Baseball Talk

When There Were Bums in Brooklyn

When big-headed, pompous-ass Mayor Rudi Guiliani, a crude man at best, mealy-mouthed, and, of course, crooked as a snake at night, decided to privatize most of the New York City government and services, he sold off the city television channel for what I believe was 95 million dollars to an old buddy of his, one of Jesus Christ’s best friends, too, good ole boy, Larry Paxton—Channel 31 totally owned by the people of New York City, who for the numbers they have don’t have much power at all—certainly not in the mayor’s office, so the old goombah mayor just up and sold the television station and it became the Pax Network, Pax not for the peace you and I are looking for but the “peace” that stands for Jesus X. Christ; yep, that same Jewish reformer of 2000 long dumbass years ago, who when he was born all the soothsayers said he was the Prince of Peace (you didn’t know Prince was working even back in those days)—born on Xmas day, the big Barbarian feast and party day, Old Tannenbaum, the Yule log—you don’t hear much about the old Yule log anymore—the Winter Solstice or some such cold-weather people holy day where you need a big fire in the fireplace, a goose roasting on the kitchen hearth, flagons of good hearty wines, barrels of porter and ale, good cigars and clay pipes for the dudes and plenty of sherry and poetry and piano music for the ladies—God-damn that sounds boring as pagan hell.

So before Larry Paxton cranked up his Pax Network, before he gave it over to blatant commercialism and Jesus H. Christ—you know he had to lease a bunch of rerun crap, like Bonanza and Diagnosis Murder—so for a few months, the channel was taken over by an all vintage sports network that specialized in showing sports-related shows all day—like Home Run Derby where big homerun hitters of the 60s like the Mick, Willie Mays, Ted Kluzewski, Roger Maris, Ernie Banks, Harmon Killebrew got together in Los Angeles’s Wrigley Field, home of the old Pacific Coast League’s Los Angeles Angels, and went through a nine-inning set-up with a bush league pitcher throwing bush league fast balls up against these guys whose only way of scoring and winning the derby was by hitting as many homeruns as they could in 9 innings of coming to bat—ground balls, pop flies, etc., were considered outs. But the greatest moment in this sports network’s short life was when they showed all 7 games of the 1952 Subway Worlds Series between the Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers.

I, wisely, taped all seven games—but I lost 6 of them to destruction—though joyously the other day, I found Game 6 still preserved on a VHS tape that also contained a long interview with Ted Williams.

I stopped what I was doing right then and there and watched the game from beginning to end. It was a baseball fan’s dream afternoon. There I was in Ebbetts Field on a beautiful day for baseball, in black and white, yes, but that didn’t bother me; I grew up with black and white television so I learned to imagine colors and was very disappointed when color teevee took over; the colors looked so gaudy, so unreal to me a black and white kid who could fill in his own colors that were truer to the spectrum than the teevee color blends. I’ve always thought teevee color was not real; just like early colored movies the color was way too rich, too something, like, too unreal to be true.

Anyway, there I was in Ebbetts Field back in 1952…Billy Loes was starting for the Dodgers against Yankee veteran Vic Rashi. Billy Loes had a hell of a record as a pitcher; that, I hadn’t realized. It was so wonderful; the guys were all wearing those old blousy uniforms, blousy pants, blousy blouse, with only numbers, no names, on their backs—Dodgers in script across the front of the Brooklyn uniforms and the Yankees NY monogram on the fronts of their pinstriped uniforms.

Defensively the Dodgers were Roy Campanella behind the plate; Gil Hodges on first; Jackie Robinson on second; Billy Cox at third; PeeWee Reece at shortstop; damn, there they were—and then in the outfield, George “Shotgun”Shuba in left, Duke Snider in right, and Carl Furillo in center. Wow. And the Yankees were Yogi Berra behind the plate; Big Johnny Mize on first; Jerry Coleman at second; Gil McDougal at third, with Scooter Rizzuto at shortstop; and in the outfield, Gene Woodling in left, the Mick in center, and Irv Noren in right.

Brooklyn needed this game to win the World Series, as they were up 3 games to 2 in what had been a wild series—with Brooklyn having a chance to win their first World Series, if they could only win this game.

The announcing of the game was shared between the Yankees’s announcer, Mel Allen, and Brooklyn’s announcer, Red Barber, “the Old Redhead,” who started right off saying things like “this game could become a double-jointed doozie”—wonderful clever baseball announcing.

