Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America Read Online Free PDF Page A

one.” In 1946 during spring training a rookie pitcher named Frank Shea was trying to lose some extra weight, so he created an extra-heavy sweat suit in which to run extra laps. He was proud of how hard he was working to get in shape. One day he came back to the dugout soaked with sweat and pleased with himself for staying with so ambitious a program. But his cap was turned sideways. McCarthy took one look at him and said, “Young fellow, if you can’t wear that uniform right, don’t wear it at all.”
    McCarthy even extended his idea of class to lectures about the use of hard liquor. He did not want his players to drink, he would tell them, but he knew that on occasion they needed to relax, and that liquor helped. Therefore, if they had to drink, they should drink what he drank: White HorseScotch—because it was the best, and the real danger in drinking came from using cheap, off-brand stuff. It was said that while managing Chicago in the twenties, McCarthy had once lectured Hack Wilson about the seriousness of his drinking. He illustrated his lecture by pouring a shot of whiskey into a glass filled with worms. The worms quickly died. “What did you learn from that?” he asked Wilson. “That if I drink I won’t have worms,” the slugger answered. Unfortunately, McCarthy’s own drinking increased significantly in his later years as a manager. His players had a code name for it. When he was on one of his benders, he was, they said, “riding the white horse.”
    When McCarthy first became the Red Sox manager there was a great deal of speculation about how he would handle Ted Williams. Williams was famous for his love of hitting, his impetuous relationships with fans and the press, and his hatred of wearing ties. It was said that he owned two ties, a blue one and a brown one, and that once a year, on the occasion of some special charity fund raiser, he would actually wear one. McCarthy showed up for his first meeting with Williams without a tie himself and later explained to reporters that a manager who could not get on with a .400 hitter did not deserve to manage in the big leagues.
    McCarthy had strong opinions about almost everything. He was an inveterate smoker of cigars, which he could move nimbly around and through his fingers in various positions. He did not like pipe smokers on his team because he thought they were too contented. (Red Rolfe, the Yankee third baseman, had been a pipe smoker and had tried to hide it from the manager; the other players were sure that McCarthy knew and tolerated it only because Rolfe was so good a player.) McCarthy even had his own peculiar views of history. For example, he liked what he called the “dark-haired Poles” because, he claimed, they came from the south of Poland and had fought fiercely whenever Poland was attacked.But he wanted no part of blond-haired Poles, who he said had not resisted their enemies at moments of crisis.
    He liked to tell his players that he knew all their tricks because he had tried them himself. “I know your games,” he would say. “I was the one who had the phones taken out of the clubhouse in Chicago. I knew what the players were doing—using them all the time to call their bookies.” He hated card games and barred them from his clubhouse. To him they were a waste of time. When he saw his players with cards—the one thing a baseball player had, once the season began, was plenty of time—he would push them to do something else. Why, that man who invented the little wrapper for the sugar cube, he would say, would never have done that if he had been playing with cards. Once the players entered the clubhouse they were there to play baseball. Frank Shea once brought a newspaper into the clubhouse during spring training in 1946. “What’s this?” McCarthy asked, picking up the paper. “It’s a newspaper,” Shea said. “Shea, you just throw it in the garbage pail over there. You’re here to play baseball, and if you want to read about