Baseball; the Last Great American Pastime by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview
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Baseball; the Last Great American Pastime
Page 137
#9- The Fifties- I Like Ike and Mickey
As early as I can recall I had an avid interest in
baseball. I had children’s games with wooden bats-on-a-spring,
marbles and holes indicating results, as well as games which
required the more professional performance based playing cards
with dice determined outcomes on the carded possibilities. The
earliest memory I have of the real pro game was when our black
and white television showed Yogi Berra jumping all over Don
Larsen after he got the last called strike to complete the only
World Series perfect game against the Brooklyn Dodgers on
October 8, 1956. As I was already seven years old at the time,
it could not possibly have been the first game I saw, but I
don’t have anything other than hazy memories of any of the
preceding ones. I suppose that it’s difficult for me to find
something to be more noteworthy, as to this day it is the only
time a World Series perfect game has been done. Larsen has said
that on that day he had the best control he ever had; as opposed
to speed or movement; of his life that day. Mom and I were
somewhat together in that she was diddling with something of
concern to only her in the kitchen and I was in the adjacent
room, though potentially visible to each other. My guess was
that for her, I was the equivalent interest of her black kettle
stove; and that was all right. As usual at that time of fall, my
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Dad was off travelling somewhere, playing softball for a team
which always managed to blow the big play and come in second.
“Mom, how unusual is a perfect game?”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to wait until your father comes
home.”
Yes. And yes again from a different direction. Back then
the World Series games were almost always televised during the
day. At the time the marketing professionals had not yet sunk
their hooks in entirely. All weekday Series games started in the
early afternoons when kids were at school and their fathers were
at work. The kids could get home to see about half of it on a
black and white TV, but poor old dad would have to wait for the
weekend; unless he was again on the road, in which case the
waiting time was most inaccurately measurable, with nothing
daring to claim better, through permutations of 1949 Miller’s
“Death of a Salesman.”
Don Larsen had a spotty, fifteen year, big league career.
He was traded around the league and played for seven teams
(Baltimore twice) before the days of free agency when a player
was team property. His lifetime record was 81-91, with a 3.78
ERA. The latter figure is quite respectable and is lower than I
expected to find. At 6’4”, 215 he was a big pitcher for his
time, and had a style which went against type; as he used a lot
of off speed stuff.
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The 1950’s was marked as a New York time. The American
League New York Yankees continued their dominating tradition
well established in the twenties, thirties, and forties; and
more than ever before with the rock called DiMaggio. On the
other side of the aisle, now the once laughable National League
Brooklyn Dodgers-Bums were consensus pre-season favorites to win
every pennant. Hell, they had the all-star team. As is their
nature, people would argue which of the teams and which players
were superior; and they’d be arguably wrong eighty percent of
the time; the results ostensibly inadmissible evidence. The
unanimity of baseball experts said that it was the Dodgers who
were the best. I suppose that it would be rude to say that
betting results were contrarian.
But, despite having the virtual National League all-star
lineup, the Dodgers had a bad habit of blowing it at the last
minute and consequently their old clown name was resurrected and
they were again termed “The Bums,” especially in Brooklyn. The
other New York team; the National League’s New York Giants were
generally not in the debate; only the favorite of my obstinate
father; despite having Willie Mays and pennant winning 1951
“Shot heard round the world” Bobby Thompson on the roster. Bobby
has been quoted as saying; “In New York, after that famous home
run, they expected me to be up there every year. That homer
raised me to a high level, with the top guys in the game. It was
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a pretty fierce rivalry. I'm just speaking for myself, but I
think it was general through the clubs. We didn't like them, and
they didn't like us.”
The baseball fan of today would do well to keep in mind
that expansion had not yet come, and there were only a total of
sixteen teams. With no inter-league, regular season games, the
teams played each other 23 times, and fierce rivalries were the
result. Sometimes familiarity does breed external contempt and
simultaneously and to some ironically, internal respect. Either
way, it’s always fun to watch.
At the time and for a bit more the US got most of its news
in paper format. The land of “I like Ike” and “Baseball and
Ballantine” was a different country than the times of the
internet and video games, in more ways than the “Grand Theft
Auto VI” addicts can imagine. You’ll note that I did not say
“better;” I said “different.” It’s much too easy to fall into
the trap which many do. You know the one. It’s when the old
timers perennially say how much better things used to be; when
in truth it’s a personal statement formed merely because it was
better for them; solely due to the fact that they were young and
hopeful at the time.
I would have a personal, irrelevant difficulty in
attempting to argue with the word often used; “simpler.” The men
would make an evening ritual of going to the center of town to
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buy the evening edition from the forty-five year old paperboy.
Then they’d hang around and make one line comments to each
other; such as; “Ah, they should have pinch hit for Lockman; for
Chrissakes Mize was on the bench,” or “Durocher must have been
pie-eyed drunk to do that.” They always read the paper from the
back forward. No, most didn’t read Hebrew. It’s that the papers
were set up in a strange way. It was duplicitous. The news of
the world started on the front and moved toward center. The
sports news started on the back and moved toward the center. You
guessed it. The bulk of the advertising was in the middle. The
people I saw never read much of it as it was a sign to quit as
the world news was on the black and white horizon.
