Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (9 page)

Robinson’s testimony before Congress illustrated the new perspective he had adopted. No longer would he stand quietly in the background while witnessing acts of discrimination on and off the field. No longer would he hold his fire when asked about issues and events involving racial issues. Sportswriters, accustomed to subdued responses when he first arrived at Ebbets Field, now found Robinson to be outspoken when discussing matters that touched on racial discrimination. Some of the reporters accepted the change in attitude as inevitable. Others, like Dick Young of the
New York Daily News
, found it disruptive and therefore enjoyed talking with other black players, like catcher Roy Campanella, who did not have any cause to advance. “The trouble between you and me, Jackie,” Young said at one point, “is that I can go to Campy and all we discuss is baseball. I talk to you and sooner or later we get around to social issues. It just happens I’m not interested in social issues.” But Robinson was, and he would trumpet his views on social issues whenever he could (including the occasion in 1953 when he bluntly said on a television program that the New York Yankees—who had never had a black player on their roster and would not until 1955—“have been giving Negroes the runaround”).

Robinson’s willingness to be assertive on social issues was not always well received. The country was only beginning to correct the racial discrimination that pervaded virtually all aspects of life, and Robinson’s pointed remarks often made people feel uncomfortable or, in some situations, generated open hostility. By 1954,
Sport
magazine said that Robinson was “the most savagely booed, intensively criticized, ruthlessly libeled player in the game.” And Robinson himself felt obliged to counter the attacks with an article in
Look
magazine entitled, “Now I Know Why They Boo Me.”

In the meantime, he continued to provide the Dodgers with sterling performances in the field. In 1950, he had a .328 batting average (second-best in the league) and almost led the Dodgers to another pennant (which they lost on the last day of the season to the Philadelphia Phillies). And in 1951, he had another good year, batting .338 (third-best in the league) and hitting a career-high nineteen home runs. He was also instrumental in preserving the Dodgers’ tie with the Giants, who had that remarkable comeback after being down sixteen and a half games in the middle of August. In the last game of the season, with the Giants now settled in first place, the Dodgers were pitted against the Phillies at Shibe Park in Philadelphia with the score tied in the twelfth inning and the bases loaded. Phillies first baseman Eddie Waitkus (the player whose strange encounter with an obsessed female fan was the inspiration for Bernard Malamud’s novel
The Natural
) hit a scorching line drive toward right field that appeared destined for a hit and a Phillies victory. But Robinson, playing second base, timed his jump perfectly and snared the ball in what was described by a
New York Times
sportswriter as “one of the greatest, if not the greatest, clutch plays I have seen.” Robinson then sealed the victory (and a tie with the Giants) with a home run in the fourteenth inning. Still, even Jackie Robinson had his limits. He could not secure the Dodgers’ success in the three-game play-off series that followed with the Giants, and the Dodgers once again went home empty-handed.

By this time, Robinson was making close to $40,000 in salary—tops among the Dodgers. But the increase in pay was not the only change that had taken place. Walter O’Malley, the principal Dodger owner, had engineered an arrangement in 1950 to buy Rickey’s stock in the team and force him out as general manager (replacing him with Bavasi). Although he had supported Rickey’s efforts to integrate baseball, O’Malley was having second thoughts about the selection of Robinson as the test case. A fastidious lawyer, O’Malley was one of those who bridled at Robinson’s new outspoken approach. It was creating adverse publicity and was not what O’Malley wanted for his club. By 1956, O’Malley reached the breaking point and bluntly told Bavasi, “I’m sick of him popping off and his outbursts. Get rid of him!” And so Bavasi began making plans to trade Robinson to the Giants after the 1956 season was over.

Long before then, O’Malley had made another change that was to Robinson’s liking: he replaced Burt Shotton with Charlie Dressen as manager in 1951. A short (five-foot-five-inch) man with a stocky build, Dressen was enamored with the word “I” and had an apparent belief in his own infallibility when it came to making decisions. But he did heap praise on Robinson, constantly reminding his second baseman in 1952 of his importance to the club—and then, with the prospect of a rookie (Junior Gilliam, another African-American) who could play second base with flair, Dressen moved Robinson to third in 1953 and benched third baseman Billy Cox, who was widely recognized as a superb fielder. (“That ain’t a third baseman,” Casey Stengel once remarked after watching Cox in a World Series. “That’s a fucking acrobat.”) But Cox’s hitting was not what it used to be, and Dressen believed the change at third would better serve the club’s interests. The only problem was that Dressen forgot to tell Cox about the move, and the veteran third baseman was bitter when he read about his demotion in the newspapers. (“How would you like a nigger to take your job?” he rhetorically asked sportswriter Roger Kahn at the time.) Robinson ultimately defused the situation, praising Cox as “the best third baseman” and “the most underrated player in baseball.”

