Next Year, and the Next Year
So I was wrong.
With all the promise that 1951 had given us, 1952 did everything it could to destroy our hopes. A couple of weeks before the season started, Monte Irvin broke his ankle sliding into third base during an exhibition game in Denver. On its own, this was a bad omen, but the Giants were still able to get off to a 16-2 start once the regular season got under way. At the end of May, we played the Dodgers and swept the three-game series, but that left us only two-and-a-half games up on them in the standings.The day after the Dodgers’ series ended, however, our season came crashing to an end, the way I saw it.
That was the day Willie Mays reported to his draft board and was inducted into the Army. They gave him a uniform and shipped him off to Fort Eustis, Virginia, just like that. I realized then that the Army doesn’t have any regard for the feelings of the average American baseball fan; if they did, how could you explain this callous act?
The Giants quickly lost six out of their next eight ball games, the Dodgers moved into first place, and then Sal Maglie hurt his back in July, and Larry Jansen — not wanting to be left out, I guess — hurt his, and even though we hung around close enough to catch up, we never did. The Dodgers finished four-and-a-half games ahead of us, then went on to hand the Yankees their fourth straight World Series championship. I was just about sick of the Yankees by this time, if you want to know the truth.
Once again, all we really had to look forward to was next year, but 1952 turned out to be almost a dream year in comparison to 1953. The Giants were dull (especially without Willie, who was still playing ball for Uncle Sam) and couldn’t put anything together all season long. We finished 70-84, rotten enough to wind up in fifth place, several miles behind the Dodgers, who won 105 games and the increasingly less-rare honor of getting a field-level view of the Yankees as they collected their fifth World Championship in a row. Something simply had to be done about the Yankees.
The next year was not the same.
1954 started with me getting my heart broke. In February, the Giants made a trade to get Johnny Antonelli from the Braves, who had moved to Milwaukee from Boston the year before. Antonelli was going to bolster our pitching staff, and we also got Don Liddle, Ebba St. Claire and a minor-league shortstop named Billy Klaus, who later was a regular for the Red Sox, but never played in the bigs for us.
Antonelli ended up winning 21 games for us in 1954 and led the league in earned-run average. Liddle contributed a steady 9-4 season, and St. Claire got into twenty games as a back-up catcher.
And all we had to give up for this was Bobby Thomson.
In February, before knowing that Antonelli would win 21 games for us, I couldn’t believe that the Giants could ever do anything so heinous as this. Bobby Thomson was eternally linked to the Giants — to the greatest single moment in the entire fabled history of the franchise, if not of baseball itself — and they traded him, for what? To get some pitching. Big God-damned deal.
I got my heart broken again in early Spring. Dad signed me up to play Little League for the first time, so I went out for the tryouts along with 613,927 other kids (it seemed) and took my ten pitches (I think I hit three balls in the air and a couple of weak grounders) and then made the rotation through each of the infield and outfield positions.Two days later, a guy called our house and told my Mom that I had been selected to play on his team. She hollered for me and handed me the phone, and the guy introduced himself and said I’d be playing for the Papa’s Pizza Dodgers. I guess he expected me to yell “Great!” or “Ya-hoo!” or to thank him profusely for the opportunity, but instead all he got was a moment of silence. I was stunned.
“Is that okay?” he asked, with some enthusiasm.
“That’s fine,” I said, with no enthusiasm at all. How could this happen to me? The guy told me where our first practice would be, and for me to be there at ten o’clock on Saturday, and to bring my glove. I told him I’d be there. I’d be there, and I’d be a Dodger. Reluctantly.
So Saturday morning, Dad drove me and my glove over to the field and introduced himself and me to our manager, a guy named Jack with a red face and a flat-top hair cut. Jack never smiled. He looked like a Marine sergeant, except he was nervous and tended to get flustered when things didn’t go his way.
Things didn’t exactly go Jack’s way during that season. The Papa’s Pizza Dodgers were a scrawny, rag-tag, underfed bunch of kids. We were at the lowest level of Little League; it turned out that some of the other guys I went to school with who tried out ended up playing in leagues designated as “the majors” or “the minors.” We were the leftovers. I was a leftover.
