May 22, 1949: Don Newcombe pitches and hits Dodgers to win over Reds in first NL start

“The Dodgers have found the man whose strong right arm may lead ’em out of their pitching wilderness.” – Harold Burr, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 23, 19491

Don Newcombe had an outstanding 1948 season for the Triple-A Montreal Royals, with a record of 17-6, a 3.14 ERA, 16 complete games, and three shutouts in 27 starts. He no-hit the Toronto Maple Leafs, 8-0, in mid-August, then returned to the mound five days later and one-hit the Rochester Red Wings, 3-0. A scratch infield single was all that prevented him from back-to-back seven-inning no hitters.2 Newcombe’s three victories in postseason play led the Royals to the International League’s Governor’s Cup, as well as the Junior World Series title over the St. Paul Saints, four games to one.

Was the 22-year-old Newcombe ready for the National League? He thought so. There was every expectation that he would head north with the Dodgers in 1949 after spring training, despite his poor performance in the Cuban Winter League, attributed to a case of infected tonsils.3 But when the Dodgers left Vero Beach, Newcombe was sent back to Montreal. He went home to New Jersey instead, noting years later in an interview, “I thought I was good enough to pitch with the Dodgers, and that’s where I wanted to be.”4 In a week’s time, Newcombe realized the error of his actions, apologizing to Royals general manager Buzzie Bavasi and rejoining the Montreal club.5

The circumstances of Newcombe’s minor-league reassignment were perplexing to the only Black member of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, Sam Lacy, writing in The Sporting News.6 Lacy reported that Dodgers GM Branch Rickey had placed a $300,000 price tag on Newcombe’s pitching prowess. The New York Giants, Cincinnati Reds, and Chicago Cubs were interested, but their offers were all rebuffed, one supposedly for $250,000. According to Lacy, it seemed that Rickey never had any real intention of selling Newcombe.

Rickey claimed that Newcombe’s maturity didn’t match the pace of his physical development as a pitcher. “Bringing him up one year too soon might mean the loss of five years of great pitching for him.”7 And so, he remained in Montreal to start the 1949 season.

The Dodgers’ first long road trip of the season, in mid-May, brought them to St. Louis and then Cincinnati. Their 14-13 record put them in a disappointing fourth place in the NL. After all, Rickey was very clear at the outset of the season as to what he thought of his team: “This is the best big league squad I’ve ever been associated with, either at St. Louis or in Brooklyn.”8 Help was desperately needed to bolster their pitching staff. It was time to call up Newcombe from Montreal to join Roy Campanella, his catcher, friend, and former roommate in 1946 at Class B Nashua.

It was not surprising that both the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Cincinnati Enquirer highlighted the news of Newcombe’s call-up in their sports pages.9 Black baseball fans were expected to flock to the ballparks in those cities to see Newcombe pitch, just as they had in 1947 for Jackie Robinson’s historic debut with the Dodgers.

Newcombe’s first game as a Dodger came at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis on May 20 in a seventh-inning relief appearance. It was a disaster. With the Dodgers trailing the Cardinals 3-2, he struck out Chuck Diering on three pitches to open the inning. Bob Broeg wrote in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that “an enthusiastic portion of 22,602, the season’s largest crowd, cheered the relief pitcher wildly.”10 But three consecutive singles followed before the game-clinching blow on Newcombe’s first pitch to Enos Slaughter, a bases-clearing double down the left-field line. Newcombe’s night was done and the Dodgers lost, 6-2.

Less than 48 hours later, he was back on the mound, this time at Crosley Field as the Dodgers’ starting pitcher in front of Cincinnati’s largest crowd (28,141) since Opening Day. His mound opponent was the Reds’ Eddie Erautt (2-2, 4.26 ERA). The Cincinnati Enquirer later observed that the cheering in the stands was “longer and louder for the Dodgers than it was for the Reds.”11

Erautt well appreciated the significance of Newcombe’s pitching appearance in Cincinnati. The 24-year-old right-hander’s first major-league win had come in a 10-hit complete game against the Philadelphia Phillies on May 15, 1947. Two days earlier, he was on the bench when Jackie Robinson played his first game in Cincinnati. Erautt admired Robinson, later noting, “We both came up in ’47. He’d get thrown at three times a game and go down, but he’d never say anything. He’d just get back up and get his hits.”12

