“You could not possibly train a baseball squad in Havana. The distractions are too great. … The after-dark program down there would kill a team before it ever had a chance to appear in National League competition. …” So opined baseball legend John McGraw when asked why he never took his New York Giants to Cuba, though he often vacationed there himself. “There are too many women, there is too much drinking, there is too much gambling, and the climate is much too hot.”1 Despite McGraw’s warnings, another brilliant baseball mind was to test that theory, and for a very specific reason.

Mention the Brooklyn Dodgers and the year 1947 to any baseball fan and they will immediately acknowledge it as a landmark season for both the franchise and major-league baseball. But besides the obvious reason for the familiarity of the year—the signing of Jackie Robinson and the official integration of the major leagues—the ’47 season was unique for team president Branch Rickey and his club in other areas as well. The Dodgers became the first team in baseball history to have their manager suspended before the season had even begun. Leo Durocher, a character not unfamiliar with controversy, had became fodder for the New York tabloids during the previous year by indulging in violent altercations with umpires, hitting a fan, and allowing actor George Raft to borrow his apartment and conduct a dice game in his living room. Leo added to the chaos when he wed divorced actress Laraine Day, an event that caused the Brooklyn chapter of the Catholic Youth Organization to withdraw its support of the famed Dodgers Knothole Gang.

Durocher then capped it off when he accused New York Yankees president and co-owner Larry MacPhail of entertaining two alleged gamblers at an exhibition game between the clubs. Pointing to MacPhail’s private box, Durocher chided: “If that was my box I’d be barred from baseball.”2 The two gamblers, Connie Immerman and Memphis Engelberg, were actually in the box behind the Yankees executive’s, but the incident was the proverbial straw and it forced Commissioner Albert ”Happy” Chandler to call for two hearings between the parties. On April 9, just before the season began, Chandler suspended Durocher for the season for “conduct detrimental to baseball.” Leo and his team were stunned.

The incident that touched off this baseball war was historically important for more than just the fact that it led to the suspension of the Dodgers manager: The private box in question was located at Gran Stadium in Havana, Cuba, the site chosen by Rickey for his team to train that spring.

The Dodgers were not totally unfamiliar with Cuba, having previously used Havana’s La Tropical Stadium as their spring training site for the 1941 and ’42 seasons, before Rickey arrived from St. Louis. Wartime travel restrictions, however, ended that experiment. And as early as 1943, Rickey had shown interest in having heralded Cuban Leaguer Silvio Garcia become the first player to test major league baseball’s color barrier. According to Cuban baseball authority, Edel Casas, Rickey traveled to Cuba and, thinking ahead to possible racial abuse, asked Garcia during the interview, “What would you do if a white American slapped your face?” When Garcia declared, “I kill him,” Rickey moved on.3 (However, a less popular version of the tale claims Rickey sent Walter O’Malley to Havana with a $25,000 letter of credit to sign the shortstop. When O’Malley got there Garcia was gone, probably having enlisted in the Cuban Army.)

When Jackie Robinson trained with the Montreal Royals in Daytona Beach in the spring of 1946, Rickey began to witness some of the racial confrontations he had feared. Trying to avoid as much of this as possible while preparing Robinson for his major-league debut, Rickey cited Cuba’s passion for baseball and its easy access from the mainland as two good reasons to hold training camp there in 1947. Another valid reason, no doubt, was the fact that blacks had been playing baseball in Cuba since the turn of the century. A city that had seen the likes of Oscar Charleston, Josh Gibson, and Satchel Paige appeared safe from any social upheaval at the sight of the Dodgers rookie.

If an under-the-radar arrival in Cuba is what Rickey wanted, that’s exactly what he got. The week the team landed, the new Gran Stadium (Gran Estadio de La Habana, to be exact) hosted the climactic three-game series between perpetual rivals Havana and Almendares in what was probably the greatest pennant race in the history of the Cuban League. Almendares needed to sweep the series to take the flag and they sent former Cardinal Max Lanier (in exile from the major leagues as a jumper to the Mexican League) to the mound. Lanier won the first game, 4-2. Almandares won again the next day, 2-1. An overflow crowd of almost 40,000 attended the third game, and watched in a frenzy as Lanier went out on one day’s rest and defeated Havana 9-2 to sweep the series and capture the title.

With the local baseball season at an end, it was the Dodgers’ turn to take over Gran Stadium. Built only the year before as part of Havana’s burgeoning modernization, the ballpark reportedly included a playing field and lighting system of major-league quality. Along with these fine facilities, the players were housed at the best resort in the city, the Hotel Nacional. These opulent quarters boasted beautiful swimming pools, fine restaurants, and the players were quartered with visiting diplomats and international businessmen. The Triple A Royals were housed at the Havana Military Academy, a prep school attended by the wealthy offspring of government employees. The black members of both squads, however, stayed at neither of these locations.

Robinson and the Royals’ other black players—Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, and Roy Partlow— were taken instead to the Hotel Boston in “old” Havana. Jackie was irate. “I thought we left Florida … so we could get away from Jim Crow,” he complained to the Dodgers’ traveling secretary, Harold Parrott. “So what the devil is this business of segregating the Negro players in a colored nation?”4 Parrott explained to Robinson that the whole thing was Rickey’s idea. Though the Hotel Nacional was fully integrated, the Dodgers’ head man didn’t want to take the chance of any incidents while his team was staying there. “I’ll go along with Mr. Rickey’s judgment,” Jackie finally said. “He’s been right so far.”

Some have questioned whether Rickey was right in segregating the black players from the rest of the team, believing it was an overreaction. Where the team stayed, however, made no difference to a number of white Dodgers who were nonetheless offended by Robinson’s presence. Led by Dixie Walker, the de facto leader of the team, the group included Hugh Casey, Carl Furillo, and Bobby Bragan and it started a petition to keep Jackie off the club. During a trip to Panama for a three-game series against the Royals, Durocher, still the Dodgers’ manager, caught wind of the uprising and exploded.

“I told them what they could do with their petition, and I don’t think I got much back talk on it,” he said years later. “I told the players that Robinson was going to open the season with us come hell or high water, and if they didn’t like it they could leave now and we’d trade them or get rid of them some other way. Nobody moved.”5 Rickey confronted his mutinous players in his hotel room and reiterated that anybody that wanted to leave the team would be accommodated. The petition got no further. Though some tension undoubtedly remained into the regular season, there were no more internal flare-ups in Cuba.

While in Havana, the team played ”home” series against the Yankees and Boston Braves, along with games against the Royals and a team of Cuban all-stars. In addition to the trip to Panama, they took quick jaunts to play in Caracas, Venezuela, and the Panama Canal Zone, before finally breaking camp during the first week of April and heading home to Brooklyn.

The Havana experiment lasted only a single spring. The club’s training camp costs that year were reported as being the highest in the majors. Surprisingly, the fans in the baseball-hungry country didn’t show up in the numbers the Dodgers had expected. Attendance for their series against the Braves was so low that the visiting Boston club lost money on the deal, causing even the St. Louis Browns to cancel their upcoming trip. The prevailing thought may have been that the city, having just experienced the most pressurized pennant race in Cuban League history, had seen enough baseball for a while. But this was disproved later that spring when the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, featuring the champion Racine Belles, arrived. Fifteen thousand fans showed up for that league’s first practice game in Havana. In the end, the Dodgers opted not to return in 1948, choosing the less expensive Dominican Republic as their spring-training site.

The Dodgers, by then located in Los Angeles, did return to Cuba one more time. When heavy Florida rains threatened a weekend set in 1959 against the Cincinnati Reds, the teams opted to move the series to Gran Stadium. It was the last time the team played there; that same year, Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, and baseball’s official dealings with the nation ended. Still, despite John McGraw’s warnings, that spring in Havana became a milestone in Dodgers history. The team may have lost a manager but gained a leader, Jackie Robinson, who subsequently changed the fate of their franchise, and baseball, forever.

IRV GOLDFARB saw his first baseball game at Yankee Stadium in 1962, but his first game at the Polo Grounds a year later made him a Mets fan for life. Irv was a disc jockey for 22 years in Buffalo, Hartford, and New Haven, Connecticut, and now works at ABC Television in New York. He lives in Union City, New Jersey, with his future wife, Mercedes, a more insane Mets fan than he is. Irv has had chapters published in both “Deadball Stars of the National League” and “Deadball Stars of the American League”; “The Fenway Project”; and “The Miracle Has Landed: The 1969 New York Mets.” He has been a SABR member since 1999.

Sources

Allen, Maury. Jackie Robinson: A Life Remembered. London: Franklin Watts,1987.

Frommer, Harvey. Rickey and Robinson: The Men Who Broke Baseball’s Color Barrier. New York: Macmillan, 1982.

Polner, Murray. Branch Rickey. New York: Atheneum, 1982.

Robinson, Jackie, and Alfred Duckett. I Never Had It Made. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972.

Branch Rickey biography from SABR’s BioProject.

“Cuban Baseball” by Bruce Brown from The Atlantic on-line, June 1984. 

“The ’47 Dodgers on Havana:  Baseball at a Crossroads” by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria from the 1996 issue of Spring Training.

 “Is They…or Is They Ain’t His Guests? Sporting News, March 26, 1947. (photo caption)

“Out-of-the-ordinary  spring training sites” by Bob Kimball, USA Today, February 13, 2009. p. 9.

“Training Horizons Widen for Majors” by Dan Daniel Sporting News, February 26, 1947.

“High Jinxes and High Hopes in Havana” from MovieTone News-1947.

Notes

Leo Durocher made the cover of Time magazine just once: the April 14, 1947, issue. Published the day before Jackie Robinson broke into the major leagues with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Time article did not cast the Dodgers’ manager in a kind light. The words “I don’t want any nice guys on my ball club” ran beneath Leo’s portrait. The background picture depicted Leo giving an umpire an earful of abuse, standard operation procedure for the manager nicknamed “The Lip.”

Just five days earlier Durocher had been suspended from baseball for a year. Commissioner Albert “Happy” Chandler cited Durocher’s string of moral shortcomings: gambling debts, associations with known gamblers and nightlife figures, and a scandalous marriage with charges of adultery, bigamy, and contempt of court. Brooklyn owner and general manager Branch Rickey often said Leo possessed “the fertile ability to turn a bad situation into something infinitely worse,” but Leo seemed finally to have hit rock bottom.1 Outside of Brooklyn, many baseball fans and observers gloated. Dodgers’ fans were devastated. Durocher’s suspension was shaping up as baseball’s “story of the year” before the season had even started.2

Then Robinson took the field in Brooklyn. Led by Burt Shotton, a sort of anti-Durocher, the Dodgers won the pennant. They pushed the Yankees to a seventh game before losing the World Series. Leo and his troubles had quickly receded into memories of spring training. The 1947 season could have provided an opportunity for Durocher to shine along with Brooklyn’s new star. Instead, the Time cover would be the highlight of Durocher’s 1947 season. His unerring ability to find trouble and draw attention removed him from a landmark season in baseball history.

When he broke into the American League, Leo Durocher gained notoriety for his brash actions as well as his quick glove. In 1928, at the age of twenty-two, he was playing shortstop for the New York Yankees, yet he was garnering more attention from his sartorial and off-field choices. Before that first season was a month old, Yankees manager Miller Huggins had to reprimand the young Durocher for brashly overdressing. Leo might have made rookie money but he spent profligately, routinely overdrawing his bank account. Leo acquired his nicknames “The Lip” and “the All-American Out” from Babe Ruth himself. Before the 1928 season concluded, Ruth also accused Durocher of stealing his watch.3

Durocher’s financial troubles followed him after his trade to Cincinnati in 1930. Gambling opportunities beckoned from Kentucky, just across the Ohio River. When traded to St. Louis during the 1933 season, he needed the Cardinals’ general manager, Branch Rickey, to cover his outstanding debts. During the 1934 season, Durocher married an independent and wealthy local businesswoman, Grace Dozier, with Rickey’s permission and blessing. Eventually, though, Leo reverted. Things didn’t change much when he was traded to Brooklyn before the 1938 season. His spending and gambling habits continued apace, but nobody could deny his will to win. After a year team president Larry MacPhail appointed him manager for the 1939 season.

