1949 Yankee of the Past: Lefty Gomez

"Lefty Gomez met a friend who didn't know that Lefty's Binghamton team had ended the season in the Eastern League basement. 'How'd your club finish, Lefty?' asked the friend. 'With nine players,' answered the Goofy One."

-Baseball Digest, January 1948

THEY CAN'T DO THAT TO HIM!
"Vernon Lefty Gomez, the old Yankees' pitcher, now managing Binghamton in the Eastern League, recently was recalling the old days with Marse Joe McCarthy. Lefty recalled how infuriated McCarthy was when El Goofo, pitching against the New York Giants in the 1937 World Series, paused in his work and nonchalantly watched an airplane flying overhead. When the airplane disappeared, Gomez went back to work against Mel Ott, the Giants' batsman of the moment. Later, Lefty got a blast from McCarthy. 'You want to lose the game?' roared Joe. 'When you're not thinking like that, Ott might knock one out of the park.' 'Not,' answered Gomez, 'when I've got the ball in my hand. If that's the way these Giants play, hitting homers when I've got the ball in my hands, I'm getting out of baseball right now.'"

-Arch Ward in the Chicago Tribune (Baseball Digest, February 1948)

"When Lefty Gomez filled out a detailed application blank and questionnaire for a job recently, one line asked the question, 'What was your last employment?'
'Pitching baseball,' Gomez answered.
Then the next question: 'Why did you leave that employment?'
In complete honesty, Gomez wrote: 'Couldn't get the other side out.'"

-Fred Russell in the Nashville Banner (Baseball Digest, February 1949)

1948 Yankee of the Past: Babe Ruth

RUTH'S TOP HOMER
"Q.- (Asked of Babe Ruth)- What home run do you remember most fondly?
A.- I hit a lot of homers and I was fond of every one of them. But I guess the one I treasured most was that one I hit off Moses Grove in [1928]. That was the year the Yankees went on the road thirteen games ahead and came back half a game behind the Athletics. We had to win two out of three with the A's to take the pennant and when Grove had us 5 to 2 it looked like curtains. But that homer of mine won for us and we got into the World Series. It made a difference of $6,000 to every one of us."

-Prescott Sullivan in the San Francisco Examiner (Baseball Digest, January 1948)

BABE RUTH POINTS

Most Dramatic Home Run In World Series History

"There was a grim bitterness between the New York Yankees and the Chicago Cubs as they met in the 1932 World Series. The Yanks had taken the first two games.

It was the third inning of Game Three when mighty Babe Ruth stepped to the plate to face Charlie Root. Jeers and catcalls greeted the great Yankee home run king. Root whipped over the first ball and the Babe himself held up a finger for 'Strike One.' The second ball blazed over and Ruth held up two fingers for 'Strike Two.'

Then, with the huge crowd roaring, Ruth pointed toward the centerfield bleachers. Root wound up and threw-  and Ruth's bat met the ball with the sound of TNT exploding. It disappeared over the centerfield wall- almost exactly where Ruth had pointed."

