DAVID HALBERSTAM'S OCTOBER 1964

While I watched bits of the World Series, getting into November, which had a great ending as Kansas City beat the Mets, I was also reading a World Series book, David Halberstam's account of the Series in 1964. It was the end of the New York Yankee dynasty: the St Louis Cardinals beat the Yankees in seven games, the Yankees fired manager Yogi Berra (you can link to my obituary of Yogi here) and hired the Cardinals' Johnny Keane and began a tailspin that lasted until George Steinbrenner in the 70s created the Bronx Zoo teams and instituted a policy of buying the best players from the teams that beat New York.

While Halberstam's book, which was published in 1994, gives a good account of the surprising regular season (in which both teams could've been counted out, and don't forget the Phillies' remarkable collapse) as well as the Series (remember, these were the glorious days before interminable wild cards and playoff series); he has wider concerns. He opens with a quote from George Romney (Mitt's father) speaking about the fate of General Motors: "There is nothing more vulnerable than entrenched success." The Yankees, of course, were the General Motors of baseball, the Cardinals had once been Ford to their GM, before New York's three teams took over domination of baseball just after WWII. He contrasts the teams nicely: the Cards a team with young talent brought along by Keane's teaching hand, the Yankees a team of fading and aging superstars, held together by Yogi's confidence in his former teammates and easy-rider approach to clutch games.

The Cardinals were also a team benefiting from black stars: Bob Gibson just reaching his peak as a dominant pitcher; Lou Brock, set free by Keane to play his kind of game; Curt Flood covering acres in center field, Bill White a steady rock of a leader at first base. The Yankees, in contrast, had catcher Elston Howard. The National League had got the jump on the American in racial terms, and it was starting to show. Moreover, these players were part of a a new wave of black stars: college-educated, unwilling to sit in the back of the bus, demanding to be respected as men as well as players.

Halberstam is concerned with race here, and because his stories are almost always built around people, his picture of the way changing racial mores reached baseball and reflected changes in America is brilliant. Likewise he recognises that the times were changing on a generational basis too: younger players with different attitudes were reaching the big leagues, players with more options, like the Yankees' Jim Bouton or Pete Mikkelsen, or the Cards' Ray Sadecki. They clashed with managers or veteran players simply because they began to question the entrenched hierarchies of how things were done.

The teams were different too in the way they were built. The Yankees were used to having a mighty farm system, always developing new stars, and players they could trade away for veteran role players. But owners Dan Topping and Del Webb (who oddly barely gets a mention) were looking to sell the team, and cutting their losses (they would sell to CBS after the season) so the farm system was run down. How cheap were they? With the Yankees down three games to two in St Louis, management had the players check out of the hotel and bring their bags to the ballpark before Game Six, even though a Yankee win would mean a game seven the next day. The Yanks dutifully won anyway.

The Cardinals themselves had once been run by a cheapskate of Olympian proportions them, Branch Rickey, who crafted the farm-system blueprint, and they were still producing talent, but this team was built on astute deals by current GM Bing Devine-- bringing in Dick Groat, Curt Simmons, and most importantly Brock (for Ernie Broglio)-- but Devine clashed with team owner Gussie Busch (of the Budweiser fortune) and Busch brought back Rickey, numbering Devine's days.

Baseball was changing, though Topping and Webb had bought the Yankees from Jake Ruppert, another beer baron, the days of owners who made their livings off their baseball clubs, and tended to either know the game well or know that they didn't and left the club to those who did, were ending. Busch was the epitome of the modern owner, who treated the team as his plaything, and the players and staff as his indentured serfs. Soon Curt Flood would mount the first assault on baseball's servitude, with a lawsuit to end the system which bound a player to his team by a series of automatically renewable one-year contracts, the infamous 'reserve clause'. As baseball's owners changed in nature, so did the players, and eventually, bankrolled by TV, our modern free-agency era would begin, though not without huge unrest.

We know some of the stories well: most notably Mickey Mantle, the Yankee superstar brought low by injury: I had forgotten that in this series Mantle was moved to right field and Roger Maris played center field (Maris would soon wind up in St Louis, out of the New York spotlight he hated). Whitey Ford, their ace pitcher, was also on his last arms, and was not a factor after the series' first game. Halberstam tells those stories, but he actually spends more time on the Cardinals, whose tale transcends baseball to society better, and also is the one we don't know that one so well. And because he writes so brilliantly, (The Teammates is one of my favourite baseball  books) it works wonderfully.

