Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (5 page)

It was only a start. Sal pitched six more complete games, including three shutouts, and finished the season with a 5-4 record and a 2.35 earned run average. For Maglie, however, the more enduring memory of that season was the first game of a Sunday doubleheader with the Dodgers in September before 54,740 fans in the Polo Grounds. He was called in to relieve in the tenth inning with the score tied. He breezed through that inning but fell apart in the next inning when he walked two batters and saw Dixie Walker, the Dodger left fielder, get a hit that won the game. “For some reason that made me resent the Dodgers,” Maglie later recalled. It was a bitterness that would stay with him all the years he pitched with the Giants.

But that was all in the future. The 1945 season left Maglie feeling proud of his accomplishment. He had finally made it to the big leagues. But he was no fool. He knew that staying there would require hard work. So he was receptive to the proposal of Dolf Luque, a Giant coach, that he play winter ball in Cuba for a team that Luque was going to manage in Cienfuegos.

Luque, a fifty-five-year-old Cuban native, was a colorful figure who had pitched in the National League for twenty years between 1914 and 1935, with considerable success. Luque told Maglie that the key to success was a willingness to pitch high and inside so that the batter was always kept off balance. Never, said Luque, should you allow the batter to feel comfortable at the plate. “Luque believed in protecting the plate,” Maglie later explained, “and I became a believer too.”

Sal was able to turn Luque’s advice into sterling pitching performances, and so the Niagara Falls native was in good shape and full of expectations when he arrived at the Giants’ spring training camp in Miami Beach, Florida, in February 1946. Those hopes were buoyed when Ott greeted him by saying, “We’re depending on you, boy.” And soon thereafter he signed a contract for $7,500. It was all enough to make Maglie believe that he had finally come into his own.

For reasons he could never fathom, Sal’s aspirations for a meaningful spot in the Giants’ pitching rotation soon evaporated. He pitched in a few exhibition games, including one on March 30 in which he pitched five strong innings and struck out seven batters. “And then,” said Maglie, “I never got a chance to pitch again—not even batting practice.” Maglie did not have the courage to confront Ott about the manager’s refusal to use him. He sat in silent frustration, wondering whether he had a future with the Giants.

There was, however, another option. Jorge Pasquel, a thirty-eight-year-old Mexican, was using his considerable wealth to lure American players to join the Mexican baseball league—where he had substantial interests—in the hope that he could make that league a more profitable venture. In January 1946—while he was still in Cuba—Maglie had been approached by Bernardo Pasquel, Jorge’s younger brother, who had offered him a $7,500 salary with a $3,500 signing bonus. Maglie, believing that his future with the Giants was secure, turned it down immediately. Bernardo understood, but gave the young pitcher his card and told Maglie to contact him if he had a change of heart.

While he was fuming about Ott’s refusal to use him in spring training, George Hausmann and Roy Zimmerman, two other Giant players, contacted Maglie because they had heard that he had received an offer from the Mexican League, and they wanted to know if Maglie had a telephone number for the Pasquels. When Sal said that he had Bernardo’s card in his hotel room, Zimmerman and Hausmann arranged to meet Maglie there so that they could make the call and secure offers to join the Mexican League (which they ultimately did).

Rumors about the Pasquels’ efforts were swirling around all the major-league spring training camps, and it did not take long for Ott to learn that Hausmann and Zimmerman had used the telephone in Maglie’s hotel room to make contact with the Mexicans. Unfortunately, Ott assumed—wrongly—that Maglie had been the recruiting agent for the Mexicans.

Maglie knew that something was up when he walked into the clubhouse the next morning. It was, he remembered, “deathly quiet.” Ott summoned Maglie to his office, shut the door, and berated him for trying to steal American players for the Mexican League. Ott refused to let the pitcher tell his side of the story. Instead, the manager marched out of the office with Maglie in tow and demanded that all the players line up. He then proceeded to ask each man whether he intended to “jump” to the Mexican League. When he finally came to Maglie, Ott received an affirmative response. Sal Maglie was going to play baseball in Mexico. He contacted Bernardo Pasquel and secured a $10,000 signing bonus and a salary commensurate with his Giant salary.