Dodgers broadcaster Red Barber once wrote about the 1947 season: “Try to untangle Durocher from either Rickey or MacPhail and it’s no story.”4 Barber had a point. Durocher’s 1947 season-long suspension resulted partially from the ongoing feud between the two baseball executives. Both had handled Durocher as a player; in fact, Rickey had orchestrated with MacPhail Durocher’s trade to Brooklyn. When MacPhail entered the Army after the 1942 season, Rickey took over as Brooklyn’s team president. That meant he had Durocher on his hands again, now as a player-manager. Durocher had led the Dodgers to the 1941 pennant, two second-place finishes (1940, 1942), and a third-place finish in his inaugural season. After Rickey took over, the Dodgers stumbled, finishing third twice and even falling as far as seventh in 1944. By 1946 Leo had led the Dodgers back to second place, narrowly losing the pennant again to the Cardinals.5

Rickey biographer Lee Lowenfish writes that even as the 1946 season ended, Rickey recognized that his manager still swam in dangerous waters. Actor and avid gambler George Raft’s friendship with Durocher seemed worrisome.6 During his climb to Hollywood fame, Raft had befriended several baseball stars. With Durocher, though, Raft had found a true buddy—a quick-witted, gambling, nightlife-loving buddy. Raft and Durocher stayed at each other’s apartment when visiting the other’s home city. Raft once said: “We used each other’s suits, ties, shirts, cars, girls.”7 In 1944, with Durocher away at spring training in nearby Bear Mountain, New York, Raft hosted a gambling night at Leo’s apartment during which a wealthy patron lost several thousand dollars in a rigged craps game. By 1946 rumors had surfaced connecting Durocher and Raft with New York mobsters Joe Adonis and Bugsy Siegel. The Brooklyn district attorney’s office had tapped Durocher’s telephone, and the manager’s name had surfaced amid a check-cashing scandal at the Mergenthaler Linotype Company in Baltimore.8

Westbrook Pegler, a syndicated columnist for the New York Journal-American, had seen enough. In October 1946 he began a series of articles decrying Raft and Durocher as threats to society. In a phone conversation with Rickey, Pegler proclaimed Durocher a “moral delinquent” who would eventually “drag Rickey and baseball down to his own level of shame and shameful companions.”9 As Lowenfish writes, “Rickey could not effectively say to Leo Durocher, ‘You must cut all ties to George Raft.’ Somebody else would have to do it.”10 In November, Rickey sent Arthur Mann, his new assistant, to Chicago to arrange a meeting between the commissioner and Durocher. Mann told Chandler of Rickey’s wish:

Any reasonable method for telling Durocher emphatically that he must sever connections of all kinds with people regarded as undesirable by baseball—gangsters, known gamblers, companions of known gamblers, and racketeers. Regardless of names or identity, anybody whose reputation could hurt Leo or baseball.11

Chandler finally tracked Durocher down at an NBC studio where Durocher was rehearsing for a spot on the Jack Benny radio show. Chandler insisted that Durocher meet him on November 22 at the Claremont Country Club in Berkeley, California. Mann returned to Brooklyn, presuming his confidential business concluded.12

At the appointed time, Chandler and Durocher strolled across the greens. The commissioner produced a list of those whom Leo should avoid at all costs. Arthur Mann writes:

“Raft, Adonis, Siegel, Engelberg, etc.—a special coterie of men to avoid; and Leo readily agreed, even though it meant cutting off some apparently harmless associations of nodding acquaintance. Chandler was firm, but not threatening. He told Leo that the time had come to choose between undesirables and baseball, to halt wagging tongues; that there would be no trouble if he, Durocher, created none.”13

Leo acknowledged that the break would be difficult, but worth it. Chandler seemed satisfied. However, at just this moment, Leo sprang something new on the commissioner. He told Chandler about his love affair with the actress Laraine Day. They would be married just as soon as her divorce was final. Leo neglected to tell the commissioner that when he first met Laraine in 1942, he also was married. (His divorce from Grace Dozier went through in 1943.)14

Chandler hoped the furor could be contained, but in January 1947, Day and Durocher’s marriage hit the headlines. Day had filed for divorce from her husband, Ray Hendricks, a bandleader and manager of the Santa Monica airport. Hendricks accused Durocher of stealing Day’s affections. The press loved it. A divorce settlement soon was reached, but the California divorce decreed a year’s wait before Day could remarry. However, Day darted across the border to Juarez, Mexico, to obtain a “quickie divorce.” She then returned to El Paso, Texas, and married Durocher the same day, January 21, 1947.

As Arthur Mann wrote: “Could Chandler understand and appreciate that, more often than not, Durocher would parlay a simple situation into a complex problem through abysmal thoughtlessness?”15 Meanwhile, Chandler found himself facing unwanted and unpleasant comparisons to his predecessor, Judge Landis. Chandler’s unwillingness to tackle Durocher preemptively stood in contrast to Landis’s swift and stern punishments for those he discovered gambling on baseball.

With Day and Durocher’s marriage, the simmering scandal threatened to boil over. Judge George Dockweiler, who had granted Day’s interlocutory divorce decree, now considered charging her with adultery. In the eyes of the California court, Day remained married to Hendricks. With her actions in Texas, she now had two husbands. Durocher realized that Dockweiler had capitalized on their celebrity status to make his point. Dockweiler admitted he would not have pressed another, less recognized couple so hard. “That judge,” Leo proclaimed to the press, “is nothing more than a pious, Bible-reading hypocrite.”16 Eventually Dockweiler was removed from the case, and Day and Durocher remarried in California in 1948.17

At the time, though, the scandal surged ahead. Leo’s marital fanfare drew the attention of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy. A former governor of Michigan, mayor of Detroit, and lifelong bachelor, Murphy devoutly practiced his Roman Catholic faith. He gladly wore the mantle of the top court’s morality crusader. Murphy urged Commissioner Chandler to take swift and permanent action, reminiscent of Landis’s tenure, against the unrepentant Durocher.

Just after the 1946 season the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn had threatened Rickey that the Brooklyn Catholic Youth Organization would boycott Dodgers games. CYO members constituted the largest block of the Dodgers’ Knothole Gang, a youth outreach endeavor Rickey had begun in Brooklyn as he had in St. Louis. Church groups were solicited to make attending baseball games part of their moral and social recreation programs. A CYO boycott of Dodgers games would greatly reduce attendance at Ebbets Field. As national president of the CYO, Justice Murphy went even further, threatening Chandler with a nationwide CYO ban on baseball. On March 1, 1947, the Brooklyn CYO made good on its threat and withdrew from the Dodgers’ Knothole gang.18

Meanwhile, the Dodgers prepared for spring training in Havana, Cuba. Durocher tried being on his best behavior, but found it tough going when he kept meeting old friends like Memphis Engelberg and Connie Immerman. Durocher and Immerman knew each other from the 1920s, when the young Yankees shortstop frequented the Cotton Club. Now Immerman was managing a new casino in Havana. Engelberg, a well-known New York area horse handicapper, was a good friend of both Durocher and Charlie Dressen, who was now coaching with the Yankees.19

Writing thirty-five years later, Red Barber pointed out an important but often ignored precedent to Chandler’s decision. On April 3, 1947, Bert Bell, commissioner of the National Football League, made public his belated decision to suspend indefinitely two New York Giants football players, Merle Hapes and Frank Filchock. Gamblers had offered the two players bribes to throw the 1946 championship game. Hapes and Filchock took a week to notify team officials. News of the attempted bribery made headlines on December 5, the morning of the game (which the Giants lost to the Chicago Bears, 24-14). Even though the two players’ culpability lay in their delayed response to the bribes, Bell took a few months to respond. His decision to suspend Hapes and Filchock indefinitely was the harshest punishment for professional athletes since Landis’s suspension of the eight Black Sox players in 1921. New York’s sportswriters reacted positively to Bell’s strong (if not necessarily swift) decision. Barber thus mused: “Did Chandler note the widespread approval that Bell received, or had Chandler made up his mind on his decision before April 3? Was Bell’s decision, and its timing, the final nail in the lid of Durocher’s coffin?”20

These forces—the nation’s ongoing concern about gambling in baseball and other sports, Chandler’s ascension to baseball commissioner, Rickey’s simmering feud with MacPhail, and Leo’s spotty record on non-baseball activities—provided the material causes for his suspension. As will be seen shortly, the efficient cause—the actual act that resulted in suspension—came in early April. The formal cause, though, remained Leo’s highly visible and public refusal to play according to “the rules” set down by baseball’s watchdogs. Historian Jules Tygiel has dismissed another commonly assumed formal cause: Chandler and MacPhail’s opposition to Rickey’s plan to integrate the Dodgers.21

Rickey had been planning to integrate the team since 1945 and had carefully chosen Army veteran and Negro Leagues player Jackie Robinson for the task. Leo actually played a small but pivotal role in assuring Robinson’s major-league debut. While training in Havana, the Dodgers traveled to Panama for a weekend series against some Caribbean All-Stars. Durocher learned that several Dodgers players had created a petition in opposition to Robinson. Durocher called a team meeting at midnight. The coaches assembled the team in an empty dining-hall kitchen. Still in his night robe, Leo told the players they could “wipe your ass” with the petition. Rickey, he assured them, would trade anybody unwilling to play with Robinson. For his part, Leo declared:

I’m the manager of this ballclub, and I’m interested in one thing: winning. . . . This fellow is a real great ballplayer. He’s going to win pennants for us. He’s going to put money in your pockets and money in mine. And here’s something else to think about when you put your head back on the pillow. From everything I hear, he’s only the first. Only the first, boys! There’s many more coming right behind him and they have the talent and they’re gonna come to play. . . . Unless you fellows look out and wake up, they’re going to run you right out of the ballpark.

Roger Kahn adds that Leo concluded: “Fuck your petition. The meeting is over. Go back to bed.”22 The short meeting speech captured Durocher’s meritocratic world view. Winning, especially financially lucrative winning, erased all surface differences.

That, Kahn has written, might have been Leo’s finest hour. Had he not been suspended for the entire 1947 season, Robinson would have enjoyed the support of Leo’s (in)famous commitment to winning.23 Leo’s willingness to engage umpires, opposing players and managers, and fans themselves would have buffered Robinson from at least some of the abuse he encountered.

The events leading to Leo’s suspension soon followed. In March 1947, the Yankees came to Havana for an exhibition series against the Dodgers. This meant Durocher’s good friend and former assistant, Charlie Dressen, now sat in the opposing dugout as a Yankees coach. The two friends had been teammates for two seasons on the Cincinnati Reds (1930 and 1931). Off the field, they both enjoyed card games and receiving horse-betting tips, especially from Memphis Engelberg.

Dressen’s defection to the Yankees had upset Durocher, and Leo characteristically, struck back. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle regularly ran a column titled “Durocher Speaks” so the Dodgers manager could weigh in on various issues. Harold Parrott, a former sportswriter now working for the Dodgers, actually ghost-wrote the pieces. The March 3 column claimed that because Yankees owner Larry MacPhail had failed to sign Durocher as the new Yankees manager he sought revenge by signing Dressen. With unreflective irony, Durocher accused the Yankees’ owner of unsportsmanlike conduct. Reverting to his Dodgers past when he routinely fired and rehired Durocher, MacPhail erupted, demanding that Commissioner Chandler punish the Dodgers manager.

Then Leo made things even worse. On March 9, in another game with the Yankees at Havana’s new Estadio del Cerro, Durocher noticed Engelberg and Immerman sitting directly behind the Yankees dugout. MacPhail had given them the choice seats and sat himself just a few feet away. Durocher immediately complained: “If I did that, I’d get kicked out of baseball.” Rickey too had noticed the same two characters in MacPhail’s box seats in the previous day’s game. Dick Young of the New York Daily News quoted Durocher complaining that MacPhail associated with the very same gamblers Leo had to avoid. In other words, Durocher viewed this situation as analogous to his confrontation with Judge Dockweiler: While Durocher must atone for every infraction, others were allowed to commit the same sins without fear of retribution.24

On March 16 MacPhail filed a protest charging Durocher and Rickey with slander. He also named Engelberg and Immerman as Durocher’s friends, implying that the manager still associated with gamblers. Chandler now had no choice. Durocher and Rickey had questioned the commissioner’s leadership as well as MacPhail’s off-field associations. Chandler called a meeting for March 24 with Durocher and MacPhail. After MacPhail finished reviewing the charges, Durocher apologized, claiming, “It’s all baseball jargon. I didn’t mean anything derogatory in that article about you. . . . I needled you, but it was purely baseball and nothing personal.” Durocher effectively admitted that he and Parrott had directed the column at Chandler’s decisions, not MacPhail himself or his friends (who, of course, were also Durocher’s!). Momentarily outgunned on the ball field, Leo had sought an advantage on his former boss. As he had several times as Dodgers owner, MacPhail tearfully embraced Durocher and claimed the incident finished. “You’ve always been a great guy with me and always will be a great guy. Forget it. It’s over,” MacPhail declared.25

It turned out MacPhail was wrong. At the same meeting, Durocher had reminded Chandler that the commissioner himself had named Engelberg and Immerman among those to be avoided.

Chandler responded by querying Leo about gambling in the Dodgers locker room. After Leo answered, Chandler then asked MacPhail if he had offered Leo the Yankees’ manager job. MacPhail stalled. Arthur Mann noted that Chandler did not ask Leo the same question. Chandler likewise did not rule on MacPhail’s charges. At a March 30 meeting, held with Rickey present, it became clear that Yankees management could have handed Immerman and Engelberg the tickets.

Rickey and co-owner Walter O’Malley considered the matter closed. However, they then received an ominous sign. Chandler dismissed MacPhail and then casually asked Rickey and O’Malley, “How much would it hurt you folks to have your fellow out of baseball?”26

Presuming order restored, the Dodgers returned to Brooklyn. Rickey set about finalizing the plans for Robinson to start on Opening Day at Ebbets Field. On April 9, while Durocher met with Rickey to discuss starting Robinson in an exhibition game that afternoon at Ebbets Field, Chandler telephoned with his decision. Both teams were fined $2,000 each for detrimental conduct. Harold Parrott was fined $500 and ordered to stop publication of “Durocher Speaks.” Dressen was suspended for thirty days for signing with the Yankees while still under contract with the Dodgers. Durocher was suspended from baseball for one year.27 

Rickey exploded, repeatedly yelling, “You son of a bitch!” Durocher and Arthur Mann both knew something was wrong when the normally abstemious Rickey used such profanity. Leo, uncharacteristically, responded with only an indignant “For what?” Later Leo said, “To this day, if you ask me why I was suspended, I could not tell you. Neither could any sportswriter who followed the case.”28 

The suspension made news nationwide. Dodgers’ fans regarded the decision as cowardice prompted by Chandler’s acquiescence to MacPhail who, according to Brooklyn fans, had instigated the affair. Arthur Daley wrote in the New York Times: “The Lip is in a comparable position to the chap hauled into traffic court for driving through a red light and then being sentenced to the electric chair.”29 Nationally, though, Leo’s suspension appeared as proof that repeat offenders could not always expect to escape punishment. The Catholic press took special glee in noting that Leo finally had his comeuppance.30

Durocher glumly accepted his fate, moving into a secluded house in the Santa Monica hills with Laraine Day. He occupied himself with yard work, the Hollywood night life, and following the Dodgers with Red Barber’s broadcasts. Rickey promised Leo his full year’s salary, and then named Burt Shotton as interim manager.31

With Durocher gone, Robinson was left to face alone the racist opposition of men like Phillies manager Ben Chapman. Robinson’s teammates, led by Pee Wee Reese, embraced Robinson and provided instead a quieter, perhaps more stable, support than Durocher’s combat-ready mentality could have. It cannot be assumed that Robinson would have suffered less if Leo had not been suspended for 1947. Durocher and Robinson had their own conflicts in the 1948 season before Leo left to manage the archrival Giants.