-1948 Swell Sport Thrills No. 12

THE GREATEST

"It had to come sometime, of course. But Babe Ruth had seemingly acquired a cloak of immortality as if he were a demi-god who had sprung from Zeus. He was not an ordinary mortal even in life. Now in death he will assume still more grandiose proportions as an almost legendary figure. The Babe was a truly fabulous man, the best beloved and the best known person of our times, greater even than the sport which spawned him.
Here are two striking and most illustrative incidents. One Sunday morning last March the Babe was kneeling in church when a prim, bonneted old lady tapped him on the shoulder. 'Mr Ruth,' she whispered, 'I just want you to know that I pray for you every day.' Obviously she had never seen a baseball game in her life. Yet her imagination had been so captivated by the Bambino that she remembered him in her prayers. And that undoubtedly was multiplied of hundreds of thousands throughout the country.
The other incident happened during those grim days at Guadalcanal in the early stages of the Pacific war. The Americans and the Japanese had come to grips at long last in their fight to a finish. Among other things they exchanged were insults on hastily lettered placards. Important personages on each enemy side were vilified until our boys reached their supreme. 'Emperor Hirohito is a stinker,' the card said- except the last word was considerably stronger. Thereupon the Japs countered with their insult supreme. Their retaliatory card said: 'Babe Ruth is a stinker.'
Their choice is illuminating. It could have been Roosevelt or MacArthur. But the Nipponese mind seemed to sense that the Babe was a greater figure than either of them.
The hold that Ruth had on the public mind has never been matched by anyone in sport or out of it. He commanded it just by being himself, the most natural and unaffected man in this wide world. He lived a full and lusty life. He did incredible things, some of which have seen print and some which never will. In a way it is unfortunate that the entire story could never be told, because it would make the Babe a still more unbelievable person than he actually was.
The King of Swat was much more than a magnificent baseball player. Experts will argue themselves blue in the face as to whether Ruth or Ty Cobb was the greater performer. It doesn't particularly matter. The Babe was in a class by himself when it came to color. He teemed with it, vibrated with it and exuded it from every pore. He could strike out and excite a crowd infinitely more than Cobb hitting a grand slam home run with two out in the ninth.
As a left-handed pitcher at the beginning of his career he was one of the very best and his record for consecutive scoreless innings in the World Series still stands. As an outfielder he also was one of the very best, a beautiful thrower and a more than adequate ball hawk. As a batter he was superb. That was his forte. If he had concentrated on singles instead of homers, he would have left hitting marks which never would have been approached.
There can be no questioning the fact that he saved baseball when that structure was rocked to its very foundation by the Black Sox scandal of 1919. And along came Ruth with the distraction of his thunderous bat. The fans thronged to see him and the scandal was brushed aside. He hit more home runs and longer home runs than any man had ever fashioned before.
His appetites were prodigious. His physique was prodigious. His feats on and off the field were prodigious. He made money on a massive scale and he spent as faster or even faster than he made it.
His failures were also cut from the heroic mold, such as his .118 batting average in the 1922 World Series and his disastrous season of 1925 when he hit only .290 and lost his rebellion against the authority of Manager Miller Huggins. But his failures were so few that only his glorious successes will be remembered. Even the record book, ordinarily dull and statistical, takes on a certain enchantment and glamor where it lists the fifty-four marks the mighty Bambino left behind him.
His most extraordinary contribution to the game, however, rests in the fact that he alone changed its complexion and contour. It had been a game of 'inside baseball,' a tightly-played contest of single runs- stolen bases, squeeze plays, placement hitting. But the booming bat of the Babe demonstrated that runs could be gathered like bananas- in bunches. He soon had everyone swinging from his heels, shooting for the fences and trying to follow his lead.
Not only did he transform its strategical concepts, but he revitalized it in the box office, making new fans in untold numbers. He raised the general salary scale of all major leaguers until rookies now get higher wages than stars received before he brought his boisterous bat and boisterous personality on the scene.
Babe Ruth's records may all be broken someday, but the imprint he left on the game can never be erased. He was baseball's greatest figure and the sport never will see his like again."

-Arthur Daley, condensed from the New York Times (Baseball Digest, October 1948)

1948 Yankees of the Past: Earle Combs and Joe McCarthy

EARLE COMBS

THEY GOT THE BEES-NESS
"Earle Combs, who this season has rejoined his old Yankee boss, Joe McCarthy, on the coaching staff of the Red Sox, adds further proof that anything can, and usually does, happen in a ball game.
'I was playing center field for Louisville one day when I heard this noise behind me,' Combs said. 'Turning around I saw a cloud of bees swarming toward me. I shouted 'Time!' and ran for the clubhouse. When the other players saw what was happening, they all started running after me.
'The fans were getting a big laugh out of it until the bees headed for the grandstand,' Earle said. 'Then they began running for the exits, too. Not until the bees had disappeared over the top of the grandstand did we all return to the ball game.'"

-Ed Rumill in the Christian Science Monitor (Baseball Digest, July 1948)

JOE MCCARTHY

HE'S EYEING HIS EIGHTH WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP

"A one-time $6.50 a week 'head tender' in a Philadelphia woolen mill- a stoutish, sedate Irishman with gimlet brown eyes, an aggressive jaw and a usually-distressed look- Joseph Vincent McCarthy- is taking over the Boston Red Sox this spring to refurbish his reputation as baseball's most successful manager.