A couple of sidebars: Oddly, in Halberstam's previous baseball book, the Summer Of '49, I was puzzled by one thing he wrote, that the Red Sox had moved Johnny Pesky from shortstop to third base because he was quicker and had more range than Junior Stephens. No one gets moved from short to third because they have more range, at least they didn't until the Yankees moved Alex Rodriquez to allow Derek Jeter to remain at short. Stephens was a Cal Ripken-like big shortstop whose strong arm allowed him to play deep and gave him more range. There's always something that makes you wonder how accurate the things you don't know about are. In his book on Bill Belichick Halberstam credited Belichick (as captain) and new coach Terry Jackson for turning around Wesleyan's lacrosse programme; but having been there and played the year before Terry took over, I could tell you a large part of the turnaround came when Wesleyan stopped playing bigger Division One programs like Yale, Brown, UMass, Washington & Lee, UConn or New Hampshire.

Anyway, in this book Halberstam mentions Frankie Frisch (the Fordham Flash) and calls him a 'former New York Giant great'. Which was true in the 20s, but Frisch, who fell out mightily with Giants' manager John McGraw, was traded to St Louis for Rogers Hornsby and had a a second great career as player-manager and leader of the 'Gas-House Gang', the great Cardinal teams in the 30s. In a book about the Cardinals that description would seem more relevant.

As I said I was watching the Series while I read this book, and I was thinking what a mistake-prone series it was: sloppy fielding and bad execution of basic baseball. But reading Halberstam's account, I was reminded of how many bad plays characterized this series as well: Phil Linz, the Yankee reserve infielder forced to play short by Tony Kubek's injury, but also Mantle's struggles throwing and numerous other errors, many forced by the faster game the Cardinals, led by Brock and Flood, played.

They are gorgeous memories anyway, and there are few writers who can bring them alive, and give them such depth and humanity, as Halberstam. I met him once, when we were both covering the Chicago Bulls in Paris (I was writing for USA Today; he was researching his book on Michael Jordan). We went to dinner, and he was not only the most interesting man at the table, he was the most interested: you could see just why his interviews gave him so much material. The blessing is how deftly he used it.

SAVIN ROCK, 1956 (a poem)

Yogi Berra died yesterday, and while I was revising the obituary I'd written a few years ago for the Guardian's stock files, I thought about this poem. I don't remember when exactly I wrote it; it was part of my master's thesis at McGill, so it was probably in 1975 or 76, in Montreal, but it might have been earlier. It was published with a group of my poems in 1984, in Cid Corman's Origin, Fifth Series issue 3, in Kyoto. Cid was a real baseball fan; for years we exchanged post cards and aerogrammes (remember them?) between London and Japan, discussing poetry, baseball, Charles Olson and sumo wrestling. Cid died on my birthday in 2004; I got to write his obituary for the Guardian, you can link to that here.

This poem was also published in a baseball-themed literary magazine, Spitball, in 1987, and in my collection By The Sound (Torque Press, Southampton) the following year.

Savin Rock was an amusement and resort area along the shore in West Haven, Connecticut, where my parents grew up. It had been big at the turn of the century, right through the depression. My great grandfather had a hot dog stand and pizzeria there; my grandfather, his son in law, at one point was partners in an auction house where my father, again, a son in law, worked weekends. I think it's pretty self-explanatory: there were rides, Peter Franke's fun house, penny arcades (in one of which a waxed gypsy lady inside a glass machine issued printed fortunes if you inserted a nickel), a huge wooden roller coaster, bumper cars, the Wild Mouse, and the remnants of Donovan Field, where the West Haven Sailors baseball team played, run by George Weiss who later was the general manager of the Yankees.

Don Larsen's perfect game was pitched in game 5 of the 1956 series; Berra hit a home run in the second game, but two in the deciding game 7, won by the Yankees as Johnny Kucks pitched (and Berra caught) a three-hit shutout. Both those games were at Ebbetts Field but it's probably game seven I am calling up in the poem. In game six Bob Turley pitched 10 innings of four-hit ball and lost 1-0. That's 28 innings in which Yankee pitchers held the Brooklyns to just 7 hits; Berra knew how to pitch to the Dodgers.


SAVIN ROCK, 1956

Don Larsen was tossing the perfect game.
Berra homered onto Bedford Avenue.
The wax lady cackled in the penny arcade
& scared me, her ignorance of the Series.
I didn't want my fortune told,
I wanted to know who had won.

At grandpa's auction prices always went up,
The marks investing junk with sudden value,
Carried away with the power of their words.
After closing we drove past the hot dogs:
Jimmie's, Turk's, Phyllis's, Jake's.
Jake was your great-grandfather, he told me,
As he always did. He ran away when he was 12
& went out west to be a cowboy.
12 seemed very old. A cowboy named
Rosenthal, my father said, & shook his head.