It was not a precipitous decision for Maglie. “I was sore about the brush-off I had been getting all spring,” he later explained, “and I knew I was marked lousy for sure now. I could get almost as much money in Mexico as the Giants were paying me. I was twenty-nine, and I had only a few years left to build up a little nest egg for me and my wife.” So he and Kay discussed the matter before the confrontation at the clubhouse and decided that, if Ott’s attitude remained unchanged and the Pasquels met his conditions, he should seize the opportunity—even though major-league baseball commissioner Happy Chandler had issued an edict that any player who joined the Mexican League would be banned from American baseball for five years.

In retrospect, Maglie’s decision to go to Mexico proved to be a profitable one—his manager in the Mexican League was none other than Dolf Luque, and the Cuban veteran continued to pour wisdom into his American protégé. Maglie was assigned to the team in Puebla, a small village located seven thousand feet above sea level near the Sierra Madre mountains, and he was forced to survive in conditions that were nothing short of primitive. “A train track ran through the outfield,” Maglie later remembered, “and when a train had to go by, the game stopped, a gate opened in right field, the train chugged across center field and then went out through the gate in left.”

The poor playing conditions were compounded by the means of transportation. The players had to travel from town to town in old buses that were constantly breaking down and that were filled with local villagers who had had brought along chickens, goats, and other livestock (a situation that finally convinced Maglie to charter a private plane to make the trips to distant towns). And then there was the weather. Located high in the mountains, Puebla could be comfortable, but the humidity and heat were overwhelming in Veracruz, Tampico, and other towns on or near the coast. “You could take a dozen showers down there and still not cool off,” said Maglie.

There was another aspect to the weather that had a more lasting effect on Maglie’s career. In Puebla, he saw that his curveball barely broke and that his fastball had more velocity. In contrast, his curveball broke more sharply in the lower elevations while his fastball had less movement. Maglie therefore learned to make his curveball break in high altitudes. Having mastered the curve in higher altitudes, Maglie saw that the ball would break that much more sharply when he pitched at lower elevations. “I was just a thrower before I jumped,” Maglie later said. “Dolf Luque and the altitude taught me how to pitch.”

With that instruction and experience, Maglie proved to be the most accomplished pitcher in the Mexican League—winning twenty games in 1946 and twenty-one in 1947—and earned the adulation of Mexican fans. But the adulation of the fans could not hide the stark reality of the Pasquels’ business venture. Despite their early willingness to invest whatever money it took to entice American players to cross the border, the Pasquels could not generate enough revenue from the games to pay the high salaries that had been promised. By the end of the 1947 season, the venture was over and the American players had no alternative but to return to the States.

Chandler’s five-year ban was still in place, and so Maglie retreated to his home in Niagara Falls with an uncertain future. He bought a gas station and kept his eyes open for other opportunities to play baseball. As luck would have it, something materialized in Canada. Sal was recruited to pitch for the Drummondville Cubs in the Quebec Provincial League for the 1949 season. The signing of the former New York Giant generated headlines in Canada’s local media, and the area fans were not disappointed. Maglie won eighteen games during the regular season and then another five in the play-offs to lead the Cubs to a championship in October. The fans rejoiced by carrying him off the field.

Two months before that joyous conclusion, Maglie learned that he could leave the Cubs and return immediately to the Giants. The opportunity arose because lawsuits by the excluded players had persuaded Chandler to drop the ban on the Mexican “outlaws,” as they were called, and allow them to rejoin their teams. Maglie resisted, largely because he wanted to make sure that he was well positioned—physically and emotionally—to make it a success. “I was in such bad shape,” he later explained, “that I was afraid of queering my chances of sticking.” So he decided to wait until the 1950 season.

When Maglie arrived at the Giants’ training facility in Phoenix the following spring, he was a far different player from the one the Giants had last seen six years earlier. He now had three different curveballs, one of which would break down sharply when it was almost on top of the plate. (“That man can do things with a curve I never saw before,” said Steve O’Neill, his former manager at Buffalo and now a major-league coach.) He also had far more self-confidence than he had possessed as a rookie in 1945. And, perhaps most important, he now had a strategy for keeping the hitters off balance.

