Sports Illustrated The World Series: A History of the Fall Classic from the Pages of Sports Illustrated

By Sports Illustrated

From its inception, Sports Illustrated has chronicled baseball's greatest spectacle: the World Series. Now, SI celebrates the grandeur and spirit of the Fall Classic with a deluxe commemorative book featuring the magazine's iconic photography alongside classic stories from legendary writers. Along with overviews of notable teams and championships, this new volume includes stats, facts, and anecdotes spanning World Series history. The nostalgic past meets the electric present in this ultimate examination of baseball's storied event. Bringing MLB history to life by diving into the legendary SI archives, Sports Illustrated The World Series is essential for every baseball fan's collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sports Illustrated
• Release date: Oct 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781637275139

Book preview

Contents

Introduction: This Little World by Steve Rushin

The 1950s

SI’s coverage begins as New York remained the center of the baseball world, even as one of its teams moved West

The 1960s

An unforgettable home run and the Miracle Mets bookended the decade

The 1970s

An era dominated by dynasties saw four teams win nine World Series

The 1980s

The ’80s were the decade of parity, highlighted by a pinch-hit home run in Hollywood

The 1990s

The Braves controlled the NL as Jeter’s Yankees formed another dynasty in the AL

The 2000s

Several franchises broke their championship droughts and rewarded generations of fans

The 2010s

New champions emerged on both coasts, and the Lovable Losers finally shed their moniker

The 2020s

One team became a lightning rod for controversy on its way to back-to-back World Series appearances

1967 World Series. Photograph by Neil Leifer

Introduction: This Little World by Steve Rushin

Since its inception,

Sports Illustrated

has borne witness to every World Series, a crucible that reveals the majesty of baseball and the men who have played it

In the first game of the first World Series that

Sports Illustrated

ever covered, in the first full month of the magazine’s existence, Willie Mays made The Catch at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan, five miles uptown from SI’s offices. From there, a 26-year-old named Roger Kahn had been dispatched to write about the Fall Classic. That was 1954, where this book auspiciously begins, when the World Series was like the Met Gala or the New Year’s Eve ball drop: an annual fixture on the New York City calendar.

The Yankees had won the previous five Fall Classics. In 1955, the Brooklyn Dodgers won their only title. (Kahn would immortalize those men as The Boys of Summer.) The year after that, in the Bronx, Yankees right-hander Don Larsen pitched the only perfect game in the history of the World Series, an American institution that once played out before a rapt nation on transistor radios smuggled into schoolrooms; on flickering sets watched through the windows of TV showrooms; and in headlines stripped across city newsstands. Read all about it? Americans did, often in the pages of

Sports Illustrated

, whose stories and photographs still stand up, almost literally, as in a pop-up book.

For something contested among 29 American teams and one in Canada, World Series is of course a hyperbolic descriptive. But to baseball fans it feels exactly right. For a couple of weeks every October, the planet is held in the two-seam grip of Bob Gibson or Sandy Koufax, Mickey Lolich or Dwight Gooden, Mariano Rivera or Madison Bumgarner. The Tiffany trophy, with its 30 flags flapping in an invisible breeze, calls to mind the headquarters of the United Nations. For its range of human emotions—Fisk’s homer, Buckner’s error—the World Series, like Shakespeare’s England, really is this little world.

But it’s also a lost planet. Happily,

Sports Illustrated

arrived just in time to capture a golden age in black-and-white. The New York Giants, the Brooklyn Dodgers, the billboards for Ballantine beer and Chesterfield cigarettes, flannel uniforms, striped stirrups, suited spectators, neck-tied umpires, fans who bum-rushed the field to slap their heroes on the back or tear up sod as a souvenir—all of these would slowly vanish, like a home run ball beneath a scoreboard ad for El Producto cigars. Going, going, gone.

Willie Mays led the Giants against Cleveland in the 1954 World Series. Photograph by Mark Kauffman

As in the Wizard of Oz, the magazine would turn from black-and-white to vivid color. See Vida Blue in green and gold, the Big Red Machine, the red-white-and-blue bunting draped from the Yankee Stadium facade, like laundry hung out to dry. If the red numbers on the brilliant white uniforms of the Dodgers look like lipstick on a shirt collar, well the World Series was always slightly illicit, a reason—in broad daylight—to play hooky from work or school.

World Series games haven’t been played in the slanting shadows of an afternoon sun since 1984, at Tiger Stadium. (The last Series game played in the day at all, in 1987, was beneath the Teflon roof of the Metrodome in Minneapolis.) For nearly 40 years now, the World Series has been a nocturnal animal, and one of those happy exceptions to your mother’s warning that nothing good happens after midnight.

It was 20 minutes before midnight in Toronto when the Blue Jays’ Joe Carter hit his walk-off home run to end the 1993 World Series and he joyously jumped from base to base. But it was after midnight by the time Carter undressed at his locker, where the man collecting his clothes wasn’t the clubhouse attendant but a Hall of Fame curator, zipping the rightfielder’s garments into Mylar bags before spiriting them to the celestial laundry of Cooperstown.

Carter, as he giddily acknowledged, had just realized his childhood dream. And in covering the World Series for

Sports Illustrated

, I had realized my own, more modest, childhood fantasy.

***

At my first World Series, writing sidebars for SI as a 24-year-old in 1990, I sat with the game’s magnificent bard, Roger Angell of The New Yorker, in the Oakland and Cincinnati press boxes. For reasons never explained to me,

Sports Illustrated

always procured for Angell his World Series press credentials. So I got to watch him watch the World Series. A young colleague doing the same said to me with envy: Look at him. He files one piece in the fall on spring training, and one piece in the spring on the Fall Classic.

Steve Rushin wrote SI’s cover story on the 1991 World Series after his hometown Twins won it all. Photograph by Heinz Kluetmeier

A slight exaggeration, but still: writing the 5,000-word World Series story for SI was more fraught with deadline pressure. As a kid, I had watched Twins games on the TV in our basement in Bloomington, Minnesota, and written stories about those games on my mom’s Royal typewriter. Hours after Jack Morris pitched 10 innings of shutout baseball in Game 7 to give the Twins a 1–0 World Series win for the ages on a Sunday night in 1991, I drove a rental car from the Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis to my childhood home, where I wrote the story from 2 a.m. to 9 a.m. in the same basement, in front of the same TV, in a shirt sticky with flop sweat and champagne spray.