On the first day of practice, Jack had us line up in a row, side by side, as he read off our names. Each guy was supposed to step forward when his name was called so that Jack could check out who he had gotten stuck with, and the kid was supposed to tell Jack what position he wanted to play.
We had maybe fifteen or sixteen kids on the team. On that first day, all fifteen or sixteen stepped forward and all fifteen or sixteen said he wanted to be a pitcher, including me. I don’t know why I said I wanted to be a pitcher, but I figured it would be a neat position to play, and besides, everybody else said they wanted to pitch, and I figured I had to be better than some of these other losers.
Jack stared at his clipboard and made a quick evaluation. I guess he realized right then that he was in pretty deep trouble, and I guess he realized he wasn’t going to go too far with a ball team made up entirely of pitchers. It hadn’t been tried before, I guess, and he didn’t want to be the ground-breaker.
He split us up and pointed us into different directions — this kid at shortstop, that kid in left field, and so on — and took the remaining kids off to the side. One of the kids he sent out to the mound, and the other he told to grab a bat and get ready to hit. I had been sent to man second base, so I stood there punching my glove and sweeping the dirt around with my black sneakers, waiting for the kid out on the mound to get warmed up.
I should have known then that some things in life just aren’t what they appear to be. The kid out on the mound was named Jack, and he had a crummy, jerky motion, and his pitches looped in toward the plate and had nothing on them (especially when they bounced in three feet from home), but it turned out that Jack was really Jack Tasker, Jr., son of the manager of the Papa’s Pizza Dodgers. How damned convenient.
So little Jack got to stand out there and lob his worthless pitches for fifteen minutes while we stood around on the field waiting for someone to hit the ball so that we’d have something to do. Finally, Jack Senior pulled Junior off the field and gave him a big proud Dad smile and sent another kid out there. This kid was almost as bad as little Jack, but not quite. The kid who hit against him knocked the ball around pretty good, but it seemed like Jack Senior was running out there after every other pitch, showing the kid on the mound how to step, or how to hold his arm, or how to follow through.
The kid who was playing first base by me said in my direction, but to no one in particular, “Jeez, why don’t you teach your own kid how to pitch?” and then he did a perfect imitation of Jack Junior’s floppy motion, adding some minor enhancements (sticking out his tongue, rolling his eyes, and flopping his head around).
“Hey!” Jack Senior yelled, “You men look alive out there!”
The first baseman went back to his position, but every time Jack Senior turned his back, he went into his floppy imitation of Jack Junior. It was really hysterical, and turned out to be the only other thing I really remembered completely about that first day of practice.
The other thing was my chance to get out on the mound and show my stuff to the coaching staff, which was made up entirely of Jack Tasker and a short, skinny cancerous-looking guy with greasy, curly black hair who chain-smoked and whose name I can’t remember for the life of me.
I got four warm-up pitches and then a kid stepped in against me. I had no idea what to do. There was a white rubber rectangle thing on the ground. I had no idea what it was. I figured I had to stand on it, so I did. I had no idea what to do with my hands. I knew how to throw a ball, but I had no idea whether pitchers held it differently from regular people. I never knew these things, because I guess you were just supposed to know them, somehow.
I threw one pitch and nearly hit the kid at bat on his butt.
“Aim for your spot,” Jack Senior hollered at me. I had no idea what my spot was. The catcher held his glove up. I figured, what the heck, I’ll aim for that. I went into what I assumed to be a proper wind-up and threw again. The ball sailed outside by at least a foot.
“Step straight toward the plate,” Jack Senior hollered at me. Now this was good advice. This was actually advice that has stayed with me forever. It works: you step right toward where you’re throwing, and the ball goes there. It really works. So I went into my wind-up and stepped right toward the plate and fired the ball. The ball hit the dirt five feet in front of the plate; I know it did, because I saw it when I looked up from looking at my foot as I threw to make sure I was stepping straight toward home plate. I could tell that some of my new teammates were starting to grow restless and fidget a little behind me. I wanted to do good. Jack Senior came running out toward me, stood behind me, grabbed my right arm with his right hand and my left leg with his left hand, and proceeded to move my left leg so that my foot raised up, and then he brought it down right straight pointing toward home.
