October 6, 1941: Dodgers submit quietly to Tiny Bonham and the Yankees

At the start of Game Three, Brooklyn fans draped a large banner from the railing of the center-field bleachers that read, “We waited 21 years, don’t fail us now.” The sheet proclaimed its message proudly throughout Games Three and Four. But by late in Game Five, the banner was sagging and unreadable, an apt metaphor for the fate of the Dodgers, who wilted in submission to the relentless Yankees machine.

Brooklyn and its fans seemed understandably deflated after a crushing defeat in Game Four, when a potential game-winning third strike got away from catcher Mickey Owen and opened the door to a four-run ninth-inning Yankees rally. The fans didn’t hold it against Owen. They gave a him a rousing ovation when he was introduced in Game Five. However, although attendance was a tick higher than it had been for the previous two games, the park was unusually subdued. New York’s stunning comeback had brought mortality into clear focus.

The Dodgers went with their best to try to keep the Series alive. Veteran Whitlow Wyatt, the winning pitcher in Game Two, tied for the National League lead with 22 victories that summer. Meanwhile, Yankees manager Joe McCarthy turned to his fifth different starter of the Series, the ironically nicknamed Tiny Bonham, a hulking product of the Oakland, California, shipping docks who approached his assignment with the eagerness of a puppy: “When McCarthy told me I was going to pitch the fifth game I was so thrilled that tears came to my eyes. It was what I had always wanted to do.”1

New York threatened in the first, putting men at first and second for Joe DiMaggio, but on a 3-and-2 pitch, Wyatt struck out the American League MVP and Owen cut down Red Rolfe at third on the front end of an attempted double steal. Brooklyn mounted a challenge of its own in the bottom half, but after Pete Reiser’s two-out triple, NL home-run champ Dolph Camilli, suffering through a miserable Series, popped harmlessly to short.

Charlie Keller began the Yankees’ second with a walk, and Bill Dickey followed with a single up the middle. Reiser had a good chance to catch Keller advancing to third, but his perfect one-hop throw from center skipped through the legs of third baseman Lew Riggs. Wyatt was backing up, which temporarily saved the day, but next came the irrepressible Joe Gordon, who was 6-for-11 in the Series so far with four RBIs. On his second pitch, Wyatt uncorked a wild one that sailed way over Owen’s head and allowed Keller to score the first run. Then Gordon singled to right, driving in Dickey and giving New York a 2-0 lead.

The Dodgers showed a fluttering pulse in the bottom of the third. Wyatt, a dangerous hitter, led off with a double high off the left-field wall, advanced to third two batters later when Riggs singled off Bonham’s foot, and then came home on Reiser’s fly out. That perked up the crowd until the fifth, when Tommy Henrich took Wyatt deep, hammering his first pitch over the wall in right, just fair but well gone. “When last seen from the high press box,” Shirley Povich wrote in the Washington Post, “the ball was being pursued by a posse of boys down a street two blocks from the park.”2

Henrich’s blow put the Yankees up 3-1, and seemed to take the energy out of everyone on the Brooklyn side except for Wyatt. He brushed back the next hitter, DiMaggio, with a couple of fastballs before retiring him on a long fly to center. On his way back to the dugout, DiMaggio had a few words for the Dodgers right-hander. “I didn’t like how a couple of pitches came at my head,” DiMaggio admitted. “When I passed him, I said, ‘The Series is over, kid, so take it easy.’”3 When Wyatt, the former Sunday school teacher, offered a profane rejoinder, DiMaggio lost his characteristic cool and spun back toward the mound to have it out.

Immediately the benches cleared to keep the two men away from each other. No punches were thrown and apparently no feelings were too badly bruised. When DiMaggio returned to his position in center field in the bottom of the fifth, the bleacherites booed lustily and one fan whipped an apple at him, but for Wyatt, it was all in the game. “It’s just one of those things that happens in the heat of battle,” he shrugged. “Joe is a great player and I like him.”4

The rest of the way was as easy as breathing for Bonham. “You know, it may sound [strange], but I wasn’t as nervous out there as I have been for some league games,” he said.5 Bonham was known for his forkball, but he claimed he threw it only twice, instead relying almost entirely on fastballs. He wasn’t overly deceptive, but he was extremely effective. He allowed just two baserunners from the fourth inning onward, retiring the side on four pitches in the sixth and three pitches in the seventh. Were it not a World Series game, it would have been a monstrously dull way to spend an afternoon. The Sporting News described the crowd as “still as a morgue.”6 The only real excitement in the late innings came when a fan in the upper deck in left field carelessly discarded a cigarette and caught a piece of red, white, and blue bunting on fire.

