...."Still raining, Doc?" Erskine asked the question of Dr. Harold Wendler, an osteopath who was the Dodgers' trainer. If the game was on, Wendler would work to loosen Erskine's tight right shoulder.
"I do believe it's let up," Wendler said. "I think we'll have a ballgame."
"I want to see for myself," Erskine said, and that was the beginning of a small disaster.
Windows in the trainer's room and the adjoining clubhouse at Ebbets Field were crescents of frosted glass placed near the ceiling. They provided ventilation and privacy. Fans milling about on Sullivan Place could hardly peer through windows nine feet above the sidewalk....
Erskine fetched a stepladder, climbed up and worked a window open. The rain had stopped....
As Erskine clambered down, his foot slipped and his right knee slammed against a metal radiator cover. Erskine had torn up the same knee playing high school basketball. Pain and nausea assaulted him he sat down on the nearest object, a black equipment trunk. His head sagged forward and he banged his forehead just over the right eye on the same metal edge that had pounded his knee...
Charlie Dressen came running from his office. "It's all right, dammit, Carl. You take another day. I'm going to warm up Loes." Billy Loes, a twenty-two-year-old righthander from Queens, had won thirteen games that season.
"I'm okay," Erskine said, a bit grimly. "I just need a few minutes. Anyway, my dad's come all the way from Indiana to see me pitch in the World Series. I'm not letting everybody down."
Shaken, determined, Erskine lasted into the sixth inning. In every one the Yankee lead-off man reached base. In four of the six, the Yankee number-two batter got on base as well. In the first inning Roy Campanella threw out Hank Bauer and then Phil Rizzuto, trying to steal. The Dodgers bunched three singles in the third inning -- one a push bunt by Duke Snider -- and Roy Campanella batted in Pee Wee Reese with the Brooklyn run. But Erskine was scrambling to throw strikes, and to focus past his aching knee. "He ain't pitching like Erskine," Dressen said after a while.
....Still, he was pitching with grand and gritty determination.
The Yankees tied the score in the fourth, went ahead by a run in the fifth and when they loaded the bases with nobody out in the sixth, Dressen bowed to the inevitable, told Erskine to ice his knee and summoned Billy Loes. A run scored when the Dodgers botched a double play. Then Billy Martin, the street kid from Oakland, stared down Billy Loes, the street kid from Queens, and hit a three-run homer into the left field seats. The Yankees won 7-1....
Rud Rennie, the Yankee beat writer, said from time to time, "The Dodgers aren't playing the Pirates today. They're playing like the Pirates." He was going to start off his piece...with an observation along that line. Harold Rosenthal ... commandeered Erskine and the radiator cover. What angle did that leave the youthful lead writer, myself, after a sloppy and finally one-sided game? I wrote:
The Yankees settled down at Ebbets Field yesterday and with a crushing 7-1 victory evened the World Series at one-game apiece. While the crowd of 33,792 fans watched gravely, Vic Raschi, the heavy-chested righthander, overpowered Brooklyn with a three-hitter, and Billy Martin, the skinny second baseman, buried the vestiges of Brooklyn's hope with a three-run homer in the sixth inning when the Yankees scored five times.
Martin, 24, a pinch runner in last year's Series, has matured rapidly. So has Mickey Mantle, who won't reach his twenty-first birthday for two more weeks. The Kid from Commerce, Oklahoma, slammed three of New York's ten hits.
What elixir has Casey Stengel been feeding his young warriors? Pure Flatbush water?
Memories of Summer, Roger Kahn
Copyright 1997 Hook Slide, Inc.
University of Nebraska Press
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