“Keep your head up and look at the catcher’s target,” he commanded. “Don’t look at your foot.”
He swept my right arm back and over in the pitching motion.
“There,” he said. “Just follow through. Give it a shot.”
He ran back off the field. I looked in at the catcher. I went into the wind-up, remembered about my foot, stepped down, gave it a quick glance to see how close I was to pointing straight at home, saw I was off by an inch or two to the left, looked back up at the catcher and fired the ball past him to the screen.
Now I wanted the skipper to come out and move me elsewhere. I was convinced that I could not pitch. I knew it in my heart, I knew it in my arm, and I knew it in my feet. I couldn’t do it. Jack left me out there for a few more miserable attempts at getting it right, and then he came out and yanked me. I took my place with the batter kids, and hit a few weak dribblers on the infield when I got to the plate.
It was a thoroughly awful experience, made better only by the fact that I wasn’t much worse than anyone else out there.
A week before our regular season started, we got our hats and uniforms. The hats were a plain dark blue with a white block-letter “D” on it. The uniforms were plain white T-shirts with the words “Papa’s Pizza Dodgers” painted on them in dark blue. Our manager instructed us to wear white jeans with our shirts for the opening game; a stunning ensemble, indeed.On opening day, I didn’t make the starting line-up. This shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. What didn’t surprise me was our manager’s choice as our starting pitcher, a fellow by the name of Jack Tasker, Jr.
With no small help from little Jack, who walked four batters in the first inning, and even less help from our defense, which was ill-trained at fielding grounders, catching fly balls, throwing to the proper base, and not throwing the ball away into the stands (we had mastered everything else), we were quickly behind by six runs as we came to bat the first time. Our first three batters went down in order, meekly, then our guys hustled back out there and kicked it around long enough to give our opponents three more runs. I sat on the bench with Jack Senior and the guy whose name I don’t remember, and I started thinking that I had to be better than these clods we had out there.
I got my chance to prove it in the sixth inning. Our left fielder, a friendly kid named Mike Hennigan, rapped a solid single to center and Jack Senior called for me to go in to run for him. I jogged out to first base as Mike trotted off, and our next batter bounced one to third base. I put my head down and raced to second, sliding in just as the ball got there. I was out by a mile, but the kid dropped the ball at his feet, and I was safe. I got up and felt a burning sensation at my left knee, so I looked down to check it out. My pants’ leg was torn open, the white fabric now brown and dirty. The skin on my knee was scraped and bleeding. My Mom was going to kill me for ruining a pair of brand-new pants, but the heck with it: I had made it to second base.
I took a short, safe lead off the bag and watched our batter tap one toward shortstop. I ran full steam ahead to third as their shortstop gobbled up the ball and launched it to first base. There was a commotion accompanying the ball’s errant arrival at first base, and Jack Senior — coaching at third — started jumping up and down and yelled at me to run home, so I did. I crossed the plate standing up and got a couple of quick handshakes and back-pats in congratulations as I headed back to bench. I was sweating and out of breath and my pants were ripped and my knee was bloody, but it sure felt good. I was a real ball player, albeit a Dodger.
I was out in left field the next half-inning, still feeling excited and ready for more. The first ball of the inning bounced past third base into my territory, and I ran over to pick it up and tossed it to second base, holding the runner at first. The next guy hit one in the air toward me, and I weaved around, got under it, and pulled it in. Not bad at all. After an infield out, the next batter hit a little blooper that our shortstop backed up on. I ran up, slowed down, he stumbled, and the ball bounced in between us for a base hit.
“Call for it out there,” our skipper yelled to us. “Let’s see some teamwork!”
Teamwork wasn’t our problem. Being totally devoid of talent was.
I got to start in right field the next few games and showed off in front of my Dad a couple of times, making routine catches and backing up plays on the infield and throwing to the correct base and always trying to hit the cut-off man. I had a couple of base hits in a couple of games, but I had absolutely no power at all. I couldn’t get the ball in the air for the life of me. It was this simple fact alone that I believed to be the reason why I never advanced on to bigger and better things as a ball player.
