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

yourself, you do it in your hotel room,” McCarthy said.
    Temptation was everywhere. When Clarence Marshall was a rookie, McCarthy called him over just after the club had reached New York. “Hey, kid, where do you live?” he asked, while his eyes looked at a spot of grass about twenty yards in front of him. He is most decidedly not looking at me, Marshall thought. He is talking to me, but it is as if I don’t exist. “The Edison Hotel, sir,” Marshall said, naming a hotel in midtown. “Don’t let the bright lights and the stinking perfume get you,” McCarthy said. That was all. His eyes never moved. Rookie dismissed.
    He most emphatically did not like the new bonus-baby rules, which allowed teams to sign young players for huge sums of money, but demanded that they skip the minor leagues and start with the big-league clubs. When Bobby Brown had arrived as the Yankees’ first bonus baby in 1947,McCarthy had watched him carefully and skeptically. Finally he took Brown aside and told him, in words that sounded strangely archaic to Brown, “Bobby, we don’t have any rats on the Yankees.”
    He was even more resentful when he came to the Red Sox, which had a weaker farm system. In 1948 the Red Sox had an eighteen-year-old bonus baby named Chuck Stobbs’s on the roster. Stobbs had signed for $35,000—the equivalent of five years’ salary for most rookies—before he had even thrown his first strike. During spring training McCarthy made him feel as if he didn’t exist. Finally, toward the end of spring training, McCarthy signaled Stobbs to come over. Stobbs felt a rush of excitement. Perhaps, this was going to be his big chance. The manager began to talk about how to play second base. The footwork was critical, McCarthy said. Second base? Was he going to be transformed into a second baseman? Bewilderment showed on Stobbs’s face. “You’re not Goodman, are you?” McCarthy said, referring to Billy Goodman, a young infielder. “No, sir,” said Stobbs, “I’m Stobbs.” “Get the hell out of here,” McCarthy roared, and Stobbs gratefully did. He stayed with the team for the entire 1948 season and pitched a total of nine innings.
    As McCarthy saw it, ballplayers were to play hard, and they were not to take defeat lightly. Once in 1937 the Yankees split a doubleheader with one of the weaker teams in the league, losing a game they should not have lost. Afterward, McCarthy came prowling angrily through the locker room. A utility outfielder named Roy Johnson, relatively new to the team, saw McCarthy and complained just loud enough for him to hear that you could not win every game. McCarthy heard him. Later that day he called up his superiors. “Get me Henrich,” he said. Tommy Henrich was brought up from the Yankee farm team in Newark, and Roy Johnson was waived out of the league. The point was clear to everyone: Even halfway sassing the manager was a verybad idea. But the Yankee players who had come up while he was managing—such players as Henrich, Charlie Keller, and DiMaggio—had a special affection for him. He played them regularly, did not jerk them around, and tried to protect them from the front office and the press.
    McCarthy was particularly suspicious of the press. He regarded it as a hostile force, and was as pithy with the Boston press as he had been with the New York writers. When a Boston writer suggested that if Williams played in Yankee Stadium, with its short fence, he would break Babe Ruth’s record for home runs, McCarthy looked at him coldly and said simply, “Gehrig didn’t.” The Boston writers soon learned to deal with him by being provocative. Joe Cashman, a reporter for the Boston Herald, decided that the best way to get information was to make a statement, especially a stupid one, rather than ask questions. That so confirmed McCarthy’s view of writers as people who did not know baseball, he could not refuse the bait.
    To the Red Sox, McCarthy brought his old prejudices, with the