He would often throw a fastball at the batter’s head—sometimes even behind his head—so that the batter could never feel comfortable at the plate. Maglie never intended to actually hit the batter (in part because he did not want to put a man on base). And he picked his targets carefully (Brooklyn catcher Roy Campanella being one—before Dodger games, Maglie would often proclaim to his teammates, “Campanella’s going down on the first pitch”). Still, there were some players—like Don Zimmer of the Dodgers in later years—who would never see a Maglie knockdown pitch because the pitcher knew they might get hurt. (“I didn’t dare throw at him,” Maglie later said of Zimmer, “because I knew he’d freeze.”) But other batters—those he left sprawled on the dirt—believed that Maglie was indeed trying to hit them. Fearing another inside pitch close to the body, the batter would often step back from the plate and be set up for a sharp-breaking curveball on the outside corner. The approach worked wonders for Maglie, and, not surprisingly, he later confessed that the knockdown pitch was “the best pitch in baseball.”

There was another major change when Maglie arrived for spring training in 1950: Mel Ott was gone and Leo Durocher was now the manager. A man with a fiery temper and an unbridled sense of competition, Durocher was interested in only one thing on the field: winning. And he was prepared to do whatever it might take to achieve that goal. So Maglie took heart when Durocher greeted him in Phoenix by saying, “I’m very happy to see you. I see you want to pitch.”

Despite that encouragement, Maglie, now thirty-three, did not feel secure when the Giants broke camp and began the season. At first, Durocher used him sparingly in relief, and Maglie began to wonder whether he was, literally and figuratively, on his last legs. But then, on July 14, he was called in to relieve in a game against the Boston Braves in the third inning. Maglie shut the Braves down for the rest of the game, secured the victory, and gave Durocher the incentive to give him a chance. On July 21, the manager called on Maglie to start a game against the St. Louis Cardinals in Sportsman’s Park. The Mexican outlaw pitched the Giants to a 5-4 victory with a performance that impressed his teammates and startled the Cardinals. (“Where have you been keeping that guy?” Stan Musial, the Cardinals’ premier player, asked Giants’ broadcaster Russ Hodges. “He’s got the best curve I’ve ever seen.”)

Durocher immediately placed Maglie in the Giants’ pitching rotation, and the Niagara Falls native responded with a record that was nothing short of remarkable. He proceeded to win ten more games in a row in less than two months, including four straight shutouts—matching a record held by four other National League hurlers. He also brought himself to the brink of tying the major-league record of five shutouts and simultaneously came within four outs of breaking the National League record for consecutive scoreless innings (forty-six and a third) held by former Giant pitcher Carl Hubbell.

Maglie finished the season with a record of eighteen wins and four losses, leading the league in winning percentage. He also finished the season with a new nickname—“The Barber.” There remains some uncertainty as to the origin of the nickname. Some claimed it was pinned on Maglie by Durocher, who said that Maglie looked “like the barber at the fourth chair.” But the more probable genesis of the nickname was a comment by Jim McCulley, a reporter with the
New York Daily News
, who said he coined the nickname because Maglie “shaved the plate and came so close to the batters.”

In either case, the nickname demonstrated that Maglie had arrived, and in 1951 he proved that his performance in 1950 was no accident. He won twenty-three games while losing only six over the course of 298 innings, helping the Giants overcome a sixteen-and-a-half-game lead by the Dodgers in August to finish in a tie for first place and forcing a play-off series of three games. Each team won one play-off game before the third and deciding game was held at the Polo Grounds on October 3, 1951. Durocher understandably asked Sal to start the pivotal game.

Maglie held the Dodgers for seven innings, and the score was tied at 1-1 as he began the top of the eighth. But after a few hard ground balls, a walk, and a wild pitch, Maglie walked off the mound at the end of the inning with the Giants trailing 4-1. He was lifted for a pinch hitter in the bottom of the eighth inning and, racked by despair, walked back to the clubhouse to watch the rest of the game with Giant owner Horace Stoneham. Although the situation looked bleak, Stoneham was not ready to surrender. “Sal,” he told his star pitcher, “the game’s not over yet. Have a beer.” And then—after the Giants had whittled the Dodger lead down by one run—Maglie and Stoneham watched as Bobby Thomson hit a three-run home run in the bottom of the ninth to give the Giants a 5-4 victory and the National League pennant. The excitement spilled out of the field and throughout the sports world as radio and television announcers screamed, “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” “I picked up Stoneham,” Maglie recalled, “and we danced around.” No small feat, considering that Stoneham weighed about two hundred pounds.