While I was getting my first taste of organized baseball out on the fields of Staten Island in the Spring of 1954, the Giants were trying to rebuild after their dismal showing in ’53.I was beginning to mature a little in my view of baseball, as well as life, by then. I was edging on eleven years old and was beginning to figure it all out. Baseball was still the great mystery: what was it about the Spring? What was it about the blue sky, and the smell of a newly-mown lawn? What was it about the instinct to find where last you had left your leather mitt in the Fall? About the urge to collect a few pennies and ride your bike to the store to see if the baseball cards were on the counter yet, and the disappointment when they weren’t (you’d be back to check again tomorrow), and then the excitement as you stood on the sidewalk beside the newspaper rack and slowly opened the wax paper (what do this year’s look like?) and there they were: Dave Philley, Willie Miranda, Jim Hegan and — damn, there he was, Hoyt Wilhelm, gripping the ball with his knuckleball grip — a Giant in your very first pack of the new season!
Baseball cards were a part of the education, like multiplication flash cards in school, except that to this day I have to think for a moment when I multiply nine times seven; yet, without pausing for an instant, I can tell you that a 1954 Larry Jansen was yellow with Larry (his long-jawed face unsmiling, his sober eyes staring calmly at you) looking out from the left-hand side of the card, his name in red block letters at the top of the card and pitcher NEW YORK GIANTS in black underneath it, the Giants’ script logo in the top right corner, a black-and-white photo of him following through on his delivery in the lower right corner, and his autograph (very clear and well-formed) across the bottom. The back was printed in green and orange with a brief biography of his career, a synopsis of his statistics, and three cartoons about how Jansen had seven kids and how his oldest son — that would be Dale, who we got to watch grow up year after year in the family photo section of the yearbook — shags fly balls during batting practice for the Giants before home games. (Nine times seven, I think, is sixty-three.)
One of the things I also remember about the Spring of 1954 was a picture in the newspaper of Willie Mays coming out onto the field at the Giants’ training camp in Phoenix after two years in the Army, waving and smiling, ready to bring us the pennant.
The other thing was a small article in the sports section about the new Milwaukee Brave, Bobby Thomson. During an exhibition game in Florida, he had broken his ankle so bad that it required surgery, and he would be out of action indefinitely. I remember thinking that Bobby was meant to be a Giant, and that maybe this was God’s way of making that clear to us.
On the other hand, once the season started, Johnny Antonelli began making the trade look like a pretty good one for us. He ran a streak of eleven straight wins in the middle of the season on his way to finishing 21-7 with the best earned-run average in the National League, 2.29.
Antonelli was quite a sensation that year, but the real story was Willie Mays, who took all that unused talent that was basically on the shelf while he was in the service and let it run wild. By the All-Star break, Willie had thirty-one home runs and was ten ahead of Babe Ruth’s 1927 pace, during which he established the long-standing record of sixty. Willie was just plain blasting the cover off the ball, and in June we went on a tear, winning twenty-four out of twenty-eight games, including a three-game sweep of the Dodgers to wrap up the month.
That put us four games up in front and we kind of glided the rest of the way in, never getting too far in front, but never letting anyone get closer than three-and-a-half games to us. Willie’s home run chase tailed off — he finished with forty-one — but he led the league in both batting average (.345) and slugging percentage (.667) and was voted the Most Valuable Player in the National League. The Giants clinched the pennant a week before the end of the season and began preparing themselves for the World Series.
The powerhouse Yankees, coming off of their fourth consecutive World Championship, won 103 games but finished eight games behind the Cleveland Indians, who emerged as the best team in baseball in 1954, with a 111-43 record that made our 97-57 mark look pitiful in comparison. The Indians had three of the four best pitchers in the American League in 1954 — Bob Lemon, Early Wynn and Mike Garcia — plus a guy named Bob Feller, who went 13-3 for the season. Lemon and Wynn each won twenty-three games, Garcia won nineteen and led the A.L. in earned-run average, anchoring perhaps the best pitching staff, man-for-man, in baseball history.