In his memoirs, Chandler solely blamed Durocher. He had “run a thousand red lights,” Chandler said in reference to Daley’s remark.32 Later on, Dodgers chroniclers like Peter Golenbock and Roger Kahn would suggest that at least partial blame could be pinned on Walter O’Malley. The future Dodger owner repeatedly failed to defend Durocher successfully before Chandler and Brooklyn’s Catholic leaders.33 Durocher and others blamed Branch Rickey. Day repeatedly told Durocher, “That man is not your friend.” Rickey, according to Day, put up a pious front while watching to take any advantage.34 The Day-Durocher-suspension saga still receives attention from baseball aficionados. Day’s death in November 2007 rekindled interest, six months after Major League Baseball and the entire nation recognized the 60th anniversary of Robinson’s Opening Day start with the Dodgers.35

The 1947 season concluded with the Yankees beating the Dodgers in a tight seven-game World Series. After the final out, MacPhail sought out Rickey who politely shook hands while whispering a rebuke. MacPhail then went on a drunken rampage that involved fistfights and firing George Weiss, the Yankees’ farm director.36 When Chandler had asked Rickey and O’Malley how much it would hurt to lose Durocher, Rickey replied that Durocher “has more character than the fellow”—meaning MacPhail—“you just sent out of the room.”37

Durocher certainly committed his fair share of what might be called “surface crimes.” He gambled and allowed gamblers access to his players, and his personal life ran antithetically to the very traditional values baseball was supposed to represent and defend. When confronted with a deeper crime like the racism fueling the Dodgers’ petition, Durocher revealed his pragmatic, yet moral, side.38 What and who Leo defended that night in Panama became the lasting story of the 1947 season, not his suspension which began the season.

JEFFREY MARLETT teaches religious studies at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York. He is the author of “Saving the Heartland: Catholic Missionaries in Rural America, 1920-1960” (Northern Illinois University Press, 2002). He became interested in Leo Durocher while preparing undergraduate ethics courses.

Notes

1. Quoted in Lee Lowenfish, Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), p. 348.

2.  See David Mandell, “The Suspension of Leo Durocher.” The National Pastime: A Review of Baseball History #27, Cleveland, Ohio: Society for American Baseball Research, 2007:  pp. 101-4.

3. Leo Durocher, with Ed Linn, Nice Guys Finish Last. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975. pp.. 46-47 (Huggins), 65 (Immerman), 48-55 (Ruth). Gerald Eskenazi, The Lip: A Biography of Leo Durocher (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1993), pp. 47-48.

4. Red Barber, 1947: When All Hell Broke Loose in Baseball, New York: Da Capo, 1982, p. 19. Eskenazi, The Lip, pp. 199-200.

5. http://www.baseball-reference.com/managers/durocle01.shtml accessed 28 November 2009.

6. Lowenfish, p. 407.

7. Lowenfish, p. 408.

8. Lowenfish, p. 408. See “$750,000 Swindle: Brooklyn clerk gravely steals a fortune to buy some of the good things of life for his family.” Life, November 18, 1946.

9. Arthur Mann, Baseball Confidential: Secret History of the War Among Chandler, Durocher, MacPhail, and Rickey (New York: David McKay Company, 1951), p. 38.

10. Lowenfish, p. 409.

11. Mann, p. 44.

12. Mann, pp. 43-44.

13. Mann, p. 46.

14. Mann, pp. 46-7; Eskenazi, pp. 174, 202-3; Happy Chandler, Heroes, Plain Folks, and Skunks: The Life and Times of Happy Chandler with Vance Trimble (Chicago: Bonus Books, 1989), pp. 206-7.

15. Mann, p. 29.

16. Roger Kahn, The Era 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World.  (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), pp. 27 (first quote), 28 (second).

17. Durocher, Nice Guys Finish Last, p. 235.

18. “Catholics Quit Dodgers Knothole Club in Protest over the Conduct of Durocher,”  March 1, 1947, p. 17; “MANNERS & MORALS: Don’t You Want Me to Be Happy?”,(February 3, 1947).

Kahn, pp. 29 (Brooklyn CYO), 36-37 (Murphy and Chandler); Chandler, p. 213; Barber, p. 103.

19. Durocher, p. 245. Mann, pp. 71-2.

20. Barber, pp. 125-6 (quoted).

21. Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy 25th anniversary edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 177; Tygiel, Past Time: Baseball as History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 113.

22. Durocher, p. 205. Kahn, p. 36.

23. Kahn, p. 35.

24. Lowenfish, Rickey, p. 421-2.

25. Quoted in Peter Golenbock, Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers 1984 (Chicago, IL: Contemporary Books, 2000), p. 101 (Durocher and MacPhail quotes);  See also, Baseball Confidential, p. 102-4.

26. Lowenfish, Rickey, p. 424.  Mann, Baseball Confidential, p. 102-15.

27. Louis Effrat, “Chandler Bans Durocher for the 1947 Baseball Season,” New York Times (April 10, 1947), p. 1, 31;

28. Lowenfish, Rickey, p. 425.  Durocher, Nice Guys Finish Last, p. 257, 235 (emphasis in original).

29. Arthur Daley, “Sports of the Times: Chandler Flexes His Muscles,” New York Times, April 10, 1947, p. 32.

30. “Durocher Versus the CYO,” Catholic Digest 11 (June 1947): p. 96; reprint from The Catholic Mirror (April 1947).

31. Leo Durocher, The Dodgers and Me: The Inside Story (Chicago: Ziff-Davis, 1948), p. 273.

32. Chandler, p. 221.

33. Kahn, pp. 30, 265 (finances); Golenbock, Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1984), p. 105.

34. Durocher, Nice Guys Finish Last, pp. 270-1.

35. http://www.baseball-fever.com/showthread.php?t=70561

36. Kahn, pp. 140-2.

37. Mann, p. 114.

38. For the contrast between “surface” and “deep” crimes, see Carlo Rotella, Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters From the Rust Belt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 119.

Rickey was “The Mahatma” or “El Cheapo,” depending on who was writing about him. After signing Jackie Robinson in 1945, and then after promoting him to the Dodgers in ’47, Rickey was both praised and damned at the same time; there was no in-between. Shortly after his death on December 9, 1965, he was lionized and beatified. A few years later, the revisionists looked at his feet of clay and questioned his integrity. Now the neo-revisionists are re-examining Rickey and his legacy. Since Rickey is already long buried, they will praise him and resurrect the good about him that was interred with his bones.

But which Rickey was on stage in Brooklyn in 1947? The answer is easy: All of them. And it is the press that will guide the tour of that season.

The first stop is a January meeting in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. Rickey told the assembled major-league owners that he intended to promote Jackie Robinson that spring. The owners were shocked and voted 15–1 against the move, thereby putting Rickey and Commissioner Happy Chandler on notice. There was nothing the owners could do to prevent Rickey from doing what he felt was best for his club, but it did take steel nerves on Rickey’s part to continue with his plan. What may have worried the other owners was a 1946 report by Yankees boss Larry MacPhail that said owners should brace themselves for poor black fans driving away prosperous white fans.

A second stop takes place on the wintry night of Tuesday, February 5, at the Carlton YMCA in Brooklyn, where Dodgers executive secretary Herbert T. Miller had gathered together “30 distinguished Brooklyn Negroes” to meet Rickey, according to an article in an October 1951 issue of Sport magazine. They probably expected to hear that Jackie Robinson would be promoted to the parent Dodgers after a successful 1946 season with the club’s top farm team in Montreal. After all, Robinson had successfully made the switch from shortstop to second base, batted .349, stolen forty bases, and helped the Royals win the Little World Series. But it was a vintage Rickey performance because the crowd didn’t get what it expected.

He bluntly told his guests that the biggest threat to Robinson’s success, if he was promoted, would be that “the Negro people themselves will ruin it. . . . We don’t want what can be another great milestone in the progress of American race relations turned into a national comedy and an ultimate tragedy. If any individual group or segment of Negro society uses the advancement of Jackie Robinson in baseball as a social ‘ism’ or schism, I will curse the day I ever signed him to a contract, and I will personally see that baseball is never so abused and misrepresented again.”

Yet for some reason the audience of community leaders and other respectable middle-class citizens bought Rickey’s idea. They knew that society would be watching and judging. So they hastily started a campaign based on the phrase “Don’t Spoil Jackie’s Chances” and urged restraint and moderation among Robinson’s fans.

Why did they buy it when millions identified with Robinson? In him, they saw their own chances at gaining that promised equality too long denied. Perhaps they realized that this first step was a cautious one, fraught with danger both personal for Robinson and monumental for America. Or perhaps they were simply mesmerized by Rickey’s blunt assessment of the nation’s psyche. As Ed Fitzgerald wrote in a profile of Rickey published in a November 1947 issue of Sport:

Branch Rickey is a man who possesses tremendous magnetism. Measured in terms of candlepower, his personality lights up a whole room. There’s an intensity about him that thrusts itself upon your imagination and kindles a fire of interest in you. When he speaks, you find yourself leaning forward to catch every word. There’s something about the way he talks, easily but deliberately, that makes you certain the things he’s saying are of deathless importance. Whatever that elusive quality is that enables one man to dominate a group of his fellows, Rickey has it.

Not all the ballplayers who played for Rickey, or the sportswriters who covered those players and those teams, would completely agree with Fitzgerald’s assessment. (Enos Slaughter supposedly once said that Rickey had to open the vault to get a nickel change.) But it is a measure of the man that he could indeed make people talk about him, curse him, and debate his tactics during his life and decades after it ended.

What Rickey didn’t tell his audience that wintry night in Brooklyn was that he had a plan. The first step was to move spring training away from segregated Florida to sites and games in more tolerant Cuba and Panama. Along the way, Rickey thought, Robinson’s outstanding play in camp and in exhibition games would naturally lead to the Dodger players clamoring for him to be promoted. (Robinson had a .625 batting average and also stole seven bases that spring.)

But there were two immediate obstacles (not counting what would happen if Robinson didn’t perform up to expectations): Rickey wanted Robinson to switch to first base because the Dodgers were weak there; and some players threatened to organize a petition against Robinson’s potential and expected promotion.

The plans also called for manager Leo Durocher to demand that Robinson be called up for the good of the team. That part of Rickey’s plan failed miserably since Commissioner Chandler suspended Durocher for the season on April 9 for a host of indiscretions. The suspension had a polarizing effect on baseball. As Chandler put it:

A good many New York sports writers, no fans of mine anyhow, jumped to the defense of their fallen hero. . . . Time magazine made an accurate summation of that situation saying: “Commissioner Chandler had done the seemingly impossible; he has made Leo Durocher a sympathetic figure.” Chandler wrote on page 219 of his autobiography that “I’ll have to confess, I didn’t think anybody could do that.”

Another point of view was summed up by Washington Post sports writer Shirley Povich: “Maybe the punishment was in excess of the crime, but who can shed a tear for Durocher?”[fn]Rudy Marzano. The Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s; How Robinson, MacPhail, Reiser and Rickey Changed Baseball (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2005), 134.[/fn]

Durocher was first replaced by Dodger scout, coach, and one-time minor-league manager Clyde Sukeforth. But Sukeforth was just a stopgap as Rickey searched for someone to guide the Dodgers for the season.

The names of former Yankees manager Joe McCarthy and former Giants player-manager Bill Terry were mentioned before Rickey decided to offer the job to old friend Burt Shotton, who had retired from his coaching job with the Cleveland Indians a few years previously. The sixty-two-year-old Shotton’s last full season as a big-league manager was with the seventh-place Philadelphia Phillies in 1933. Rather than wear a uniform again, Shotton said he would manage in his street clothes, which meant he could not go on the field. That was a crucial decision since it essentially meant that Robinson would not have someone as fiery as Leo Durocher arguing with the umpires for him.

Just a day after Chandler’s bombshell, Rickey stealthily slipped in one of his own. During the top of the sixth inning of an afternoon exhibition game on April 10 in Ebbets Field—against Montreal—he announced: “The Brooklyn Dodgers today purchased the contract of Jackie Roosevelt Robinson from the Montreal Royals. He will report immediately.”[fn]Anthony R. Pratkanis and Marlene E. Turner. “Nine Principles of Successful Affirmative Action: Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson, and the Integration of Baseball,” in The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and the American Culture, 1997 (Jackie Robinson), edited by Peter M. Rutkoff. (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2000), 152. Also found in Out of the Shadows; African American Baseball from the Cuban Giants to Jackie Robinson, edited by Bill Kirwin (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 195; and Lee Lowenfish, Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentlemen (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 425.[/fn]

Robinson had to endure a storm of protest about his promotion to the parent club. And some of the hostility came from fellow Dodgers. A spring-training survey in The Sporting News said the team was “mainly antagonistic” toward calling up Robinson.[fn]Marzano, p. 135.[/fn] It was Rickey who headed off the nascent rebellion from within the ranks. While it may have been naïve on his part to believe the team would clamor for Robinson’s promotion in order to bring them a share of any potential World Series wealth, Rickey nevertheless realistically told the rebels they could play with Robinson or be traded.

