Читать книгу Summer of Shadows - Jonathan Knight - Страница 10

Such a flavor in the air was nothing new for the capital of baseball. At least one New York team had played in the Fall Classic each of the previous five seasons and in six of the last seven. The streak would continue, albeit in a surprising fashion. It would be the Giants who would carry Gotham’s torch into the World Series, not the mighty Yankees. For the first time in six years, the baseball gods in pinstripes would not participate in the sport’s showcase—because of the men confidently marching through Grand Central Station on this Tuesday morning.

As they stepped onto the platform beside track twenty-six, spotlights burst on, and bulky television cameras whirred to life to record the arrival of these conquering titans. A cadre of New York’s finest carved an aisle through the mass of equipment and bystanders for the visitors to pass through. Photographers from New York newspapers began barking orders, telling the players how they should pose for the pictures. The players ignored them. This team had already conquered this city, and these battle-tested players weren’t naïve enough to believe they owed the desperate photographers any favors. If anything, the camera hounds should be bowing and scraping, just as they did when they visited the clubhouse at Yankee Stadium, which would sit silent this week. It was this group of ballplayers, not Casey Stengel’s celebrated Yankees, who had been Ed Sullivan’s guests on Toast of the Town two nights before via a camera linkup in Cleveland.

It would be a busy day for the Cleveland Indians. After they settled in at the Hotel Biltmore and their wives headed out for a much-anticipated shopping trip, they would take batting practice at the Polo Grounds—a place of legend for most of these players, not unlike Camelot or Sherwood Forest. Then that evening, many of the players and coaches were invited to the Biltmore’s grand ballroom to participate in a pre-Series radio program broadcast nationally to more than eight hundred stations on the Mutual Network, including a hundred from fourteen Latin American countries, where more than casual interest in the Series had been generated for the first time. “This autumn baseball show no longer is local,” baseball commissioner Ford Frick stated, “but interest in it is felt all over the world.”

Donning the new uniforms that had been tailored for them to wear in the World Series, they took batting practice at the Polo Grounds on a perfect afternoon for late September on the East Coast. Burning as brightly as it had in July, the sun boiled the city, raising the temperature into the low eighties as the Indians attempted to comprehend the nooks and crannies of the peculiar ballpark. They now realized the jokes they’d made in their final workout back in Cleveland were not, in reality, jokes. Somebody would pop a shallow fly to right and watch it be caught just a few yards behind first base. “Home run in the Polo Grounds,” the batter would offer with a smile, drawing laughter from his teammates. But now they saw that the dimensions of this strange ballpark located a stone’s throw from the Harlem River were no laughing matter. A routine fly ball to right field in Cleveland, one caught seventy-five feet in front of the fence, could indeed be a home run here. And conversely, a ball hit to center field would need to travel nearly twice as far—almost five hundred feet–to leave the park as one hit to right.

Yet as the Indians warmed up and took swings in the batting cage, and the outfielders started to study the tendencies of baseballs hit off the ancient outfield walls, they were not at all concerned with minor details like the dimensions of the field they were playing on. They’d won more games than any other American League team in history—more games than any major-league team had won in a half-century. They’d won in every park they’d played in, beaten every team that had dared to stand in their way in every imaginable fashion. Over the course of the summer, they’d taken the Yankees to the mat six times on their own diamond. The Polo Grounds may have been shaped like a bathtub, but after exorcising the demons of Yankee Stadium it didn’t frighten the 1954 Cleveland Indians. Nothing did.

They were heavy favorites to defeat the Giants in the World Series—possibly in as few as five games, saving themselves the hassle of a return trip to New York the following week. In combined polls of 208 baseball writers conducted by the Associated Press and United Press International, 147—more than 70 percent—picked the Indians to win. They’d won fourteen more games than the Giants, but more importantly, in a tight pennant race, had stared down the Yankees, who’d won the last five World Series, including a triumph over the Giants three years earlier. Even Cleveland third base coach Tony Cuccinello, who’d spent the last two weeks scouting the Giants, couldn’t see how that team could possibly beat the Indians more than twice—really, he couldn’t imagine losing more than one time. And he wasn’t alone.

“We don’t know how many games will be required to put our lads on top,” a Plain Dealer editorial admitted. “We happen to hold a couple of tickets for game No. 5—but if they can do it in four, we’ll not complain.” Thus, back in Cleveland, the latest item for conjecture during coffee breaks and lunch hours centered on how many games it would take the Indians to put the Giants away. It was the latest item for conjecture in what had become a summer of questions: Are we really prepared for an atomic attack? Is Cleveland about to become one of the most important trade centers in the world? Is television just a fad? Are this year’s Indians the best team ever to play the game? And, of course, there were the most asked questions of all: What happened to Dr. Sam’s t-shirt on the night of the murder? Why didn’t their dog, Kokie, bark? And the final, breathless question: Such a nice, good-looking young doctor with a pretty wife—why in heavens did he do it?