With two outs in the ninth, pinch-hitter Jimmy Wasdell lifted a routine fly ball to DiMaggio, an anticlimactic end to a tightly fought World Series. New York took the game, 3-1, and the Series four games to one. The Yankees weren’t new to this. It was their fifth title in six years, but they celebrated as if they had never won before. Indeed, it had been a challenging season – they dropped 16 of their first 31 games and then saw their beloved erstwhile first baseman, Lou Gehrig, die in June. They had earned the right to cut loose.

Coach Art Fletcher danced on a trunk in the clubhouse as the team sang its traditional victory song, “The Sidewalks of New York.” McCarthy was late coming in from the field, but when he arrived, his guys belted out another rendition just for him. DiMaggio pushed his way through the madness to hand the baseball to Bonham, who kissed it for the benefit of photographers before giving McCarthy a back ride around the room, with the rest of the team pummeling them every step of the way. As the New York Times described it, “Punches were flying, bodies were swaying, trunks were being banged around, benches were pushed out of place, towels flew through the air. And the noise was terrific.”7

Brooklyn manager Leo Durocher was ostensibly gracious, ducking into the Yankees’ celebration in his underwear to shake hands with McCarthy and give Bonham a congratulatory slap on the cheek. Back in his own clubhouse, though, he was somewhat less tactful. “[W]e made their pitching look good because we weren’t hitting,” he groused. “No pitcher like that Tiny Bonham today, who was throwing fastballs all afternoon because he does not own a curve, should make us look so bad.”8 He also sought out home-plate umpire Bill McGowan after the game to remind him of Brooklyn’s displeasure with the veteran arbiter’s strike zone.

His players struck a similar tone. Camilli was bellyaching about Brooklyn’s bad luck. “If we’d just got half the breaks, not all of ‘em, the Series right now would be no worse than three games to two in our favor.”9 Teammate Dixie Walker called the champs “the luckiest club that ever stepped onto a ball field.”10

McCarthy heard some talk like this from the writers gathered in his clubhouse and was having none of it. “What the hell?” he exploded. “The Dodgers were lucky to win a game. Those Dodgers are a great team. You can’t take that away from them, but don’t expect me to sit here for hours praising them. I have a great bunch of ballplayers of my own.”11

The degree of the Yankees’ October dominance is nearly incomprehensible. Since 1927, they had appeared in 36 World Series games. They won 32. McCarthy surpassed the Athletics’ Connie Mack and became the first manager to win six World Series titles. Brooklyn was still waiting for its first. Its fans, though, were undeterred.

A man named Mike Rinaldi spoke the mantra that would be repeated incessantly in the borough over the next decade and a half, when he told a reporter, “It’s in the bag for next year.”12

SOURCES

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author used the Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org websites for pertinent information, including play-by-play and box scores.

The author also reviewed the following sources for play-by-play and other information:

Drebinger, John. “Yankees Win Series as Bonham Beats Dodgers, 3-1,” New York Times, October 7, 1941: 1, 28.

Vaughan, Irving. “Yankees Win Eighth World Series Title Since 1927,” Chicago Tribune, October 7, 1941: 21.

“Yanks Get to Wyatt in Second to End Series at Ebbets Field,” New York Times, October 7, 1941: 29, 31.

NOTES

1 Robert B. Cooke, “Staid Yankees Stage Wild Dressing Room Scene as Though Series Crown Were Novelty,” New York Herald Tribune, October 7, 1941: 29.

2 Shirley Povich, “Whit Wyatt Bows Before 34,072 Fans,” Washington Post, October 7, 1941: 18, 21.

3 Henry McLemore, “Gordon: Ace of the Series,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 7, 1941: 1-2B. Some newspaper accounts claimed DiMaggio hollered at Wyatt, “It isn’t over yet;” however, given the Yankees’ lead in the game and commanding advantage in the series, it seems more logical that DiMaggio would have taunted Wyatt by saying the Series was over, which is the version of the story that he told McLemore.

4 Billy Goodrich, “Farley, Ever the Politician, Sits Behind Dodgers, Roots for Yanks,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 7, 1941: 11.

5 Cooke.

6 “Bonham’s Four-Hit Pitching Stifles Dodgers in Clincher,” The Sporting News, October 9, 1941: 8.

7 James P. Dawson, “Punches, Towels Fly in Profusion,” New York Times, October 7, 1941: 28.

8 Harold Parrott, “Gordon Good But He’s No Frisch – Leo,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 7, 1941: 11.

9 Roscoe McGowen, “Bombers Lauded by Dodger Scout,” New York Times, October 7, 1941: 28.

10 “Gossip of the Fifth Game,” The Sporting News, October 9, 1941: 8.

11 Lou E. Cohen, “Dodgers Lucky to Win One Game, Says McCarthy,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 7, 1941: 11.

12 “‘Wait Till Next Year,’ Dodger Fans Chant,” Brooklyn Eagle, October 7, 1941: 1, 3.