Читать книгу Summer of Shadows - Jonathan Knight - Страница 11

The crack of the bat echoed through the Polo Grounds like a rifle shot, and even those leaning against the rafters of the ballpark could tell that Wertz had gotten all of the pitch. The ball soared into the outfield as if fired from a rocket. The players inside the Cleveland dugout rose to their feet and watched the white fleck zoom across the blue sky. They knew Wertz had hit a game-winning, three-run home run. Such dramatics were nothing new to them. Unheralded players had risen to the occasion throughout the long, sweltering summer, winning and saving games from the clutches of defeat. This time it would be Vic Wertz’s turn. A promise he’d made to Lemon on their previous trip to New York had just been delivered.

So enraptured with the path of the baseball, nobody, at first, noticed Willie Mays. Rosen, his right leg heavily taped to comfort a nagging charley horse suffered three weeks earlier—the latest in a line of injuries that plagued him in 1954—immediately sprinted toward second, knowing that in case the ball somehow hit the wall and ricocheted back into play, he’d need every second to make it around the bases on his bum leg. Doby, as Cleveland’s center fielder, was more familiar with the area the ball was carrying toward and was more cautious. He skipped halfway between second and third and paused. Not only did he know better than his teammates just how far it was to the center-field wall in this bastardized ballpark, but he also knew that the Giants’ young center fielder was one of the rare ballplayers who was just as good as everyone said he was.

In that first second after Wertz’s shot cleared the infield and began its course toward history, Willie Mays’s actions were almost laughable. He turned with his back completely facing the plate and began running “like a scared deer,” Sporting News would describe, toward the dark canyon just to the left of straightaway center field. Of the better than 53,000 people in the park that day, none thought Willie Mays had a chance of catching up with the ball. None, that is, but Mays himself. As the ball cruised out of the shadow of the grandstand and was illuminated by the bright autumn sun, Mays craned his head slightly over his right shoulder to follow its path. The ball began its descent right about where it would have cleared the fence in any of the other fifteen stadiums in Major League Baseball. But with the Polo Grounds fence still another forty feet in front of him, Mays now knew he had it. He had enough time, in fact, to begin his habit of slapping his glove with his throwing hand the way he did before every routine catch.

Finally, in a drawn-out moment that seemed to last much longer that it actually could have, Mays—the “24” on the back of his jersey still squared toward the infield—held out his left hand and watched Vic Wertz’s dream settle into it. Mays’s cap spiraled off his head and floated into the grass behind him

In the years to come, the catch would be described as the greatest in the history of the game, one that only Mays could have made. Naturally, Cleveland fans, while impressed by the snag, scoffed at the notion. Partially it was sour grapes. But more than that, they’d seen Larry Doby make comparable catches for years, many of which he’d had to contend with outfield fences to achieve. For instance, Mays’s catch paled next to that truly incredible one Doby had made in Cleveland back in July—on the night the detectives finally got Dr. Sam.

For a moment, there was no sound at all. It was as if the air had been taken out of the Polo Grounds and for one perfect instant, fifty thousand people were unable to react. But then, as the magnitude of what they’d just witnessed settled in, they did. The crowd exploded into applause as Mays skidded to a stop a few feet in front of the center field wall, turned and fired the ball back toward the infield before falling to his knees. It would have been possible for a runner with Doby’s speed to tag up from second base and come around to score in the time it would take the ball to be shipped back to the infield, essentially a New York City cab ride from home plate. But Mays’s throw, while harried, was on target. Doby had been able to scamper back to second, tag up, and motor to third. Rosen, pulling into second as Mays caught up with the ball, had no choice but to turn and hobble back to first without even entertaining the option of tagging up. Wertz returned to the dugout, stunned. The greatest hit of his life had turned into nothing more than what was known in the game as a “loud out.”

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

The thought ran through the minds of fans back in Cleveland as they watched, listened to, or heard about the miraculous catch. It had been a summer of promising omens and portents—all of them signaling that 1954 belonged to the Cleveland Indians. Every break had gone their way. Each time a key player was injured, and they’d suffered more than their share, a reserve would step up and deliver. Adversity was nothing new to the Indians, but Mays’s catch marked the first time all season that fate betrayed them.