Everyone admitted the Giants were tough, particularly their young center fielder who’d just reached superstar status with a dynamite season after missing all of the 1953 campaign while serving in the Army. Twenty-three-year-old Willie Mays could certainly hurt them, but Cuccinello and the majority of reporters knew the Indians were too good to lose to a team with one slugger and a bunch of role players.

The Indians had a center fielder comparable to Mays both in the field and at the plate, in addition to a heavy-hitting third baseman who’d already made more impact than the heralded Mickey Mantle had made with the Yankees. They had the league’s batting champion at second base, the franchise’s first Latino star, who’d been contacted the previous week by the president of his home country of Mexico seeking Series tickets for himself and several members of his cabinet. A sudden celebrity, the previously unknown Bobby Avila had also been named honorary mayor of a tiny California town that bore his last name. But the hamlet’s three hundred citizens were distracted from following their figurehead in the World Series when on the day before the Series began, a commercial fishing boat exploded on its docks. Seven people—the equivalent of 2 percent of the town’s population—were missing and presumed dead. Some may have considered this a bad omen. But bad luck alone wouldn’t be enough to vanquish the Indians.

Even if you considered the teams equal offensively, the Giants themselves had to admit that their pitching staff was nowhere near comparable with Cleveland’s. The Indians brought four pitchers into the Series who would eventually be inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame. Their front-line starting rotation—better known throughout baseball as the “Big Three”—had combined to win sixty-five games during the season. On the rare occasion when one of them couldn’t finish what he started, the Indians had two young aces to call on in relief—a right-hander and a left-hander, forming the franchise’s first true bullpen.

Following the afternoon workout and a harried dinner back at the hotel, several of the Indians headed to the Biltmore ballroom for the 8:30 Mutual broadcast. Try as they might to remain humble, their confidence couldn’t help but spill out on the air. “This is my sixth Series as a player or official,” Cleveland general manager Hank Greenberg said, “and is giving me my biggest thrill because I grew up in New York, and the Giants were my first baseball love. It is a thrill playing the Giants, and it will be a still greater thrill beating them.” Following that sentiment, American League president Will Harridge good-naturedly informed the radio audience that the Indians were about to bring home the junior circuit’s eighth straight world championship. Fans across the nation flipped off their radios at the conclusion of the show wondering if the Giants would even be able to make things interesting over the next seven days.

The players were then free to take in the Big Apple, whose gates opened to a landscape of entertainment, from nightclubs to Broadway shows. Those seeking a more low-key evening could take in any number of movies that weren’t showing back in Cleveland. One in particular that had received much attention since its New York premiere eight weeks earlier was Rear Window, the latest thriller from director Alfred Hitchcock, his second release of the summer. This one, like the first, centered on the nefarious plot of a husband attempting to kill his wife. Considering these visitors from Cleveland had just left a city submerged in the Sheppard case—a very similar, real-life tale—it’s doubtful Hitchcock’s latest spellbinder had much appeal.

Wednesday morning dawned cloudy and overcast in New York, but by noon, the sun burned off the haze and the afternoon promised to be as sparkling and bright as the day before. Appropriately, New York was experiencing an Indian summer—just as Cleveland had for the past five months. Temperatures would soar into the eighties as the day took on a flavor of June rather than one on the brink of October. Better than fifty thousand fans poured into the Polo Grounds to witness the first game, the largest crowd ever to attend a contest involving a National League ballclub. Scalpers made a mint on the streets around the Polo Grounds, taking in as much as fifteen dollars for reserved seats and an outrageous twenty-five dollars for box seats.

The game also drew a cavalcade of celebrities: Spencer Tracy, J. Edgar Hoover, Don Ameche, Lou Costello (and, of course, Bud Abbott, who together had followed the Indians for years), Sammy Davis, Jr., and Roy Rogers. Perry Como would sing the national anthem, and leading the Indians cheering section would be comedian Bob Hope, who also was a part-owner of the franchise. He said he’d been hit up for tickets by just about every star in Hollywood, and he had guaranteed he’d wrap production on his latest film, The Seven Little Foys, in time to attend the Series. If they hadn’t, Hope explained, “we’ll wind it up behind the left-field foul line at Cleveland Municipal Stadium.”

Back in Cleveland, fans who’d climbed on the ever-growing bandwagon of technology and purchased a television could catch the first two games on two of Cleveland’s three stations—one with local broadcasters and the other, WNBK, carrying NBC’s national broadcast. WNBK even installed a television in the window of its headquarters in downtown Cleveland at East Ninth Street and Superior Avenue, and throughout the afternoon, a large crowd circled the window to follow the action. Similarly, televisions had been installed in banks and department stores—including a colossal twenty-one-inch model on the second floor of Lane Bryant—so that shoppers could follow the game action. Workmen busy six feet beneath Superior Avenue listened to the game on a small radio sending the play-by-play through an open manhole cover. Hotels hosted grand “watch parties” sponsored by local businesses, which wined and dined clients over expensive food and drink as the game played out in crisp, if colorless, images on the screens before them. With an influx of out-of-town baseball fans flooding the city, many of these same hotels also rocketed their room rates to three times the usual cost. Restaurants, also overwhelmed with new clientele, politely informed diners to request no substitutions during the World Series.