In this first game of a Sunday doubleheader, it didn’t take long for the Dodgers to grab the lead. With two outs in the top of the first, Duke Snider lined a double into the right-field corner. He scored when Jackie Robinson – who had driven in a career-high six runs in Brooklyn’s 15-6 win over the Cardinals a day earlier – hit a twisting fly-ball double just inside the right-field foul line.13

Newcombe was in a jam right off the bat.14 Bobby Adams opened the first inning with an infield single to deep short and Virgil Stallcup followed with a looping single to right, advancing Adams to second. Newcombe retired Lloyd Merriman, Johnny Wyrostek, and Ted Kluszewski to end the threat, not allowing another baserunner until Hank Sauer’s one-out single to left in the fifth inning.

When Carl Furillo opened the second being hit by a pitch and Campanella followed with a single to left, Dodgers manager Burt Shotton leveraged Newcombe’s batting prowess – he had accrued a .281 batting average in three full seasons (1946-1948) in the minor leagues. Eddie Miksis sacrificed the runners to second and third. When Newcombe singled to right for his first hit as a Dodger, Furillo and Campanella scored for a 3-0 Dodgers lead.

To no avail, Erautt settled down after the second inning and allowed only three hits in pitching through the eighth inning. The Dodgers’ other significant scoring opportunity came in the sixth inning but was thwarted by Merriman, the rookie center fielder. With one out, Robinson and Gil Hodges drew successive walks. Merriman denied Furillo’s blast to the center-field corner with a one-handed, leaping catch.15 But the Reds had no answer to Newcombe’s pitching performance and they now owned a 19-game home losing streak to the Dodgers, dating to June 22, 1947.16

In a word, Newcombe was masterful. Not a single Reds baserunner reached second base after the first inning. In the 99-pitch outing, he threw only 30 balls and did not yield any walks. In fact, only one batter ever saw ball three. In the bottom of the second, Dixie Howell hit a fly ball to left on a full count to end the inning.

Harold Burr speculated in The Sporting News that Dodgers fans might very well look back on this game as the turning point in the National League pennant race.17 As it happened, the pennant was decided on the last day of the regular season with the Dodgers finishing one game ahead of the Cardinals.18

Newcombe (17-8, 3.17 ERA) was the workhorse of the Dodgers’ pitching staff. Despite missing the season’s first month, he led the team in most statistical categories – 19 complete games in 31 starts over 244 1/3 innings. His five shutouts and 5.488 strikeouts per nine innings were tops in the National League. In the last eight days of the season, with the pennant on the line, Newcombe appeared on the mound four times. He was named NL Rookie of the Year, garnering 21 of 24 first-place votes.

Now it was time for another World Series between the Dodgers and the New York Yankees, a rematch of 1947. The Yankees won the ’49 World Series in five games, but it is the opening game in 1949 that Newcombe always remembered and considered one of the best he ever pitched.19 He matched Allie Reynolds pitch for pitch until the bottom of the ninth, when Tommy Henrich hit a walk-off home run, the first in World Series history, for a 1-0 Yankees victory.20

After the 1949 season was over, Newcombe reflected back on his long-held aspirations and expressed them quite simply, “I want to be the best pitcher,” he said. “I want to be the new Walter Johnson.”21

Author’s Note

The nightcap of the doubleheader was indeed noteworthy. Ken Raffensberger pitched a 2-0 shutout, his bid for a no-hitter broken up by Gil Hodges’ line-drive single to left to open the eighth inning. The Reds’ victory finally broke that losing streak against the Dodgers.

Raffensberger’s performance also reminded fans of what happened when they had last beaten the Dodgers at home. Ewell Blackwell’s bid for a second successive no-hitter was broken up by Eddie Stanky’s single to center with one out in the ninth. Blackwell’s 4-0 win came just four days after he no-hit the Boston Braves, 6-0.22 The record of Reds pitcher Johnny Vander Meer’s successive no-hitters in 1938 remained unequaled.23                                                                                      

Acknowledgments

This essay was fact-checked by Laura Peebles and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources

The author accessed Baseball-Reference.com for box scores/play-by-play information (baseball-reference.com/boxes/CIN/CIN194905221.shtml) and other data, as well as Retrosheet.org (retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1949/B05221CIN1949.htm). The 1950 Bowman baseball card for Don Newcombe was obtained from SABR’s Rucker Archive (sabr.org/rucker-archive).