Both in the country and in the world of baseball expansion
had begun. People were moving west, and they took some of the
old eastern teams with them. There are still some who moan about
the Dodgers and Giants having moved to California, most of them
now articulating that through the orificial wobbles well known
to the sometimes disinterested residents of nursing homes.
Whatever. It was undeniable that the moves were formerly indeed
nasty. There was no warnings given and one day they just dropped
the bombs.
You might say that New York still had one home town team.
But if you said that you would not be aware that a Brooklyn
Dodger fan would be a New York Yankee fan under absolutely no
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circumstances. I’ve heard that countless testimonies of water
boarding torture did not even result in one conversion.
A Giant fan is another story. The only one I knew was my
father, and he just lost interest in the San Francisco version,
and just lived to be one who always made fun of the Yankees. He
had the comradery of an established and disgruntled group. Now,
I sometimes think of that as negative behavior; but the ensuing
enlightenment of “New Age” was a term that was still twenty
years away. And besides, not only did they have to go west to
expand; they had to take our stuff with them? Jeez. That’s
adding insult to injury.
We say that time heals all wounds. It is polite to say
that. Whenever we hear bad news about California, Arizona or
Colorado we secretly ..............
That was some of what was going on when I first became
addicted to baseball. But, somewhere in there I started to hear
names like Ruth, Gehrig and Foxx. At the time they were all
among the lifetime top ten home run hitters. I never got to see
them and I felt cheated. So, I did the next best thing. I got a
bunch of baseball books; some with pictures. I also collected
baseball cards; acquiring them all through games of chance I
always seemed to win. One year someone put out a series of all-
time great cards nobody else but me cared about. Somehow I got
the money to buy 90% of them; five at a time; and read the year-
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by-year lifetime stats on the back of the black and white card.
I was forever hooked to the past.
Back in the 1950’s, I learned that every malcontent who did
what they “righteously” did, did what would come to be, and were
pre-cursors of the 1960’s anti-hero thing. This is getting a few
years ahead of the chapter title, but the thought seems to
better fit this here.
Like my contrarian and abandoned father; many New Yorkers
hated the potent New York Yankees, culminating in the slight
jumping ahead of the worship of the hapless 1962 National League
expansion team called the New York Metropolitans, shortened to
Mets. In their initial year, they were perhaps the worst team to
ever play professional baseball, registering a season record of
40-120. It may be substantiated that the teams who had lost
games to the Mets became the victims of obscene taunts and
genitally encoded derision. The Chicago Cubs of that year were
fortunately camouflaged, as they made inroads into being a
candidate for the worst of all time, and played the Mets even at
9-9; the only team not to win the season series. The fans had
little choice than to accept the subsequent League apology for
having granted continued “order” through their rules established
during the drafting process.
It is somewhat amazing to look back at the 1962 Mets
opening day lineup of;
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Charlie Neal 2B
Frank Thomas LF
Gus Bell RF
Gil Hodges 1B
Don Zimmer 3B
The players were not shabby in the least. What was telling
was that they were all well past their primes; that generally
being 28-32 in baseball. The average age of the lineup was 33.
The Mets had tried going for a good team from day one as opposed
to a younger, to-be-proven team, and failed in the American
penchant for instantaneous success. In future years it would be
rumored that old timers traded or sold to the Mets would
announce their retirement rather than suffer the indignity of
playing for the joke of the league.
The New York fans, in possible reaction to the Yankees’
perennially winning “fascism,” and the others’ abandonment,
reacted with a perversity broken out which rivalled the
intensity of “The Miracle at Coogan’s Bluff.” A kind spirited
overture of something like; “Love the cute, hapless losers” was
the only possible explanation. Actual Met performance also no
doubt contributed to the occasional fan perception as Ron
Swoboda dove for a single he should have taken on one hop,
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missed it, and turned it into an inside-the-park home run; Choo
Choo Coleman became the only catcher in the league to be as
proficient in catching and throwing the ball with his off hand
as he was in catching and throwing it with his strong one; teen-
aged, local high school phenom, Ed Kranepool settled into his
pro .261 disappointment thanks to an ending flourish, which
elevated his batting average and his home run yearly average to
6.5; and worst of all every fourth day to see the glum-faced
presence of 41 year old and all-time great Warren Spahn trudging
to the mound in full expectation of breaking the record for
losses to add to his record of having established the modern
National League record for wins with the Braves of Boston and
Milwaukee. Perhaps it was viewed as the inevitable demise of the
great one brought about by the mere addition of age and no sense
at all of when to quit. More likely, it was a heroic worship of
failure, decades prior to copycat Leyner.
Heavily in the New York area and less so beyond, stories
like these were practically the only way to comprehend a fan’s
reaction to predictable and expected success. Like that of the
country at the same time seeing itself as being afflicted with
privilege, many were out and out revolted by the manner in which
ability consistently defeated illogical hope anytime it chose to
step down on the gas pedal. The Yankees anywhere else but first
place? The New York Yankees? Not a chance. New Yorkers had
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become accustomed to those competently fascist Yankees showing
up out of shape, drunken and joking, and consequently trailing
by a few games midway; only to get a bit in excess of half
serious and run away with the pennant in the second half of the
season.