In Denver, Colorado, vacationing President Dwight Eisenhower settled in at his “summer White House” at Lowry Air Force Base to watch the first few innings on television before heading out for a round of golf. He would bring with him a portable radio to listen to the remainder of the game as he played.

At one o’clock that afternoon, Eastern Standard Time, the day’s business ground to a halt. Schoolchildren with understanding teachers in both New York and Cleveland were permitted to listen to the game on the radio, where Cleveland’s own Jimmy Dudley would team up with Al Helper to describe the play-by-play action to a national audience.

In Cleveland’s office buildings, elevator operators announced the score to new groups of passengers as they stepped on board. Outside, drivers of cars without radios hollered out windows at stoplights and intersections to bystanders, inquiring the score and situation. Even those without access to a radio or television wouldn’t be left in the dark. By calling Greenwich 1-1212, the standard phone number to receive an automated message reading the time, Ohio Bell operators would also announce the score of the game. And right away, there was good news to report.

On the fourth pitch of the game, New York pitcher Sal Maglie—nicknamed “The Barber” because of his tendency to pitch high and tight—trimmed a little too close, hitting Cleveland leadoff hitter Al Smith squarely in the back. Bobby Avila, the league’s batting champion and national hero of Mexico, then laced a single to left center, and Smith’s speedy legs carried him to third. Maglie settled to retire the two most dangerous—and most historically significant—hitters in the lineup: Larry Doby, the league’s first black star, and Al Rosen, the first Jewish player to earn MVP honors since his general manager, Hank Greenberg, a decade earlier. With two down and Doby and Rosen safely put away, Maglie appeared in the clear. All that stood between him and the Giants dugout was Cleveland’s first baseman—a short, prematurely bald young man who looked more like an insurance salesman than a ballplayer. Few, if any, of the Giant fans in the Polo Grounds that day had heard of Vic Wertz. By the end of the afternoon, however, he would be the talk of the Big Apple.

Wertz was unusually nervous as he stepped into the batter’s box. Part of the reason was that this would be his first World Series at-bat. But he was more concerned with his left index finger. He’d jammed it taking a few extra swings after the previous day’s batting practice, and in the moments afterward he could tell that it would affect his grip on the bat. He decided not to tell anyone about it for fear that he would wind up on the bench for the game. Instead, that night he bought a sponge and snipped off a small piece that he would hold in his left hand between his finger and the bat to provide some relief and allow him to maintain his natural grip and swing. The night before, it seemed silly, but as he dug into the thick dirt, Vic Wertz knew his fortunes in the Series would rest on the success of a small piece of sponge.

Wertz crushed Maglie’s second pitch into deep left center, where it caromed off the wall near the Giant bullpen, stationed along the warning track. Smith scored easily, and Avila scampered around the bases with the second run as Wertz motored into third with a triple. Maglie retired the next batter to end the inning, but the damage was done. Back in Cleveland, fans cheered on every street corner. As expected, the Indians would have no trouble with these Giants. If New York’s pitching couldn’t contain the Cleveland bats, the Giants were in deep trouble indeed. With Bob Lemon, the kingpin of the Big Three, on the mound, Wertz’s two runs might be enough to carry the day.

Lemon was wobbly through the first two innings but managed to keep the Giants off the board, while Maglie settled to keep the Indians at bay over the next two frames. In the third, three singles and a walk enabled New York to knot the contest at two. Lemon persevered, then rallied after giving up two more hits in the fourth to keep the score tied, though things could have been much worse. The Giants had stranded seven runners in the first four innings and were a base hit from blowing the game open on three separate occasions. They’d let Lemon up off the mat and were about to pay the price. Cleveland’s ace retired the next eight New York hitters and cruised into the eighth. And in the top half of the inning, the path to his third career World Series victory began to materialize.

Maglie was running on fumes. He walked Doby to start the inning, and then Al Rosen slapped a hard grounder deep in the hole at shortstop and the throw to second wasn’t in time to catch Doby. Giants manager Leo Durocher, realizing the critical moment the game had reached, quickly pulled Maglie and called on part-time starter Don Liddle to put out the fire. He’d face fellow lefty Vic Wertz, who’d added a pair of singles to his first-inning three-bagger and was enjoying one of the finest days in his career, which four months before had appeared to be limping to a disappointing conclusion. Working quickly, Liddle got ahead of Wertz one-and-two. His fourth pitch, a fastball, rocketed through the shadow cast by the grandstand that now stretched halfway across the infield, but Wertz read it perfectly. His hands tightened on the handle of the bat, flattening the tiny bit of sponge in his left hand. He was so locked in on the trajectory of the ball, he wasn’t even sure what kind of pitch it was, simply that he was about to clobber it. And he did.

“When I smacked the ball,” Wertz would say later, “it felt so good, and I was so sure of how hard I tagged it that all the details were erased from my mind.” It was, he added, the hardest he’d ever hit a ball in his life.