A Moment of Silence: Remembering Herb Score

As we came out of the ferryboat landing and walked to the Port Authority Building, the sky was overcast and a light rain was falling. It was noon, and we had two hours to get to Yankee Stadium. Maybe the doubleheader would be rained out, we thought. The date was June 26, 1955. I was fifteen and together with my mother and father and two friends had come to New York for the Indians-Yankees Sunday doubleheader. We had gone to early Mass at the Scranton cathedral and then dashed to the station to catch the Lackawanna Railroad’s special baseball train to New York. The train was a daily single mail car train on a government contract, but on baseball excursion weekends the railroad added additional passenger cars, a dining car, and a bar car as well as a boxcar full of beer. For $7.50 each, we got to ride to New York and see the ballgames. There were more than 1,500 people from Scranton on the train that day. In addition to the baseball fans, there were families just visiting New York, people going to plays and museums but not the city’s famed shops, since the stores were all closed on Sunday back then. When the train pulled into the Hoboken railyard, we all walked directly to the connecting ferry pier for the five-minute ride across the Hudson River. We all walked, that is, except for a few of the supposed ball fans who had spent too much time in the bar car on the trip in and would spend their afternoon and early evening sleeping in Hoboken.

At the Port Authority building, we caught the subway train up to Yankee Stadium and proceeded through the bustling crowd to find our seats. By then the rain had stopped, and the grounds crew was removing the tarpaulin from the infield. There was going to be a game after all.

Scranton had had a minor-league team as recently as 1953, and it was a Red Sox affiliate through the 1951 season, but there were few Boston fans in town. The Yankees broadcast every game on a local radio station, and the train excursions made it convenient to see them play once or twice a year, so I became a Yankees fan. The only other alternative was to watch the hated Brooklyn Dodgers (they of one of the greatest lineups of all time: Reese, Robinson, Snider, Campanella, Hodges, and Furillo) on black-and-white television when a local station showed all their home games. I had no interest in the Dodgers or the National League. I’d seen my first major-league game four years earlier, when a neighbor had taken me to Philadelphia to see the National League champion Phillies play the Cardinals. That was the only time I ever saw Stan Musial play, and I can still remember that he went hitless in twelve at-bats.

On this Sunday, the American League champion Indians were six games behind the league-leading Yankees, with the pesky Chicago White Sox between them in second place with the season nearly half over. Cleveland had come into New York four games behind, but had lost Friday and Saturday’s games to the Yankees. All-Stars and future Hall of Famers populated both lineups. The Indians had set a league record the previous year for victories in a season. They had four experienced twenty-game winners in their starting rotation with Bob Feller, Bob Lemon, Early Wynn, and Mike Garcia. The team lineup lacked speed but included such proven hitters as Gene Woodling, Bobby Avila, Al Rosen, Ralph Kiner, Al Rosen, Larry Doby, and Vic Wertz. The Yankees had won five pennants and five consecutive World Series from 1949 to 1953 under the legendary Casey Stengel, and they were embarrassed by Cleveland’s record-setting pennant win in 1954. Their roster included an impressive collection of proven performers such as pitchers Allie Reynolds, Eddie Lopat, Johnny Sain, and Whitey Ford as well as Bob Turley and Don Larsen, who would go on to make valuable contributions to their team. Beyond pitching, they were an experienced and impressive balance of good fielding and good hitting. Players of note included Gil McDougald, Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Bill Skowron, Phil Rizzuto, Enos Slaughter, and Hank Bauer (Enos Slaughter having been traded to the Kansas City Athletics in May).

The Sunday morning rain had vanished, and the sun began to come out as the doubleheader began. Cleveland’s starting pitcher was Early Wynn, with a 9-2 record. Wynn had already beaten New York twice in the season. The Yankee starter was Tommy Byrne, a former fireballer who had been resurrected from the minors, where he had lost his fastball but found much needed control and a slider. Byrne’s record was 5-1. After three scoreless innings the first game became a Yankee nightmare. Early Wynn gave up three singles in the first three innings and no hits after that in pitching a complete game 5-0. He struck out eight. Byrne gave up a run in the fourth and then surrendered a 415-foot home run to Ralph Kiner, the former National League home-run champion, who played left field for the Indians. Kiner’s blast (his 361st) tied him with retired Yankee hero Joe DiMaggio for sixth place on the then all-time home-run hitting list. Byrne walked three men in the eighth and gave up a single as Cleveland scored twice and sent him to the showers. As Casey Stengel, the Yankees’ gnarled and bowlegged manager waited for the relief pitcher to walk in from the bullpen, he casually played catch with himself on the pitcher’s mound, throwing the ball into the air and then catching it one-handed in the sunlight while the crowd looked on. The Indians scored another run in the ninth off the Yankees’ relief pitcher, Jim Konstanty, who had been the National League MVP in 1950 while pitching relief for the Phillies.

