Читать книгу Summer of Shadows - Jonathan Knight - Страница 14

Championing the innovative idea of creating a centralized farm system that marched in step with the parent club rather than keeping track of multiple minor-league teams with separate agendas, Greenberg rented an abandoned air base in Marianna, Florida, and built four baseball diamonds with a central platform in the center. Scouts and managers would combine efforts to create not one minor-league team, but an entire farm system. The camp soon moved to a larger complex at Daytona Beach and the program expanded. By the mid-1950s, the Indians oversaw the most fertile farm system in baseball.

After Veeck sold the team in 1949, the new owners appointed Greenberg general manager. Yet even in this new role as one of the most powerful men in the game, Greenberg still encountered some of the anti-Semitism that had haunted him in his playing career. When he attended the winter owners meetings in Phoenix, he was not permitted to stay in the same hotel as the rest of the guests because he was Jewish.

By the end of his first season as GM, two things were clear: first, Hank Greenberg was not Bill Veeck. And second, he wasn’t going to try to be. Whereas Veeck was personable and charming with Cleveland reporters, Greenberg was aloof, feeling he knew more about baseball than any members of the media. During long games on hot summer afternoons at Municipal Stadium, reporters would snicker at the confident Greenberg, who would sit in his reserved box with his shirt off, soaking in the sunlight as if he were nothing more than a fan—not that any ordinary fan would be so crass as to take off his shirt in public.

It didn’t take long for animosity to settle in, as reporters who’d grown accustomed to Bill Veeck quickly turned on Greenberg. Meanwhile, Greenberg began the controversial process of restructuring a good—but not great—team. Despite a strong third-place finish in 1949 and a ninety-two-win campaign in 1950, the Indians, thought Greenberg, needed to be rebuilt. He released longtime fan favorite and seven-time All-Star Ken Keltner as well as pitcher Gene Bearden, who’d won twenty games during the magical 1948 season. First baseman Mickey Vernon, shrewdly acquired by Veeck in one of his final transactions with Cleveland, was traded away after only one year, costing the Indians four of his All-Star seasons. Most notably, after the 1950 season in which many thought the Indians had choked down the stretch, Greenberg decided to pull a trigger that Veeck never could. When Boudreau announced his intention to retire as a player after 1950 and just be the manager, Greenberg felt his value to the Indians plummeted. He released Boudreau and brought in minor-league manager Al Lopez, introducing him at a press conference and shocking area reporters after flying Lopez into Cleveland under an assumed name and putting him up at his own house in Shaker Heights. While many reporters knew Lopez and thought it was a good move, Greenberg’s subterfuge fueled his adversarial relationship with the press.

Without question, for better or worse, by 1951, this was Hank Greenberg’s team. Yet little changed in the standings. The Indians continued to contend through much of the summer, only to finish second to the mighty Yankees three consecutive years. A fourth straight failure in 1954 would be a rebuke to Greenberg, who had yet to match Veeck’s accomplishments. For all his intelligence and articulate descriptions of his plans to the press, Greenberg’s tenure in Cleveland had been rocky.

“If you judge a front-office executive on his accomplishments in … player-juggling and talent-handling, Greenberg is a failure,” Franklin Lewis wrote in the Cleveland Press. “If you add the delicate field of public relations, both with the press and the fandom, Greenberg is a flop.” He did have some support among the fan base, including the proprietors of a laundry that distributed buttons to its clients that read “We’re Witcha Hank!” No matter how many shirts around town displayed this message, Greenberg knew his fate would be decided on the field. Another failure in 1954—even a narrow one—would likely signal the conclusion of his duties with the Indians.

There was, however, reason for optimism. Al Lopez called the ’54 Tribe the strongest team he’d had in his four years at the helm. Yet in the same breath, he revealed that only four starting positions were set. Four others would be determined in spring training, hardly the recipe for success in a league dominated by perhaps the finest team in baseball history.