The rest of the inning is lost to history, drowned out in the thunderclap of the catch. Pinch-hitter Dale Mitchell walked to load the bases with one out, and the Indians were still in prime position to take command of the game. Had they done so, Willie Mays and the most celebrated catch in World Series history would have become minor footnotes to Cleveland’s 112^th victory of a blessed season. Dave Pope, a valuable pinch-hitter all season, struck out looking on a one-and-two pitch, leaving it up to eleven-year-veteran catcher Jim Hegan, who had a knack of coming through in the clutch. He also fell behind one-and-two, but then blasted the next pitch toward left. Hegan knew he’d gotten all of the pitch and watched it soar toward the upper deck, following the same path as Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard round the world” homer that won the pennant here three years before. Hegan knew he’d belted a grand slam that would prove once again that these Indians were a team of destiny—that no matter what misfortune came their way, they would respond and overcome.

But as he neared first, his gaze still on the ball, he couldn’t believe his eyes. From the Cleveland bullpen in right center, Hal Newhouser saw it, too. It was as if an invisible hand was pushing the ball down. Hegan saw New York’s left fielder, Monte Irvin, slowing down at the base of the wall, but not in the slumped-shouldered manner of an outfielder knowing he didn’t have a chance. Irvin’s posture was straight as an arrow, and he was raising his left arm. Hegan realized Irvin thought he had a play.

And with another look up to the ball, Hegan saw that Irvin did. The steady wind blowing in from left field all afternoon had caught Hegan’s grand slam in its stream. Instead of becoming a souvenir, the ball plopped into the glove of Monte Irvin, who had pressed his spine against the wall like a child being measured on his birthday. Irvin later said the ball missed hitting the light overhang of the scoreboard by less than six inches.

Two walks, one hit, one incredible catch, and one wind-induced fly ball. No runs. Both the land and the air had turned against the team of destiny.

Lemon was unfazed by fate’s double-whammy. He glided through the eighth and ninth, and after Al Rosen was unable to bring a runner home from second with two out in the top of the ninth, the game toiled into extra innings.

With the grandstand shadow now casting darkness over the entire infield, Vic Wertz led off the tenth with a double to the gap in left center that even Willie Mays couldn’t get to. It was his fourth hit of the game, and as he was lifted for a pinch-runner, the partisan Polo Grounds fans rose to their feet to offer this unlikely hero a standing ovation. A sacrifice bunt and an intentional walk put runners on the corners with one down, but once again the Indians’ usually heady bench failed them when pinch-hitter Bill Glynn struck out swinging. Bob Lemon was due up next, and manager Al Lopez, already having used five players off the bench and knowing Lemon still had gas in the tank, decided to allow his pitcher to bat. Lemon, a better career hitter than most of the league’s pinch-hitters anyway, lined a pitch toward right field. With a runner on first, Lemon’s liner was placed perfectly to zoom past the first baseman, who should have been at the bag holding the runner. But New York manager Leo Durocher, playing a hunch as he often did, instructed his first baseman to ignore the runner and play in his normal spot. As a result, he was standing right in the path of Lemon’s line drive. He snared it, and the inning was over. Like St. Peter on the morning of the crucifixion, luck had now denied the Indians three times.

Lopez’s decision to stick with Lemon still appeared solid when Lemon fanned Don Mueller to start the bottom of the tenth. But then he walked Willie Mays on five pitches, setting the climax to this operatic struggle into motion. Knowing reliable Jim Hegan was no longer behind the plate, lifted for a pinch-hitter in the top of the frame, Mays took off for second on Lemon’s next pitch and made it easily. With the winning run now in scoring position, Lopez changed tacks. He had Lemon intentionally walk left-handed Hank Thompson so he would match up better with the right-handed Monte Irvin. But Durocher countered, pulling back Irvin for substitute batter extraordinaire Jim Rhodes—better known as “Dusty”—who’d carved a niche for himself in his three-year career as a pinch-hitter, hitting .341 off the bench in 1954. Still, it was a gamble. The one time Rhodes had faced Lemon in a spring training game, he struck out on three pitches. Rhodes stepped into the batter’s box at 4:12 p.m., exactly ninety minutes before the sun would settle into the New York horizon.

Lemon’s first pitch, his 142^nd of the day, was a sinking curve, and a good one, arriving over the plate just below Rhodes’s belt. Rhodes, who intended to take the first pitch to allow himself to settle in, couldn’t resist. He swung and made contact, glancing it off the top of the bat. As he completed his motion and saw the ball float awkwardly into the air, Lemon knew he’d just gotten the second out and mentally turned to how he would pitch to Davey Williams, the next batter. In the broadcast booth, announcer Al Helper’s voice remained in its neutral cadence as he described the path of the baseball, certainly not slipping into the rising crescendo foreshadowing a big play. Bobby Avila saw the ball spiral off Rhodes’s bat and started running to his left from his stance near second base. He figured he’d be able to get to it before right fielder Dave Pope could reach it. In another second, he changed his mind. It was carrying enough, he saw, that Pope would have the easier play. Avila slowed to a stop and watched Pope jog to his right, clearly with a bead on the ball.