The Ebbetts Field public address announcer was Tex Rickard, who sat down just outside the first-base end of the Dodgers’s dugout at a mic and amplifier.

The umpire behind the plate was Art Passarella.

The game started. Both pitchers looked unsteady, having control problems in the first several innings, both getting out of bases-loaded jams until the bottom of the fourth with the score 0-0 when Duke Snider absolutely clobbered the ball over the dead centerfield wall, about 410 in Ebbetts Field—Yankee Stadium’s centerfield fence was 427 feet from homeplate in those days of deep centerfield fences but short right field porches or left field foul lines.

Here’s what I noticed about this game. First of all the camera positions were marvelously witty and overseeing. Three cameras were used, one at the end of the Dodgers’s dugout just in front of Tex Rickard, then one over at the end of the visitor’s dugout on the third base side; but the main camera, that was the coolest camera of all, was mounted on top of the backstop to look down on the playing field from above, showing the batter at bat, the pitching mound, the whole infield, and part of the outfield. It worked dammit; it not only worked, it worked beautifully, perfectly as far as I was concerned. That camera was great; a long fly ball—no problem, the camera followed the ball from when it hit the bat until it met its fate in the outfield. The cameras showed you the whole playing field, even the stands and fans and stuff unlike today’s camerawork that mainly stays focused up the nostrils of the players until they actually pitch or hit or field when the cameras alas pull back and show as much of the play as they can. In 1952 they didn’t have any instant replays—and that was great; you had to see the play and remember it as it happened to treasure it in your mind. I swear, these were the best camera angles I’ve seen used in a baseball game in a long, long time.

And what I noticed in the stands! All the men were wearing jackets and ties. Most of them were also wearing dress hats. A lot of men were smoking pipes, too. And the ballplayers, especially Big Johnny Mize, had chaws of tobacky in their cheek pouches throughout the game. There were women at that game, but they were baseball babes, wild women, wearing funny hats and paraphernalia—though mostly the crowd was male.

There were surprisingly to me a lot of blacks at that series. It was Brooklyn; and Brooklyn had 2 black players and had just signed on Sandy Amoros, a Cuban black; however, the Yankees didn’t have any black players yet.

Another thing that was fun about this game: the arguing with the umpires. It’d had been a long time since I’d seen such frantic in-your-face arguing—vicious arguing—to the point where the umpires turned their backs on the arguers in warning before they threw them out of the game.

The dugouts in those days were just that: holes “dug out” of the ground with a wooden roof over them—tight—nothing in them but a wooden bench.

Casey Stengel, the Yankees’s manager, I noticed, managed from the top step of the dugout the whole game—Red Barber saying it must be really hot in the Yankees’s dugout for the Old Professor to be managing from that top step. The Dodgers manager, Charlie Dressen, the Little Skipper, managed from his seat on the bench, the end of the bench closest to home plate, the same seat on the bench that today’s managers manage from. [Connie Mack used to manage the Philadelphia Athletics from the top step of the dugout; he also always wore a suit (though he would take the jacket off during the game; I remember he wore suspenders to hold his pants up) and tie and a straw boater; he never wore a baseball uniform like the other managers.

Another thing very noticeable about the playing fields in those days were the bullpens. They were out in the open, just outside the foul lines, the Dodgers’s pen up the right field foul line in that corner—the Yankees’s in the left field corner.

It was quite a thrill for me when Tex Rickard announced that Preacher Roe was coming in to relieve Billy Loes when the Yankees got to him. In the fifth, after Duke Snider hit that homerun in the fourth. The Yanks scored three runs, one a lead-off homerun by Yogi Berra over the same place in centerfield Duke had hit his home run, putting the Yanks up 3-1, though the Dodgers came back to tie it until Mickey Mantle and the Yankees went on to win the game and send the series into the seventh game—which the Dodgers did finally win; their first World Series win after many trips to the World Series without a Series pennant. [“Winning the pennant” in those days really meant that; the winning team was given the League Pennant and then the World Series pennant when they won that, too.

Baseball—the greatest game ever invented by human beings.

Red Barber at one time during this game said, “Mel, I feel some high-sterics going on on the Brooklyn bench about now.”

A World Series boxseat ticket to the 1952 Series cost $6.00.

thegrowlingwolf

for The Daily Growler