If this were a scratch-and-sniff book, and it probably ought to be, it would smell like champagne and cigar smoke. In the following pages, you’ll ingest those twin totems of celebration. The Mets’ hero Mookie Wilson holds a giant jeroboam of champagne in 1986. Marlins hero Edgar Renteria, in 1997, smokes a cigar the size of a nightstick. Near the end of Kahn’s 1954 Series story, in the Giants’ clubhouse, he describes outfielder Jim (Dusty) Rhodes: Big Jim stuck a cigar in his mouth. ‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Where’s the champagne?’

But I’ve also witnessed the opposite of joy. After the seventh inning of the decisive Game 6 of the 2003 World Series, at Yankee Stadium, with Josh Beckett of the Marlins dominating the home team, I rushed to the elevator leading to the clubhouses to avoid swimming against the tide of humanity that would be exiting the stadium at the end of the game. When the elevator arrived, and the doors parted, there he stood, God in a topcoat: Yogi Berra was smaller than his playing height of 5’7", yet somehow too big for a freight elevator.

The Marlins waited at home plate after Alex Gonzalez’s walk-off homer in Game 4 of the 2003 World Series. Three days later, they were champions. Photograph by Al Tielemans

His resting Yogi face was funereal. The former Yankee catcher, winner of 10 World Series as a player, and three more as a coach or manager—and a member of six more losing teams—said nothing. But in his rush to beat the crowd, the man who famously declared, It ain’t over ’til it’s over was signaling that this World Series was, indeed, over before it was over.

He knew better than any man on Earth, having competed in 19 Fall Classics. And he was right. Beckett completed his nine-inning, five-hit shutout, and that particular Yankees dynasty was decisively over. The elevator descended to clubhouse level, and the doors parted once again for Yogi, as the Red Sea had done for Moses. And then Yogi Berra—who had leapt into Don Larsen’s arms in this same stadium in 1956—disappeared into the South Bronx night.

***

The World Series is like that—Biblical, magical, Shakespearean, filled with dynasties and ancient imprecations. The year after Yogi, 2004, the Red Sox broke their 86-year World Series curse. The San Francisco Giants, heirs to that 1954 team in the Polo Grounds, won three titles in five seasons in the 21st century. (Their Yogi was a catcher named Buster.) The Cubs broke a 108-year unlucky streak that was like the Old Testament in reverse: a goat had been sacrificing them.

All of those stories are here, every one of them different, but each with baseball at its cushioned-cork center. Over the decades, the games have grown longer and been pushed later—later in the night and later on the calendar. Eight of the Series in this century have spilled into November. But even with a pitch clock, the Fall Classic and their constituent games circle back to the timeless qualities of beauty, wonder and dramatic tension. From Dusty Rhodes in 1954 to Dusty Baker in 2022, the world and the World Series keep turning. All paths still lead to home. Dust we are, and to Dust we shall return.

The 1950s

1954 World Series

New York Giants (97–57) over Cleveland Indians (111–43–2)

4-0

1...2...3...4... & BINGO

Excerpted from

Sports Illustrated

October 11, 1954

BY ROGER KAHN

Baseball experts gave the Giants only a slim chance to beat the Indians, but the Giants amazed the experts, the fans and undoubtedly themselves. Everything Leo Durocher tried worked

The boys did it all.

—Giants manager Leo Durocher

Only once during the New York Giants’ annihilation of the Cleveland Indians did Al López, the Cleveland manager, permit himself the luxury of rage.

For four days López suffered in reflected humiliation while the Giants swept the 1954 World Series from the Indians, four games to none. The sweep was an achievement baseball men had insisted was impossible. Bookmakers admitted it was possible, but rated the possibility at 22-to-1. Yet as the incredible victimized him, Al López remained soft-spoken save for a single interlude after the second game when Early Wynn failed, when the Indian attack failed for the second time and when ultimate defeat became a clear and present danger.

Reporters were admitted to the visitors’ clubhouse at the Polo Grounds five minutes after the second game ended. They gathered in a tight circle about López. There were some good questions and some bad. At first López answered in whispers.

What was the turning point today? one reporter asked.

There wasn’t any turning point, López murmured.

There’s got to be a turning point, the reporter insisted. What was it?

There wasn’t any, I’m telling you, López repeated, breaking out of a whisper.

Was the turning point when Doby couldn’t catch that ball Rhodes hit? the reporter persisted thickly.

Now goddam, López shouted. What are you trying to do. Ask your questions and answer them, too? Goddam. What are you trying to do?

When the Series ended Saturday some reporters tried to plant in López’ mouth more words about a turning point. With considerable difficulty synthetic quotes were created. Actually, as López knew, the 1954 World Series was without one single hinge. There were a great many points at which things turned against the Indians. To equate one against the other is to equate the destructiveness of a teaspoonful against a tablespoon of uranium.

Willie Mays robbed Vic Wertz with his unforgettable over-the-shoulder catch in Game 1 against Cleveland to help secure a Giants victory. Photograph by Bettmann

The first game, which the Giants won 5 to 2, was a turning point because it had been generally assumed that Bob Lemon, Cleveland’s starting pitcher, was stronger and better than the Giants’ Sal Maglie.

The second game, which the Giants won 3–1, was a turning point because it had been generally assumed that Early Wynn, pitcher of three two-hit games in September, was unbeatable in a clutch.

The third game, which the Giants won 6–2, was a turning point because it had been generally assumed that the Indians were waiting to sandbag the Giants at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium.

The fourth game, which the Giants won 7–4, was a turning point because it had been generally assumed that the Indians would win the World Series.