Despite the controversy, the new third baseman responded well to his manager’s oft-stated compliments—as did the team as a whole—and the Dodgers of 1952 and 1953 dominated the National League, easily winning the pennant both years (and losing the World Series in each of those years to the Yankees). Robinson handled third base with aplomb and contributed to the team’s success with his bat as well (hitting .308 and .329, respectively, in those years). But then Dressen killed the goose that laid the golden egg by demanding that O’Malley reward his accomplishments with a two-year contract instead of the standard one-year deal. O’Malley did not like to lose control, and Dressen found himself without a job for the 1954 season.

Walter Alston, who had managed the Nashua farm club when Bavasi was the general manager, became the new manager for the club. For Robinson, the change proved to be an unwelcome one. Unlike Dressen, Alston was not effusive in his praise of the Dodgers’ new third baseman. And, beyond that, Alston had a completely different approach to management that Robinson found unsatisfactory. In contrast to Dressen’s ebullient personality, the new Dodger manager was a quiet man who did not believe in ruffling feathers. (On one occasion, Robinson was shocked to see that he, but not Alston, had run onto the field to challenge an umpire’s call that a Duke Snider hit that bounced back into the field from the bleachers was a double instead of a home run. “If that guy hadn’t stood standing out there at third base like a wooden Indian,” Robinson told one teammate with reference to Alston, “this club might go somewhere.”) The tension grew in the clubhouse, and at one point Alston challenged Robinson to a fistfight that was forestalled only when Roy Campanella stepped in between them, saying, “When are you two guys gonna grow up?”

The tension did not bode well for Robinson or the Dodgers during the 1954 season. Robinson was beginning to slow down (in part because of the increased weight he could not shed), and Alston sometimes played him in left field and at other times simply kept him on the bench (although Robinson did manage to hit fifteen home runs and bat .311 in 124 games, the fewest he had played since joining the Dodgers in 1947).

Alston’s quiet manner and revised strategy did not bode well for the Dodgers, and the Giants ran away with the pennant. For his part, Robinson began to think about retirement. “I was getting fed up,” he later said, “and I began to make preparations to leave baseball.” But he really had nowhere to go—at least not yet—that could pay him the same salary the Dodgers were providing. So he reported for spring training in 1955, slightly overweight and slower afoot but ready to do what he could to bring the pennant back to Brooklyn.

The other Dodgers were equally motivated, and it showed. The team set a major-league record by winning the first ten games of the season and ultimately breezed to a pennant, finishing thirteen and a half games in front of the Milwaukee Braves. Sadly, Robinson was not a major factor in the Dodgers’ success. Alston played him in only 105 games and, for the first time in six years, he batted below .300 (a very mediocre .256) with only eight home runs (thus marking the first time in his career that he hit less than twelve in a season). Still, he was a bundle of energy and daring, and, if there was any doubt, he removed it in the first game of the World Series in Yankee Stadium. The Dodgers were losing 6-4 in the top of the eighth inning, and, after getting on base through an error, Robinson eventually found himself on third and determined “to shake things up.” Dancing and darting off third base, Robinson made a dash for home plate as Yankee southpaw Whitey Ford went into his pitching motion. Yogi Berra caught Ford’s pitch and, in his view, tagged Robinson out. The umpire disagreed, and Robinson had his nineteenth steal of home. Later, after the Dodgers beat the Yankees to win their first World Championship, one commentator gave special recognition to the former UCLA athlete for “breathing life into a Dodger team which from the start of this series seemed destined for the embalmer.”

However much observers and teammates appreciated his contribution to the Dodgers’ World Series victory, Robinson was, literally and figuratively, on his last legs when the 1956 season began. He was able to raise his batting average to .275, but he played only seventy-two games at third, and players as well as sportswriters openly speculated about Robinson’s imminent retirement.

