The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World by Roger Kahn Page B

who never complained, did hard duty, rising from private to captain, with a fighting unit in South China.
    *Vince was a gifted defensive player, but he led the National League in strikeouts six times. Dom, who wore spectacles, played eleven seasons for the Boston Red Sox. Fenway Park rooters made him the hero of a song Harvard men and others chanted to the tune of “O Tannenbaum”:
Oh, Dominic DiMaggio!
    He’s better than his brother Joe.
    *Editors and publishers allowed the baseball writers to live in indentured servitude because, bless my M.B.A., it saved money. Only after World War II did several nasty incidents prompt three newspapers to pay their own way. These were the
New York Times
, the
New York Herald Tribune
, and the
Daily News
.
    *
Mirabile dictu
, it has come to pass.
    *The senior Boston baseball writer on this trip, Hy Hurwitz of the
Globe
, later told me: “I know Williams. We were in the Marines together. He staged that tantrum to get you to knock the Boston press in a national magazine. Whatever you asked him, he was going to end up knocking the Boston press.”
    *The season of 1939 was not easy. In the grip of a fatal disease, Lou Gehrig had to stop playing for the Yankees after eight games. Subsequently, pulled muscles and inflamed corneas seemed less than serious. Still, McCarthy could safely have rested DiMaggio in September and protected the .400 average while the eye healed. The Yankees won the pennant by seventeen games.

Birth of the Bombers
    We weren’t a very subtle team. We didn’t pull a lot of squeeze plays. All we tried to do was hit the ball so hard it broke in half.
    —
Robert W. Brown, third baseman and M.D.,
    looking back on his days with the Yankees
    I N THE LAST WEEK of May 1947, the champion Red Sox came to New York to play four games against the Yankees. As the Reliable Jersey House* foretold, Detroit and Boston were leading the league, with the Tigers out front of Boston by half a game. Pat Mullin of Detroit was leading American League batsmen at .355. Ted Williams was leading American League sluggers with ten home runs in thirty games. The Yankees, playing under .500 ball, stuttered in sixth place and L. S. MacPhail suddenly erupted.
    He fined Joe DiMaggio $100 for refusing to pose for a special promotional newsreel. “I’ve been with this team since 1936,” DiMaggio said, “and this is the first damn time I was ever fined.” He fined outfielder Johnny Lindell $50 for telling some young Yankees that they didn’t really have to attend banquets arranged by the Yankee publicity department. MacPhail remained obsessed by his image of the high-flying (though sixth- place) Yankees, not all of whom trusted aircraft to retain their wings. “After May 31,” MacPhail announced, “any Yankee who refuses to fly, except Frank Crosetti, who has always refused to fly, will pay his own fare for train transportation.”
    At the same time, with no publicity, MacPhail hauled in Phil Rizzuto and second baseman George Stirnweiss. “I know you two bastards met with Jorge Pasquel at the Concourse Plaza [a hotel a block away from Yankee Stadium].” Working outside the frame of organized baseball, Pasquel was scouting talent for his Mexican League and offering generous contracts.
    “I thought it was a free country, Mr. MacPhail,” Rizzuto said. “I thought I had a right to hear what the man had to say.”
    “Well, listen, you little bastard, and that goes for you too, Stirnweiss, if you guys talk to Pasquel again . . . just talk . . . you’re goddamn suspended. Got that straight?”
    Thus within three days MacPhail publicly fined two-thirds of his starting outfield and privately threatened to suspend half of his starting infield. Recollecting, Rizzuto, the greatest shortstop not yet chosen for the Hall of Fame, said, “Whoosh.”
    “What does that mean, Phil?” I asked.
    “Nothing. Just thinking about MacPhail makes me go ‘Whoosh.’”
    Stanley “Bucky” Harris, the Yankee