In the first inning of the first game the Indians looked good. They scored two runs when Vic Wertz made the first of his eight hits, a triple to right center field that batted in Al Smith and Bobby Avila. Then the Indians, winners of more games than any American League team in history, went into a miniature decline and fall. The Giants tied the score in the third inning. In the sixth, with Wertz at third base, Jim Hegan bounced fiercely to Henry Thompson at third. Thompson fought the grounder with both hands until it surrendered. His throw to first base was in time by half a step.

When that ball squirted away, Thompson said, all I was thinking was I gotta get that son of a buck over to first base.

In the eighth inning, with two Indians on base and no one out, Vic Wertz hit a ball 450 feet, where Willie Mays caught it. Never before had so unbelievable a catch been seen and disbelieved by so many.

Was it real? someone asked Al Dark, the Giants’ captain, later.

It was real, Dark said, as though he had only then convinced himself.

A terror on the basepaths as well as in the field, Mays hit .286 and drove in three runs during the Series. Photograph by Mark Kauffman

But there was at least one more turning point in that first game. With two Giants on base in the tenth inning, a high-living Southerner named Jim Rhodes pinch-hit for Monte Irvin and lifted a fly into the breeze that blew toward right field. Bobby Avila, Cleveland’s second baseman, started back for the ball. A customer in the right-field stands muffed it. Three runs scored; the Giants had won.

Next afternoon at the Polo Grounds the crowd sagged below 50,000 and there were proportionately fewer turning points. Johnny Antonelli, the Giants’ young left-hander, made his first pitch a fast ball and Al Smith, Cleveland’s young left fielder, hit the fast ball to the roof of the upper deck. Thereafter 13 Indians reached base and though none was observed biting dust, none scored, either.

Early Wynn pitched four perfect innings, then two Giants reached base and Rhodes again hit for Irvin. This time he pinch-popped a single to short center field beyond the reach of Larry Doby. The Indians were impaled on a sharp new turning point.

He’s a pretty fair hitter, said Giant Scout Tom Sheehan of Rhodes.

He’s a County Fair hitter. He goes up there and swings.

Then the Series moved to Cleveland where one store was caught with a sign showing. Congratulations, Indians, the sign in the window read. You’re sitting on top of the world.

A BIG DEAD SALAMI

Lemon and Wynn had been beaten. Al Rosen, Cleveland’s clean-up hitter, was crippled by a pulled leg muscle. Rosen sat down as Mike Garcia got up to pitch the third game. A 37-year-old veteran named Hank Majeski took over third base from Rosen. All season subs had come through for Cleveland, but by this time a great many points had turned. Majeski went hitless, Rhodes pinch-hit a two-run single, Ruben Gomez outpitched Garcia and the Indians were down three games.

No sense waiting for the spring, Rosen said a day later as he prepared to go back to third base. Lemon goes fine with two days’ rest, said Al López when someone wondered what had become of Bobby Feller.

A small left-hander named Don Liddle held the Indians while Lemon did not go fine and the Giants moved ahead, 7–0. Cleveland fought back too late when Majeski pinch-hit a three-run homer and when a rally knocked out Liddle for Hoyt Wilhelm in the seventh. Wilhelm stopped it, but another rally knocked him out for Antonelli with one out in the eighth. Johnny whipped a curve past Wertz’s bat for a second out. With two strikes on Wally Westlake, Antonelli tossed a change-up pitch and Westlake watched it drift over the plate. When he did so, Cleveland’s hotelkeepers who had raised prices for rooms, barkeeps who had raised prices for drinks and Cleveland’s fans who had wanted to see another game on Sunday, knew what the Indians knew, too. The Giants were in.

Dusty Rhodes rounded third base after hitting a home run in Game 2 at the Polo Grounds. Photograph by Mark Kauffman

The victorious Giants moments after sweeping the Indians in Game 4 at Cleveland Stadium. Photograph by Mark Kauffman

A big dead salami, the Giants’ Joe Garagiola shouted during the clubhouse celebration. Johnny threw Westlake a big dead salami.

The boys did it all, Manager Leo Durocher shouted.

Leo, said a moist-eyed reporter. You managed great.

The boys did it all, Durocher said in normal tones.

World Champions, Whitey Lockman, the first baseman, said quietly. What do you know? But I bet they’d like another crack at us.

Big Jim Rhodes spoke for the majority. Big Jim stuck a cigar in his mouth. Hey! he shouted, Where’s the champagne?

Afterward there came perspective and with perspective came questions. Were the Indians’ 111 victories merely the reflection of a fairly good team in a terribly weak American League? Had Rosen’s leg been sound and Larry Doby’s shoulder uninjured, would there have been a struggle? Or were the Giants baseball’s supreme opportunists, unbeatable always in 1954 because of a Mays catch, a Thompson stop or a Rhodes pinch-hit home run? The answers, if they exist at all, are as elusive as that single turning point the reporter tried to get from Al López.

But one Giant official had all the answers he needed. We didn’t just beat Cleveland, he insisted. We showed those Yankees up but good.

1955 World Series

Brooklyn Dodgers (98–55–1) over New York Yankees (96–58)

4-3

WHEN BROOKLYN WON

Excerpted from

Sports Illustrated

October 17, 1955

BY ROBERT CREAMER

It was only last week the Dodgers finally beat the Yanks and won the Series. But in Brooklyn that grand day is already a part of history

Why would I be nervous? Who the hell expected me to beat the Yankees?

—Dodgers pitcher Johnny Podres

You have read of dancing in the streets at times of great joy? It is an apt phrase, but one more often figurative than literal. Yet on the night of October 4 in the year 1955, there really was dancing in the streets of Brooklyn, and weeping for pure joy, too. For that was the day the Dodgers at long, long last brought the baseball championship of the world home to Flatbush. Hundreds crammed into the ancient Hotel Bossert on Montague Street to help the Dodgers celebrate. Thousands more milled around outside, cheering, yelling, dancing.

In the far-off Caribbean, where the Dodgers, first major league team to break the color line in baseball, were immensely popular, 5,000 people paraded for four hours through the city of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, carrying banners that said At last—Brooklyn wins and Snider, Duke of Bedford Avenue. In Ciudad Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, where the Dodgers had trained in 1948, an enterprising reporter wrote that a brand-new baby had been named Podres Garcia, after Johnny Podres, Brooklyn pitching hero of the Series.

