Quote of the Day (Roger Kahn, on Ebbets Field, A Fan’s Paradise)

“Ebbets Field was a narrow cockpit, built of brick and iron and concrete, alongside a steep cobblestone slope of Bedford Avenue. Two tiers of grandstand pressed the playing area from three sides, and in thousands of seats fans could hear a ball player’s chatter, notice details of a ball player’s gait and, at a time when television had not yet assaulted illusion with the Zoomar lens, you could see, you could actually see, the actual expression on the actual face of an actual major leaguer as he played. You could know what he was like!”—Sportswriter Roger Kahn (1927-2020), The Boys of Summer (1972)

Sorry, folks, but what we’re seeing now, with a midyear opening, is fake baseball—meaningless games without fans, atmosphere and even a full schedule to compare team and individual results against those posted in other seasons. As far as I’m concerned, the cry of woebegone Brooklyn Dodger fans who once made Ebbets Field their psychic home makes a whole lot of sense: “Wait till next year!”

Yet one more reason to curse COVID-19 and the public leaders who, through inaction and/or wishful thinking, enabled it...

Quote of the Day (Red Smith, on Bobby Thomson’s ‘Shot Heard Round the World’)

“Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”— Red Smith, "Miracle of Coogan's Bluff," New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 4, 1951

Giant announcer Russ Hodges’ breathless announcement—“The Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant!”—might be what most people recall about Bobby Thomson’s walk-off homerun that defeated the Brooklyn Dodgers in the rivals’ best-of-three playoff series 65 years ago today. But to my way of thinking, Smith’s column captured the “inexpressibly fantastic” nature of the moment better, all the way down to the image of the dejected reliever who threw the fatal pitch: “Ralph Branca turned and started for the clubhouse. The number on his uniform looked huge. Thirteen.”

Quote of the Day (Roger Kahn, on a Boy of Summer)

"Carl Furillo was pure ballplayer. In his prime he stood six feet tall and weighed 190 pounds and there was a fluidity to his frame you seldom see, among such sinews. His black hair was thick, and tightly curled. His face was strong and smooth. He had the look of a young indomitable centurion ... I cannot imagine Carl Furillo in his prime as anything other than a ballplayer. Right field in Brooklyn was his destiny." --Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer (1972)

In the 1947-57 period, when the center of baseball was in New York, the Brooklyn Dodgers kept falling, with the exception of the 1955 World Series, to the New York Yankees. That team deserved better: They not only initiated a crucial moment in baseball history (the breaking of the color line, through Jackie Robinson) but also gathered together one of the most talented lineups ever to play on the diamond--perhaps the best team ever not to become a dynasty. One of their key players was Carl Furillo, born on this date in 1922 in Stony Creek Mills, Pa.

Thirty years after I first read Roger Kahn’s classic The Boys of Summer, the chapter on Furillo especially stays with me. While Kahn was covering the team as a young reporter, Furillo was a god of right field: “People came early just to watch Furillo unlimber his arm. The throws whined homeward, hurtled off a bounce and exploded against Roy Campanella's glove--pom, pom, pom, pom--knee-high fastballs thrown from three hundred feet ... Throughout the grandstands men said to one another, 'He's a master.'"

Unfortunately, his career did not end happily for the one-time “Reading Rifle,” 1953 batting champion and lifetime .299 hitter. Furillo, reacting to his unceremonious release by the Dodgers (now infamously having moved cross-country to Los Angeles) following an injury in 1960, had sued to collect the rest of his $30,000 contract, and won. After an unsuccessful attempt to secure payment he felt owed for the following season, the remaining major-league clubs turned down his written offer to pinch-hit and coach. In those pre-free agency days, it’s hard not to resist the conclusion that, in Kahn’s words, “people in baseball’s conformist ambiance decided he was a ‘Bolshevik.’"

By the time Kahn caught up with him, a decade later, Furillo was a hardhat, installing elevator doors in the old World Trade Center, then under construction. Later, he worked as a security guard for a nylon factory in Stony Creek Mills.

