Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (49 page)

The funeral was attended by Koufax, Erskine, and other former teammates. There was, however, no solace for Carl Jr. He had been planning a fishing trip with his father for his sixty-seventh birthday in March, and he could not let go of his father’s memory. And then one night he was awakened from a deep sleep, and there, in his bedroom, stood his father, wearing his familiar khaki pants and T-shirt. Carl Jr., now in his thirties, started to cry. “Why are you crying?” his father asked. “Because I miss you so much,” the son replied. “Look,” said his father. “You’ve got to stop this. This is not good.” And as Carl Jr. tried to reach for his father, the elder Furillo turned him aside. “You can’t touch me,” he said. “When the time comes, I’ll come for you. But you’re going to live a long time. So go back to sleep.” And with that, Carl Jr. fell into a deep sleep, only to awaken the next morning with a sense of relief that he had not felt since his father had died.

Although the 1957 season was not a productive one for him, Roy Campanella had much to look forward to in Los Angeles before the accident near his Long Island home in January 1958. The left-field foul line was only 250 feet from home plate, and Campanella told one sportswriter before the season began, “I’m looking forward to a real good year.”

The automobile accident not only disrupted Campanella’s baseball career. It also undermined the prosperous life he had built for himself in New York. He had told his older son that “living well is the best revenge” in combating racism, and he had made considerable strides on that front. He had that large home on Long Island’s North Shore (where he catered to his obsession with toy trains and tropical fish), a forty-one-foot powerboat, and a liquor store in Harlem that was a magnet for people who wanted to converse with the famous Dodger. (Roy had entrusted his precocious eight-year-old son with the responsibility for placing wholesale orders, and Roy Jr. later told me that liquor distributors “were shocked” when the young boy handled their calls.)

None of that was the same after the accident. And then he left Ruthe amidst allegations of her adultery and mistreatment of him (which Ruthe attributed to his “suspicious mind”). But he did have a new cause that would remain a focus for the rest of his life: as he explained in the autobiography he dictated after the accident, he had “taken on an even bigger job” than fighting for racial equality—“fighting for the equality, integration, and understanding and acceptance of the severely handicapped.”

Events both spontaneous and planned gave Campanella a platform to pursue that new role. One occasion was Roy’s visit to Yankee Stadium in October 1958 to cover the World Series for the Hearst newspapers. Arriving after the game had commenced, Campanella’s entourage realized that his wheelchair would not fit through the narrow passageway to his box seat. With no other alternative, two large firemen lifted Campanella up and carried him down the aisle while Don Larsen was getting ready to pitch to the batter. At first there was scattered applause and shouts of, “Hi, slugger,” and, “Attaboy, Campy,” from nearby patrons. But, as the press reported the next day, the display of support for the former Dodger spead quickly: “Like two mighty waves rolling in opposite directions, the applause and cheers swept down the first-base line and down the third-base line until they met in the distant bleachers.” Larsen stepped off the mound, the umpire moved back from the plate, and the game was brought to a halt as the applause and cheering reached a crescendo that lasted for several minutes.

There was a continuous stream of additional tributes for the stricken athlete over the next thirty-five years: a ceremony at the Los Angeles Coliseum in June 1959 attended by more than ninety-three thousand fans, countless articles, election to the Baseball Hall of Fame, and even a television movie about his life. Not that Roy was a passive observer in all this. He had a radio talk show, responsibility as an instructor at the Dodgers’ spring training camps, and, when Tommy Lasorda became the Dodger manager in 1977, a job as a team coach. (“I know you can’t walk,” the rookie manager told Campanella, “but there’s nothing wrong with your mind.”)

He had a new wife named Roxie who tended to his physical needs, but her tireless efforts could not eliminate all the problems her husband encountered. Roy always tried to convey a joyful optimism, but life was a periodic series of medical traumas that became more frequent as time progressed. On the last Saturday in June 1993, Roxie called Roy Jr. and told him that his father, nearing his seventy-second birthday, had died suddenly of a massive heart attack at his home in Woodland Hills, California.

