[Dodgers starter Joe Black's first pitch] was a fastball, letter high, on the inside corner. Hank Bauer, the Yankees rugged right fielder, a powerful fellow with the merciless features of a bordello bouncer, took the hummer for a strike. No radar guns existed in the 1950s, but a complicated electric-eye device had measured Black's hard stuff at 95 miles an hour. You could see right away he had a good fastball this October day.
[Allie] Reynolds, the best pitcher on earth, was slightly off his game. In addition to hard stuff, Reynolds threw a nasty, sweeping curve, which he mixed in with an occasional 100-mile-an-hour knockdown. Batters earned their pay -- some said combat ribbons -- when Reynolds pitched. But this afternoon his curve broke wide and low. You can't spot knockdown pitches when you keep falling behind in the count....
Opening the second inning of a scoreless game Jackie Robinson cracked a fastball into the lower left-field grandstand for a Dodger run. The Brooklyn crowd applauded sedately, as though fearful noise would enrage the Yankees. Reynolds walked around the pitching rubber in a tight, angry circle. He believed profoundly that knockdown pitches subdued black batters....
Very quickly, in the top of the third, Gil McDougald, the Yankees' twenty-four-year-old third baseman, pulled a home run to left and tied the score....
Suddenly the game felt tense at Ebbets Field. The Yankees' number-seven hitter had tied the score with nobody out. Now came Billy Martin, the raucous banana-nose from Berkeley, who took over second base after quiet, gentlemanly Jerry Coleman was called back into the Air Force to fly fighter missions over Korea.
Blake looked fidgety. He threw three straight balls to Martin. He wiped his forehead with a white uniform sleeve. Then he struck out Martin, and Reynolds, on a full count, and rough Hank Bauer with a curve at the knees. He had fanned the side. The rookie was not getting rattled....
Phil Rizzuto and Mickey Mantle singled in the Yankee fourth. Then Joe Collins, the Yankees' first baseman, drove a hard liner toward right center. Rizzuto tagged up wit the run that would put the Yankees ahead. [Carl] Furillo, the greatest arm on earth, caught the Collins line drive and threw home. His throw looked even harder than the liner. Rizzuto, a shrewd baserunner, stopped in his tracks and slid back to third. A ground out to Robinson ended the threat.
With two out in the sixth inning, Pee Wee Reese lined an outside fastball safely to right. Duke Snider was the batter, a batter at last coming into his own. In his first World Series, three years earlier, Snider found himself outmatched by Yankee pitching and struck out eight times in five games. Now, at twenty-six, he had learned to lay off bad pitches. Reynolds tried to tempt Snider with a wide curve. Snider looked. The ball bounced into the dirt and spun away from Yogi Berra. Reese ran to second. Reynolds walked another tight circle. The count went to two balls and one strike. Reynolds came in with a fastball and Snider lifted a long drive, high over the scoreboard in right centerfield. The baseball bounced on the cobblestones of Bedford Avenue, where reckless children pursued it among honking Plymouths and Chevrolets. This was Snider's first World Series home run. (He had ten more on an eventful journey to the Hall of Fame.) The Dodgers led by a score of 3-1.
The Yankees charged yet again in the seventh. Irv Noren walked. Gil McDougald slapped a grounder into the hole on the left side. Billy Cox, the best third baseman of his time, lunged and speared the ball and started a snappy double play. Jackie Robinson at second was the unshakable pivot man. Billy Martin lashed a hard drive up the line. Cox wore a cheap, black, shabby glove. Shabby and magical. He stabbed backhand and trapped the drive between his black glove and the brown infield earth. Martin strained toward first, hoping to beat out a hit. Cox waited and looked at the baseball. It was signed by Warren Giles. Hope swelled in Martin's breast. Cox gunned down the young Yankee by half a step.
Things brightened for the Yankees in the eighth. Gene Woodling, a solid .300 hitter, batted for Reynolds and cracked a high smash against the screen in right-center field. The carom eluded Carl Furillo and kicked past Snider. Woodling, a squat, barrel-chested character, rumbled into third. Bauer flied to center and Woodling scored easily when Snider's throw sailed up the first-base line. Black retired Rizzuto, but it was a one-run game again, a one-run game in a small ballpark. With two shaky outfield plays, the great Dodger defense seemed to be wavering.
Ray Scarborough relieved Reynolds and got two quick outs. Then Reese lined a fastball into the lower stands in left. He had hit a homer in the Dodgers' disappointing 1949 Series and now, with this crucial eighth-inning Drive, Reese became the first Dodger ever to have walloped two World Series home runs .... You had to concede that Brooklyn's recurrent autumn disasters amounted to more than wretched luck. The element of powder-puff hitting persisted.
History aside, the 1952 Dodgers had regained their two-run margin. In the ninth inning ... Snider ran down Yogi Berra's long fly to right center. Robinson moved smartly toward second and threw out Joe Collins. Black dug deep and struck out Irv Noren. That gave the Dodgers the victory, 4-2. In five previous World Series, no Brooklyn team had ever won the opening game. The big relief pitcher walked off the mound in a careful, businesslike manner and extended his hand to Roy Campanella.
....Grasping the key factor in a complex game, and doing it quickly, is not as simple as it may appear. The best of baseball writers, the two Lardners, Smith, Cannon, and the Dick Young of the 1950s understood baseball from their marrow. The poetry or noise they made proceeded first from deep understanding. My job in the Ebbets Field press box after the Dodgers' great victory on October 1, 1952, was to find the right angle and -- just about as important -- get the score in the first paragraph....
My story on the first game began: "Home runs and Joe Black, the combination that brought the Dodgers the opening decision in their quest for their first World Series championship yesterday. Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, and Pee Wee Reese slammed in all the Brooklyn runs with homers. Black made the hitting stand up with good speed and great control and while a record Ebbets Field crowd of 24,861 watched quietly, the Dodgers whipped the Yankees, 4-2."
Memories of Summer, Roger Kahn
Copyright 1997 Hook Slide, Inc.
University of Nebraska Press
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