Oh, it was a day to burn into your memory. And it was a game to remember, too. You must realize that whenever baseball men gather for small talk, to cut up old touches and freshen yellowed memories, they always drag out ball games long since played and run them through the projector of reminiscence. They recall a fielding play from this one, the way a man ran bases in that one, the things a hitter did in still another.

Occasionally, they will recall the contest itself, the whole game, the entity, the things that went before it and the things that came after, and then it is a really special memory, because of all the thousands on thousands of ball games played since the beginning of time—which in baseball legend is reckoned as 1839—only a handful, perhaps a dozen or two, are accorded this honor.

Two of baseball’s iconic players—Jackie Robinson and Yogi Berra—collided in the ’55 Series. Photograph by Mark Kauffman

Thus, when a game barely finished is at once added to this select few—instantly caught in memory, so to speak, like an insect perfectly preserved for all time in a piece of clear amber—it is a very rare game indeed.

Such was the seventh and deciding game of the first World Series ever won by the Brooklyn Dodgers. First of all, it was undeniably historic. Then, because it was the culmination of a tremendously spirited comeback by the Brooklyns who, two down after the first two games, won four of the next five to win the Series, it was splendidly dramatic. And, finally, since it marked the end of the curious domination the New York Yankees had held for so long over the Dodgers, and destroyed the latest myth of Yankee invincibility, it was properly epic.

The pitchers were lean, dark, hawk-faced Tommy Byrne, who had crowned his comeback from the minor leagues with a victory over the Dodgers in the second game; and blond, blue-eyed youthful Johnny Podres, whose masterful handling of New York in the third game had stopped a Yankee runaway.

The Dodgers, in the first three innings, managed to get just two men on base against Byrne, both by walks, and neither went past first. But the inexorable Yankees, in the last half of the third inning, moved to demolish Podres. With two out Rizzuto walked on four straight bad pitches, and Martin singled. The awkward, dangerous McDougald fenced with Podres, ball by strike, until the count reached the classic three-and-two and John Podres reached the near edge of destruction. As Podres and McDougald fought, the menacing Yogi Berra, waiting to bat next, slowly waved two bats back and forth, seeming bemused, watching Podres like a patient, hungry cat.

Podres, to his credit, put the three-and-two pitch over the plate, but McDougald tapped a heartbreaking little grounder toward third base that seemed sure to be a safe hit to load the bases, since the third baseman, Hoak, playing back, had no chance to get in to it in time. Rizzuto, hurrying down from second, slid into third...and incredibly the slowly moving ball bounced off his leg and ricocheted past the base. No one for a moment knew just what happened, but then it was clear: a batted ball had struck the base runner. Rizzuto was out. The inning was over. The Dodgers were safe. Berra had to put down his bats.

Duke Snider homered off Whitey Ford in Game 1, one of Snider’s four homers in the Series. Photograph by Mark Kauffman

Pee Wee Reese turned a double play in Game 5 that erased Elston Howard from the bases. Photograph by Mark Kauffman

The Dodgers scored the first run of the game in the fourth inning when Gil Hodges, batting with two men out and a runner on third, doggedly stood up to Byrne, even after the left-hander had sent two good called strikes past him, and then broke the pitcher’s heart by hitting a single into left field for the run. They scored again in the sixth, adding what is aptly called the insurance run. This is the one extra run that limits the enemy’s maneuvering, alters his strategy and generally provides the team that has it with a pleasant added measure of comfort and confidence in times of stress like, say, the last three innings of the final game of a seven-game World Series.

Comfort, confidence or whatever, everything went well with the Brooklyns. For instance, Manager Walter Alston pressed his luck and tried for even more runs by inserting a pinch hitter for Don Zimmer, his second baseman. The pinch hitter failed, but this was Brooklyn’s day, you see, and the move paid off anyway. Gilliam, who had been playing left field, moved to second to replace Zimmer, and little Sandy Amoros, a fleet-footed Cuban, took Gilliam’s place in left. And, almost immediately, in the bottom of that sixth inning, came the play that brought the Yankees crashing down to earth. And Amoros was the key to it. Gilliam, wise men opined, would never have made the play.

The last three innings were brilliant with tension. Now, at last, it seemed that it could be done: the Yankees could lose; and more, the Dodgers could win.

The seventh inning belonged to Pee Wee Reese, the captain of the team, the veteran shortstop who had played in five losing World Series and who wanted so much to win. He charged Skowron’s grounder like a ferret, pounced on it and made the play. Cerv hit another grounder that Pee Wee, almost frantic with need, charged and handled. Howard singled but the injured Mickey Mantle, pinch-hitting, popped up behind third, and Reese, rushing under it, bounced with eagerness, waiting, bounced, bounced, grabbed the ball, and bounced again, lightly now, with the third out in his glove.

Johnny Podres was named MVP of the Series, the first time that award had been given. The Dodgers pitcher posted complete-game victories in Games 3 and 7. Photograph by Mark Kauffman

In the eighth the Yankees made a last, vain, thrashing grab for victory. Rizzuto singled. Crafty little Martin, two runs behind, tried to push a hit into right, but Furillo came fast and took it at his knees. McDougald rapped a base hit. Berra, the menace, gave Brooklyn pause, but he lifted a high fly to right. Two out now. The fierce Hank Bauer was at bat, and the Yankees were on the edge of the dugout. Podres threw a ball to Bauer, then a called strike. Bauer fouled a pitch back to the screen and took a second ball. Podres set himself and then threw violently, as hard as he could, with so much effort that he fell off the mound toward third base, staggering to keep his balance. The pitch split the plate. Bauer swung and missed, and the crowd roared, a full-throated shout of victory. The Dodgers jounced off the field.