 

Billy Martin knew at the beginning of the 1957 season that his days as a Yankee were numbered. “One thing goes wrong this year,” general manager George Weiss told him, “you’re gone.” Ironically, the cause for Martin’s departure was a fight in which he did not participate. Mantle, Bauer, and other Yankees took their wives out to celebrate Billy’s twenty-ninth birthday in May and found themselves in the Copacabana on New York City’s East Side. Verbal confrontations with a group of bowlers (who were hurling racial epithets at entertainer Sammy Davis Jr.) led to a challenge for a fight (with those words that Billy Martin could never resist—“Let’s go”). The Copa bouncers decked one of the bowlers in the men’s room before any of the Yankees could take a swing, but the next day’s newspaper headlines enraged Weiss: “Yankees Brawl at the Copa.”

Stengel gave Martin news of his trade to the Athletics on June 15 when the team was in Kansas City. Over the next four years, there was no shortage of general managers interested in having the former Yankee on their team—each believing that the fiery second baseman would lead the team to a pennant. (“I never claim a pennant in advance,” said Cleveland GM Frank Lane after the Indians acquired Martin in 1959, “but with the acquisition of an experienced second baseman, we are now a sounder club.”)

Unfortunately, none of those expectations was fulfilled. Martin could never muster the same drive that he had with the Yankees. “After I was traded,” he later confessed, “I wasn’t the same player. It felt like my heart was broken.”

Martin became a coach for the Minnesota Twins in 1965 and used that opportunity to launch one of the most successful managerial careers in baseball history. The first triumph was in 1969 with the Twins. Billy transformed a mediocre club into an aggressive unit that won the West Division. Despite that achievement, Twins’ owner Calvin Griffith fired Martin after the season because of a series of indiscretions (including a well-publicized fight in a bar with Twins pitcher Dave Boswell). Not that Griffith should have been surprised. He told a sportswriter after signing Martin at the beginning of the season that he felt like he was “sitting on a keg of dynamite.”

Other owners soon learned to appreciate Martin’s talents as well as that volatile personality. He brought the Detroit Tigers winning seasons in the early 1970s but was fired after a series of confrontations with the general manager. That was followed by a miraculous turnaround with the Texas Rangers (who finished second in the division after having lost 105 games in the season before Martin joined the team). Perhaps no incident was more telling of Martin’s managerial style than the time when third baseman Toby Harrah was struck on the arm by a pitch and immediately slumped to the ground, writhing in pain. “I’m thinking,” Harrah later remembered, “Billy’s going to come up and say, ‘Hey, Tobe, how ya doin’?” Instead, Martin leaned over Harrah and whispered, “Listen, Toby, when you get on first, I want you to steal second on the first pitch.”

The relocation to Texas was as much symbolic as real. “He likened himself to a gunfighter,” said his son Billy Martin Jr. And so Martin changed his appearance to match the image—growing a mustache and wearing a cowboy hat, cowboy boots, and other Western garb. It ultimately proved to be too much for the Rangers’ management, who could not abide the constant confrontations or Billy’s fondness for the bottle. The drinking was especially troublesome. It was a widely known problem that often kept people on edge because they never knew when Martin might explode. “I went out with him a lot,” said Tony Kubek, “and you would say, ‘Uh-oh. This next drink is going to be the one. And I’m not going to be there when he has that drink.’”

George Steinbrenner surely understood the risks of any association with Billy Martin when he hired him as the Yankees’ manager in July 1975. But the Cleveland shipbuilder also had a dream—restoring the now second-rate Yankees to the glory days of their past. And he was sure—like all those previous owners—that Billy had the managerial skills to bring a pennant to Yankee Stadium. Martin did in fact bring the World Series back to New York, but he and Steinbrenner remained locked in a constant state of conflict as each tried to control the team’s destiny. And so, over the next fourteen years, he would be fired five times by Steinbrenner, only to be rehired on four separate occasions.