Throughout the early part of his career with the Dodgers, Furillo had clung to his dream of a championship with a Sisyphean determination against the odds. Among all the players interviewed by Kahn, except for third baseman Billy Cox (a bartender a decade removed from the game), perhaps none had been buffeted by time and fate as much as Furillo.

Today, he would undoubtedly have had a lawyer, money manager and accountant to look after his financial needs. Before the onset of free agency, however, Furillo was at the mercy of every kind of ploy management dared pull: not just his unconditional release when his days as an everyday player were gone, but also the Dodgers' reimbursement of only half his relocation expenses to the West Coast after he'd been promised full payment.

A few years before his death in 1989, Furillo accepted an invitation from the Dodgers to appear at one of their Old-Timers’ Games in Los Angeles. It was good that fans finally had a chance to pay tribute to this proud man and superb ballplayer who had been instrumental in the team’s first World Series win in Los Angeles and their only fall classic victory in Brooklyn.

Song Lyric of the Day (Dave Frishberg, Immortalizing an Unusual Baseball Name)

“Whitey Kurowski, Max Lanier
Eddie Waitkus, Johnny Vander Meer
Bob Estalella
Van Lingle Mungo.”— “Van Lingle Mungo,” words and music by Dave Frishberg (1969), from The Dave Frishberg Songbook

The man who gave his name to the only song I know that’s composed entirely of the names of baseball players was born on this date 100 years ago.

Van Lingle Mungo (in the image accompanying this post) was a righthanded flamethrower who, in 14 seasons, compiled a 120-115 record and 3.47 ERA. Much of that time was spent toiling for the Brooklyn Dodgers, whose second-division play often made him lose control of his temper and of games. An injury led the Dodgers to release him in the 1941 season (naturally, the year they made it to the World Series), whereupon he reinvented himself as a junkball specialist.

That record and temperament made Mungo the subject of one of the typically priceless one-liners from Casey Stengel, his manager with the Dodgers: “Mungo and I got along just fine," said Stengel. "I won't stand for no nonsense, and then I duck."

That same fiery temperament might have made me, for one, reluctant to turn him into the subject of a song, but jazz pianist and composer Dave Frishberg probably did not know this when he did so: It was simply an unusual name that summoned an entire lost world of his youth.

But when Mungo heard that he was the subject of a song, the former player--now in his late fifties--wanted to know why he wasn’t getting royalties. (In those pre-free-agent days, players and ex-players had to hustle for every dollar they could get.) Frishberg patiently explained that hardly anybody associated with the song was likely to see any money from the tune, especially the songwriter himself, and that Mungo’s best recourse was to write a song about him. At that, Mungo grinned and said that maybe he would. (He didn’t.)

In a way, I liken what is now one of Frishberg’s signature tunes to Stephen Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here.” Each, containing references to an era unfamiliar to someone growing up today, becomes, in effect, a mini-history (in the case of the latter, “I got through Abie’s Irish Rose, five Dionne babies, Major Bowes”).

As a baseball fan, I find “Van Lingle Mungo” a deeply humbling experience. You see, I could only identify 12 of the 38 names in the song. That kind of average might be okay on the baseball diamond, but hardly elsewhere.

This Day in Baseball History (Ruth Plays Last Game)

May 30, 1935—Once better paid than the President of the United States, not only credited with spurring the New York Yankees to their tradition of glory but even with saving the national pastime itself in the wake of the “Black Sox” scandal, Babe Ruth bowed out of major-league baseball in a quiet, most un-Babe-like way: not at the cathedral of sports, Yankee Stadium, but at the Philadelphia Phillies’ decrepit Baker Bowl, grounding out meakly to first base, misplaying a ball in left field, injuring his knee in the process, then taking himself out at the end of the first inning.

Playing out the string and out of condition, The Babe had, only five days before, given fans one last reminder of how he had transformed the game—and why he had been its principal box-office attraction—by clubbing three homers for the visiting Boston Braves at Forbes Field, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The last of the trio was so Ruthian—sailing over the right-field grandstand, rolling over into neighboring Schenley Park, in what witnesses claimed was the longest drive ever recorded at Forbes—that fans might have been forgiven for thinking he was reviving his game.