The ninth was Podres’ inning. His strength and speed were overpowering, and the anticipation of victory rode on every pitch. Skowron tapped back to the mound, and John, plucking the ball tardily from the netting of his glove, threw him out. Cerv raised an easy fly to Amoros. Howard, the last man, took a called strike (the crowd exploded with noise), a ball, swung and missed (another explosion), took a second ball high. He stepped out of the batter’s box, and the crowd jeered impatiently. He stepped back in. He fouled a pitch back, fouled another. The Dodger infield moved restlessly, fidgeting. Podres threw again, a big fat, arrogant changeup that Howard swung at and topped on the ground, fittingly enough toward Reese. Pee Wee fielded it (commenting later that it seemed to take hours to pick up the ball), threw it to first to Hodges, and that was it. After a half century of waiting the Brooklyn Dodgers were champions of the world.

1956 World Series

New York Yankees (97–57) over Brooklyn Dodgers (93–61)

4-3

THE NAME IS YOGI

Excerpted from

Sports Illustrated

October 22, 1956

BY ROBERT CREAMER

Not even the unparalleled brilliance of Don Larsen’s perfect game could dim the World Series luster of the squat, unbeautiful Berra—ballplayer extraordinary

[Ted] Williams is the best natural hitter, but [Yogi] Berra is the best natural ballplayer.

—Yankees manager Casey Stengel

The most impressive thing about the World Series was Yogi Berra; there’s no getting away from it. Don Larsen was The Hero (there’s no getting away from that, either), and Larsen is certainly deserving of all the praise and rewards coming his way, but Berra was incomparably the best player in the Series, the most valuable, the principal reason why the New York Yankees are again the champions of the baseball world.

In a way, the furor about Don Newcombe and the implication—or, for that matter, the flat accusation—that he chokes up and is easy to beat in a tight situation is a slur on Berra. For in the second game it was Berra’s grand-slam home run that knocked Newcombe out of the box, and in the seventh game it was Berra’s successive two-run homers that beat him, and while there is undoubtedly some foundation for the belief that Newcombe is not the best pitcher in the world in a tense game against a good club (though this has more to do with the man’s particular skills than with his psyche), it should be remembered that it took the best player in the Series to beat him. In the four times he came to bat against Newcombe, Berra had three home runs and a walk. Of the 11 runs that Newcombe allowed in the Series, Berra batted in eight. Success like that against any pitcher would be remarkable enough; against a man of Newcombe’s stature, it borders on the legendary.

After all, in that seventh game Newcombe twice had to pitch to Mickey Mantle, the most devastating hitter of the season, each time with a man on base and one out. Twice Newcombe struck Mantle out. And the second time Berra batted, Newcombe had him struck out, too. But Roy Campanella, ordinarily an impeccable catcher, failed to hold on to that foul-tip third strike and Berra, allowed another chance, hit the homer that destroyed Newcombe and sent him slouching off to the showers beset by gnawing doubt and self-recrimination.

Don Larsen struck out seven Dodgers and pitched the only perfect game in World Series history in Game 5. Photograph by Bettmann

What it boils down to, probably, is simply that Berra is a better baseball player than Newcombe and, indeed, very possibly one of the best baseball players who ever lived. Two years ago Casey Stengel was asked in a survey who he thought was the best natural ballplayer in the American League. Stengel thought the question over carefully, his facile tongue temporarily stilled, and then replied: Williams is the best natural hitter, but Berra is the best natural ballplayer.

It seemed an odd choice for most natural—the chunky, awkward-looking Berra over some graceful athlete like, say, Mantle or Al Kaline, but Stengel is a baseball fan as well as a master practitioner of the art, and he has a deep admiration for the man who feels the game, whose instincts and reflexes are perfectly geared to the environment of 98-mph pitches, 200-pound base runners with spikes high, sudden variations in the age-old theme of bat, ball and glove. No one feels baseball better than Yogi Berra, no one relishes the excitement of its competition more, no one reacts more quickly to its constant challenge. He is a masterpiece of a ballplayer and this year’s World Series was his showcase.

Others made their mark, too. Perhaps no one was more appealing than old Sal Maglie, who is just as much at home in baseball as Yogi is. His duel with Mickey Mantle in the Series was a fascinating thing to watch: two fine athletes fencing with each other.

In the first inning of the first game, Mantle hit a two-run homer off Maglie to send the Yankees ahead. Maglie’s shoulders did not slump, his features did not sag. He struck out two men in a row to end the inning and came marching off the mound looking as though he were muttering: Those blank-blanks...2–0.... Who do they think they are, getting a 2–0 lead on me? And, actually, in the dugout where the pitcher is usually comforted and consoled by his teammates after giving up two runs, it was Maglie who did the comforting. Come on, he said. Two runs are nothing. Let’s get them back. And the Dodgers did.

But the duel between Maglie and Mantle went on. The next time Mickey batted, the way Maglie pitched was sort of magnificent. He threw a low curve in close for a called strike, followed with a surprising fast ball close for a second called strike, threw a curve low for ball one, then a fast ball directly at Mantle for ball two. There was a delay then. The umpire examined the ball. A man got up and began to throw in the bullpen. The crowd lit a cigarette.

Then Maglie crouched on the mound, the ball held behind his right knee, and peered in at Mantle and Campanella. Mantle readied himself, thinking perhaps of the close curve, the close fast ball. Maglie threw, a lovely curve on the outside that just caught the edge of the plate for called strike three. He got him! a man yelled.

Yogi Berra leapt into Larsen’s arms when the game was over, a moment immortalized in this photograph. Photograph by Bettmann

Whitey Ford lost the Series opener but came back to pitch a complete game and get the win in Game 3. Photograph by Richard Meek

And he got him again, in the ninth, with a man on first. Maglie said later it was the best pitch he threw all day and one of the best he ever threw, a good curve low and a little bit to the outside. He knew Mantle wanted to swing, knew that he wanted to pull the ball. There was then, according to the law of Maglie, nowhere else for a low curve outside to go but to Second Baseman Gilliam. Mantle swung and hit a stinging two-hop grounder directly to Gilliam, and it was one of the fastest second-to-short-to-first double plays anyone ever saw. How many times has Mantle, batting left handed, where he has the two-step head start to first, hit into a ground-ball double play? The first game was Maglie’s round.

