Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (47 page)

Greenberg was not about to give Mitchell that chance to play regularly, and by midsummer Dale had advised the Indians that 1956 would be his last year. Still, he hoped he could finish his career with Cleveland and return to Oklahoma with his pride intact. But it was not to be. Mitchell learned at the end of July that Greenberg had sold the thirty-five-year-old player’s contract to the Brooklyn Dodgers for $1,000. Not that Greenberg or anyone else from the Indians’ management would tell him. The news came instead from Dodger manager Walter Alston.

He called the Mitchell home in Cleveland and, when Bo answered, Alston identified himself and asked for the young boy’s father. Bo, not quite seven, knew enough baseball to know that Walter Alston was the Dodgers’ famous manager. He called his father to the phone in the other room and then surreptitiously listened while Alston told Mitchell that he would be moving over to the National League to help the Dodgers, who were then locked in a tight pennant race with the Milwaukee Braves. “Dale,” Alston said, “we just purchased your contract, and we need you as soon as you can get here.” Mitchell masked his disappointment about leaving Cleveland but felt that some disclosure about his future plans was warranted. “Well,” he responded, “I’ve let it be known that I’ll be retiring at the end of this season.” Alston was not to be deterred. “I know that,” he replied, “but we need you as a left-handed pinch hitter on the team if we’re going to win the pennant.” “Okay,” said Mitchell. “Just so you know that this is my last go-around.”

The Cleveland press was not happy. The
Cleveland Plain Dealer
reported on July 30 that the team had sold the contract of “one of the most popular players ever to wear a Cleveland Indian uniform.” Mitchell was equally disappointed. He had invested all of his energies and emotions in the Cleveland Indians. He had performed better than most and certainly had reason to feel that he had contributed to the team’s success over the last ten years—two American League pennants, one World Championship, and most other years as a contender. Now the Indians had shuffled him off to another team without a word. As Bo Mitchell later recalled, “They certainly cut a piece of his heart out when they mistreated him like that.”

But Dale Mitchell was an honorable man. He and Dale Jr., now thirteen years old, drove the next morning from Cleveland to Pittsburgh to join the Brooklyn Dodgers. They reached Forbes Field in the late morning and strode across the empty field to the visitors’ dugout, both of them in street clothes and Dale carrying the suitcase with his baseball equipment. They went into the Dodgers’ dugout on the third-base side of the field, walked to the back of the clubhouse, and there, with a shaft of summer sunlight coming in from the high windows and illuminating the locker room, they saw Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Carl Furillo, and Pee Wee Reese, each wrapped in a white towel and sitting on a folding chair, playing cards on an overturned crate. It was an informal but striking introduction to the National League.

Brooklyn turned out to be as much as Mitchell could have hoped for in his last “go-around.” The Dodgers included many accomplished players who were used to winning and had the talent to keep on winning. Beyond that, they provided some of the camaraderie Mitchell had treasured at Cleveland. “He liked Brooklyn and felt like it was a class organization,” one of Mitchell’s sons later recalled.

True to his word, Alston began using Mitchell as his left-handed pinch hitter against right-handed pitchers. Mitchell responded to Alston’s confidence and performed well, including a hit in his first plate appearance to drive in the winning run in a game against the Braves. He went on to rack up six pinch hits in fourteen at bats in September when the Dodgers came from behind on the last weekend of the season to overtake the Braves. So Mitchell was not surprised that Alston asked him to pinch-hit for Sal Maglie when the Dodgers were down to their last out in the fifth game of the World Series.

 

Dale Mitchell has no interest in spoiling Larsen’s bid for a no-hitter. He and his new teammates are still focused on winning the game. We can beat this guy, they kept telling themselves in the dugout. All we have to do is get someone on base and then we can break this game wide-open. “We were so close,” Mitchell later told Peter Golenbock, “that we really felt we were going to win it.”

Now, however, the former Cleveland Indian is down to his last strike, and Larsen’s pitch is coming toward him. The aging player sees the ball clearly as it approaches, and he begins to lift his right foot slightly in anticipation of taking a swing. But as the ball comes closer Mitchell sees that it is moving up and away from him—clearly high and outside. He checks his swing and turns back to face Babe Pinelli, assuming that the veteran umpire will confirm Mitchell’s almost infallible judgment on the strike zone.