If only he’d retired immediately afterward…

Not Quitting While Ahead

But professional athletes never know to quit while they’re ahead, do they? We love the storybook ending—Ted Williams homering in his last at-bat (and, characteristically, almost as a point of honor, perversely refusing to tip his hat to the Red Sox crowd that had sometimes booed him); John Elway and Michael Strachan, going out as Super Bowl champions; or Rocky Marciano, retiring undefeated and unscarred as heavyweight champion.

Instead, we get Mickey Mantle, hanging around for four seasons too long on weak knees, his lifetime batting average diping below .300; Muhammad Ali, refusing to retire after taking back the heavyweight championship from Leon Spinks, until his nervous system had sustained more blows from ring foes; or the New York Giants’ Y.A. Tittle, in an unforgettable image, knees sunk to the turf, his bald head smeared with cuts from the beating he took from the Pittsburgh Steelers in his final season.

Most of these latter athletes didn’t realize until too late that their skills were irreversibly declining. To his credit, that couldn’t be said for Ruth. He had wanted to call it a day after his 1934 season with the Bronx Bombers, when his 22 homers were nearly half of his total from only two years before that.

No, The Babe stuck around, despite his age (40), terrible knees and dismal playing condition (245 pounds, the heaviest of his career), for another reason: to fulfill his dream of managing a major-league franchise someday. To do so, he was prepared to part ways with the team on which he became an American legend.

A Quest to Manage

Ever since the death of Yankee skipper Miller Huggins, Ruth had hoped to segue from player to player-manager to strictly manager. In those years, it was not uncommon: John McGraw, Rogers Hornsby and Bill Terry had done so. There seemed no reason, the Bambino thought, why he couldn’t, too.

Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert demurred. Ruth might have resented the man who settled in eventually as Huggins’ successor, Joe McCarthy, but Ruppert felt loyalty to this crusty baseball man who had brought another world championship to Yankee Stadium in 1932.

There was another, not unimportant factor at work, too. McCarthy might have excelled at strategy and teaching players the fine points of the game, but he was even better at discipline, at making players cut out the crap and concentrate on winning.

Ruth could never compete in this area. As a player, he had been a virtual law unto himself, a hellraiser of awe-inspiring proportions. As a manager, any attempt he would make to enforce the kind of rules he had so blithely disregarded would be dismissed as rank hypocrisy.

“Colonel” Ruppert had made it a point that he would not release Ruth before the end of his playing career, but the owner’s commitment to McCarthy brought a parting of the ways. Ruth had missed out on a chance to manage the Detroit Tigers, but the Yankees got word that another franchise might be interested in the services of their on-the-way-out legend.

That led to the formerly unthinkable prospect of the greatest slugger in baseball history belting his final round-trippers not with the Yankees—not even with the team who hired him (and let him go) originally, the Boston Red Sox—but a squad that had been finishing out of the running for even longer than the Bosox: their hometown rivals (if you could call them that), the Boston Braves.

Beantown Fiasco

Enter Judge Emil Fuchs, president of the lowly Braves, desperate to stave off bankruptcy. A bug planted in his ear by Boston Mayor James Michael Curley—that Ruth, a huge draw in the city the prior year, would be great to have as a manager—made the financially strapped owner consider this as an option.

Fuchs already had a manager in Bill McKechnie, but there were ways of getting around this. He could secure Ruth’s services first as a player, then promise more.

The “more” part is where it became interesting. Had Fuchs the owner presented to Fuchs the judge the kind of agreement he proposed for Ruth, he would have at least immediately hauled him into chambers and demanded what was going on. More likely, he would have judged the pact null and void.

A February 23, 1935 letter from Fuchs to Ruth spelled out in written form what they’d discussed over the phone the day before. In addition to $25,000 in a straight-salary contract as a player, he’d also receive “an official executive position as an officer of the corporation”; a share of the profits “during the terms of this contract”; an option to purchase “at a reasonable figure” stock in the Braves; exact amounts spelled out in a separate contract between him, the club, “and as the case may be, with the individual officials and stockholders of the club”; and appointment, for the 1935 season, as “assistant manager.”