Two of the more disgruntled players were reserve catcher Bobby Bragan and popular outfielder Fred “Dixie” Walker. During a heated meeting with Rickey in spring training, Bragan said he wanted to be traded. Walker also asked to be traded in a letter to Rickey on March 26. Walker’s wish almost came true; a deal with Pittsburgh was agreed to in principle before Rickey vetoed it. With both stars and reserve players discontented, Rickey had to act decisively. Lester Rodney, the sports editor of the Communist party’s Daily Worker, credited Rickey with standing up to the pressure from the players:

“Kirby Higbe was traded immediately. . . . And when Carl Furillo said . . . ‘I ain’t gonna play with no niggers!’ Rickey snapped back, ’You don’t want to play with no niggers? Then you can go back to Pennsylvania and pound railroad ties for $15 a week. You’ll never set foot on a big-league baseball field again.’ Carl played. They all played.”[fn]The quote is from a biography of Lester Rodney, Press Box Red; The Story of Lester Rodney, the Communist Who Helped Break the Color Line in American Sports, by Irwin Silber.[/fn] A postscript must be noted here: By the end of the 1947 season Furillo, Bragan, and Walker had come to admire Robinson.

It was that sort of hyper-attention from the press that Rickey was continually adapting to in Brooklyn. Ambivalent press coverage dogged Rickey and his teams throughout his long career in baseball. In 1947, coverage started out positively with a May editorial in Crisis magazine that gave Rickey all the credit for “shrewdly picking” Robinson in 1945 and then wisely delaying the announcement of his promotion to the big leagues until just five days before the season opened. Then, just as Rickey had asked in his February 5 speech at the Brooklyn YMCA, the magazine also asked “Negro newspapers” to provide balanced coverage and not dwell solely on Robinson. Just as Rickey asked in that speech, the editorial concluded by urging all Americans to respect Rickey’s “judgment and courage” and Robinson’s “skill and courage.”

In its September 22 issue, Time magazine ran a story about Robinson’s winning the Rookie of the Year award from The Sporting News. The article did more than praise Robinson; it also labeled Rickey “the smartest man in baseball.” The cover story gave credit to Robinson for enduring “the toughest first season any ballplayer has ever faced.” But it also praised Rickey for hiring Pittsburgh Courier sportswriter Wendell Smith to travel with the team as a companion for Robinson, and for setting up “how-to-handle-Robinson” committees of prominent African Americans in National League cities.

Rickey wrote that he “picked” Robinson both for his play on the field and for his strength and character off the field. He asked Robinson not to retaliate when jeered. Yet the support committees would seem to have been ineffective, for between the positive Crisis editorial near the start of the 1947 season and the laudatory article in Time near the end of that season came the slings and arrows of less complimentary screeds. (Supposedly the character of Judge Goodwill Banner in Bernard Malamud’s novel The Natural was partly based on a Rickey habit of talking over people’s heads and being too theoretical.)

And Jimmy Powers of the New York Daily News did a lot of slinging, branding Rickey “El Cheapo” around 1945. It got so bad that in 1946 Rickey considered suing Powers. An article in Sport in November 1947 assessed the situation:

Powers misses no opportunity to sink another shaft into Rickey. It can hardly be denied that the Dodgers’ chief executive is an inviting target. Sometimes it seems he delights in furnishing critics like Powers with more ammunition.

Nothing Rickey does convinces Powers, who, of course, doesn’t want to be convinced. He has more fun, and keeps his readers more excited that way.

Rickey didn’t try to mislead the press, said his friends and allies both in the press and in the Dodgers’ office, he just had a tendency to over-answer and not everyone could follow his logic. And yet there were probably times, his biographers wrote, when Rickey probably “preferred not to be understood.”[fn]Leverett T. Smith Jr. “A Man of Many Faucets, All Running at Once; Books by and about Branch Rickey,” in The National Pastime; A Review of Baseball History #28 (Cleveland, Ohio: Society for American Baseball Research, 2008), 53-63.[/fn] Baloney, wrote New York Daily News writer Dick Young in a January 1953 issue of Baseball Digest:

Branch Rickey, though he reflects an aloofness in his relations with the press, is profoundly aware of the newspaper criticism directed against him. And yet much of the adverse comment written about Rickey results from his condescending approach to the press. Writers not so much resent his evasiveness, but rather his insufferable belief that he is getting away with it. Rickey, while talking to newsmen, creates the impression in his audience that he is thinking: “I can wrap these lame-brains around my little finger with my rhetoric.”

Few men have the nimble brain of Branch Rickey, including the newsmen whom he tries to deceive, but baseball writers are proud of the trust which is often placed in them. Rickey, inordinately suspicious, fails to project this feeling of trust. He substitutes arrogance and scorn, and as a result receives the “bad press” he cannot understand.

One of the reasons he got some bad press was his seeming contradictions and chutzpah in claiming the Robinson story as his own. For example, Commissioner Chandler felt slighted in having his role in Robinson’s breakthrough ignored and he blamed Rickey:

During our hours together out in the cabin I kept getting the impression that Rickey felt he was God Almighty, and that he was somehow the Savior of the black people. He tried his best—and this I know—he and his whole outfit moved in to give him the full credit for breaking the baseball color line. They wanted to keep everybody else, including me, out of it. But of course he couldn’t have done it without my approval. When he came down to Versailles [Kentucky], he had two chances: slim and none. But I did it for him, made it possible. I never could understand why he always cut me out of it, every time he mentioned the Jackie Robinson decision. I was surprised, and I suppose somewhat hurt by his attitude.[fn]Albert (Happy) Chandler with Vance H. Trimble. Heroes, Plain Folks, and Skunks: The Life and Times of Happy Chandler (Chicago: Bonus Books, Inc., 1989), 229.[/fn]

Also feeling slighted was the Daily Worker, which had been actively campaigning since the mid-1930s to integrate baseball. Historian Jules Tygiel once credited the Communist press and the African American press for continually pushing the idea that baseball should be integrated. Daily Worker sports editor Lester Rodney said:

Of course, it always rankled me that [Rickey] never acknowledged the role of the Daily Worker in all this. But he was a big anti-Communist and he hated the idea of us getting credit for anything—especially for breaking the color line. He didn’t want anyone to think that he had succumbed to pressure from the Reds.[fn]Irwin Silber. Press Box Red; The Story of Lester Rodney, the Communist Who Helped Break the Color Line in American Sports (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2003), 102.[/fn]

That may or may not settle the “how” of the decision, but it certainly doesn’t settle the “why” and there again, Rickey offered conflicting reasons. He once told Look magazine sports editor Tim Cohane, in a piece published in the magazine on March 19, 1946: “I cannot face my God much longer knowing that His black creatures are held separate and distinct from His white creatures in the game that has given me all my own.”

That quote, as well as the story that Rickey was a crusader for equal rights after witnessing Charley Thomas (an African American catcher on Rickey’s Ohio Wesleyan team) cry in his South Bend, Indiana, hotel room in 1903 because of discrimination, are examples of what former Daily Worker sportswriter Bill Mardo calls the bubba meinse school of history. (Bubba meinse is a Yiddish expression that loosely translates as something akin to myth.)

In other talks with reporters, Rickey said that signing and then promoting Robinson was based solely on winning a pennant for the Dodgers. An article by John Chamberlain in an April 1948 issue of Harper’s magazine quoted Rickey (who got right to the point of the matter, which seemed to surprise the writer who expected Rickey to be evasive) as saying that Robinson was not promoted “to solve a sociological problem.” Instead, Rickey answered succinctly: “I brought him up for one reason: to win the pennant. I’d play an elephant with pink horns if he could win the pennant.”

The 1947 season was a trying one for the Dodgers. It was a season in which some people made fundamental personal changes in their beliefs that also indirectly helped shape a country. And Branch Rickey led them the whole way. At the end of it all, after losing a heartbreaking World Series to the New York Yankees, four games to three, Rickey encountered Yankees boss Larry MacPhail outside the clubhouse. The two had once been close. But MacPhail’s role in Rickey’s problems with the owners and Durocher’s suspension were a sore spot. Worst of all, MacPhail’s name kept popping up at odd times.

Rickey biographer Lee Lowenfish wrote: “The last straw may have been the recent comment by the combustible Yankees president that Leo Durocher would never have been suspended if Branch Rickey didn’t really want it to happen. In front of a swarm of photographers MacPhail offered a handshake to his defeated rival, but Rickey whispered, ‘I am taking your hand only because people are watching us, but never speak to me again, never.’”[fn]Lee Lowenfish. Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentlemen (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 438.[/fn]

JOE MARREN is an associate professor in the communication department at Buffalo State College. He was a summa cum laude graduate of Buffalo State in 1986, and he received his master’s degree in history from St. Bonaventure University in 1996. Marren worked as a newspaper reporter and then editor at a variety of community newspapers in western New York for eighteen years.

Sources

Books

Chandler, Albert (Happy), with Vance H. Trimble. Heroes, Plain Folks, and Skunks: The Life and Times of Happy Chandler. Chicago: Bonus Books, Inc., 1989.

Golenbock, Peter.  “Men of Conscience,” in Joseph Dorinson and Joram Warmund, editors, Jackie Robinson; Race, Sports and the American Dream, Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1998.

Mardo, Bill. “Robinson—Robeson” in Joseph Dorinson and Joram Warmund, editors, Jackie Robinson; Race, Sports and the American Dream, Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1998.

Marzano, Rudy. The Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s; How Robinson, MacPhail, Reiser and Rickey Changed Baseball. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2005.

Pratkanis, Anthony R. and Marlene E. Turner. “Nine Principles of Successful Affirmative Action: Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson, and the Integration of Baseball,” in The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and the American Culture, 1997 (Jackie Robinson), edited by Peter M. Rutkoff. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2000. Also found in Out of the Shadows; African American Baseball from the Cuban Giants to Jackie Robinson, edited by Bill Kirwin. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

Silber, Irwin. Press Box Red; The Story of Lester Rodney, the Communist Who Helped Break the Color Line in American Sports. Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2003.

Articles

Cohane, Tim. “A Branch Grows in Brooklyn,” Look (March 19, 1946), p. 69.

Fitzgerald, Ed. “Branch Rickey, Dodger Deacon,” Sport, November 1947, p. 58-68.

Gross, Milton. “The Emancipation of Jackie Robinson,” Sport (October 1951), 13ff.

Lardner, John. “Reese and Robinson: Team Within a Team,” New York Times Magazine (September 18, 1949), 17ff.

Lowenfish, Lee. “The Gentlemen’s Agreement and the Ferocious Gentleman Who Broke It,” in The Baseball Research Journal (38:1, pp. 33-34), edited by Nicholas Frankovich. Cleveland: Society for American Baseball Research, 2009.

Mann, Arthur W. “Say Jack Robinson: Meet the Dodgers’ Newest Recruit,” Colliers (March 2, 1946), pp. 67-68.

Meany, Tom. “What Chance,” Sport, January 1947, pp. 12-13, pp. 96-97.

Sheed, Wilfrid. “Branch Rickey: He Revolutionized Baseball. Twice. and He Was a Penny-Pinching, Scheming Hustler of a Saint, Too,” Sport, December 1986, p. 29, p. 137.

Smith, Leverett T.  Jr. “A Man of Many Faucets, All Running at Once; Books by and about Branch Rickey, in The National Pastime; A Review of Baseball History (28), 2008, Society for American Baseball Research, 53-63.

Washburn, Pat. “New York Newspapers and Jackie Robinson’s First Season,” Journalism Quarterly Winter 1981, pp. 640-44.

Young, Dick. “Being A Baseball Writer,” Baseball Digest, January 1953, pp. 83-94.

“Rickey and Robinson,” Crisis, May 1947, p. 137.

Rookie of the Year,” Time (Sept. 22, 1947), 70.

The old ballpark was “the fun house of baseball,” as artist Andy Jurinko has said, with its cozy stands bringing fans near enough to the action to make matters up close and personal, whether for players, umpires, or the person sitting next to you.

It was close enough to hear the players’ chatter, close enough, if you were sitting in line with the first base bag, to see the whites of the first baseman’s eyes. It was close enough for those who were on the field to see and hear you. And to be seen and heard in Brooklyn, at Ebbets Field, was not to be forgotten.

It was a palette of color, from the ads on the outfield walls from the right field corner to the left, whether for Coca Cola, Botany Ties, Burma Shave, Gem Blades, or a host of others, save for a hitter’s blackened background in straightaway center.

There was the scoreboard that jutted out from the right-center field wall, along the right field wall that separated Bedford Avenue’s sidewalk from the field; it was the only wall in the ballpark that did not have a double decked stand behind it. The scoreboard, at each side, angled back to the wall, which was twenty feet high, topped by a twenty foot screen. The top ten feet of that wall were straight; the bottom ten feet were angled back towards the infield, wreaking unpredictable havoc with caroming fly balls.

The angled wall ran over from the right field corner to a double-door exit gate in deepest right-center field that President Roosevelt’s limousine had driven through merely two and a half years before. There was enough of a crack under those doors for children—hell, not just children, adults, too—to lie flat on their stomachs to watch a game. Occasionally, a street cop would come along and tap their heels with a billy club—time to move.

Atop the scoreboard was a Bulova clock. In May of 1946, the 30th to be exact, Bama Rowell of the Braves had stopped that clock in the second inning of a doubleheader’s nightcap, at precisely 4:25 in the afternoon. The ball stayed inside the clock for a double, the inspiration, of course, for the movie version of Bernard Malamud’s book, The Natural.