They talked about cars.
My dad had his eyes on a blue '55 Ford.
I wished he played for the Red Sox.
I would run away north and watch him pitch.
I wished they'd someday win the pennant.
I was five years old. I don't remember now
If I knew then who Don Larsen was.

YOGI BERRA: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of Yogi Berra is up at the Guardian online now; you can link to it here. It should be in the paper paper soon. It is pretty much as I wrote it, so follow the link to read it, but there are a few things I didn't have space to say, and a few that would not matter to the British audience.

One of them I got off my chest on the BBC World Service's Newshour this afternoon, at 13:55 on the clock, if you go to BBC IPlayer or link to it here. I did a more brief interview with the World Service's Outside Source in the morning: you can listen to that here. It was recorded off my mobile phone as the train pulled into Waterloo Station.

I mentioned in the obit his feud with George Steinbrenner: you can get an idea of what I thought of Steinbrenner if you read my IT intro and link to the Independent obit I wrote here. Berra was treated badly by the Yankees in his first go-round as manager; the team rallied around Yogi to win the pennant, and the Cardinals may have won the '64 World Series, but they were a far better team. But being treated badly by Steinbrenner was something completely different, and Yogi deeply resented the lies and the public humilation which were Steinbrenner's meat and potatoes. There wasn't really that much discussion of Yogi's managerial style today, but he was baseball shrewd, prone to play hunches, and epitomised what Tom Boswell once referred to as the 'glorified cruise director' whose job as manager was to keep everybody happy for 162 games.

It was Suzy Waldman of WFAN who got Yogi and the Yankees back together, but I always thought the 'kindler, gentler' George Steinbrenner of those days was a pretty shallow facade.  Yet David Cone pitched a perfecto on Yogi Berra day in 1999, as if to echo Don Larsen's in the 1956 World Series; has there ever been a better picture of spontaneous sporting joy than Berra's leap into Larsen's arms?

I pointed out that Berra grew up in St Louis' 'Dago Hill', now known, in more politically correct times, as 'The Hill'. That was the neighbourhood which produced the core of the 1950 US soccer team which beat England, guys who played for Simkins Ford in the St. Louis league. I also got the feeling Berra would have liked to have played baseball for his hometown Cards ('hometown' got cut from the piece in the Guardian, go figure) but you have to feel he was born to be a Yankee.

Where Mickey Mantle was incredibly handsome, Whitey Ford slick as a hustler at the Metropole, Yogi was like a collection of spare parts thrown together; R2D2 to Mantle's Luke Skywalker and Ford's Hans Solo. But as Yogi once said, 'you don't hit with your face'.

I wrote in the piece that in 1950, Berra had at 597 at bats and struck out just 12 times. For a guy who swung at almost everything, that boggles credulity. He walked only 55 times, but hit a career best .322 and had an on-base percentage of .383, also a career high. He finished third in the MVP voting that year, behind teammate Phil Rizzuto and Boston's utility player Billy Goodman.

Bill James wrote about Berra's body type, which wasn't that unusual in baseball. He was more or less 5-8 180 in his prime, heavier later; James says Roy Campanella was 5-9 205, Roger Breshnahan and Smoky Burgess roughly the same. Hack Wilson and Kirby Puckett are others James mentions in the outfield. Short and powerful is good for baseball.

I also owe James for the insight into that 1950s Yankee dynasty: Casey Stengel had Mantle in center field, he had Gil McDougald who could handle any infield spot and allowed Casey to stack his lineup toward his hunches, and he had Berra who never had a really bad year and was not necessarily a great catcher, but a great handler of pitchers, hit like an outfielder, and caught both ends of double-headers 117 times. Look at virtually all the great catchers and you'll see a pattern of good and bad years; Campanella seemed to alternate them. This is due largely to the wear and tear, if not injury, at the position, but Berra was remarkably durable and consistent. Cochrane, Bench, Pudges Fisk and Rodriquez, Gary Carter. OK maybe not Mike Piazza, but he wasn't a very good catcher. Casey was once asked what the secret of his success was and he said 'I never play a game without my man', and his man was Yogi.

I never bought into Maypo or YooHoo, but I bought into Yogi. I was never a Yankee fan, but I liked Mantle, enjoyed Stengel, appreciated Ford, admired the way they won, and loved Yogi. Almost everyone did. New York was the center of the world in the 1950s, and Yogi was the guy who brought the glamour of the city down to earth. It wasn't over until it was over. RIP Yogi.