That last position was especially curious, chiefly because it had never been created before. As Ruth was given to understand, it meant that McKechnie would consult with him on strategy in the upcoming season. In 1936, when the latter moved up to general manager, Ruth would succeed him in the dugout.

The letter became more and more curious as it went along. By its conclusion, Fuchs was writing that first, before Ruth became manager, McKechnie’s loyalty would have to be amply “rewarded”. Maybe Ruth would like to become a manager eventually, maybe even an owner or part-owner of a major-league club.

Or: “It may be that you may discover that what the people are really looking forward to and appreciate in you is the color and activity that you give to the game by virtue of your hitting and playing and that you would rather have someone else, accustomed to the hardships and drudgery of managing a ballclub, continue that task.”

Ruth was so desperate to manage that he was willing to look past all these mealy-mouthed promises and flimsy escape clauses. Before long, baseball fans were surprised to hear that he’d been given his unconditional release by Ruppert and was heading up to Beantown.

Ruth’s time with the Braves—the exhibition season and two months of the regular season—turned out to be disastrous for all concerned.

McKechnie, really not a bad sort, would have had to have been a saint to solicit Ruth’s opinion. He didn’t.

Ruth, already in sorry physical shape, wasn’t helped by various ailments. In the outfield, this player—once possessed of one of the most feared throwing arms in the game—needed constant assistance from his centerfielder.

Worse was what happened at the plate. In 28 games and 72 at-bats, Ruth compiled only a .181 batting average with six homers (half coming from the Forbes Field performance) and 12 RBIs.

Ruth should have heeded the advice of his wife Claire and quit immediately after his Forbes Field game, but he wanted to keep his promise to Fuchs to visit the remaining clubs on this road trip. But he and the owner were now feuding constantly, and two days after bowing out of the Phillies contest, matters had come to such a pass that Ruth gathered reporters together at his locker to tell them he was out of the game.

As bad as the Braves' experiment with Ruth was, it was also probably the highlight of that sorry squad that year. His six HRs, in only two months of playing time, ranked second for the entire team. Their 38-115 record was the worst recorded by a National League franchise in the 20th century. (The New York Mets, with a 40-120 record in 1962, had an excellent excuse: They were an expansion franchise with a combination of mostly untried youngsters and vets on the downswing in their career.)

McKechnie and Fuchs, each in his own way, got what was coming to them. The long-suffering manager, freed from his Job-like sufferings in Beantown, went on to manage the Cincinnati Reds to a National League pennant in 1939 and a World Series championship the following year. Fuchs was forced to sell the Braves one month after he gave Ruth his unconditional release, and resorted to bankruptcy in 1936.

The Greatest Disappointment of a Triumphant Career

Amazingly, though rejected once by the Yankees, Ruth looked to them again to revive his managerial hopes. But all they would offer was a post with a minor-league team, the Newark Bears. The proud slugger, believing that other former players—former players of less than his caliber, at that—had gone straight into leading at the major-league level, scoffed at it as an insult.

In 1938, Ruth jumped at one last chance to manage, this time with the Brooklyn Dodgers, who hired him as their first-base coach. But at the end of the season, his heart was broken once again when the team hired Leo Durocher—a player Ruth had once dismissed as “the all-American out”—as their manager.

His inability to become a manager was the greatest disappointment of Ruth’s career. To be sure, both the Braves and the Dodgers exploited his box-office appeal. But if he had looked deeply into himself, Ruth would have understood that ultimately he was the one chiefly responsible for this failure, because of his own lack of elementary restraint and self-discipline as a player and his proud refusal to manage at anything less than the major-league level.

This Day in Baseball History (Jackie Robinson Terrorizes Pirates on the Basepaths)

April 23, 1954—Jackie Robinson put on a virtuoso display of daring, stealing second, third—and, in the final indignity, home—all in the same inning, helping the Brooklyn Dodgers edge the Pittsburgh Pirates, 6-5.

