Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America Read Free Page B

America his father was first a laborer and then a conductor on the BMT subway. He also thought baseball was a foolish choice for a career and argued vehemently against it. Finally his wife softened his opposition—she observed that if it didn’t work out, then their son could take a real job. Still, Fiore Rizzuto was suspicious of this new world, outside New York City, that his son was entering—it might be like the old country, filled with people from the Black Hand. As Phil set off on his first train ride to a town in Virginia, his father pinned twenty dollars (Phil’s only money) into his undershirt so that robbers would not be able to find it. He warned hisson not to fall asleep on the train, no matter how tired he was.
    Johnny Pesky of the Red Sox was born in Portland, Oregon, to Croatian immigrants named Paveskovich. Pesky picked up his abbreviated surname first as a schoolyard nickname, then it became a means of simplifying box scores, and finally he took it as his legal surname. That bothered his parents—did this mean their son was ashamed of his real name? They worried as well that by choosing sports as a vocation Johnny was becoming a bum.
    Tommy Henrich, grandson of German immigrants, knew how hard it was for the members of his family who had come from the old country to understand his career. On the occasion of his first contract, his father told his grandfather, “Tommy is going to play professional baseball.” “Oh, is that so,” the grandfather replied. “What is he, anyway—the striker?”
    Baseball, then, came to symbolize the idea of America as a land of opportunity and justice for all. And in 1947, finally, with the coming of Jackie Robinson, the sport was going to open up not just for the sons of recent immigrants but to native sons of color as well. The coming of Robinson did not take place without some rumbling, most notably from players who were from the South, or whose talents were so marginal that the coming of blacks represented the most basic kind of a job threat. In spring training, 1947, Leo Durocher, heading off an early protest by some of his white players, warned, “He’s just the first. Just the first. They’re all going to come, and they’re going to be hungry, damned hungry, and if you don’t put out, they’ll take your jobs.”
    He was right: That very sense of continuity, the belief that life would once again be the same, was erroneous. The country was already changing, the pace of life accelerating, due in no small part to the coming of a powerful new communications empire, of which baseball itself would be aprime beneficiary. In 1947, the World Series was telecast to a few Eastern cities. In 1948, there was a crude attempt to televise the Series to the East Coast from so distant a city as Cleveland by having a plane fly above the ball park in a kind of horse-and-buggy version of a satellite. That year there were so few television sets (by one count, 325,000 in all of America, half of them in the New York City area) that the Gillette Company, which was sponsoring the games, placed 100 new sets on the Boston Common so that ordinary fans might gather there and watch.
    It was immediately obvious that there was a natural affinity between sports and television, and by the spring of 1949, advertisements in The New York Times pushed baseball as the reason for buying a set: “Batter Up! Imperial offers you a Box Set. RCA Victor Television. $375. Installation and home owner policy $55. 52 square inch screen.” That was in contrast to a GE set: “So Bright! So Clear! So Easy on the Eyes! $725.”
    Television’s vast impact on sports was still to come. For the moment, though, radio had greatly increased the size of audiences and put fans in daily contact with their favorite teams. In 1946, a radio broadcaster named Mel Allen traveled with the Yankees to every game and did the first live broadcasts of away games. Previously, those games had been done by local sports announcers