Notes

1 Harold C. Burr, “Newcombe Stiffens Flock Mound Corps,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 23, 1949: 15.

2 “1-Hitter for Newcombe,” The New York Times, August 21, 1948: 10.

3 “Don Newcombe With Dodgers,” The Sporting News, March 9, 1949: 31.

4 Robert Creamer, “Subject: Don Newcombe,” Sports Illustrated, August 22, 1955: 28.

5 Creamer.

6 Sam Lacy, “$300,000 Tag on Newcombe – Yet Hurler Remains in Minors,” The Sporting News, April 20, 1949: 19.

7 Lacy.

8 Harold C. Burr, “Rickey Terms the Dodgers ‘Best Team I Have Ever Been Associated With,’” The Sporting News, April 27, 1949: 9.

9 “Dodgers Bring Up D. Newcombe,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 14, 1949: 6A. “Bums Recall Newcombe,” Cincinnati Enquirer, May 15, 1949: 63.

10 Bob Broeg, “Hit-and-Run Helps Cardinals Run Losing Streak Into the Ground,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 21, 1949: 6A. The New York Times’s account of the game provided readers with the same fan reaction: “Newcombe brought delirious cheers from thousands of his admirers in the right field pavilion seats when he blazed three straight strikes past Chuck Diering to start the inning.” (Roscoe McGowen, “Slaughter’s 3-Run Double Helps Munger Subdue Brooklyn, 6 to 2,” The New York Times, May 21, 1949: 17)

11 Lou Smith, “Reds to Rest Today; Phillies Here Tuesday,” Cincinnati Enquirer, May 23, 1949: 18.

12 Bruce Enos, “Eddie Erautt,” SABR Baseball Biography Project. Accessed April 2025.

13 Roscoe McGowen, “Newcombe, in 1st Start, Holds Cincinnati to Five Blows – He Drives in Two Runs,” The New York Times, May 23, 1949: 30.

14 Paul Dickson, The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, 3rd Edition (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), 709. Right off the bat – “Immediately; without ado; understanding quickly; from the very beginning. The term is an extended metaphor from the speed with which a ball flies off the bat.”

15 Lou Smith, “Raffy Hurls One-Hit Game; Reds, Dodgers Break Even,” Cincinnati Enquirer, May 23, 1949: 18.

16 Lou Smith, “Reds to Rest Today; Phillies Here Tuesday.” A review of data from Baseball-Reference.com confirms that the Reds’ 19-game losing streak to the Dodgers included only games played in Cincinnati.

17 Harold C. Burr, “ Newcombe Tagged New Dodger Dandy,” The Sporting News, June 1, 1949: 11.

18 John Fredland, “September 29, 1949: Former Cardinal Murry Dickson knocks St. Louis out of first place,” SABR Baseball Games Project. Accessed April 2025.

19 Charles Dexter, “The New Newcombe,” Baseball Digest, September 1955: 8. (Reprinted September/October 2023).

20 Steven C. Weiner, “Allie Reynolds two-hitter, Tommy Henrich home run give Yankees a 1-0 win in World Series opener,” SABR Baseball Games Project. Accessed April 2025.

21 Dexter.

22 Gregory H. Wolf, “June 18, 1947: ‘The Whip’ Ewell Blackwell throws a no-hitter for Reds” in Gregory H. Wolf, ed., Cincinnati’s Crosley Field: A Gem in the Queen City (Phoenix: SABR, 2018), 157-159.

23 Gregory H. Wolf, “June 11, 1938: Reds’ Johnny Vander Meer tosses first no-hitter,” SABR Baseball Games Project; Gregory H. Wolf, “June 15, 1938: Johnny Vander Meer tosses second straight no-hitter in historic night game at Ebbets Field” in Gregory H. Wolf, ed., Great Historic and Memorable Games from Brooklyn’s Lost Ballpark (Phoenix: SABR, 2023), 117-120.