Though he never even got a chance to try on a major league uniform as a player, he has won seven World Series- a record, two more than Connie Mack, more than twice as many as John McGraw.

He is the only manager to win pennants in both leagues.

In twenty-eight years of piloting, twenty of them in the majors, he has finished out of the first division only once. He has wound up lower than third only three other times. He has won eleven pennants, nine of them in the majors. His big league teams have won .614 of their games.

He has weathered, with gentlemanly grace and dignity, dramatic showdowns with three of the game's greatest stars- Grover Alexander, Rogers Hornsby and Babe Ruth- winning two outright, gaining a moral triumph on the other occasion.

What, then, has the guy got on the ball?

To be sure, he has been fortunate in tying up with two- and now a third one- of baseball's wealthiest organizations. Certainly his task usually was somewhat less complex than that faced, say, by Zack Taylor with the Browns. The William Wrigley, Jr. millions gave him wide purchasing power with the Cubs, though he didn't make use of it as much as is generally believed. The Ruppert millions gave him the best scouting and perhaps the most intelligently operated farm system in the business. But millions long failed the Red Sox; the farm system wasn't a consistent winner for the Cardinals.

Diffident, even shy at times, McCarthy attributes his success to a self-effacing 'I've been pretty lucky all my life.' It's much more than that, of course. Primarily, it's that he knows how to pick men. He knows how to handle them. He instills in them a hustling, fighting spirit, preserves harmony, insists on team work in preference to individual honors. He is an astute handler of pitchers. He is a stickler for discipline, yet he knows when it is advisable to ease up on the reins in training matters.

As yet, some aren't quite ready to accept him as a great strategist, on a plane with Miller Huggins, for example. Yet he plays a sound game. He hasn't the flair for personal showmanship like a John McGraw or a Leo Durocher. He prefers the background. The credo of simplicity, which he inherited as a poor half-orphaned boy in Philadelphia's Germantown, has stuck with him.

He lets results speak for themselves. He took over the Cubs in the cellar and in four seasons not only led them to a championship, but made them the best Cub team in more than thirty years.

He took over the Yankees in 1931 and the next year they won the pennant. True, he did have Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Bill Dickey up there slugging for him, BUT- and get this- none of them was as individually effective in 1932, when they won under McCarthy, as in 1930, when they didn't win without him.

Don't believe it? Here's the proof. In 1932, Ruth hit eight fewer homers and batted eighteen percentage points less than he did in 1930. In 1932, too, Gehrig made seven fewer homers, hit thirty points lower and drove in twenty-three fewer runs than in 1930. And Dickey hit twenty-nine points less in 1932 than in 1930. Yet the Yankees, who finished only a few games above the second division without McCarthy in 1930, won the pennant under him in 1932 with 107 victories, three more than the runner up- and then swept through the Cubs in four straight in the World Series.

And he has been doing things like that ever since, interrupted only by his temporary retirement after quitting the Yanks the summer before last.

'I get a lot of letters saying I'm ruining baseball,' McCarthy remarked during his tenure with the Yanks. 'I'm ruining the league, they say. What kind of guy am I? Do I think I have to win 'em all and not give anybody a chance? Do I want to win them all?'

In a quiet voice, McCarthy answered himself.

'Well, who doesn't want to win them all?'

It was 'tough sledding,' both literally and figuratively, for Joe McCarthy, the boy. He not only had humble beginnings, but an accident as a tot in Philadelphia's Germantown almost stopped his baseball career before it had begun.

His left kneecap was badly broken as his sled careened against a rock zooming down a steep hill in Germantown, where he was born April 21, 1887. It left him with a loose cartilage that slowed him up considerably. And, he allows, 'like most of us swaybacks, I wasn't very fast to start with.'

His contracting father was killed in a cave-in when Joe was only three, forcing him as a youth to help with odd jobs, such as carrying ice. The family situation prevented his attending high school. Instead, he worked in the cotton and woolen mills. His extra qualities were recognized early, however. Most of the boys in the mill got $5 a week. As a 'head-tender,' Joe got all of $6.50.