But in the fifth game, that memorable day when millions of onlookers watched with Don Larsen as the clock of outs ticked toward his perfect game, that day Mantle’s riposte defeated Maglie. Sal pitched rather well, too, you will remember, retiring the first 11 batters. But with two out in the last of the fourth, the score 0–0, it was Maglie vs. Mantle, and Maglie lost. His strategy now called for outside pitches (in Ebbets Field a left-handed hitter like Mantle can hit an outside pitch into the left-center-field seats—in Yankee Stadium it’s much less likely; in Ebbets Field an inside pitch can be lined hard to right and still end up as nothing more than a single because it can be stopped by the high wall—in Yankee Stadium a line drive to right has only a three-foot fence to clear to become a home run).

Maglie’s first pitch was a called strike on the outside corner. The second pitch—delivered to the same outside edge of the plate—was a ball. The third—again in the same place—was a second called strike. The fourth—same place—was fouled off. The fifth—same place—missed for ball two. The sixth—same place—was fouled off again, as Mantle skillfully protected the strike zone.

For the seventh pitch, Maglie decided to cross Mantle up. He shifted inside, hoping to catch Mickey leaning in on the plate, looking for the outside pitch and unable to cope with anything in close. He was wrong. Mantle was waiting, apparently had been waiting right along. Mickey swung and hit the line drive to right, low and just fair, but high enough and fair enough to be a home run (his third of the Series and his second off Maglie). He had won this time, and it cost Maglie the ball game. In all probability, it also cost the Dodgers the Series.

Berra drove in 10 runs against the Dodgers, while Mickey Mantle hit three home runs. Photograph by Olen Collection/Diamond Images/Getty Images

THAT YANKEE PITCHING

The sixth game, obscured by Larsen’s Fifth and Newcombe’s Seventh (the one heroic, the other tragic), was actually one of the finest World Series games ever played. Clem Labine and Bob Turley pitched through nine scoreless innings before the Dodgers won 1–0 in the 10th, on Jackie Robinson’s line-drive single over the uncertain head of Enos Slaughter, thus enabling Brooklyn to stay precariously alive for one more day. But in retrospect, that game has become no more than a particularly striking part of the dominant movement of the Series: the five consecutive complete games hurled at Brooklyn by the supposedly inept Yankee pitching staff. Whitey Ford gave up 8 hits and 3 runs; Tom Sturdivant, 6 hits and 2 runs; Don Larsen, 0 hits and 0 runs; Bob Turley, 4 hits and 1 run; and Johnny Kucks, 3 hits and 0 runs.

It is impossible to know whether this overpowering display of pitching depth is a sign to the future that the Yankees, despite seven pennants in the last eight years, are just beginning to show how good they really are; or the futile hitting an omen that the Dodger dynasty, built on the great skills of a small band of extraordinary players (Robinson, now 37, Reese 37, Furillo 34, Campanella 34, Hodges 32, Snider 30), is finally about to crumble; or the whole thing simply a dramatic coincidence (it is an extraordinary fact that Larsen, Turley and Kucks pitched the single best games of their careers on successive days). But certainly the mere fact of its happening has characterized the 1956 Series: this may have been the Series of Berra, of Larsen, of Maglie and of Newcombe; but mostly it was the Series when the Dodgers stopped hitting and the Yankees learned to pitch.

1957 World Series

Milwaukee Braves (95–59–1) over New York Yankees (98–56)

4-3

A MEAN HAND WITH A ROCK

Excerpted from

Sports Illustrated

October 21, 1957

BY ROY TERRELL

Lew Burdette, who came out of the West Virginia hills to tame the dread Yankees in the World Series, is baseball’s biggest paradox: killer and clown, with a touch of genius on the side

If you want to know how much it usually snows in Alaska or what a salamander eats, just ask Lew.

—Braves equipment manager Joe Taylor

Less than an hour after the best rock thrower ever to come out of Nitro, West Virginia, had intimidated the New York Yankees for the third time in seven days, Casey Stengel was doing his best to forget all about it. Sitting half-undressed in his office under the vast old Stadium and sounding a little as if he expected George Weiss to be hiding under the couch, Stengel talked about next year.

Now I got to build another team for New York, he said, and I’ll build it. I got some pretty good ideas. There’s that Denver farm club, it had a pretty good season. There must be some men there to disturb somebody.

He shrugged.

Maybe they cannot hit that pitcher we saw today, either, but then maybe he will not live long.

If this is the premise upon which Stengel hopes to recapture his westerly-flown world championship, it would be wise if Casey should prepare himself for disappointment. That pitcher, an erstwhile taxi driver, pool shark, amateur obstetrician and right-handed raconteur of renown named Lew Burdette, is singularly well equipped to survive the rigors attendant with becoming a World Series hero. Unlike Stengel’s own Don Larsen, another man who pitched very well one October but failed to remember how he did it when April rolled around, Burdette will probably show up for the 1958 season better than ever.

For one thing, he is a better pitcher than Larsen, a fact frequently overlooked in the past by those citizens so concerned with the function of Burdette’s salivary glands that they forgot he also had a rather remarkable right arm. But perhaps even more important, not the glaring television lights he will face in the next few weeks nor the cramped and unfamiliar stance required to sign some $10,000 worth of endorsements nor even the long winter of adulation and mashed potatoes which await him on the banquet circuit stand much chance of upsetting Lew Burdette’s mountain-grown sang-froid.

From the November day in 1926 when he was born in a West Virginia ghost town until the October day not quite 31 years later when he became Milwaukee’s No. 1 candidate for president of the world, Selva Lewis Burdette Jr. has been much more than just a pitcher. He is, in fact, baseball’s No. 1 paradox.

A big (6 feet 2 inches, 190 pounds), square-shouldered man with a ruggedly handsome face, close-cropped sandy hair and a strange, floppy walk, Burdette is considered by National League hitters—and now the Yankees—to be meaner than an acre of snakes. Despite his nervous, fidgety mannerisms on the mound, he works with a vast confidence and determination. That is when he is pitching. When he is not pitching he becomes baseball’s No. 1 screwball. Burdette, they say, is a real squirrel.