If there ever was a need for parity in baseball, the
American League of the 1950’s exemplified it more than any other
time. The Yankees coasted to eight pennants during the decade;
while the Indians and the White Sox competed for the right to
claim second place, of some seeming relevance to habitues of
Cleveland and Chicago. But what can one do in the face of
commanding, raw talent. This was before free agency and the
possible “charge” of being “the best team money can buy.” They
had Billy Martin, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Bill Skowron,
Whitey Ford, Elston Howard and a strong supporting cast. This
was at a time consensus experts consider to have been the best
players as Ernie Banks, Yogi Berra, Roy Campanella, Mickey
Mantle, Eddie Mathews, Willie Mays, Stan Musial, Whitey Ford,
Robin Roberts, Warren Spahn, and Ted Williams; Mantle the best
of them in the 1950’s. The Yanks were so good, that they
couldn’t find Siebern, Howard, Cerv, Simpson, and Blanchard a
permanent place in the lineup. The overloaded Yankees traded
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away players who would become the best hitters on their new
teams. The pillars became my “reasonable” expectations.
The Yankee dominance coincided with the 1950’s world view
of the US; primarily vis-à-vis striving Moscow and the
occasional recognition of how many people were in Mao’s
allegedly disinterested China. The earliest of “conspiracy
theories” arose in seeming ignorance of simple finance. There
was a certain false logic to the minority opinion that ball
clubs such as the Washington Senators, and the Philadelphia-
Kansas City Athletics were merely secondary franchises rumored
to exist only to be a subsidiary of the Yankees, viewed as such
only due to much later 20-20 hindsight perceptions of their
penchants for sales or sham trades for players conducive to
Yankee interests; those players substantially a one year help
near the end of their playing careers, in return for those with
many year potential good time. Despite being chastised for the
procedure, this was when the Yankee dynasty began to crumble.
The Yankees, along with their two other league brothers in
New York baseball; the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants,
owned major league baseball for all of the 1950’s. Through the
decade’s first seven years, every World Series winner
represented “The Big Apple;” as did five of its losers. There
has been great debate over what era of baseball is most
rightfully represented as the game’s Golden Age, but if you were
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devotees of an analogy to the US place in the world or loyalists
for any one of the three New York-based teams, it was easy to
believe this particular period was it. All the largest-in-the-
country, New York based newspapers and TV stations correctly
said so.
A Golden Age outside of New York’s city limits was
questioned in speculation stemming from the few iconoclasts
sufficiently defiant to buck the overwhelming weight of the
information machine. At some parks, attendance actually dropped.
Not to be overtly against the grain, the blame was placed on
things ranging from aging ballparks, to a somewhat premature
citing of decaying inner cities, to television, to rock n’ roll.
Absurd desperation for any answer even mentions teams mentally
resigned to lose starting on opening day.
Prima facie evidence suggests that the postwar
transitioning of America into more modern times gave many teams
on baseball’s bottom rung a chance to climb to more prosperous
heights. The Boston Braves made the initial experiment in 1953
when they moved to Milwaukee and instantly became MLB’s
attendance leader. Yes, even more than the Yankees. Despite an
excellent 92-62 season they were never in the pennant race,
finishing second, thirteen games behind the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Still, this was a dramatic improvement over their 64-89, next to
last place finish the prior season. Other suffering franchises
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followed suit and made geographic moves, leaving the bad end of
their two-team markets. The St. Louis Browns went east to
Baltimore, and were re-named the Baltimore Orioles. The
Philadelphia A’s were more traditional moving west to Kansas
City, while keeping their name.
This was the first time baseball had a major team in
Baltimore since 1901. The Wilbert Robinson, Wee Willy Keeler,
and Dan Brouthers led team which almost dominated 1890’s
baseball was known by some as dirty players and by others as the
inventors of the “inside” or “scientific” game. Both assessments
are likely incorrect. It was sold, was moved, and curiously
became the New York Highlanders, who changed their name to the
Yankees in 1913.
But, the boom of falling of the first Twin Towers was heard
around the baseball world in 1958. Two of New York’s very own,
the Giants and the Dodgers, never known as poor franchises,
picked up stakes, just like the people, and headed to
California. Must have had something to do with the weather or
getting tired of playing second fiddle. Millions of Yankee
hating, disillusioned, hardcore fans were left in the lurch.
Brooklyn still hates the Bum Dodgers.
Welcome to my nightmare strike zone. In a decade where
baseball as a tradition, as one small symbol of the country’s
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traditions, is being questioned by the first of America's
emerging counter culture, called Beatniks, Major League Baseball
saw its biggest problem to be, of all things, an overabundance
of offense in the game. In actuality the number of runs scored
in the fifties almost mirrored the forties. So, those in charge
prescribed the traditional remedy for the misdiagnosed disorder;
an increased strike zone, further contributing to a downward
spiral in hitting, and greatly aiding an already talented batch
of pitchers. By the next decade runs-per-game will drop by
almost a gigantic, non-sarcastic one.