'In between jobs, I started playing sandlot ball, as almost all kids do,' he recalls, 'but it wasn't until I was fifteen that I played with my first regular team. That was the Chew A.A. It was named that because we played in a little park in Chew Woods, named after the famous Germantown family, whose mansion was Washington's headquarters during the revolution. I played the outfield and often got as much as a couple bucks a game.'

McCarthy was far from a natural ball player, the sort that is born with fast feet and big hands, who makes plays gracefully and instinctively. Instead, he belonged to the much larger class of built-up players who must develop the hard way by training and coaching.

However, he was good enough to catch on with the Germantown semipro team. Then his baseball ability won a scholarship at Niagara University. 'At that time Niagara was more of a preparatory school,' McCarthy explains, 'and so a high school education wasn't a requisite.' He played one spring with the Purple Eagles, outfield and shortstop, in 1906.

'Then I get a trial with Wilmington in the Class-B Tri-State League,' he recalls. 'I played exactly twelve games. I hit .175. In three weeks I was released. The next season- 1907- I went back with Franklin, which had in the meantime entered organized ball in the Inter-State League. I played the infield and hit .314- incidentally, one of two years of my fifteen as a player in which I hit over .300- and was sold to Toledo.

'In one of my first games with Toledo I struck out four times and thought surely I'd be released that night. I managed to last three full seasons and part of a fourth, however, though I never hit more than .250. I played third and the outfield.'

In the middle of the 1911 season, Toledo traded McCarthy to Indianapolis, where Jim Burke, who later was to become McCarthy's loyal lieutenant with the Cubs and Yankees, was manager. Burke released him to Wilkes-Barre at the end of the season- and inadvertently started McCarthy on his managing career.

When Darby Bill Clymer, Wilkes-Barre manager and half owner, signed to manage Buffalo in 1913, he asked McCarthy to succeed him as pilot of the Wilkes-Barre club. And thus, at the somewhat precocious age of twenty-five, McCarthy's managerial career was under way.

The closest Joe McCarthy, second baseman, ever came to the major leagues was the day the Yankees- yes, the same Yankees he later led to seven world titles- refused to pay $3,000 for him and the time the Federal League disbanded shortly after he jumped to the Brooklyn club.

Both incidents occurred during the winter of 1915-1916. Prior to that, in 1913, McCarthy led Wilkes-Barre to second in his first chance as a manager. He moved himself from third to second base and hit his lifetime high of .325, an average that caused Memphis to draft him that winter and Buffalo to buy him immediately from Memphis.

He played two seasons with the strong Bison team that included such familiar baseball stars as Joe Judge, Charley Jamieson, Fred Beebe, Frank Gilhooley and Jack Onslow. They won the International League pennant in '15.

That was the period of the Federal League turmoil. Ed Barrow, then president of the International League and later, by a curious turn of fate, president of those same Yankees McCarthy managed, endeavored to help his I.L. clubs sell some of their stars in an effort to get a war chest to fight Federal invasion of some of their cities.

He went to New York to try to sell outfielder Gilhooley and McCarthy to the Yanks for $16,000. The Yanks offered him $11,000 for the pair, then decided McCarthy wasn't worth $3,000 and purchased Gilhooley alone for $8,000.

Discouraged, McCarthy, who was getting only $2,000 a year at Buffalo, went for Federal League bait that winter. When the circuit broke up before the season opened, he was assigned to Louisville. In 1916, as a member of the famous infield that had Jay Kirke at first, Roxy Roach at short and Johnny (Red) Corriden at third, he helped win the American Association pennant. No member of that infield missed as much as a single time at bat in the full 168 game schedule.

McCarthy was to remain with Louisville for ten years. In 1919, when Pat Flaherty resigned as Pilot, owner Bill Knabelkamp made McCarthy playing-manager. He led the Colonels to pennants in 1921 and 1925 and in the former defeated the supposedly unbeatable Baltimore Orioles in the Little World Series.

Even at Louisville, his leadership caused him to be discussed in the New York office. Once when Paul Krichell, Yankee scout, and Barrow were discussing Miller Huggins' health, Krichell remarked: 'Keep that man McCarthy in mind. If anything should ever happen to Hug, he would make a good manager for the Yankees.'

He did.