But Avila noticed that Pope was also moving backward. That damned ball was carrying farther than he thought it would. He glanced back to Mays, who, dancing off second, might have a chance to tag up and advance to third.

Pope shifted again, this time shuffling to his left to follow the path of the ball. Avila’s eyes widened. Pope was on the warning track and still trying to back up. This isn’t happening, Avila thought. This can’t be happening. The same wind that had slapped down Hegan’s potential grand slam two innings before had picked up Rhodes’s lazy fly ball and was carrying it toward the obscenely short porch in right field. “It was nothing,” Pope would say later. “A can of corn … a little can of corn.”

With his back pressed against the wall, just as Irvin had done to catch Hegan’s drive in the eighth, Pope leaped up into the sea of hands poised two feet above his head. Though not actively reaching for the ball, the Giants rooters in the first row still leaned forward in natural anticipation as the ball neared them. It glanced off the torso of a fan, just above the tip of Pope’s glove, and pinballed back onto the field. It was a home run—the cheapest in the history of the World Series.

It had traveled just 258 feet—fifty-seven feet shorter than Hegan’s out in the eighth and roughly two hundred feet shorter than Wertz’s. The preposterous nature of Rhodes’s homer further underlined the injustice of Wertz’s robbery. “Wertz hits the ball as far as anybody ever will,” Lopez sighed later, “and it’s just an out.” Indeed, just as Wertz’s blast would have been a home run in any ballpark but one, Rhodes’s game-winning home run would have been a routine fly ball in any baseball park in America. Except one.

Five days earlier, Cleveland Press sports editor Franklin Lewis had made a prediction that turned out to be eerily accurate. “Fluke hits, such as pop fly home runs, are much more likely to be stroked in the Polo Grounds than in Cleveland,” he wrote. “A 200-foot home run can turn the trend of a contest there. An outfielder’s catch of a 450-foot fly ball can attain an equal effect, positive or negative, according to your rooting interest.” As it happened, the rooting interest of Cleveland had been decimated by both occurrences in the space of thirty minutes.

Plain Dealer sports editor Gordon Cobbledick called it a “little-boy” homer. Most other reporters dusted off an old baseball term coined by a crusty New York writer who had disliked legendary Giants manager John McGraw and would often highlight flaws in Giant victories. The reporter, who hailed from San Francisco, an area that at the time held a dim view of those of Asian descent, would label lucky round-trippers such as the one Rhodes hit as “Chinese home runs.” Naturally, Leo Durocher would defend it. “It was a home run,” he announced, “nothing more and nothing less.” His conviction was almost believable.

Bob Lemon lifted his glove off his left hand and fired it into the air toward the backstop with frightening force—a strikingly unusual display of anger both for the pitcher and the era. Willie Mays leaped into the air at second base, flinging his arms in circles, landed, then leaped again with the joy of a young boy on Christmas morning. In his celebration, Thompson came up right behind him at second, and Mays finally began to prance toward third at a slow pace. By the time they’d reached third, Rhodes had caught up with both, and the trio rounded the bag and jogged toward home as if part of a conga line. It was the fitting start for a night of revelry and celebration in New York City. “A storybook finish for the New York Giants in the first game of the 1954 World Series …” Al Helper told his radio audience.

Back in Cleveland, there would be no celebrating; nor would there be panic. The Giants had stolen one, fair and square. It simply underlined what strokes of luck were required to beat the greatest team in recent memory. The Indians had stranded thirteen men on base and were an incredible one-for-sixteen at the plate with runners in scoring position. Vic Wertz had delivered both runs and half of Cleveland’s hits, but the rest of the lineup and each pinch-hitter had either struggled or been outright robbed. Through it all, Bob Lemon had been his usual dominant self, allowing only two hits after the fifth inning—only one if you didn’t count Rhodes’s lucky shot. It was just a bad day for the Cleveland hitters and a tough break for Lemon. It proved that the Giants would need divine intervention to top any of the Big Three and that all the Indians needed was a little bit of offense for everything to turn out the way it was supposed to.

“So we lost in the tenth inning, after an afternoon of blood-chilling thrills,” a Plain Dealer editorial comforted the following morning. “But are we downhearted? Not on your life. It’s only the first one, and there are plenty more to come.

“There’s no reason for civic gloom. Tomorrow’s another day!”

Indeed, it had been a summer of bright tomorrows in the Best Location in the Nation, days and nights filled with good news and shining optimism.

But this time, setting a heart-wrenching tone for the remainder of the century and beyond, tomorrow would never come.