Their everyday players weren’t too bad, either. They had the American League batting champ, second baseman Bobby Avila, who hit .341; they had the league’s top home run hitter and RBI man, Larry Doby, who homered 32 times and drove in 126 runs. They also had Vic Wertz, Al Rosen and Fuzzy Smith, and that’s what the Giants had to look forward to in the World Series.
The Series opened with Sal Maglie facing Bob Lemon at the Polo Grounds. They battled to a 2-2 tie through seven innings, then Maglie started to fade in the top of the eighth, walking Doby and giving up a base hit by Rosen to deep shortstop. With Cleveland threatening, Leo brought in Don Liddle to replace Maglie. The first batter Liddle faced was Vic Wertz, a left-handed hitter with pretty good power.Wertz took Liddle’s first pitch and crushed it deep to center field — to the deepest part of the deepest center field in baseball; only this center field was patrolled by Willie Mays. As Doby, Rosen and Wertz began circling the bases, Mays turned his back to home plate and began running toward the fence. He glanced back once, then once more, never breaking his stride, and then he reached up over his head, stretching himself as far as he could, and the ball sailed into his glove; then, in the same motion, Willie turned on a dime and fired the ball back to the infield. Doby managed to race back to second, tag up, and hustle to third base. Rosen, already on his way to third, had to run like mad to make it all the way back to first base, just ahead of Mays’ throw. Wertz, meanwhile, was left with nothing but a long fly out instead of a home run, on a ball that would have been out of the park anywhere else.
It was the greatest catch in baseball history (please try to argue with me) and it knocked the wind out of Cleveland’s sails. The game stayed tied at 2-2 until the bottom of the tenth inning when Mays walked off of Bob Lemon, stole second, and then was joined on the basepaths by Henry Thompson, who received an intentional pass. Leo Durocher sent Dusty Rhodes up to hit for Monte Irvin, and Dusty took Lemon’s first offering and punched it just over the 257-foot mark down the right-field line, just inside the foul pole — the shortest home-run porch in the major leagues. The Giants won, 5-2, and nobody was probably more confounded by it all than Vic Wertz, who had hit a nearly 500-foot rocket blast for an out, then watched Rhodes hit a ball half as far and get a three-run home run. Ain’t baseball grand?
The Indians never recovered from that one catch by Willie. The World Series that was supposed to be such a titanic struggle for the Giants turned into a plain old everyday cakewalk. Fuzzy Smith hit the first pitch of Game Two out for a home run to give Cleveland a quick lead, but Dusty Rhodes — pinch-hitting for Irvin again — countered with an RBI single to score Mays from third and tie the game in the last of the fifth. That base hit moved Henry Thompson to third base, and he scored the go-ahead run when the Indians failed to complete a double-play. Dusty came up again in the seventh and smoked a solid 450-foot homer to right field off of Cleveland starter Early Wynn to lock the game up for the Giants, 3-1.
I guess Durocher had the whammy going, because in Game Three at Cleveland he had Dusty pinch-hit for Irvin again, this time in just the third inning, and Rhodes responded with a bases-loaded single that drove in two runs. The Giants, behind the four-hit pitching of Ruben Gomez, won 6-2 and took a three-games-to-none lead in the Series.
By Game Four, the Indians dug their own hole and were ready to shovel dirt on themselves. They sent Lemon out to salvage their dignity and got nothing in return, as we amassed a 7-0 lead with the help of a four-run fifth inning. Cleveland threw all their guns at us — Newhouser, Ray Narleski, Don Mossi and Garcia, in addition to Lemon — and nothing could stop us. Don Liddle, with relief help from Hoyt Wilhelm and Johnny Antonelli, silenced the Tribe, 7-4, and the Giants caught the evening train back to Penn Station with their first World Championship since 1933.
There was none of the emotion and excitement of the 1951 pennant chase, and Willie’s impossible catch in the first game was the only moment that came close to matching Bobby’s incredible home run in the ’51 playoffs, but the Giants of 1954 were truly a tremendous team.
Little did I know how long it would be before the Giants would win another World Series, or the changes that would occur in the years that would follow.