Below the clock, atop the scoreboard, there was a sign—not yet the Schaefer sign with the illuminating “h” and “e” for hit and error, which would come a year later; this sign invited you to “Shave Electrically.” And of course, there was the sign below the scoreboard, the Abe Stark sign, the sign that beckoned all “Hit Sign, Win Suit.” Ten years earlier, traded to the Dodgers in late career, the right-handed, right-field slice hitter, Woody English, had done so, and more than once.

But did you get a suit, Woody?

“The ball had to hit the sign on a fly, and the official scorer had to verify it,” English remembered. “By the end of the season I had hit the sign three times, so I went down to pick up my suits. A tailor was there—it wasn’t Abe Stark—and he went over to the counter and looked it up and sure enough, he saw that I had three coming. He said, ‘Right this way Woody’ and brought me over to this rack. He showed me these three pretty cheap lookin’ things…and I said, ‘Listen, just give me…one…good …suit.’

“He chuckled and said, ‘All right, Woody, c’mon back here.’ “He took me to the back, where the good suits were. And that’s what I got; one good suit.”

The walls were not padded. Pete Reiser had a nasty habit of running into them. It did not stop him. Another year would go by before that changed, and by that time, the prodigious promise of Pistol Pete would be largely spent, a product of the pounding.

It was 343 feet down the left field line; 297 down the right. Some 850 box seats had been added over the winter, bringing in the fences slightly; although the deepest recesses of right-center field was 407 feet, straightaway center field was only 386 feet, down fourteen feet from the year before.

Up in the bleachers, there were the leather lungs of Hilda Chester, who, warned by her doctors about the fragility of her heart, was given a school bell that she flagged relentlessly, while not abating the yelling at all. One time, when umpire Beans Reardon asked her why she yelled at the men in blue all the time, she replied, “Open your other eye, joik, you’ve got noive like a toothache.”

In the box seats, there was Jack Pierce, who would buy an extra seat for his helium tank; he’d spend time blowing up balloons, yelling “Coooooooo-kie!” serenading the man whose last name was Lavagetto.

In Section 8, there was Shorty Laurice and the Sym-Phony Band, an ever changing crew of musicians that included JoJo Delio, Lou Soriano, Patty George, Jerry Martin, Joe Zollo, and Zollo’s son Frank, the stalwarts. They routinely razzed the umpires with “Three Blind Mice.” No adequate adjustment was made when a fourth member was added to the crews.

When opposing hitters struck out, they were accompanied on their solemn walk to the dugout with “The Worms Crawl In, the Worms Crawl Out,” cymbals and chords blaring when the player took his seat on the bench. Catcher Walker Cooper once tried to outsmart them. He didn’t sit for several innings. When he finally did, they got him, drum and cymbals matching the posterior’s point of impact on the pine.

Public address announcer Tex Rickard would routinely intone that fans sitting along the rail in left field should please remove their clothes. Fans sitting along the third base line back towards that left field corner had good reason for removing their clothes from that special perch: for the last 15 or so feet up to the wall the foul line was painted right on the fence rail. If you were leaning against the rail, you were in fair territory.

Gladys Gooding, who for years played the organ at RKO and Loew’s Theaters before coming to Ebbets Field, was the answer to a trivia question about being the only person who ever played for the Dodgers, the Rangers and the Knicks.

Yet it’s the ethereal things that are hardest to pin down. The Ebbets Field smell has been alternately characterized as oily, inky, beery, a combination scent of hot dogs, mustard, peanuts, a smell of the grass intermingled, picked up even when walking through the Rotunda’s turnstiles down in the caverns, panoplied by the wafting aromas of the Bond Bread Bakery a few blocks away. Sweet.

The most enduring image: the ballpark façade.

At the junction of Sullivan Place and McKeever Place, in spring, 1947, EBBETS FIELD, writ large in the setback, just below the ballpark’s crown, a flag rising precisely in the middle above, testified silently to the beauty of an immortal piece of Americana, and with it, the promise of what the American summer would bring.

And that façade itself, beauty incarnate: fourteen rows of small pane, Federal –style windows, separated by brick pilasters, running from the sidewalk or just above the main gate’s galvanized iron marquise above the entryway almost to the top of the wall, with gargoyles marking the spring line for the crowning, semi-circular windows above each row, where an ornamental circle of brick-belt coursing surrounded the windows, bas-relief medallions of baseballs populating the space in between each of them, a perfect tableau before entering the eighty-foot in diameter Rotunda, with ball and bat chandelier unobtrusively dangling from the 28-foot high elliptical ceiling. If the chandelier seemed high, it was only because the ballpark’s roof itself was only eighty feet off the ground.

Crowded, teeming, the Rotunda was all that symbolized what was wrong and right about the intimacy and design of Ebbets Field, inasmuch as the ticket sellers’ lines cascaded from interior ticket windows to the room’s center, while those holding tickets pushed their way through. But never mind! This was Ebbets Field, where the smell of the grass was already in your nostrils; this was the place where, on Opening Day 1947, a teenager standing and waiting to buy tickets in the morning at the advance sale window heard a commotion, and turned around to see a squad of policemen surrounding a black man who was a head taller than each of them.

This was the moment, the very moment, Jackie Robinson stepped across the threshold of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and prepared to take it to the world, which, as everyone from Brooklyn who ever crossed a bridge understood, is what life is all about.

BOB McGEE is author of “The Greatest Ballpark Ever: Ebbets Field and the Story of the Brooklyn Dodgers” (Rivergate, 2005), which won the 2005 Dave Moore Award. His sports articles have appeared in the “New York Times” and the “Oakland Tribune”; numerous other contributions have appeared elsewhere. He currently lives in Westchester County, north of New York City, but he’s always had a home in Brooklyn.

The Dodgers signed Robinson to a major league contract just five days before the start of the 1947 season. Baseball people, especially those in Brooklyn, were still digesting the previous day’s news of manager Leo Durocher’s one-year suspension (for conduct detrimental to baseball), when the story broke of Robinson’s promotion from the Montreal Royals. He would be the first black American to play in the major leagues since catcher Fleetwood Walker played for the Toledo Blue Stockings of the American Association back in 1884.

Robinson had played second base for the International League’s Montreal Royals in 1946, but on orders from the Dodgers he had been working out at first all spring. He played first base in Brooklyn’s final three exhibition games against the Yankees, and again two days later when the Dodgers opened the season at Ebbets Field against the Boston Braves. Rumors of a sellout may have discouraged some fans from attending, but whatever the reason, a crowd of only 26,623 saw Robinson’s debut.

Jack made the game’s first putout, receiving the throw from fellow rookie Spider Jorgensen on Dick Culler’s ground ball to third base. Interim manager Clyde Sukeforth had Robinson batting second, so after Eddie Stanky grounded out, Jack stepped in against Johnny Sain for his first major league at-bat. Sain, the National League’s winningest right-hander in 1946, retired him easily on a bouncer to third baseman Bob Elliott. After flying out to left fielder Danny Litwhiler in the third inning, Robinson appeared to have gotten his first big league hit in the fifth. But, shortstop Culler made an outstanding play on his ground ball and turned it into a well-executed 6-4-3 double play.

When he next batted, in the seventh, Brooklyn was trailing, 3–2. Stanky was on first, having opened the inning by drawing Sain’s fifth walk of the afternoon. It was an obvious bunt situation and Robinson laid down a beauty, pushing the ball deftly up the right side. Boston’s rookie first baseman, Earl Torgeson, fielded it, but with Robinson speeding down the line, he was forced to hurry his throw. The ball hit Jack and caromed away, allowing him to take second and Stanky to reach third. Pete Reiser’s double scored both runners and finished Sain. Reiser later scored on Gene Hermanski’s fly ball off reliever Mort Cooper as the Dodgers won 5–3. Hal Gregg, in relief of starter Joe Hatten, got the win, and Hugh Casey got the first of his league-leading eighteen saves. Of course nobody had ever heard of “saves” in 1947, and Casey would die never knowing that he had twice been the National League leader.

When the Dodgers took the field in the ninth inning, Robinson remained on the bench as veteran Howie Schultz took over at first base. Sukeforth had inserted Schultz as a defensive measure, but the Dodgers soon realized that Robinson needed no help. Schultz played in only one more game before Brooklyn sold him to the Phillies. Ed Stevens, the team’s other first baseman, played in just five games before he was sent back to the minors.

The popular Pete Reiser, coming back from yet another injury, clearly had been the star of the game, and it was he, not Robinson, who was the focus of the story in the next day’s New York Times. Roscoe McGowen’s game account mentioned Robinson only in relation to his play, leaving columnist Arthur Daley to take note of his debut, which he called uneventful. In retrospect, it would be easy, and fashionable, to attribute the writers’ casual treatment of this history-making game to racism. However, I prefer to think that they handled it in this way because it took place at a time when baseball reporters believed that that’s what they were: baseball reporters, men who felt their sole duty was to report what took place on the field. Red Barber and Connie Desmond, the Dodgers’ radio broadcasters did the same. The mind boggles to think how the media would cover such an event today.

LYLE SPATZ is the editor of “The Team That Forever Changed Baseball and America: The 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers”, the first book in SABR’s “Memorable Teams in Baseball History” series with the University of Nebraska Press. This chapter evolved from the author’s presentation at the “Jackie Robinson: Race, Sports, and the American Dream” conference held at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University on April 3-5, 1997.

However, sometimes things get a little murky. Take, for example, the game of July 20, 1947, played by the Brooklyn Dodgers against the St. Louis Cardinals in Ebbets Field. A protest by the Cardinals that day was upheld, although the specific rule that was violated is hard to pin down. Also, the remedy decreed by National League president Ford Frick went beyond the protest rules.

Let’s address these two points separately, beginning with a short summary of what happened on the field that day. Jim Hearn pitched a great game for St. Louis, allowing no runs, two walks, only four singles, and held a 2–0 lead through eight innings. In the top of the ninth with two outs and the bases empty, Cardinals right fielder Ron Northey hit a “towering drive” to the wall in center off Hugh Casey. Dodgers center fielder Pete Reiser leaped but couldn’t get it.

Umpire Larry Goetz, working at first base in the three-man crew, ran into the outfield and immediately called “No,” ruling that the ball hit the top of the wall. Beans Reardon was the other base umpire, and as Northey approached third base, Reardon signaled that it was a home run. Northey naturally slowed his pace as he continued to the plate, where umpire Jocko Conlan called him out, ending the inning.

Roscoe McGowen described it in the New York Times: “There was a lapse of a couple of seconds before the ball dropped back on the field, where [right fielder Dixie] Walker picked it up and fired it to [second baseman Eddie] Stanky, who relayed it to [catcher] Bruce Edwards.” The sliding Northey was tagged out on a close play, pictured on page 20 of the July 21, 1947, edition of the New York Times. The Sporting News has a picture of the play at the plate from a different angle on page nine of its July 30, 1947 issue.

The Cardinals immediately and vehemently protested, saying that Northey had been deceived by Reardon. The consensus in the press box and from the umpires (in later testimony) was that the slow-footed Northey would almost certainly have been safe had he not slowed down.

Manager Eddie Dyer formally protested the game and the Dodgers came to bat, still trailing by two runs. The Cardinals used three pitchers to face seven batters, but obtained only one out as Brooklyn collected three hits, a walk, and a stolen base (coupled with a throwing error by catcher Joe Garagiola), and used three pinch-hitters to score three times and apparently win the game, 3—2.

President Frick’s ruling was released on July 25, and he tried to be Solomon-like as he reached an unorthodox decision. The starting point was to accept the widespread view that Northey would have scored except for Reardon’s action. Therefore, Frick ruled that Northey was to be credited with a home run. However, he also let the three Dodgers runs in the bottom of the ninth stand and the game went in the books as a 3—3 tie with all individual records counting in the official totals. Only Casey’s win and Murry Dickson’s loss were expunged. A replay of the entire game was scheduled as part of a doubleheader on August 18, when the Cardinals were next scheduled to be in Brooklyn.

What rule was violated? The rule book does not specifically address confusing or deceptive actions by umpires, so Frick made a commonsense determination that the events on the field were (a) caused by the umpire, and (b) unfair to the Cardinals. The stated procedure in the rule book for an allowed protest is to resume the game at the point of the protest. In this case, that would mean the Cardinals should still be batting with two outs in the top of the ninth and a 3—0 lead. The three Dodgers runs in the bottom of the ninth would be wiped out. Frick explained his action: “. . . fairness, common sense and sportsmanship must govern any decision not explicitly covered by the rules.”

There are two questions that remain unanswered for me. (1) Where was Reardon standing when the play began? (2) Why did Northey slide? It is interesting to note how umpires choreograph their movements when there are only two men working the bases. Even though Northey was a left-handed batter, it seems likely that with the bases empty, Reardon was on or near the left-field foul line. Such a position would be consistent with the facts that Goetz ran into the outfield to view the play and that Reardon was near third to make an indication to Northey.

The sliding question is more vexing. If Northey believed that Reardon gave him the homer sign, then why would he slide? The story in The Sporting News says he “jogged” to the plate. Perhaps he noticed the ball coming in and decided that Reardon was wrong, causing him to speed up and then slide in an attempt to evade the tag.

Final note: The tie game was played off as the second half of a day-night doubleheader on August 18, meaning that the Dodgers charged separate admission for the two games. The attendance at the first game was 32,781 and at the second was 33,723. The Dodgers donated “all receipts of the night game, amounting to $46,000, plus a probable $4,000 from the Frank Stevens concession stands, to the Brooklyn War Memorial Fund, Inc.” The Dodgers won both games that day, by scores of 7–5 and 12-3.