To be sure, there was little about the Indians that gave the New York Yankees pause as they reported to camp. Not only had the Yankees captured five consecutive American League pennants (followed by a quintet of World Series triumphs), but in each of the past three seasons New York had been challenged by the Indians in September, only to sprint past them with the finish line in sight. In 1951, the Indians dropped ten games back by Memorial Day, then mounted a furious August comeback, winning thirteen straight and taking a three-game lead. With two weeks to go, the Tribe held a one-game advantage on New York, then went on to lose eight of the last eleven to finish five back. A year later, the Indians ripped off seven straight wins to start the season and controlled first place in mid-June before a string of nine losses in twelve games dropped them into fourth. Cleveland rallied from seven and a half back in late July to claw within a half-game of first with a dozen to play. They went on to win nine of their last ten, but the Yankees won thirteen of their last fifteen to take the pennant by a mere two games. Even the 1953 race, which New York won by a comfortable eight and a half games, was a painful experience for the Indians, who had won a remarkable twenty of twenty-three games down the stretch—yet in the process only gained six games on the Yankees.

As the Indians tried desperately to shed their reputation as choke-ups, their fans tried to get to the bottom of their September swoons. “I believe that in Cleveland, players are affected greatly by civic pressure,” Harry Jones wrote in the Plain Dealer. “This is not true in New York. There is constant civic demand on Cleveland players, whereas the Yankees are swallowed up by the multitudes in New York once they leave the ballpark.”

Ever since the Indians had triumphed over the Yankees and Boston Red Sox in their legendary pennant race in 1948, no matter what they did or how much they improved, New York was always better. Granted, the Yankees were better than everyone, but the contrast came into stark relief with Cleveland since the Indians were the only American League team capable of competing with them. In fact, since 1950, the Indians had won more games than any other team in the American League. Any other team besides New York, of course. The Indians had been good, even great, at times. But not good enough. “Ever since they won the world championship in 1948 it has been one thing or another with the Indians,” Sporting News declared. “One year they had superlative defense but not enough hitting. The next year they battered down the fences but their infield fell apart.” Reflecting this trend, as the Indians’ offense exploded for sixty-five runs in their first four exhibition games of 1954, a fan hollered from the grandstand, “Save some of those runs for the Yankees!” Exhibition game or not, everyone knew the Indians needed all the help they could get.

Pushing the buttons on New York’s well-oiled (and financed) machine was the oracle of baseball himself, Casey Stengel, who in his twenty years as a manager had forgotten more about baseball than most managers would ever know. After the Yankees won their fifth straight World Series the previous fall, Stengel admitted he didn’t know why the string couldn’t reach six or seven. Before spring training, he noted that the club was stronger than at any time since he’d been manager. Then, as if thumbing his nose at the rest of the league, he added, “The other clubs are sore and desperate. The ‘Hate the Yankees’ campaign will be picked up with more venom.”

In a preseason poll of 197 baseball writers, 119 picked the Yankees to return to the World Series for a sixth straight season. “The Yankees will win the pennant,” Stengel boldly proclaimed as the team headed home from spring training, “because there isn’t a club in the American League capable of beating them.” It was a direct shot at the Indians, the only team within arm’s length of New York in recent years. Stengel’s sentiment was reflected in the writers’ poll. Of the seventy-eight dissenters, only twenty-four picked Cleveland to topple the dynasty. On the off chance the Yankees would fall, the experts said, it would not be the Indians who tripped them. And their sickly 13–16 spring record did little to change minds.

It appeared the window of opportunity to dethrone the mighty Yankees had passed. “You could pick the Indians to win the American League pennant this season and get away with it, I suppose,” Harry Jones wrote in the Plain Dealer. “But frankly, I can’t.” The paper’s sports editor, Gordon Cobbledick, agreed, noting that the team would have to prove it was capable of winning the big game. “They’ve been a long time earning a reputation as a team that looks like a champion until the chips are down,” he wrote. “They have to show me that they think like champions.” And they had to do it quickly, Cobbledick added, because time—defined in sports as the median age and condition of a team’s key players—was running out. “The Indians as they are now constituted can’t last much longer,” he said. “It’s now or never.”

As the team began its journey across the continent back to Cleveland, so too did a young couple on their way home after an extended vacation in California. The husband, a thirty-year-old doctor named Sam Sheppard, had traveled out west to attend a medical conference and had brought his wife, Marilyn, with him. As they headed home from what would be the last trip they would ever take together, each carried a secret from the other. During part of the trip, when the young doctor had stayed at a friend’s house away from his wife, he had reconnected with an old flame—a pretty medical technician who used to work with him in Cleveland—and the two had resumed their sexual relationship.

And his wife, not knowing this, also did not yet realize that her life had changed in another way. During the trip, she had become pregnant with their second child.

There was also a third secret, unbeknownst to either of them. In three months, Marilyn Sheppard and the burgeoning life within her would be murdered.