the pennant-clinching game for the Indians. The next year was no different, with Mitchell appearing in only sixty-one games with just fifty-one at bats, and there was now constant talk about what would happen to one of the Indians’ most popular players. “I’m still convinced that I can produce playing regularly,” Mitchell told a reporter at spring training in 1956. But he knew that the decision to play him regularly was not his to make and that he could endure only so much frustration. “If I can’t get the chance,” he added, “I may as well go home and get into a business that will keep me occupied.”