DAVID W. SMITH is the founder and president of Retrosheet. Learn more about protested games at Retrosheet.org.

In 1947 Israel (the nation state) was still one year from its founding. The Holocaust was too painful even to contemplate. And Hank Greenberg was playing his final year in the Major Leagues, at first base for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Greenberg was the most successful Jewish sports figure in the mid-twentieth century in the national pastime. He hit more home runs in one season than anyone but Babe Ruth, (some say it was anti-Semitism that kept him from passing the Babe, but baseball historians argue that’s unlikely.)1 Greenberg played in many All-Star Games and in several World Series, served his country in World War II—one of the first ballplayers to enlist—and ended up as one of only two Jewish players (the other, Sandy Koufax) in the Hall of Fame. But more important, Hank refused to play on Yom Kippur (of course he did play on Rosh Hashanah, but that’s another story). He inspired a poem, a banner headline in the Detroit press, and the love of Jews everywhere.2

But my interest in Hank Greenberg is not because of what he meant to the Jews, but because of what he meant to Jackie Robinson, and what that connection meant to Jews who are passionately committed to social justice. The 1947 season wasn’t only Greenberg’s last year as a major-league player, it was Robinson’s first. And while it wasn’t easy for Greenberg to endure the anti-Semitism in the majors, it didn’t compare to the abuse Jackie Robinson experienced when he became the first African American to play in organized baseball in the twentieth century, after blacks were barred from the sport not by law, but by a “gentleman’s agreement” among the owners.

Robinson and Greenberg met one afternoon when Jackie reached first, and Hank was the first baseman. In that encounter at first base, Robinson reported that Greenberg treated him with respect and said words of support to him. And in the Jewish press (and the New York Times) that was news.3 That moment became a legend in Jewish baseball history, preserved in every account about Greenberg (and Robinson) that Jews write.

That moment is important to me because it reminds me that in those days Jews saw part of our role as Americans to support unpopular causes in the name of justice. We could be the ones who set an example by welcoming Robinson into an America that was learning to denounce bigotry. We pride ourselves on our role in the civil rights movement, on the fact that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched with Martin Luther King. That moment reminds me that Jews should also take pride in the fact that our passion for civil rights started much earlier (some suggest as far back as the beginning of the century), and had one of its greatest moments when we stood up for Jackie Robinson.

I grew up in Brooklyn in the Robinson era, to the stories my parents told me about the importance of being a Brooklyn Dodgers fan because they had the courage to break the color line. And I certainly was not alone. Fiction and memoir writers have immortalized the moment when Robinson came up to bat to the Jewish cries of “Yankel, Yankel,” from avid supporters.4 In the Ken Burns “Baseball” documentary, the segment about Robinson ends with a quote from the family of Eric Foner describing their experience on Passover that year. When the youngest asked the question at the seder, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” the family replied, because tonight for the first time in this century, a black man played on a white team.5

Jews were also actors in the process that brought the event about. Though much credit is given to Dodgers owner Branch Rickey, and of course to Robinson himself, the real campaign to integrate baseball had been going on for almost two decades. It was led by the African American press, with a vigorous supporting role played by the radical Jews who were sports writers at the Communist Daily Worker. And we also note the courage of Isadore Muchnick, the Boston city councilman from a liberal Jewish district who used the power of his office to put pressure on the Boston teams to give Robinson a tryout, knowing his district would stand by him, defending his actions based on the teaching of the prophets.6

Robinson himself acknowledged and appreciated the support he received from the Jewish community, and like many blacks of his era, saw in the Jews the model for the black community to achieve success in this country. Robinson defended the Jews even when the black-Jewish alliance began to rupture in the late 1960s, up until his death in 1972.7

Is this only a happy story? Of course, the fact that Robinson had to defend us means that the Jewish-black alliance had already begun to come apart by the 1970s. And of course there were Jews who didn’t want Jackie Robinson and his family to live in their neighborhood in Brooklyn in the 1940s, and others who didn’t want him to join their country club in Connecticut in the 1960s. And there were certainly those who fought for Robinson because they believed that the advancement of African Americans would also be good for the Jews. But I’d like to remember the part of our Jewish heritage that encourages Jews to remember the hesed of our youth; to stick our necks out, support causes that may not be popular, that may not even be in our own self-interest. It’s part of who we are as Jews and what Jeremiah wants us to remember.

RABBI REBECCA T. ALPERT is an associate professor of religion and women’s studies at Temple University. She attended Barnard College before receiving her Ph.D in religion at Temple University and her rabbinical training at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote, Pennsylvania. She is the coauthor of “Exploring Judaism: A Reconstructionist Approach” and the author of “Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of Tradition” and “Whose Torah? A Concise Guide to Progressive Judaism,” as well as several edited volumes and numerous articles. Her specialization is religion in America, and she focuses on issues related to gender, sexuality, and race. She has recently taught courses on religion in American public life; Jews, America, and sports; and sexuality in world religions. Her most recent book “Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball,” was published by Oxford Press in 2011.

Notes

In order to assess the relationship between the 1947 Dodgers and the advertising industry, it may be instructive to look, however briefly, at the state of American consumer culture, and by extension the state of advertising, at this pivotal time in history. The period immediately following World War II was one of rapid economic expansion. “Economic growth,” writes James T. Patterson, “was indeed the decisive force in the shifting attitudes and expectations in the post-War era.”[fn]James T. Patterson. Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1947. New York: Oxford UP, 1996, p. 61.[/fn] “These were above all years of nearly unimaginable consumption of goods,” he notes. “Between 1939 and 1948, clothing sales jumped three-fold, furniture, four-fold, liquor five-fold and household appliances, including TVs, five- fold.”[fn]Patterson, p. 70.[/fn] Given the fact that consumer goods were in short supply during the war, it is not surprising that most of this growth occurred between 1946 and 1948.

But what was behind this postwar consumer frenzy? What induced Americans to spend with abandon? Clearly, a reaction against the deprivations of the Depression and wartime was behind a good part of postwar consumerism. But Americans, accustomed by necessity to frugality, were not in the habit of consuming. They had to be directed to do so. This was the job of advertising, which James B. Twitchell describes as “the culture developed to expedite the central problem of capitalism: the distribution of surplus goods.”[fn]James B. Twitchell. AdCult: USA. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. p. 41.[/fn] And surplus goods there were aplenty, as is generally the case after a major war.

In addition to the postwar surplus that needed to be sold, factories geared up for wartime production had to be put to new use. So, too, was there a need to employ new technologies developed during the war. Taken together, these factors fed what was to become one of the largest producers of culture in America, the advertising industry. In many ways, 1947 was a transitional year for advertising. The “creative revolution” in advertising was still nearly a decade away. But while ads in the print media still resembled those of wartime, they were far more plentiful, as were the goods they sold. At the same time, a new media, soon to become the nation’s primary vehicle for advertising as well as a major durable good, was emerging. Indeed, 1947 may be seen as the beginning of the age of television.

So how did the postwar advertising boom play out in Brooklyn, and more importantly, how did it relate to the Dodgers? Although Brooklynites, like all Americans, had just emerged from a global war, their home, formerly the fourth-largest city in America but always the poor stepsister to “the city,” was essentially provincial, isolated from Greater New York as a whole. A seemingly diverse area, early postwar Brooklyn was really a patchwork of distinct neighborhoods, which Carl Prince describes as a “borough of marbleized ghettoes,” with little in common with one another. Writes Prince:

A corollary to this was the frequently confrontational nature of ethnic relationships in the borough, a hostility that matched the sense of isolation without. The Dodgers formed an ameliorating force for unity in Brooklyn, but the team’s local mystique did not miraculously bring all the people to love each other. Still, the Dodger presence helped.[fn]Carl E. Prince. Brooklyn’s Dodgers: The Bums, the Borough, and the Best of Baseball.  New York: Oxford UP, 1996. p. 102.[/fn]

*****

Perhaps the best way to advertise to such a fragmented demographic was to invoke the one element that served to unify it, the Dodgers. As such, the team was featured prominently in local advertising in 1947.

A natural place for the advertising industry to place ads in order to appeal to Dodgers fans was in the borough’s major news organ, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. In addition to the ubiquitous advertising for Dodgers games, both at home at Ebbets Field and against the archrival Giants at the Polo Grounds, the Dodgers were invoked in nongame-related print ads throughout the Eagle. Naturally, most of Dodgers-related advertising was concentrated in issues from April through mid-October, baseball season, though even in the offseason the Dodgers were never entirely absent from the paper’s advertising pages.

Businesses linking themselves to the Dodgers in the Brooklyn paper were, by and large, local. Lindsay Laboratories and Pharmacy, close by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, for example, welcomed the Dodgers at the outset of the season, urging Eagle readers to drop in to request a schedule of the team’s home games, and presumably to spend some money on health and beauty items, many newly available following the war, and perhaps have a soda at the fountain. And because watching baseball and otherwise consuming was apt to make a person hungry, Lee’s Chinese restaurant, just a stone’s throw from Ebbets Field, trumpeted its proximity to the Dodgers, urging readers to convene there before and after games.

Regional and national advertisers also understood that the way to appeal to Eagle readers, presumably Dodgers fans all, was to allude to the team in their advertising. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, freed from wartime travel restrictions, appealed to Dodgers fans who might be planning a foray out of Brooklyn, however briefly, in an ad featuring a cartoon representation of an angry player informing a stone-faced umpire that “we wuz robbed,” followed by rather twisted copy reading, “But Brooklynites say that with pleasure when they discover that B&O rids them of inconvenience, traffic problems and baggage worries.”[fn]Display ad, Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 11, 1947.[/fn] The makers of Durex double-edge razor blades regularly ran contests in the Eagle, offering free tickets to fans who could describe in twenty-seven words or fewer who was the best player at a given position. While fans of all three teams were invited to enter, Dodgers fans were privileged, Brooklyn’s team always receiving top billing in the Eagle ads.

Naturally, winning the 1947 pennant brought joy to fans across Brooklyn. It also brought visions of dollar signs to Eagle advertisers. Page after page of ads placed by local businesses filled the Eagle between September 23 and October 2 congratulating the team for clinching a trip to the World Series. Some offered fans souvenirs, others claimed to be the ideal location to celebrate after a Dodgers win, and still others simply linked their names to that of the team, as if to become winners by association. But they all trumpeted their connection to the Dodgers.

As might be expected in a booming consumer economy, banks competed fiercely for the accounts of Brooklyn’s residents. South Brooklyn Savings and Loan, one of at least a dozen banks to place a congratulatory ad in the Eagle, offered fans a “FREE World Series souvenir baseball bank,” invoking Brooklyn pride with the copy “It’s a homer! It’s just the thing for your desk in the office and the bureau at home.” Not explicitly mentioned, but suggested by the ad copy, is the assumption that once those “base hit nickels, dimes and quarters grow to home run dollars,” the best place for them would naturally be the South Brooklyn Savings and Loan.[fn]Display ad, South Brooklyn Savings And Loan, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 25, 1947.[/fn] Not to be outdone, the Williamsburgh Savings Bank, the Brooklyn Trust Company, and the Lafayette National Bank of Brooklyn, as well as the Dime, Fulton, and Roosevelt Savings Banks, all offered their congratulations to the team in the pages of the Eagle.

The Marine Roof of the upscale Hotel Bossert, a few blocks down Montague Street from the Dodgers’ offices, offered itself as a place to “Celebrate our Victory” by “Dancing to the music of Hugo.”[fn]The Bossert, once Brooklyn’s most luxurious hotel, is now owned and operated by the Watchtower as a dormitory for Jehovah’s Witnesses.[/fn] The equally elegant St. George Hotel, home to several of the team’s players during the season, attempted to appeal to Dodgers fans with poetry, of sorts. “Congratulations, Brooklyn team/For every hit and run/You’re in the groove, you’re on the beam/you’ve triumphed, conquered, won,” read its print spot.[fn]Display ads, Marine Roof of the Hotel Bossert, and Hotel St. George, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 2, 1947.[/fn] Local saloons and eateries from Bay Ridge to Flatbush, from Fort Greene to Midwood, from Flatlands to Bushwick, places with names like Gallagher’s Subway Inns and the Hole in the Wall, Hoes and the White Shutter, Flynn’s Cabaret, and Hammy’s Pantry urged fans to “Dodge in and Celebrate,” or something of the sort.[fn]Display ads, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 2, 1947.[/fn]

Purveyors of consumer goods produced by the repurposed war machine also jumped on the Dodgers bandwagon. Like the Dodgers, Abraham & Straus, Brooklyn’s iconic department store, had a great year in 1947, expanding and adding, among other things, a new furniture department, christened Contemporama.[fn]Jan Whitaker. Service And Style: How the American Department Store Fashioned the Middle Class. New York: St. Martin’s, 2006. p. 315.[/fn] A&S, as it was commonly known, frequently implemented Dodger tie-ins in its advertising, not only at the season’s successful conclusion, but throughout the year. Indeed, earlier in the season, the retailer emphasized its Brooklyn roots by connecting itself to an amateur baseball series, also sponsored by the Eagle and the team, appropriately titled Brooklyn Against the World.[fn]Federated Department Stores,  http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=888, July 8, 2009.[/fn] The store’s ad copy reads, “When Brooklyn boys set out to lick the World—look out world,” declaring Brooklyn to be “Dodger Town.”[fn]Display ad, Abraham & Straus,  Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 14, 1947.[/fn] Moreover, A&S would claim agency in the team’s success. “Whee! We’re in! Bring on those Yankees,” screams a half-page A&S ad, as if the retailer naturally was at least partly responsible for winning the pennant.[fn]Display ad, Abraham & Straus, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 23, 1947.[/fn]