Martin found further success when he assumed the helm of the Oakland Athletics in 1980 after his initial managerial tours with the Yankees. Martin applied the same approach that had worked so well in the past and, as before, the players responded to his incurable optimism. After losing 108 games and finishing last in 1979, the team won eighty-three games, finished second in the division, and drew five hundred thousand more fans to the games—all of which brought Martin recognition as the American League’s Manager of the Year. (Billboards in Oakland reflected the city’s pride in their new manager: “Nothing but Billyball. Catch it.”) And when the team began the 1981 season with a 20-3 record, Billy’s face graced the cover of
Time
magazine, which described Martin’s transformation of the Athletics as “incredible.”

The success was too much for Steinbrenner to ignore, and he lured Billy back to New York. (Not that Martin played hard to get—when his son asked the former Yankee why he would want to return to the tension of a relationship with Steinbrenner, Billy had a quick response: “I’m not happy anywhere else.”) After he was fired by Steinbrenner for the last time in 1988, the sixty-year-old Martin retreated to the horse farm he had purchased in upstate New York for his fourth wife. It was there on Christmas day in 1989 that his pickup truck crashed into a stone culvert as he was returning from a local bar with Bill Reedy, his longtime drinking buddy. There remains a question whether Billy or Reedy was driving. But there is no question that the impact broke Martin’s neck and that he died instantly.

 

Although he hit forty home runs in 1957 (marking the fifth consecutive year in which he had reached that mark), Duke Snider was not pleased with the Dodgers’ third-place finish. And he was even less pleased by the Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles. He did not relish the thought of playing in the Los Angeles Coliseum, where the distance down the right-field foul line was 402 feet.

Still, Snider did well in those first two years in Los Angeles (with batting averages of .312 and .308), and he hit a home run in the 1959 World Series (thus giving him a National League record of eleven round-trippers in series play). But his knee continued to restrict his play, and the Dodgers traded him to the New York Mets in 1963. The trade reflected more than a change in venue. The Mets were a new franchise with a propensity to lose and a reputation for comical mis haps. “It was,” Snider later said, “a miserable experience.”

The Mets acceded to Snider’s request for a new team, and he played his last year with the San Francisco Giants in 1964. He had only 167 at bats and a .210 batting average—the lowest of his career. And so, when the season ended, Duke packed his bags for the last time as a player. He had played long enough to have more than two thousand hits and 407 home runs, but those last few years gave him little pleasure. “I should have retired,” he later told me, “when the Dodgers sold me to the Mets.” But he had four children in school and needed the money.

Duke’s financial concerns were well-founded. An investment in a bowling alley soured. The avocado ranch took too much time for too little profit. And so the only regular income Snider had in those first retirement days was a scouting position with the Dodgers that paid $250 a week. “It made for a lot of sleepless nights staring at the ceiling,” he later recalled.

After an unsuccessful tenure as a minor-league coach, Snider found a more suitable role as a broadcaster for the Montreal Expos’ general manager. A change in job locations was not the only transformation in Snider’s life. At Bev’s suggestion, he attended a service at the Neighborhood Church near Fallbrook, and, after it was completed, he decided, like his wife, to ask “Christ to come into my life and live in and through me.” That decision did not mean that he would become more religious. “Religion,” he explained to me, “is different than Christian ity. The difference is that it’s not what you do. You can’t do anything for God. Jesus Christ—you invite him into your heart. He’s an ingrowing spirit.”

The decision to accept Christ coincided with Duke’s election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1980. Now content with his place in baseball history, Snider began spending time with his family, attending Dodger fantasy camps in Vero Beach, and, after the memorabilia business exploded in the mid-1980s, attending card shows. The shows generated substantial revenue for the Hall of Fame outfielder, but the Internal Revenue Service later learned that the former Dodger had failed to report $100,000 of income that he had earned from the shows. And so, in July 1995 Duke Snider found himself in a Brooklyn courtroom where he pleaded guilty to a felony for tax fraud. Speaking to a battery of reporters after the arraignment, the sixty-eight-year-old Snider—now heavier than he was in his playing days, with his hair thinning and completely white—confessed that his failing health caused him to make the wrong choice for the benefit of his wife. “One of my concerns,” he explained, “was whether she would have enough money.”