When the Yankees Ruled
Two weeks ago, the Dodgers. Last week, the Giants. Much as it pains me as a Brooklyn fan who lived through the glory days of baseball in New York, 1947–1957, this week I’ll offer a tribute to the Yankees.
Give them their due: they won nine pennants in the eleven years of The Era, the last eight of them under Casey Stengel. He went on to capture two more, in 1958 and 1960, before management discovered that he was seventy years old (a birthday now in my own rear-view mirror). “I won’t make that mistake again,” Casey said in his final press conference with the Yankees.
RED SMITH: “Rooting for the New York Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel.”
LEONARD KOPPETT: “The Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium were one subway station apart, but people wanted to see the glamorous Yankees. In the 1950s, the Yankees are the lords of baseball. They win more than anybody. Everybody hates the Yankees except the diehard Yankee fans. They happen to be in the Bronx, but it is not a local Bronx thing since they are the aristocracy.”
DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: “On afternoons when both the Dodgers and the Yankees were playing an afternoon game, we set our dueling radios on opposite sides of the blanket, the warm voice of Red Barber issuing from one end of the blanket, the harsh, tinny voice of Mel Allen from the other.”
SHIRLEY POVICH: “The million-to-one shot came in. Hell froze over. A month of Sundays hit the calendar. Don Larsen today pitched a no-hit, no run, no-man-reach-first game in a World Series.
“On the mound at Yankee Stadium, the same guy who was knocked out in two innings by the Dodgers on Friday came up today with one for the record books, posting it there in solo grandeur as the only Perfect Game in World Series history.”
PHIL RIZZUTO: “I was born in Brooklyn and I always rooted for the Dodgers. I had a tryout with the Dodgers in 1937. Casey Stengel was managing. He took one look at me and he said ‘Listen kid, you better go and get yourself a shoeshine box. That is the only way you’ll make a living.’ I was crushed. And then the Yankees called me up and they had a one-week tryout camp. It’s a good thing I knew how to bunt and steal, although I did hit one in the seats.”
WHITEY FORD: “You would be amazed how many important outs you can get by working the count down to where the hitter is sure you’re going to throw to his weakness and then throw to his power instead.”
ELSTON HOWARD: “The only time wise guys were a personal trouble to me was traveling around the South in exhibition games when the rest of the club would go one way and I’d have to go to the other side of town to a colored hotel.”
BILL HIND: “I remember playing stickball with Joe DiMaggio on 54th street outside the Movietone news studios, where Joe would go once a week to do a voice-over for the sports review of the week. I, like many of my boyhood friends, rooted for either the Yankees, the Giants or the hated Brooklyn Dodgers. This of course led to many an argument among us all. Some got out of hand and fists would fly. I had a few bruises to show for my loyalty to the Yankees. As I grew older, I attended many a Yankee game and the best part of the day was when the game was over, you could go onto the field, play centerfield, have a catch, or just run the bases. Most games were day games so you could either listen to a whole game or attend one, if you were off from school or it was a weekend.”
RON HERSHKOWITZ: “In 1952, we moved to a New York City housing project, five subway stops from Yankee Stadium. It was heaven. I lived the Yankees. I went to my first baseball game in 1950 with my father in my full Yankee uniform! I relished each World Series win during the ’50s. When they lost to the Dodgers in 1955, I cried for two days. It was not supposed to happen.”
EDDIE LOPAT: “They [Yankee fans] were refined people for the most part. You’d hear the cheering, but they were kind of sedate, generally people with character. They were controlled and there was control in the ballpark.”
CARL ERSKINE: “Many of my teammates and I were born in the 1920s, so we grew up when our national heroes were Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, two awesome players on some great Yankee teams. So when we played the first game of the 1949 World Series, it was the first time many of us had been in Yankee Stadium, ‘The House that Ruth Built.’ The Yankees had just remodeled the clubhouses and had moved the visitors’ clubhouse to the third base side and relocated the Yankees behind first base. I will always believe the Yankees deliberately intimidated a young Dodger team in a very calculated way. When we entered the visitors’ locker room, we were not only confronted with the atmosphere of being in a national baseball shrine, but we also noticed that, still in place and not yet moved to the Yankees’ side, were the lockers and uniforms of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Yes, we lost the series, four games to one.”
CARL ERSKINE: “When the [World Series] games were in Yankee Stadium, the Dodgers provided two luxury buses — one for the team and one for the families. We would leave Ebbets Field to the cheers and hoopla of Dodger fans lining the streets as we passed. The police escort, with sirens blaring, announced to the world, ‘Here come the Dodgers.’ Soon we crossed the Brooklyn Bridge into lower Manhattan. The crowds thinned out a bit and were quite orderly, with fans just waving and smiling. Then we entered the Bronx — Yankee land. Now came the jeers, insulting signs, and a barrage of tomatoes, toilet paper, and eggs splattering the buses. The return trip held more of the same. We all knew what the Yankee buses were in for when the games moved to Ebbets Field. The war zone started when the Yankees crossed the Brooklyn Bridge.”
JERRY COLEMAN: “People watched the Yankees and admired the pride of the Yankees, but unfortunately, they became so successful, people hated them for their success.”
PHIL RIZZUTO: “I was a little kid of about ten years old when I first went to yankee stadium with an uncle. We sat in the right-field bleachers, back of that chicken wire. One of the things I remember is that when a batter hit the ball, he seemed to be halfway to first before you heard the crack of the bat out there in the bleachers. I always thought that was weird. Years later, when I played for the Yankees, my mouth was still open at the enormity of the place. But it even seemed bigger to me, if you can imagine that!”
The Glory Days, Part 3 was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.