Another downtown Brooklyn department store, Loeser’s, also got in on the act. Taking a page from a discount clothing purveyor and local politician, Abe Stark of Ebbets Field’s “Hit Sign, Win Suit” fame, Loeser’s promised a free nine-by-twelve-foot Karastan rug to the Dodger who hit the first home run of the Series at Ebbets Field.[fn]Display ad, Loeser’s, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 1, 1947.[/fn] Of course, Abe Stark placed a congratulatory ad, as well. These major retailers were joined by Bohack Food Stores, a Brooklyn and Long Island grocery chain, which ran a quarter-page ad depicting a gigantic cartoon ballplayer in a Dodgers uniform waving a banner reading “NL Champs,” sitting upon a pile of presumably vanquished National Leaguers, each wearing a cap identifying him as a representative of the other clubs, in front of a brightly shining sun, illuminating the Brooklyn Bridge. The ad asks Eagle readers, “Who’s a Bum?”[fn]Display ad, Bohack Food  Stores, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 23, 1947.[/fn]

The Eagle was not the only news outlet to benefit from dollars generated by Dodgers-related advertising, especially at World Series time. Ads invoking Brooklyn’s team also appeared in the New York Times and the city’s other media outlets. For the most part these ads did not appeal strictly to Dodgers fans, but invoked the team and its fans in relationship to New York’s other teams. George-Wally Haberdashers and Hatters, located in Manhattan, for example, notes that a featured hat might be “seen at the stadium,” without specifying which of the city’s three major-league ball parks it meant. This ad, claiming that “Whether you’re a Yankee or a Dodger fan, you’re always a winner in this ever popular off-the-face style by Dobbs.”[fn]Display ad, George-Wally Haberdashers and Hatters, New York Times, October 1, 1947.[/fn] The ad appeared in the Times on October 1, and was clearly intended to draw consumers from fans of not one, but two of the city’s teams, capitalizing on the fortuitous occurrence of an all-New York Subway Series. And if a Giants fan just happened in, he too could be the proud owner of a fashionable Dobbs. Unlike the ads in the fundamentally local Eagle, targeted directly at Brooklynites, George-Wally Haberdashers covered all its bases.

Given the combined popularity and success of the Dodgers, it is no surprise to find product endorsements and testimonial ads by individual Dodgers players in the pages of the print media, especially in New York. Testimonials were, after all, the meat-and-potatoes of the advertising industry, coming to prominence in the 1920s. Dixie Walker, perhaps the team’s most popular player, endorsed one of the borough’s own home brews, Schaefer Beer, in the New York Times. The testimonial seems to be aimed at New York baseball fans in general, referring to Walker as “baseball’s hardest hitting outfielder” who calls the Brooklyn brew the “finest beer I ever tasted.”[fn]Display ad, Schaefer Beer, New York Times, May 29, 1947.[/fn] Implicit in the ad is the notion that by consuming Walker’s favorite beer, Walker’s fans and other connoisseurs might indirectly share in the player’s talent. Schaefer drinkers needed only to open a cold one to “be like Dixie,” becoming hard-hitters themselves, both literally and figuratively.

Eventually, Schaefer, soon to become known as “the one beer to have, if you’re having more than one,” would cement a major sponsorship deal with the Dodgers organization, but not in 1947. Indeed, it took until 1951 for the brewery to grab a long-desired piece of the Dodgers’ sponsorship pie, the result of Branch Rickey’s reluctance to take money from the beer industry.[fn]Roberta Newman, “Now Pitching for the Dodgers: The Local Character of Baseball and Advertising in Brooklyn, 1890-1957,” in Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture 2005-2006, William M. Simons, ed.  Jefferson, NC:  McFarland, 2007, p. 81.[/fn] The Schaefer sign, with its light-up H for a hit and E for an error, was added to the Ebbets Field scoreboard, right above Abe Stark’s sign, in 1951. Eventually, Connie Desmond, one of the team’s broadcasters, would pitch the brew to the team’s fans. But in 1947 Walker was the sole Dodger to tout the pleasure of quaffing a cold Schaefer.

Although the majority of Dodger-related advertising appeared in the local print media in 1947, occasionally national ads also invoked the team and its players. Once again, Dixie Walker was one of the primary vehicles by which baseball fans and newspaper readers in other cities would consume the Dodgers. In fact, for many Americans outside New York, Walker, through his endorsement advertising, was the face of the Dodgers of 1947. Walker sold Wheaties and Wonder Bread to readers of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post. He also pitched Raleigh cigarettes, an endorsement that appears to be counterintuitive on more than one level. That Walker, an athlete and a “role model” to American boyhood, would be paid to claim “New Raleigh 903 is Smoother, Milder, Better Tasting,” seems well-nigh incredible by early twenty-first century standards.[fn]Display ad, Raleigh Cigarettes, Washington Post, July 2, 1947.[/fn] But it was not at all unusual for Walker and celebrity athletes like him to be paid to lend their names and images to cigarette advertising. Neither was it unusual for Walker, a nonsmoker, to endorse a product he did not use. It was not until 1961 that the Federal Trade Commission enforced “Truth in Advertising” laws, mandating that celebrities endorse only products they actually used.[fn]Roberta Newman, “It Pays to be Personal: Baseball and Product Endorsements,” NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture, Volume 12.1, 2003, p. 35.[/fn] The fact that Walker endorsed Raleigh, rather than Old Golds, also appears odd by contemporary standards. Old Golds were, after all, the Dodgers’ radio sponsors. In a clear example of a product tie-in, during Dodgers’ broadcasts a home team home run was an “Old Goldie.” Yet, despite the fact that Walker’s Raleigh testimonial might read as a conflict of interest, neither was it uncommon in 1947 for a ballplayer to endorse a brand produced by his team’s sponsor’s competitor.

Dixie Walker was not the only member of the 1947 Dodgers to endorse products, both locally and nationally. Shortstop Pee Wee Reese, for example, pitched for Rheingold beer, one of Schaefer’s primary competitors in the New York market. But perhaps no single player had a bigger impact on Dodgers-related advertising than the 1947 Rookie of the Year, Jack Roosevelt Robinson. As has been well documented, on April 15 Robinson stepped onto Brooklyn’s playing field, beginning the slow, inexorable process of desegregating major-league baseball. And Robinson’s impact on Dodger-related advertising was nearly as large as his impact on baseball, as a whole.

Naturally, Robinson’s debut had an immediate effect on advertising in the black press. Neighborhoods served by the Amsterdam News, the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Baltimore Afro-American, among other traditionally black publications, grew substantially during the 1940s, the result of a second “great migration” of laborers from the South, seeking economic opportunities and improved living conditions not available in rural regions firmly under the thumb of Jim Crow. Writes James T. Patterson, “This was a massive migration in so short a time—one of the most significant demographic shifts in American history—and it was often agonizingly stressful.”[fn]Patterson, p. 19.[/fn] Instantly, a significant new group of consumers might be reached through Dodgers-related advertising. This demographic differed from the team’s traditional fan base in more ways than one, which is made apparent by the ads intended to appeal to the new target market.

Over the course of the 1947 season, any number of New York businesses targeting African-American consumers linked themselves to Robinson in the pages of the Amsterdam News and the New York Age. Local businesses in Brooklyn’s own rapidly expanding predominantly black neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant, were no exception. The Silver Rail Bar and Grill on Fulton Street, for example, advertised a “Jackie Robinson Gift Party,” noting in parenthetical small print, “Jackie will not appear in person.”[fn]Display ad, Silver Rail Bar and Grill, New York Amsterdam News, August 30, 1947.[/fn] Harlem’s baseball fans were also targeted by local businesses advertising in New York’s black press. Following a Dodgers-Giants match at the Polo Grounds, Bowman’s Henry Armstrong Melody Room at St. Nicholas Avenue and 125th Street invited Robinson’s fans to celebrate with friends at their establishment, though no gift appears to have been involved.

Of course, Robinson’s appeal extended well beyond New York City. Resembling the congratulatory ads for the pennant-winning Dodgers that appeared in the Eagle at the end of the season, page after page of advertising linking local black businesses in other cities with substantial African-American communities across the country also appeared in black newspapers outside New York. A page of ads that ran in the Courier during the Dodgers’ first visit to Pittsburgh is representative of congratulatory advertisements placed in the black press. Vet Sales Company Army-Navy Surplus, Evans Tailors, and Anderson’s Service Stations all invoke Robinson. United Clothing and Furniture Company, offering easy weekly payments, lauds the African-American infielder. More importantly, Virgil H. Lucas and A.A. Lenior, attorneys, tell Robinson, “We’re rooting for you,” in their ad.[fn]Display ads, Pittsburgh Courier, May 17, 1947.[/fn] Each of these ads have something else in common. In every case, the team name is nowhere to be seen. Herein lies a clear distinction between congratulatory ads in the Courier and the other black newspapers and those placed in the Eagle. Like Lucas and Lenior, small local businesses in African-American neighborhoods outside of New York make it clear that it is Robinson, not the Dodgers as a team, with whom they wish to be associated.

Jackie Robinson, like Dixie Walker, also endorsed national products, not only in the black press, but in mainstream print media as well. While Walker sold Wonder bread to white readers of the nation’s papers, Robinson sold Bond bread in the black press, primarily in New York. Not only does Robinson’s Bond endorsement ad, which ran repeatedly throughout the season, include a personal testimonial, it also offers consumers a trade card with an image of the Dodger. “Your grocer will give you a pocket-size reproduction of this Jackie Robinson photograph, free for the asking,” reads the advertisement.[fn]“Congratulations Jackie Robinson,” New York Amsterdam News, August 23, 1947.[/fn] Presumably, while in the market, shoppers would also fill their carts with groceries, including Bond bread.

And like Walker, Robinson, also a nonsmoker, endorsed cigarettes, in this case, the Dodgers’ sponsor, Old Golds, in ads featuring action photographs of Robinson, with facsimile autographs bearing the legend “For a treat instead of a treatment.”[fn]Robinson’s Old Gold ads appeared in a variety of news outlets throughout 1947 and for years after.[/fn] Robinson’s Old Gold ads differ from the local ads in the black press. Not only was Old Gold a national brand, but Robinson’s endorsement appeared in mainstream papers as well as in the black press. Indeed, it might be said that Robinson’s national product endorsements, whose number grew throughout his career, may have led to changes in the way in which African-Americans were perceived by the majority of American consumers. It is, moreover, a little ironic that Robinson and Walker served, individually, as the advertising faces of the 1947 Dodgers. Walker, who initially had opposed Robinson joining the Dodgers, was traded after the 1947 season, while Robinson continued to the advertising face of the team throughout his career.

Throughout the 1947 season, one theme surfaces in print advertising, whether the outlet was black or mainstream, national or local. Wherever the Dodgers had fans, print ads sold televisions. Commercial television, which was introduced during a Dodgers game on July 1, 1941, with a short spot for Bulova clocks, had been halted due to the war, but resumed after hostilities ceased.[fn]James R Walker, Robert V Bellamy.  Center Field Shot: A History of Baseball on Television, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. p. 16.[/fn] On March 1, 1947 the Dodgers announced the first agreement by a major-league team to televise all seventy-seven home games, co-sponsored by Ford Motor Company and General Mills.[fn]“Advertising News and Notes,” New York Times, March 1, 1947.[/fn] Ford, along with Gillette, would also go on to sponsor the 1947 World Series.[fn]Walker and Bellamy, p. 70.[/fn] In reality, the impact of television advertising in 1947 was small, as was ad revenue. After all, fewer than one percent of all American households owned sets.[fn]Walker and Bellamy, p. 24.[/fn] A new twelve-inch receiver cost approximately $300.[fn]Walker and Bellamy, p. 26.[/fn] That sum represented ten percent of the median family income in 1947.[fn]Patterson, p. 63.[/fn] Therefore, very few viewers were aware of the poor quality of the commercials shown during Dodgers broadcasts, regular season and World Series alike.[fn]Walker and Bellamy, p. 25.[/fn] Most who saw the games did so in taverns and saloons. But television in 1947 relied on baseball for content. As James Walker and Robert Bellamy write, “The RCA chairman, David Sarnoff observed . . . ’W)e (television makers) had to have baseball games and if they demanded millions for the rights, we would have to give it to them.”[fn]Walker and Bellamy, p. 26.[/fn] “Television did not create baseball,” Walker and Bellamy note, “(b)ut baseball helped to create television. Newly minted television stations were not the only ones that need baseball to fill their broadcast hours. Television manufacturers need appealing programs to push consumers to buy their first sets.”[fn]Walker and Bellamy, p. 26.[/fn]

And sell sets they did. Ads for televisions appeared all over the print media in 1947, especially in New York. Bressner Radio, Inc, offered Eagle readers “a season’s pass to Ebbets Field” with the new DuMont 1947 Teleset. The model, illustrated in the ad, depicts a huge console with a tiny screen. What is on that screen? Of course, it is a crude drawing of the action on the field.[fn]Display ad, Bressner Radio, Inc, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 4, 1947.[/fn] Ads for televisions evoking the Dodgers, placed by Davega, a New York area appliance chain, were almost ubiquitous in virtually every regional print outlet during the 1947 season. One Davega ad, published in both the Times and the Amsterdam News, predicted a Yankees-Dodgers World Series as early as August, in an attempt to sell Philco televisions, offering easy installment payments as well as free delivery.

