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

the team, Joe Page, resided in the bullpen.
    There was a careful watch on McCarthy in 1948, and some tense moments resulted. Early in the season the Red Sox went into Sportsman’s Park for a series with the Browns. During one game a St. Louis pitcher was working on Junior Stephens, who was a notorious bad-ball hitter with a special penchant for going after high balls. As Stephens settled in the batter’s box, McCarthy yelled out, “Make him come down.” The first pitch came in high and out of the strike zone. Stephens swung and missed. Strike one. “Make him come down!” McCarthy yelled again, a little more emphatically. Again the pitch came in, high and out of the strike zone, and again Stephens swung and missed. “Make him come down!” McCarthy yelled even more emphatically. Again the scene was repeated: a high fastball, a Stephens’s swing, and a strikeout. Stephens jogged back to the dugout, turned in the general direction of McCarthy, and yelled, “Make him come down, my ass!” There was silence in the dugout: It was the first testing of a veteran manager by a veteran player. McCarthy said nothing, but waited while the regulars went back onto the field and took their positions. Then he said, just loud enough for everyone on the bench to hear, “Got a little upset, didn’t he?” There was no way to call down to Newark for a Henrich. He would not make an issue of this—Stephens was the best he had. McCarthy was going to have to make do.
    As much as anyone on the team, Stephens suffered under McCarthy. As far as he was concerned, McCarthy was always riding him, making snide remarks in the dugout about his fielding and his hitting. “If that toothless old son of a bitch gets on me one more time,” he told his friend Billy Hitchcock, the utility infielder, “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to stuff his gum down his throat.” That struggle lasted all season to the satisfaction of neither of them.
    By contrast, McCarthy continued to cultivate Williams. Early in the season Williams hit a tremendous home run into the bullpen against the Browns. When he came back to the bench, he heard McCarthy’s voice, directed at him alone, so no one else could hear it, saying, “If I could hit like you I’d play for nothing.” Williams was oddly touched, for the old man was not lightly given to praise. After the playoff game in 1948, Williams was the last to leave the locker room. As he was finally going, he heard a voice behind him. “Well, we fooled them, didn’t we?” the voice said. It was McCarthy. “What do you mean?” Williams said. “They all said we couldn’t get along and I thought we got along pretty good,” McCarthy said. “You’re right, Joe, we got along pretty good,” Williams answered.
    When the Red Sox convened in the spring of 1949, there was a generally good feeling on the team. The players from the Browns, wild though they might have been, had become integrated into the team, and there were no factions or divisions. A few days into spring training there was a contestto decide who was the best-dressed Boston player. Jack Kramer, known as Handsome Jack or Alice because he was a dandy (he not only wore silk underwear but washed it himself—most definitely not a baseball-player-type thing to do), was the odds-on favorite. He was very good-looking, and he worked during the off-season in a men’s store. It was said that he once bought a suit because the salesman told him it was the only one of its kind in the world. Later, he saw someone else wearing the same suit, so he immediately gave his away. Kramer arrived in camp with many suitcases filled with newly tailored clothes, and he showed them off to his teammates, including (this was his greatest mistake) Birdie Tebbetts. Tebbetts was a world-class needler, and he decided to sting Kramer. He brought Parnell and Matt Batts in on the joke. “Whatever I say,” he told them, “you agree.” So as Kramer unveiled one suit after another,