The first game took two hours and fifty minutes to play. It was nearing five o’clock as the intermission began. It was then announced that the attendance for the doubleheader was 66,511-the largest Yankee Stadium attendance in five years.

Whitey Ford was the Yankees’ starting pitcher for the second game. Ford had a record of 8-3. He started off very tentatively in the first inning when a double sandwiched between two walks loaded the bases with only one out. But Ford escaped without a run being scored by getting the next two dangerous hitters, Kiner and Doby, on a popup and a weak flyout. The Cleveland starter was Bob Lemon, with a league-leading win record of 10-5. With one out in the home half of the first, Lemon gave up a run on three consecutive singles. New York led 1-0 at the end of the first.

In the second, a Cleveland player pinch-hit for Lemon, who left the game. A pulled thigh muscle caused him to leave the mound. Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, it would be his last starting appearance in Yankee Stadium. As the crowd noisily awaited the start of the Yankee half of the inning, a young, lanky pitcher emerged from the Indian bullpen in left field. The crowd began to buzz a bit louder. New York’s public-address announcer Bob Sheppard intoned, “Now pitching for Cleveland, Herb Score. Number twenty-seven, Herb Score.” Score continued walking to the mound and gave his warm-up jacket to the batboy as he neared the mound.

Now the crowd was loud. New York fans, being among the most knowledgeable followers of the game, were well aware that twenty-two-year-old Herb Score was said to be the Indians’ immediate successor to the fireballing great Bob Feller. This was Score’s first outing against the Yankees, and his first appearance before a New York audience. Just a month earlier, Feller had started the first game of a doubleheader against the Boston Red Sox and beat them 2-0 with his twelfth career one-hitter. The Indians also won the second game when Score, their rookie left-hander, beat the Sox 2-1 while striking out sixteen. Now as Score got ready to throw his first warm-up pitch from the mound, the crowd of 66,000 was abuzz in anticipation. “How fast can this guy throw”? Around came the left arm as catcher Jim Hegan crouched behind the plate. The Yankees on their dugout steps were just as interested as the crowd in gauging with what velocity Score would bring the ball to the plate. Except for the cries of the beer and concessions sellers and the muted roar of people going to and from the seats to the lavatories and the food stands, near-silence took over the stadium.

Thwack. As Score’s first pitch hit Hegan’s mitt, the crowd erupted. “Fast, really fast,” they said to one another. Faster than Wynn, Byrne, Lemon, or Ford. Fast, just as advertised. Thwack. Score’s second and subsequent pitches verified the initial assessment, and the crowd quickly resumed its normal level of noise and movement as he completed his warm-up tosses.

Score then interrupted his rhythm and waved to Hegan. The crowd interpreted the wave as the end of the warm-up, expecting that Hegan would throw the next pitch down to second base, signaling the start of the Yankee’s second inning batting. Score wound up and released what was seemingly his last warm-up.

Thwack.

All sound in the jammed stadium ceased. The concessionaires’ cries and the movement in the aisles ceased. Score was done getting loose; now he was really throwing. For one, possibly two seconds, the masses sat silently, open-mouthed. The speed of the pitch was reflected in the louder sound as it hit Hegan’ s glove, as well as in the visual difficulty mere mortals had in following it to the plate after it left Score’s hand. The level of background noise in the stadium rose to a new high as viewers exclaimed, “Wow, this guy is really fast!”

Score threw four or five more superspeed pitches before giving another crooked wave of his arm. Hegan returned that final pitch to second base. The ballgame was ready to resume while the crowd buzzed and moved again at its usual level.