Pinelli hesitates for the slightest second. And then he lifts his right arm and signals a strike. The roar of the crowd explodes as Bob Wolff excitedly yells into the microphone, “Strike three! A no-hitter! A perfect game for Don Larsen!”

As Yogi Berra emerges from his crouch and runs toward Larsen, Mitchell stares at Pinelli, not believing what has just happened. He has been called out on strikes. Realizing the futility of arguing with the umpire, Mitchell slowly walks back to the Dodger dugout. As Berra leaps into Larsen’s arms near the pitcher’s mound and Yankee players and fans surround the hatless and beaming pitcher, Mitchell shakes his head, complaining to his teammates that he was the victim of a bad call.

Berra, Larsen, and Pinelli, of course, had a different opinion. (Some observers also suggested that Mitchell should have been called out on strikes because his bat crossed the plate when he checked his swing, but Pinelli made no mention of the checked swing after the game, telling reporters only that Larsen’s last pitch “was right over the middle” and “an easy call.”) But every other Yankee on the field who had a good look at the pitch agreed with Mitchell. “I had a clear view from center field,” Mickey Mantle later said, “and, if I was under oath, I’d have to say the pitch looked like it was outside.” Andy Carey, who had an even better view from third base (because Mitchell was a left-handed batter), likewise agreed that the “last pitch to Dale Mitchell was high.” Gil McDougald, with an equally good perspective from the shortstop position, had the same reaction. “It wasn’t even close,” said McDougald. “It was high.” Even Enos Slaughter, surveying the scene from left field, similarly told a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame staff that the pitch “was high.”

No matter. Larsen had made history with a superb and unmatched pitching performance, and there was pandemonium in the clubhouse afterward as dozens of reporters besieged the Yankee players. They of course wanted to know how Larsen felt. (“My legs are still rubbery all over,” the Yankee hurler responded, “and I’m so nervous and excited I don’t even know what day it is.”) The reporters also gathered around Yogi Berra, who took a drag on a cigarette and, with tongue in cheek, said to the reporters assembled around him, “So what’s new?” (Berra, however, did not dismiss the significance of the game, and later he would call it one of his “greatest thrills” in baseball.) And, of course, the reporters had questions for manager Casey Stengel as well—some of which bordered on the absurd. (“Is that the best game he ever pitched?” one sportswriter asked the Yankee manager with reference to Larsen.)

Over in the visitors’ dugout, the Dodgers likewise felt that the last pitch to Mitchell was a ball. (“High and outside,” said Carl Erskine. “No question.”) Years later, the Dodgers appeared to get some vindication from the home-plate umpire himself. “Babe Pinelli told me later,” said Duke Snider, “that he wanted to go out on a no-hitter in a World Series. That was the last game he was going to umpire. So anything close was a strike.”

Whatever their thoughts at the time or later about that last pitch to Dale Mitchell, the Dodgers did not dwell on what might have been. Disagreeing with the plate umpire was nothing new in baseball. They understood that, and they were gracious in defeat. As he sat naked on a stool in the Dodger clubhouse eating a sausage, Maglie was philosophical when asked by a reporter if he was troubled by the no-hitter. “I might have wanted him to get it,” the Dodger pitcher responded, “if we hadn’t had a chance all the time.” But this was, after all, the Yankees. “They are pros,” Maglie added. “The way we are. You make one mistake with them and you’re in trouble.”

The game ended in the afternoon of that fall day in 1956, but it provided a memory that would give Don Larsen untold pleasure for decades, long after he had retired from baseball. He would gladly recount the game and the pressures to untold fans in airports, at memorabilia shows, at Mickey Mantle’s fantasy baseball camp in Florida, and wherever else he went. “It makes me happy,” he said. “I only wish I had a buck for everyone who tells me they were at the game. If all of those folks were really there, attendance would’ve been over a million.”

The memory of that fifth game of the 1956 World Series did not give the same pleasure to Dale Mitchell. When he reached the dugout steps after the final out, Pee Wee Reese told Dale to let it go. “They’re going to be talking about this game for hundreds of years,” he said. “You’re in the history books.” But that was not enough for Mitchell. After an eleven-year career with many accomplishments and numerous accolades (including selection for the 1949 All-Star team), he knew that he would be remembered only for that one at bat in Yankee Stadium.