I was inspired to deal with this particular game by a New York Times article this past week about one of the Hall of Famer’s great specialties: stealing home. In the course of the piece, New York Mets speedster Jose Reyes expressed a desire to pull off this feat that Robinson had accomplished successfully 19 out of 31 times. 

For all his great athleticism, I don’t believe Reyes—at least from what he’s shown in his career to date—has the kind of smarts within the diamond to do this.

Yes, Robinson could certainly hit—that .311 lifetime batting average, including six straight .300 seasons, proves that. But his greatest assets were his legs and his cunning. In contrast, Reyes might have the first but not the second. 

Robinson could change the course of a game by positively unnerving a pitcher, as he did with the Pirates’ Bob Friend. Just watching him dance off first or second was bad enough. But to watch him do it off of third—knowing that the throw to the plate should be the shortest distance of all, and the hardest base for a runner to steal—was too much for any pitcher to abide. 

Though he continued to contribute key moments to the Dodgers’ great pennant runs in 1955 and 1956, 1954 was the last great year for the lionhearted Dodger. 

He was traded to the crosstown rival New York Giants after the 1956 season when Dodger management concluded he was on the decline. Robinson’s decision not to join his new team was based at least partly on the recognition that the legs that had carried him to greatness were on their way out. 

The two players I admire the most in baseball history were Lou Gehrig and Robinson, partly for all they accomplished on the field, but most of all for their courage—“grace under pressure,” in Ernest Hemingway’s words. 

Gehrig’s was displayed as he coped with the devastating disease that now bears his name; Robinson’s was evidenced, of course, as he braved countless indignities and even death threats to break baseball’s color line. 

I believe there were only two everyday players who utterly transformed the game. One was Babe Ruth, who almost single-handedly introduced the power game into the sport with his home runs. (Often during his career, Ruth would have more homers in a single season than entire teams would.) 

The other player was Robinson, whose speed revive the aggressive style of play that Giants manager John J. McGraw much preferred to Ruth’s power game.

This Day in Baseball History (Dodger Stadium Opens)

April 10, 1962 – Though the Los Angeles Dodgers lost the first game in their new home, Dodger Stadium won widespread public acclaim and began to influence powerfully the construction of ballparks throughout the rest of the decade. 

More than 52,000 fans turned out at what the media were calling the “Taj Mahal of Los Angeles,” in a game that featured two mainstays from the team’s glory days in Brooklyn: centerfielder Duke Snider and 1955 World Series pitching hero Johnny Podres. 

Fan disappointment over the 6-3 loss to the Cincinnati Reds soon turned to joy, however. In a signal of better days ahead, lefty fireballer Sandy Koufax threw a four-hitter the following day. 

In the process of fulfilling his dream of building this spanking-new structure, however, team owner Walter O’Malley had, by moving the franchise from its original home, ripped a hole in the heart of Brooklyn; ran roughshod over the rights of a disenfranchised Latino community in Los Angeles; and showed owners in all sports how to play off one metro against another in deals that did not necessarily redound to the best interests of taxpayers, let alone fans. 

The story of how the Dodgers’ departure from Ebbets Field severed a team from its intensely loyal fan base has been told and re-told repeatedly. For years, O’Malley has been cast as the villain of the piece, though there have been periodic attempts at historical revisionism. 

Well, there’s good revisionism (the more praiseworthy recent looks back at the once-scorned Reconstruction era in the South) and bad revisionism (the late-20th-century view of some historians that the Irish Potato Famine was not the product of malign forces in Great Britain). In my opinion, the more supposedly “balanced” view of O’Malley falls into the latter category, because it does not take into account the man’s character. 

From 1952 to 1956, O’Malley’s Dodgers were reportedly the only National League team to make money, so, unlike the Boston Braves moving to Milwaukee, he wasn’t moving a franchise abandoned by local fans. Yet he scheduled seven different games for the team in 1956 and 1957 in, of all places, Jersey City. 

And he appears to have exerted influence behind the scenes in inducing New York Giants owner Horace Stoneham to take his team to San Francisco, giving himself some degree of cover when he followed with his own move. 