Score settled in, nullifying the Yankee’s veteran offense for the next five innings. He and Ford matched zeroes through the end of the sixth inning. Through five innings he struck out nine with a dazzling combination of fastballs and curves. The rookie lefthander walked two, and the only hit he gave up was a single by Ford, the opposing pitcher. Throughout the entire performance the crowd was mesmerized by his fastball, as were Bauer, Berra, Skowron, Howard, and McDougald, among many other Yankees.

In the seventh, with the score still 1-0 in favor of the Yankees, Ford walked Indians center fielder Larry Doby with one out. Shortstop George Strickland singled Doby to third, and another walk loaded the bases. The Indians then pinch-hit for Score. Hank Majeski lofted a medium fly to right field for the second out, and Hank Bauer converted that into a double play by throwing Doby out at the plate.

Elston Howard singled to open the Yankee half of the seventh, and one out later Mickey Mantle came off the bench to pinch-hit. Mantle was hitting .290 and leading the league in home runs and runs scored, but he was also suffering from a sore throat, had gone 0 for 12 in his most recent at-bats. He had also left several runners in scoring position while going 0 for 3 in the first game. Batting right-handed against left-hander Don Mossi, who had replaced Score on the mound, Mantle hit a vicious line shot directly at the feet of Indian third baseman Al Smith. Smith was either going to make a great short-hop stop of the ball or be castrated. But the ball bounced twenty feet straight up in the air over Smith’s head and then curled down the left-field line while Howard scored and Mantle legged it into second base.

There was no further scoring in the game. To the delight of the huge hometown crowd, the Yankees captured the second game 2-0, with Ford pitching a complete-game four-hitter. With the victory, the New Yorkers stayed six games ahead of the Indians in the standings and three games ahead of the second-place White Sox, who were losing a doubleheader to Boston on the same day.

The games were over just before 7:30 in the evening. We had two hours or so to get away from the stadium and ride the subway and ferry back to Hoboken for the train ride back to Scranton.

In the intervening years I have seen hundreds of major sporting events. Yet I remember that particular doubleheader as if it were yesterday. After the early rain, it was a perfect day to watch a ballgame in Gotham. The huge crowd, the well-played two-hour-plus games, and the numerous Hall of Fame ballplayers who populated the lineups of the two clubs made it a special day.

Herb Score is not in the Hall of Fame. Neither is he particularly well remembered outside Cleveland, where he later spent more than thirty years as an Indians play-by-play radio and TV announcer. On May 7, 1957, in the first inning of a home night game, Score was hit in the face by a line drive that Yankees’ second baseman Gil McDougald hit off one of his fastballs. The comeback liner fractured Score’s nose and badly shattered his right eye socket. Following surgery and extended recuperation, he attempted, without success, to regain his former mound effectiveness. He never regained the speed and control that had earned him the Rookie of the Year award in 1955. That year he won 16 games and struck out a league leading 245 batters (still the American League record for rookies) in 227 1/3 innings, with an ERA of 2.85. The next year he won 20 games and struck out a league-leading 263 batters while compiling an ERA of 2.53. He won only 17 more games in five years following his injury. He joins such hard-luck pitchers as J. R. Richard of Houston and Mark Fidrych of the Tigers, whose baseball talents were great but who blazed for too brief a period. Both Ted Williams and Yogi Berra have testified to how great Score’s potential was before the accident. Williams remarked that Score “was on his way to being a great pitcher.”

Who was the greatest baseball player I ever saw? I am often asked that question. I always ask the questioner to clarify the query. Does he or she mean the greatest by record regardless of how he did on the day that I saw him-for example, Stan Musial, who I saw once go hitless all day long, or Ted Williams, who I saw only once on a day when he went 0 for 3 in an exhibition game. Or does the questioner mean What player gave the greatest major league performance on the day I happened to see him? I never saw a more impressive performance by an athlete than that by Herb Score in his New York debut. Striking out nine estimable Yankee batters in just five innings with a mercurial fastball was an awe-inspiring feat. There is no better tribute to the power and uniqueness of that accomplishment than the moment of silence that followed Score’s first full strength pitch from the Yankee Stadium mound. Sixty-six thousand people, as one, sat in absolute silence. I have never seen a reaction like that again.