RCA, not to be outdone, placed a full-page ad in the New York Times, making sure consumers were aware of the fact that not only the Dodgers but also the Giants and the Yankees broadcast their home games. RCA’s ad included the promise that “several television cameras strategically located cover the baseball diamond to bring you a close-up of the action wherever it occurs. The engineer can switch from one camera to the other for the best view.”[fn]Display ad, RCA, New York Times, June 1, 1947.[/fn] Why buy any other brand?

In many ways 1947 was the heyday for Brooklyn as well as Dodgers, but changes were afoot. Following the lead of his father, a real-estate developer who fled his Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood when an African-American family moved in, Bill Levitt broke ground on Long Island for what would become the largest private housing project in American history. The lily-white subdivision was to be called Island Trees, but the name Levittown stuck.[fn]David Halberstam, The Fifties, New York: Villard Books, 1993, p. 131.[/fn] “Suburbs had long surrounded major cities, but there had been relatively little residential building in the 1930s and early 1940s, and the fantastic sprawl of suburbia was only beginning in the mid-1940,” writes Patterson.[fn]Patterson, p. 11.[/fn] And what did Bill Levitt offer free to new homebuyers in his development?—a television set. Why make the trip to Ebbets Field, when the Dodgers could come to you in the comfort of your brand-new, two bedroom cape or colonial? Indeed, with the breaking of ground in Levittown, white flight from New York had begun. Many of the Eagle’s readers, avid Robinson fans all, would soon begin the exodus out of Brooklyn, headed for Long Island, New Jersey, and points west. Ten years later, the Dodgers would follow.

In many ways Dodger-related advertising, a sign of postwar prosperity and consumerism, may be seen as a bellwether for what was to come. The team’s fans would retreat into their new homes, complete with their Contemporama furniture and labor-saving appliances purchased at A&S, not the one in Brooklyn, but in the store’s branches in New Jersey and on Long Island. They would watch Jackie Robinson steal home in Game One of the 1955 World Series on RCA televisions, perhaps purchased at Davega’s. Still, the mark of these wholesale changes, which may be traced to the early postwar years, would not be truly felt for nearly a decade. Unlike the 1955 Dodgers, the 1947 Dodgers did not win the World Series; nevertheless, it most certainly was a great year for Brooklyn, its team, and Dodger-related advertising.

ROBERTA J. NEWMAN is a cultural historian who has written extensively on sport and the media. She is currently working on a coauthored book-length project dealing with the last days of segregated black baseball. A lifelong Brooklynite, she is a member of the faculty of New York University’s liberal studies program.

“Joe DiMaggio up, holding that club down at the end. Big fellow sets, Hatten pitches—a curveball, high outside for ball one. Sooo, the Dodgers are ahead, 8–5. And the crowd well knows that with one swing of his bat this fellow’s capable of making it a brand-new game again. Outfield deep, around toward left, the infield over-shifted. Here’s the pitch, swung on—belted! It’s a long one deep into left center—back goes Gionfriddo! Back- back-back-back-back-back . . . he makes a one-handed catch against the bullpen! Ohhh-hooo, Doctor!”

Television, a World Series first that year, caught the iconic Yankee Clipper’s rare flicker of emotion as he kicked the dirt near second base. Joe D. was still miffed after the game. “‘Don’t write this in the paper,’ [DiMaggio] told a group of reporters, ‘but the truth is that if he had been playing me right, he would have made it look easy.’”[fn]Halberstam, David. Summer of ’49. New York, NY: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2002. p. 49. David Halberstam, age 13, was in the stands at Yankee Stadium that day. See Zant, John. “Gionfriddo’s Catch Receives the Stamp of Authority”. Santa Barbara Newsroom, May 11, 2007.[/fn] Gionfriddo himself later admitted that he was playing shallow, and a couple of steps over-shifted to left, at the direction of coach Clyde Sukeforth.[fn]Dave Anderson, “Subway Series Reflections: A Ride on the Carousel of Time,” The New York Times, October 20, 2000.[/fn] This heightened the drama of his sprint.

Al recounted the play many times over the years, most vividly in Roger Kahn’s book The Era 1947-1957. He described “Death Valley” in old Yankee Stadium, making the catch as a lefty, and getting a good jump. “‘I picked up DiMaggio’s ball good . . . I didn’t think I had a chance . . . I put my head down and I ran, my back was toward home plate and you know I had it right. I had the ball sighted just right.’ After all these years, Gionfriddo laughs in gorgeous triumph.”[fn]Kahn, Roger. The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2002: p. 127.[/fn]

DiMaggio became more gracious about the play in later years. Talking with Al to a group of children, Joe said, “Some big guy wouldn’t have ever made the Catch. A big guy woulda backed off and left it to go over the fence. But this little guy. He always had to work harder than anybody else . . . he never gave up.”[fn]Ibid., p. 128.[/fn] DiMaggio and Gionfriddo also got together in 1974 to offer their recollections for the television program “The Way It Was.”[fn]Weichel, Penny. “Gionfriddo Revisited”. The Oil City (Pennsylvania) Derrick, November 16, 1974.[/fn]

Though most stories at the time said the ball would have been a home run, debate remains. Even then, it was not unanimous. Associated Press writer Frank Eck noted, “many in the [Yankees] dressing room believed the ball would have hit the iron fence for at least a triple.”[fn]Frank Eck, “DiMag’s Blow Called Longest He Ever Hit,” The Titusville (Pennsylvania) Herald, October 6, 1947.[/fn] DiMaggio biographer David Jones quoted historian Eric Enders: “This was merely an example of the halo granted DiMaggio by the New York media. Film of the play clearly shows that it would not have left the park. Indeed, Gionfriddo caught the ball two full steps in front of the fence.”[fn]Jones, David. Joe DiMaggio. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004. pp. 97-98.[/fn], [fn]Enders, Eric.100 Years of the World Series. New York, NY: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003.p. 118.[/fn]

Al himself always thought he stopped it from going out. At the time, he told The Sporting News, “Bobby Bragan was in the bullpen, and he said it would have cleared the fence by from one to two feet.”[fn]Birtwell, Roger. “Little Al Didn’t Expect to Stay With Dodgers,” Sporting News, October 15, 1947.[/fn] On the radio, Red Barber (who was not given to hyperbole) said, “He took a home run away from DiMaggio.”

Visual evidence is questionable. Newsreel footage does not show the play from start to finish; there are even allegations it may be a staged re-enactment. However, an expert in the field, Doak Ewing, proprietor of Rare Sportsfilms, Inc., says, “Anybody who thinks that doesn’t know film. There are a couple of different views out there, with different angles, but how could you stage that crowd?” Sue Gionfriddo added, “Al had been asked, and he felt that the newsreel footage was accurate. It was always his understanding that it was live.”

Along with the fans’ reaction, reality shows in the way Gionfriddo loses his cap on the run and then gets it back from the center fielder (though one cannot make out Carl Furillo’s distinctive profile). The left-field umpire—the use of six umpires was another first from the ’47 Series—also enters the frame to give the “out” sign. Alas, umpire Jim Boyer passed away in 1959; his view is unknown.

Decades later, other authors have drawn and fostered (mis)impressions from this clip. For example, another DiMaggio biographer, Richard Ben Cramer, describes Al as “dancing a spirited tarantella, unsure where to run, which way to turn, how to get under the ball.”[fn]Cramer, Richard Ben. Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2000. p. 235.[/fn] Jonathan Eig called it a “stumbling, bumbling play.”[fn]Eig, Jonathan. Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2007. p. 257.[/fn] These descriptions belie Gionfriddo’s skill as an outfielder—and many other contemporary accounts. For one, Hall of Famer Bill Terry called it “the greatest catch I’ve ever seen.”[fn]“‘Greatest Catch I’ve Ever Seen’—Terry,” Winnipeg Free Press, October 6, 1947.[/fn]

Photographers got Pee Wee Reese to pose kissing Al on the cheek, though “finally Reese, grinning as happily as all the other Dodgers, pretended annoyance and called out: ‘Let somebody else kiss this little guy. I’m tired of it.’”[fn]Roscoe McGowen, “Outfielder Feted for Mighty Catch,” The New York Times. October 6, 1947.[/fn]

“I’ve signed thousands of that picture,” Gionfriddo remarked in 2000.[fn]Anderson, op. cit.[/fn] In 1991, he said, “You think, ‘Geez, how in the world do these people remember?’ They were there when they were teen-agers, I guess, and they tell their sons, their grandkids.”[fn]Campbell, Steve. “Gionfriddo’s Name Still Catchy Over 40 Years Later,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, August 11, 1991.[/fn] Hollywood portrayed this very thing in a tender deathbed scene from the 1989 film Dad with Jack Lemmon and Ted Danson.

Sue Gionfriddo recalled, “He used to say, ‘If all the people that said they were there that day actually were there, Yankee Stadium must have held a million.’”

RORY COSTELLO is the author of “Twilight at Ebbets Field” (The National Pastime #26), an essay of stadium lore revealing what happened after the Dodgers left Brooklyn. He is a longtime Brooklyn resident but was years too late to have the pleasure of seeing a game at the lovable old ballpark in Crown Heights.

New York started Bill Bevens, a mediocre 7-13 right-hander who was a few weeks shy of his thirty-first birthday. Bevens experienced a lot of bad luck throughout the regular season, in part the residue of his seventy-seven walks in only 165 innings. Rookie Harry Taylor, who had a promising season aborted due to an elbow injury in August, got the call for the Dodgers.

The Yankees wasted no time jumping on Taylor. The first two batters, Snuffy Stirnweiss and Tommy Henrich, both singled, and Yogi Berra reached first on an error. Another walk, to Joe DiMaggio, forced in a New York run and sent Taylor to an early shower. Hal Gregg assumed the pitching duties for Brooklyn and got a pop up and a double play grounder to extinguish a potentially big inning for the Yankees. In the home half of the first, the Dodgers worked Bevens for two walks, but both runners were left stranded.

In the third, DiMaggio walked with two outs. George McQuinn then tapped a ball near the plate, and Brooklyn catcher Bruce Edwards threw wildly to first. DiMaggio, on a sign from third base coach Dressen, tried to score on the errant throw but was cut down easily at the plate on a throw by right-fielder Dixie Walker. The play provided the second-guessers with ample grist during the following few days. In the bottom of the inning the Dodgers’ Eddie Stanky led off with a walk and advanced to second on a Bevens wild pitch. But Johnny Lindell helped the Yanks escape damage with a tumbling catch of Jackie Robinson’s foul fly.

New York added a second run in the fourth when Billy Johnson tripled, and Lindell doubled him home.

The Dodgers finally took advantage of Bevens’s wildness in the fifth. The first two batters, Spider Jorgensen and Gregg walked. Although Brooklyn had yet to hit safely, they now had six free passes from the big right-hander. Stanky sacrificed both runners into scoring position. Pee Wee Reese then sent a ground ball to shortstop Phil Rizzuto who tossed out Gregg running to third. Jorgenson scored on the play making it 2–1.

To start the eighth, Hank Behrman replaced Gregg on the mound for the home club. Behrman withstood an error by Jorgensen but ran into serious trouble in the ninth. Lindell singled sharply past third before Rizzuto forced him at second. Bevens then sacrificed and was safe on a fielder’s choice when Edwards threw late to second. When Stirnweiss singled to center the Yankees had the bases loaded and a golden opportunity to put the game out of reach.

Brooklyn called in their ace reliever, Hugh Casey, to face the dangerous Henrich. Casey had won the previous day’s 9–8 contest and now, on his first offering, Henrich grounded sharply back to the mound, which led to a snappy 1-2-3 double play, pulling the Dodgers out of potential disaster. They still had no hits but were only one run down.

Thanks to a great catch by Henrich with his back to the wall in the bottom of the eighth, Bevens recorded his only perfect inning of the contest and carried his 2–1 lead into the final frame.

Bevens’s high wire act finally caught up with him in the strategy-filled, fatal ninth. After Edwards flied out to the wall in left, Carl Furillo collected the Dodgers’ ninth walk. That pass tied the 1910 mark for one World Series game set by Jack Coombs, but when Jorgensen fouled out, Bevens was one out away from the first World Series no-hitter. Al Gionfriddo, running for Furillo while Pete Reiser batted for Casey, stole second. This changed Yankees manager Bucky Harris’s thinking about pitching to Reiser. Although the talented outfielder was injured and couldn’t run well, New York decided to walk him. It was the tenth walk for Brooklyn and a disaster-inviting strategy, putting the winning run on base. Brooklyn skipper Burt Shotton sent in reserve infielder Eddie Miksis to run for Reiser.

The cat-and-mouse game reached another level when, for only the second time during the 1947 season, Eddie Stanky, a right-handed batter, was lifted for a pinch hitter. Cookie Lavagetto, another right-handed batter, was an aging veteran who had seen limited action during the season but was always a dangerous hitter. Cookie swung and missed leaving Bevens only two strikes away from victory and fame. But fate had its day as Lavagetto drilled the next offering high off the right field wall. The ball bounced around long enough for Gionfriddo to score the tying run and Miksis to tally the game winner. Bevens’s almost no-hitter had turned into an unforgettable loss.

JOE DITTMAR, a corporate trainer in the pharmaceutical industry, has been a leader in the SABR Connie Mack Chapter and was vice chairman of the Records Committee for 18 years. In addition to numerous articles published in SABR’s “The National Pastime” and “Baseball Research Journal”, he has authored “Baseball’s Benchmark Boxscores,” “The 100 Greatest Baseball Games of the 20th Century Ranked,” and the Sporting-News/SABR Research Award-winning “Baseball Records Registry: The Best and Worst Single-Day Performances and the Stories Behind Them.” Joe also teaches a baseball history class at his local community college.