It was a black mark that forever plagued Dale Mitchell. He would not, really could not, yield in his judgment, always insisting to people who would invariably raise the subject that Larsen’s last pitch was high and outside. “He never got over it,” his daughter-in-law later recalled. “He was mad about it until the day he died in January 1987.” The strikeout was particularly humiliating because Mitchell had so little regard for Larsen as a pitcher. And so the former American League All-Star had a quick response when ABC’s
Good Morning America
contacted Mitchell in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1986 and invited him to New York to share the spotlight with Larsen and Berra on a segment that would celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the event: no, thanks. He was not going to travel halfway across the country, he told his family, to talk about striking out.

19

F
or Don Larsen, the fifth game of the 1956 World Series remained the pinnacle of an otherwise lackluster career. He was able to win nineteen games while losing only ten over the next two seasons for the Yankees, but the mastery he had shown in that World Series contest was gone by 1959, leading Casey Stengel to ask the San Diego native, who hit fourteen home runs in his career as a pitcher, whether he might be interested in switching to the outfield.

The inevitable trade occurred after the 1959 season. Larsen was included in a multiplayer deal with the Kansas City Athletics that brought Roger Maris to the Yankees. Don was neither surprised nor completely unhappy with the trade, in part because he had married Corrine Bruess, a TWA stewardess, who had lived in the Kansas City area.

Over the course of the next six years, Larsen—using his no-windup delivery only sporadically—moved from one team to another in the American League and the National League (but did play a critical role as a relief pitcher when the San Francisco Giants won the pennant in 1962). Unwilling to confront a life without baseball, Larsen continued to play for minor-league teams after the Baltimore Orioles released him in 1966. “I had nothing else to do,” he later explained. He eventually found a position as a salesman with the Blake, Moffitt & Towne Paper Company in the San Jose area. He was there for twenty-five years before retiring with Corrine and his son, Scott, to Lake Hayden in northwest Idaho.

In the meantime, the memorabilia craze placed him in great demand at card shows and other events where he would sign baseballs and photos. “It’s sometimes fun,” he later told me, “but it’s hard to sign all that stuff all the time. And my butt gets tired.” And then there were the baseball fantasy camps. There too he could sign his name to paraphernalia and reminisce about the glory days with the Yankees (although he did startle the campers on one occasion by saying—in response to a question asking the former Yankees on the dais to identify the greatest player with whom they had played—that it was Willie Mays and not Mickey Mantle).

 

Sal Maglie never pitched in another World Series. He had a respectable record for the third-place Dodgers in 1957, but the Brooklyn team needed to make room for younger players and sold the forty-year-old’s contract to the Yankees on September 1, 1957 (the day after the deadline for World Series eligibility). Sal showed signs of greatness with a shutout of the Cleveland Indians at Yankee Stadium, but Stengel could not fit the former Dodger into the pitching rotation. By 1958 he was wearing a St. Louis Cardinals uniform, but his tenure with the team was brief.

Part of the explanation was Kay. She was diagnosed with cancer and needed a mastectomy. (“Sal,” Cardinal manager Fred Hutchinson told his new pitcher, “go home. Your family comes first.”) Maglie later took a job with the Boston Red Sox as a pitching coach, but Kay’s condition required his full-time attention, and he left the club in 1962 to be with his wife and the two sons they had adopted. He returned to the Red Sox as a coach in 1966 and was with the club when it reached the World Series in 1967. But relations with manager Dick Williams were never good, and Maglie found himself without a job in 1968.

Sal returned to baseball as the pitching coach for the newly franchised Seattle Pilots in 1969. The experiment was not a profitable one for the Pilots or their new pitching coach. The team finished last in the Western Division and Maglie found himself the subject of biting criticism in
Ball Four
, Jim Bouton’s best-selling account of that season. (When his teenage son asked him about the book, the father “gave his typical answer of everyone having their opinion.” But to the press, Maglie complained that Bouton “was like a spoiled little brat who always had to have things his own way.”)