Milwaukee starter Lew Burdette threw three complete games in the ’57 Series, including Game 7. Photograph by Richard Meek

An interviewer capable of getting anything but a wisecrack out of Burdette is a fortunate man indeed. For that matter, his teammates are in the same boat. When Lew and Warren Spahn, the great left-hander who also happens to be one of the game’s biggest clowns, get together, dignity deserts the Milwaukee clubhouse. It can also happen in hotel lobbies or on trains or even on the field before a game. Vaudeville would never have died if Spahn and Burdette had been around with their routine of crooked caps, absurd faces, ridiculous pepper games and jockeying antics from the bench.

Burdette’s imitation of a drunk, only one of half a dozen impersonations he practices upon the long-suffering Braves, still brings down the house. But Lew feels cheated since he had to abandon his favorite performance, an almost perfect reproduction of a policeman’s whistle. One night in Chicago he leaned out of a taxicab window, gave a blast—and snarled traffic for half an hour.

On the road, Spahn and Burdette room together. Because we enjoy each other’s humor, says Spahn. Because no one else can stand us, says Burdette.

But the Braves do not really complain. If that’s what it takes to win ball games, they say, we could use some more squirrels.

Undoubtedly one of baseball’s worst hitters, Burdette was able to look back this summer through six long years to the last time he hit a home run, in 1951 when he was playing with San Francisco in the Coast League. But against Cincinnati on August 13, he hit not one but two. After the second, Lew puffed back to the bench and announced he was giving up home-run hitting.

It’s just too dang far, he said, around those bases.

But beneath the clownish exterior on the one hand and the ornery, determined one on the other, Burdette is a man of many and diversified talents. He has driven a taxi, tarred roofs for a construction company, handled a public-relations job and is now vice-president of a real- estate firm in Sarasota, Florida, where for the last two years the Burdettes have made their off-season home.

He is an expert fisherman, a connoisseur of hillbilly and Dixieland music, a home repair man of repute (Although, usually, when he gets through with cigarette lighters, they never work again, says Mrs. Burdette) and a singer (This is questionable, says Spahn). Also an articulate and poised after-dinner speaker, a crossword- puzzle expert and, in fact, an expert on just about anything.

If you want to know how much it usually snows in Alaska or what a salamander eats, says Joe Taylor, the Braves equipment manager, who really doesn’t care for salamanders but is impressed nonetheless, just ask Lew. He knows something about everything.

Burdette is also a deliverer of babies, a talent well hidden until Christmas Day, 1954, when the Burdettes’ second child, Midge, was born in a police ambulance speeding toward a Milwaukee hospital.

I’m in this ambulance with a cop and Mary tells me we’re not going to make it in time, says Lew. So I ask the cop, ‘What’ll I do?’ And the cop says, ‘See for yourself.’ So 1 did and, by golly, I did all right.

Hank Aaron was greeted at home plate after scoring during Game 3. Photograph by John G. Zimmerman

TWO NORMAL BURDETTES

The other two Burdette children, Lewis Kent, now 6, and Mary Lou, now a little over three weeks, arrived in a less spectacular manner, although the baby was born the day after Lew pitched 10 innings in Milwaukee’s pennant-clinching victory over the Cards.

Another thing Burdette may become quite soon is a very wealthy young man. After the longest holdout in the history of Milwaukee, Lew signed last spring for $28,000. His World Series share will be $9,000 and personal appearances and testimonials could add $20,000 more. Next year his contract will undoubtedly become fatter—and next year there will almost certainly be another World Series.

The Braves are a young team and a very good team, a fact suddenly more important than in the past because the Braves themselves also believe it now. They became world champions by surmounting a large number of difficulties, not the least of which was winning their own National League pennant in the first place. Whether the Braves of 1956 choked up or lacked the spark of greatness is now academic. In the World Series of 1957 they lacked nothing, and the way they beat the Yankees—after their best pitcher lost the first game, after being humiliated in the third, after losing the vital sixth by one run—was perhaps more important than that they did beat the Yankees.

The man who did most, of course, was Burdette. The defense functioned far better than anyone had expected but the hitters hardly functioned at all. The Braves batted only .209, a figure which stands unchallenged as quite easily the worst team average a seven-game Series winner ever compiled, and only young Henry Aaron, who is known for that sort of thing, emerged with his prowess at the plate undimmed. Among the pitchers, Bob Buhl, who won 36 regular-season games in two years, couldn’t come close to winning even one Series game in two starts, and the legendary Spahn, who won and lost in two tries, was something less than his usual legendary self.

But Burdette, facing some of the most dangerous hitters in baseball and throwing an object which now goes yipe! when it is bashed with a bat instead of ugh! as in the days of Christy Mathewson, performed a feat unmatched since the great Matty’s three Series shutouts of 1905. In the first three innings of the second game, the Yankees got to Burdette for two runs. After that, through 24 consecutive innings of tremendous pressure, they didn’t score off him once. He beat them 4–2 (second game), 1–0 (fifth game) and 5–0 (seventh game).

In recent years only Harry Brecheen of the 1946 Cardinals has won three games in one World Series and the last of those was in relief. Before that, Stan Coveleskie of Cleveland (1920) started and won three Series games, and any reader who knowingly insists that there is more than slight coincidence between Burdette and this grand old spit-ball pitcher will only be referred back to Mr. Stengel.

Oh, maybe he spits on the ball once in a while, says Casey, but what the heck. If a man beats me three times I am not going to comment on him because he did a good job.

Whether Burdette actually threw the Yankees any spit balls or not, he certainly showed them an assortment of other things. In the three games Lew threw sliders, sinkers, fast balls, several varieties of plain and ordinary curves and even an occasional screwball, all backed up by a rather awe-inspiring display of control which found him walking only four Yankees, one of those intentionally, in the 27 innings he was at work.

Some of the Yankees, who had been worried most about Spahn, were surprised. Others, like Jerry Coleman, were not. I knew he could pitch, said the Yankee second baseman. I had seen him in the All-Star Game. He’s tough and he keeps everything low and he’s out there to beat you. He won 17 games, I think it was, and missed almost a month with a sore arm. You must be pretty good if you do that.

Said his catcher, Del Crandall: Lew wasn’t any better than he has been for the last two years.