Jackie ignored the speculation and often showed the spark that had made him so valuable to the Dodgers for so many years. There was the time early in the 1956 season when New York newspapers quoted Giant scout Tom Sheehan as saying that “the Dodgers are over the hill. Jackie’s too old, Campy’s too old, and Erskine, he can’t win with the garbage he’s been throwing up there.” The next day Erskine pitched a no-hitter against the Giants at Ebbets Field, and, as soon as the last out was recorded, Robinson ran up to Sheehan, who was sitting behind the Giant dugout, pulled the article from his back pocket, and waved it at Sheehan, saying, “How do you like that garbage?” As Erskine later said, “That was Jackie. A fierce competitor.” But those moments of glory were few and far between, and Robinson knew the end of his baseball career was near.

 

Robinson shows no signs of retirement as he faces Don Larsen in the top of the second inning in the fifth game of the 1956 World Series. Standing deep in the batter’s box, the Dodger third baseman is a study of concentration as Larsen prepares to throw his first pitch of the inning. It is a waist-high fastball. Robinson snaps the bat at the ball and fouls it off. Larsen checks Berra’s sign for the next pitch, and, as he does so, twenty-eight-year-old Yankee shortstop Gil McDougald, a slim six-foot-one-inch player with a freckled face and a determined look, steadies his gaze at the batter, knowing that a ground ball is always possible when Larsen is pitching well.

McDougald’s approach to playing the infield distinguished him from many of his peers. He was not content to leave fielding strategy to happenstance. He was, said Bob Wolff, “a thinking man’s ballplayer” who always “positioned himself knowing where the pitch should be.” And he knew all about the expected location of the pitches from talking to Yankee pitchers before and during the game. He would quiz them on how they intended to pitch to different batters, move wherever he thought the action would be, and rebuff requests from the pitcher to move elsewhere. There was the time, for example, in July 1951 when McDougald, then a rookie, was playing third base while Yankee ace Allie Reynolds was trying to preserve a no-hit game against the Cleveland Indians. Stengel, wearing number 37 on his uniform, motioned for McDougald to move closer to home plate against Indians batter Bobby Avila to protect against a bunt while Reynolds kept yelling at McDougald to move behind the bag to prevent any ground ball from escaping into the outfield. After hearing (and ignoring) Reynolds’ repeated demands, McDougald finally trotted over to the mound and said to Reynolds, a Native American, “Hey, Indian, what’s your number?” Reynolds was perplexed by the question. “What the hell are you talking about?” McDougald was quick to explain: “If your number don’t read 37, don’t tell me where to play.”

McDougald’s assertive attitude reflected the self-confidence of an intensely competitive player. He wanted to win at almost any cost and was prepared to place faith in his own knowledge and skills to achieve that goal. Former teammate Tony Kubek remembered that McDougald “could just explode because he was so competitive.” And Bobby Brown, a veteran third baseman on the Yankees from the late 1940s and early 1950s, agreed, saying that McDougald was “very, very tough” and “very good in big games.”

McDougald’s competitive fire had evolved while growing up in the 1930s in San Francisco’s Mission District, where he played basketball and baseball on city courts and fields. The family (which included Gil’s older brother) lived in a two-story flat. Although his father had a job at the post office, they often needed welfare stamps to buy food in those Depression years. But Gil never regarded himself as being poor. The community parks always had ample sports equipment, the facilities were maintained well and so, when he looked back on those times, McDougald would say that “you had everything you needed.”

The young athlete nurtured his talents and was able to make the varsity basketball and baseball teams at Commerce High School. He excelled in both sports but enjoyed basketball more and was able to make the All-City team. He weighed only about 140 pounds and did not stand much taller than five feet, eight inches as a senior in high school, but that was good enough for the University of San Francisco, which offered him a basketball scholarship. Gil was excited about the prospect of playing college basketball—until he started going to practices. The coach had a conservative game-plan that the freshman player found very frustrating. “‘Pass the ball around and don’t shoot until you can get a layup,’” McDougald later remembered. “I said to myself, ‘Jesus Christ.’ I wanted to move.” So he transferred to the City College of San Francisco where he could play the kind of basketball that he liked. But then something happened: “I got more interested in baseball.”