The late Mordecai Brown was being asked about that famous Merkle game on a radio program a few years ago and Joe McCarthy, waiting to be interviewed next, couldn't resist. 'Don't forget to tell them, Brownie,' he broke in, 'that the only player who did any hitting for you that day was Frank Chance- and he got three.'

Brownie's bushy eyebrows jumped an inch at that. Even he, who had been very much there that day in 1908, couldn't recall that. But it was just another proof of the amazing memory that has helped McCarthy become the master of seven world champions.

He is a close student not only of the game, but dozens of box scores daily, mentally storing away a fact here and a fact there that will be of value next week, next year or next decade.

Disclaiming any master-minding, McCarthy just plays sound, orthodox baseball for the most part. His older players are allowed to do their own thinking, with either he or his coaches signaling the rookies until they have established themselves.

His chief variation in orthodoxy comes in his hunches. His brown eyes twinkle as he says it may be that he is psychic, that he gets messages from out of the air in the early hours of the morning, like the time he started the injured Monte Pearson in the 1936 World Series- and Pearson beat the Giants, 5 to 2.

'A message from thin air,' he explained the hunch.

'But how,' persisted a reporter, 'do you get them?'

'Prepaid,' laughed McCarthy, 'and that's the best part of them.'

Besides loyalty, his chief requisite in a player is hustle. He, himself, never lets up. The Cubs had the pennant assured in 1929 and were running wild in Boston when Judge Fuchs, then bench manager of the Braves, pleaded with McCarthy.

'Have a heart, Joe, you're killing baseball in Boston. Haven't you scored enough runs- why demand more runs from your players?'

'I'll let you know sometime,' McCarthy shrugged.

The next time McCarthy saw Judge Fuchs was when the latter went to the dressing room to offer his condolences after the Cubs blew the 8 to 0 lead to the Athletics in the 1929 World Series.

'Well you got it today, Judge,' yelled McCarthy over the heads of the crowd, 'the answer to that riddle you were asking me in Boston.'

One who never pops off, McCarthy never alibis, either. Injuries? 'Those things make no difference. A manager is supposed to win even if he has fifteen injured players.' Bad weather in the spring? 'Our team trained at Brockton, Mass. and Portland, Maine in 1915- and won the pennant.'

Cynics sometimes scoff that he prefers 'ready-made' players from the high minors instead of developing his own. He admits the charge, if a charge it is. 'You can get a team from B and C players,' he says, 'but not a championship team. When you have to replace a major leaguer, it is logical to get the man nearly matured, those who have a half dozen years of experience and played regularly in AA ball. Of course, you can occasionally pick up a Cobb or a Wilcy Moore from the low minors, but the percentages are all against you.'

He admits he is a worrier. 'I've never met anybody in this business who isn't,' he says. 'It's a mental strain- trying to win a pennant. And just as soon as you do win one, there's always next season to worry about.'

A visit to a McCarthy bench is not at all like a visit to the bench of many big league clubs, where hoopla, gaiety and repartee is the order of the day. Silence stifles the atmosphere. A McCarthy player comes out, picks up a bat, goes up to the plate for preliminary swings, with seldom as much as a howdy or a nod to his mates and the barest nod to visiting newspapermen.

'We do our talking with base hits, pitching and fielding,' explained Coach Art Fletcher, when he was with McCarthy and the Yankees. 'Business-like, I guess you'd call it.'

And so it's business-like that Joseph Vincent McCarthy this month starts his quest for an eighth world title in seventeen years- and you wouldn't want to bet he doesn't get it, would you?"

-Herbert Simons, Baseball Digest (April 1948)

HIS FIRST THOUGHT

"When Joe McCarthy took over the managerial reins of the Red Sox, his first official move was to call Collinsville, Illinois, the home of his famous right-hand man and third base coach, Art Fletcher.

The latter's health has not been good the past several years and he was out of baseball even before McCarthy left the Yankees. But Mac called him, and asked if Fletch wanted to rejoin him in Boston.

'I appreciate the offer,' Fletch said, 'but my health won't permit it.'

'I was afraid that would be your answer,' McCarthy responded, 'but I just wanted you to know that I thought of you first when I needed a coach.'"

-Robert L. Burnes in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat (Baseball Digest, May 1948)