Just the same, as far as Lew Burdette is concerned, it is very nice to receive recognition outside the inner circle of baseball for something besides embroilment in one controversy after another. What the real pros have long known about another real pro, the rest of the world has finally discovered. Here is one very good baseball pitcher. But back in Nitro, West Virginia they are still not sure they believe it. When Lew was a kid he couldn’t play baseball at all.

Braves fans watched their team win the Series for the first time since the team moved to Milwaukee from Boston in 1953. Photograph by John G. Zimmerman

Nitro didn’t even exist until the last year of World War I. Then it arose from an 1,800-acre cow pasture on the Kanawha River, 11 miles below the state capitol of Charleston, to become a city of 24,000 inhabitants living in 1,724 homes and working in huge factories built in 10 months at a cost of $76 million to produce explosive nitrocellulose. The first shipment of powder was also the last. The war ended and Nitro became virtually a ghost town.

By 1924, however, a few major chemical companies had picked up the abandoned plants, and Lew’s father moved there to take a job which has lasted 33 years. An industrial-league outfielder himself, the elder Burdette used to play catch with little Lew, who was called Froggy in those days because he could beller like a big old bullfrog. But Nitro had no high school baseball team, and Lew, who had a try-out, couldn’t even make the town’s American Legion club. What he could do, though, was throw rocks.

An old friend, Dave Comstock, says Lew was the best and hardest rock-throwing boy Nitro ever had. One night, says Dave, a gang of us were knocking out windows in the Nazarene Church. Lew was half a block behind us, standing in a creek, and hitting those windows as regularly as any of us. The police came along and nabbed us and put us in jail for a scare, but they never found Lew. He got away, says Dave Comstock, because he could throw farther than anybody else.

He always could throw a rock like a bullet, says his mother. One time he was up on the hill yonder and broke the headlight on our car. He came down and told us about it, though. The boy told the truth, I remember that.

He used to go up the hill to a rock quarry after school, when he was about 13, says a neighbor, Mrs. Harry Birch, and throw rocks by the hour. He would pick one target, then another, to improve his aim.

When Lew was 17, he had a chance to get a job as messenger boy with American Viscose Corporation, but the company had only two openings and was saving them for ballplayers who could help the plant team.

I asked my father what to do, Lew says, and he told me to try out for the team. ‘Tell ’em you’re a pitcher,’ my daddy said. ‘They sure need one.’

Exactly what impact the future World Series hero made on the Nitro industrial baseball league depends upon who tells the story. Burdette says he pitched four scoreless innings in an exhibition game and got the job. The team manager, a man named Earl Snyder who is now retired, says he wasn’t impressed.

He was fast and fairly accurate, Snyder says, but he was cocky, too. To come down to it, none of us thought he’d turn out to be any good as a pitcher. He wasn’t so extra good at all. That’s not to his discredit, understand. He just hadn’t played ball before.

Last week, after watching Lew against the Yankees on TV, Snyder admitted that he was quite surprised by the improvement. Looks good now, he conceded.

But if no one else was impressed by Burdette’s potential in those days, a Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Alfred Montgomery, was. He recommended Lew to the University of Richmond and helped him get a scholarship.

He won 10 and lost two and a Braves’ scout took a look at him. Like Mr. Snyder, the scout wasn’t impressed. But the Yankees were and signed him in the spring of 1947 to a contract with Norfolk of the Piedmont League for a salary of $200 a month.

I was a real bonus baby, says Burdette. They offered me $175 but I told ’em my daddy wouldn’t let me sign unless I got $25 more.

He moved up on through the Yankee chain, playing at Norfolk and Amsterdam of the Canadian-American League in ’47, Quincy of the Three-Eye League in ’48 and Kansas City in ’49–50. After his season at Quincy he met a cute brunette telephone operator named Mary Ann Shelton at a Charleston bowling alley one night, dated her that winter and the two planned to get married after the 1949 season. Instead they got married on June 30.

I kept going home every chance I got, Lew says, so we finally decided we might just as well get married and live on that money I was spending on plane fares and telephone calls. They were married at Charleston despite an offer from the Kansas City ball club to have the nuptials perpetrated one night at home plate. Heavens no, said Mary Ann, and that was that.

Burdette made it to the Yankees at the tail end of the 1950 season, pitched one inning, gave up a run on three hits and the next year found himself back down in the minors at San Francisco. It was then, in late August of 1951, that Burdette got his biggest break.

The Yankees, battling for a pennant, needed pitching help and they needed it quick. In the devious way of the waiver, they maneuvered around the rest of the league to get sore-armed Johnny Sain, nearing the end of a great career, from the Boston Braves for $50,000 and a minor league player. The player was Lew Burdette.

Some people say he was just a throw-in, says Milwaukee General Manager John Quinn, but we really had our eye on him. The Yankees wanted to give us Wally Hood, but our West Coast scout, Johnny Moore, insisted that we get Burdette.

It appeared for a while as if the Braves had indeed been fleeced. Working in relief against the Cubs at Wrigley Field, Lew bounced his first National League pitch into the dirt three feet in front of home plate, and only unusual agility on the part of his catcher saved the second from going into the stands. My God, groaned a Boston writer, is that what we got for Johnny Sain?

Plain truth of the matter was, says Burdette now, I was scared.

79 WINS IN FIVE YEARS

He recovered, however, enough to win six games in relief for Boston in 1952 and became a starter midway through that first wonderfully hysterical year of 1953 in Milwaukee. In the last five seasons the big man who wears Sain’s old No. 33 has won 15, 15, 13, 19 and 17 games, once led the National League in earned run average and finished runner-up another time. Yet until the second week of October 1957, it had generally been Burdette’s misfortune to be remembered best for two things: a supposed prejudice against certain batters, because of alleged bean balls, and a supposed prejudice against all batters, because of alleged spit balls.

I guess I’m an old troublemaker, Lew once told Cleon Walfoort of the Milwaukee Journal. If I went to church, they’d say I was into the collection plate. I’m not really mean up here, but I guess I was in the minors and the boys know I can still get mean.

Anyway, Burdette isn’t worried about what people