Our Game by Charles C. Alexander

Author:Charles C. Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

10. Shrinking Crowds and Shifting Franchises

On Sunday, October 1, 1950, in the tenth inning of the season’s final game, George Sisler’s oldest son Dick sliced a home run into the lower left-field stands at Ebbets Field to beat Don Newcombe and give the Philadelphia Phillies their first National League pennant in thirty-five years. Long a league doormat, the Phillies had undergone a renaissance in the postwar years under the ownership of Robert Carpenter, young heir to the Du Pont fortune. Clad in bright-red pinstripes and managed by avuncular Eddie Sawyer, Philadelphia’s “Whiz Kids” were the youngest team ever to win a major-league title.

The Phillies’ stars were swift center fielder Richie Ashburn (twenty-three), one of the few players still using a big, thick-handled bat and choke-hitting to all fields; Robin Roberts (twenty-four), a strong right-hander out of Michigan State University starting a run of six straight twenty-win seasons; and slugging left fielder Del Ennis (twenty-five), NL runs-batted-in leader. Left-hander Curt Simmons (twenty-one) won seventeen games before being inducted into the army a few weeks before the season was over—the first major-leaguer drafted as a result of the outbreak of war in Korea the previous June—and Jim Konstanty, the oldest Phillie at thirty-three, set a “modern” (twentieth-century) record by pitching in seventy-four games, all in relief. Besides saving twenty-two of those games, Konstanty was the winner in sixteen others. That performance brought Konstanty the NL’s Most Valuable Player Award, the first given to a relief pitcher.

Six days later, at Yankee Stadium, the Phillies’ fantasy ended for good when the Yankees’ own Whiz Kid, a twenty-one-year-old lefty named Ed “Whitey” Ford, held the National Leaguers to two runs while Yogi Berra homered and four other Yankees scored. That completed a four-game sweep and gave Casey Stengel a second straight world’s title. Berra had sparkled all season long, driving in 124 runs on twenty-eight homers and a .328 batting average. Joe DiMaggio (.301, thirty homers, 122 rbi’s) stayed comparatively healthy that season, and little Phil Rizzuto, batting a career-high .324, gained Most Valuable Player honors. Vic Raschi, Allie Reynolds, Eddie Lopat, and Tommy Byrne pitched seventy of the Yankees’ ninety-eight wins (three more than Detroit’s ninety-five). Ford, a native New Yorker brought up in midseason from Kansas City, won nine of ten decisions, while aging Johnny Mize, purchased the previous year from the Giants, hit twenty-five homers and drove in seventy-two runs in only ninety games.

The Dodgers, not much older on average than the Phillies, had fielded a stronger team in almost every respect, and their failure cost Burt Shotton his job. His successor was Charlie Dressen, a hard-driving pepper pot and Shotton’s temperamental opposite. Shotton’s friend Branch Rickey, having lost a protracted power struggle to Walter O’Malley, also left Brooklyn. Since becoming the Dodgers’ attorney in 1941, O’Malley had carefully built his holdings and influence in the organization at Rickey’s expense. Following the disappointing 1950 season, he could finally pressure Rickey into giving up his twenty-five-percent ownership in the Dodgers, for $1,025,000. O’Malley

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