In an excellent column last September, The New York Times’ Dave Anderson took a meat ax to the new revisionism, especially when quoting former Dodger exec Buzzy Bavasi on O’Malley’s motivation (money, of course) and his strong-arm tactics in the move: 

“He could have taken the Dodgers a few miles to where Shea Stadium is, but he took them 3,000 miles. We had a vote among the eight top people in the front office, and the vote was 8 to 1 not to go to California, but the one vote was Walter’s.” (Predictably, the team’s PR press release noted that the team vote of stockholders and directors was unanimous to go to Los Angeles.) 

O’Malley wasn’t done. After flying over the hilltop location at Chavez Ravine, he had decided this was the place where he’d build, and nothing was going to stand in its way. 

Los Angeles was still reeling over a bruising fight over the failed attempt to bring public housing to this working-class Latino enclave that resulted in the mass eviction, at the threat of eminent domain, of residents. 

Enter O’Malley, bearing a gift: the promise of a baseball franchise to a massively growing city that had never seen one. The mayor was all ears, and backed the Dodger owner’s proposal to build. 

Having bought 300-plus acres back from the federal government at drastically reduced prices, Mayor Norris Paulson was desperate to see productive use of the land. A nasty battle (marked by unproven allegations of payoffs to the mayor) followed as O’Malley fought to win a public referendum on the fate of his idea—which passed by only three percent. 

 As someone who watched his own neighborhood victimized by use of eminent domain nearly 40 years ago, I have tremendous sympathy with the remaining families who, offered pitifully small compensation by the city for their land, refused to leave. 

O’Malley with his money was too strong for them, however, and in the end they went, too, making way for the bulldozers who leveled, graded, and pushed up the site of O’Malley’s dream project. 

 And dream project it was. Disneyland had impressed O’Malley in his early imaginings of his “Taj Mahal,” and, with the park’s elaborate color scheme and stress on surrounding horticulture, he sought to create his own counterpart to Walt Disney’s fantasyland. 

How typical that O’Malley looked to this other Walt for inspiration. In listening to public radio some time back, I heard a Disney biographer say he was thrilled to have a likable subject like Cary Grant, because in researching the earlier Disney book, he’d had to deal day after day with someone whose name was mud in Southern California for his tough tactics in getting the land and removing families.

Another word about this park before we go: its influence on the shape of baseball action itself over the next decade. 

After a short burst of hitter exuberance at the start of the decade, highlighted by the Yankee duo of Mantle and Maris’ assault on Babe Ruth’s cherished single-season home run mark, baseball in the 1960s became increasingly characterized by pitching dominance, especially in 1968, when the Detroit Tigers’ Denny McLain became the last pitcher to win 30 games in a season, Bob Gibson ended up with a mind-boggling earned-run average of 1.12 per game, and the American League ended up with only one hitter with a batting average over .300 (Carl Yastrzemski, at .301). 

Part of the reason for this pitcher dominance was the increased number of so-called “pitcher’s ballparks.” No blasts over invitingly short right-field porches here. 

Instead, there were places like the Dodgers’ new home, or the one created to replace it in the hearts of New Yorkers, Shea Stadium (which I’ll consider next week). 

Over the years, Dodger Stadium developed something of a reputation as a “pitcher’s park.” Now, it’s true that the immortal Sandy Koufax threw so hard that it didn’t matter where he played, since batters had trouble seeing his fastballs in the first place. 

But others on the Dodger staff, less powerful than Koufax and Don Drysdale, also flourished, at least for a time, in this ballpark. 

Opponents of the so-called “ballpark effect” argue that the Dodgers simply spent more time cultivating hitters. But I think that proponents have some good points on their side regarding Chavez Ravine, including its somewhat large dimensions, capacious foul territory, and walls with no unusual caroms a la Boston’s Fenway Park. 

This past December, Walter O’Malley was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, and it is indisputable that he opened the game up to expansionism and fielded consistently winning teams created through smart scouting and training rather than expensive contracts. 

But if you get around to watching the ceremonies where the late Dodger owner is inducted, think of what he did not only to Brooklyn, but to the squatters of Chavez Ravine to build his “Taj Mahal of Los Angeles.”