Center Field Gate

The 1950 Phillies were one of baseball’s memorable teams: a great pitching staff and heavy long-bomb hitters. And they arrived at the Fall Classic in a similar fashion to their 2009 version: having humbled the Brooklyn version of the Dodgers in the season’s final game. Then, as now, their nemesis was the Yankees, as memorable a team as the Phillies — packed with prodigious power and strong arms.  Del Ennis, Dick Sisler and Richie Ashburn were the keys to the Phillies’ line up: Ennis because of his towering bombs (31 in all in 1950) and Sisler and Ashburn because of their nose-in-the-dirt style of play. We’ve forgotten just how good Ennis was — playing for sixteen years, eleven of them with Philadelphia. In 1950 he had 126 RBIs to lead the team. Ashburn didn’t have Ennis’s power, but his career ended in the Hall of Fame: with a lifetime batting average of .308, three different years with over 200 hits – and a skyscraping OBP. There’s a statue of him now, outside of Citizens Bank Park, in Philadelphia. But 1950 was far from Ashburn’s best year and the team needed the likes of Ennis to get into the series.

“The Whiz Kids” took the N.L. by surprise. No one even knew who they were. The left side of their infield was under 25 and their two best players were kids — Ashburn was 23 and Ennis was 24. Even so, if you knew only a little bit about baseball, you’d have easily picked the Phillies to best the Yankees in the ’50 Series. Their pitching was the class of the National League. The starting rotation was led by Robin Roberts, then in his third year in Philadelphia. He’d gone 20-11 with a 3.02 ERA and he’d thrown 21 complete games. Roberts threw the last game of the season against the Trolleys, and it was a gem: he pitched ten innings of one run ball before Philly won it all in the 10th. Curt Simmon followed Roberts in the rotation — and he looked (at 20) like he was eleven. Like Ennis, he is remembered best by baseball afficiandos. He had very good, but not great years. 1950 was one of his best: he was 17-8 with a 3.40 ERA. The third arm in the rotation belonged to Bob Miller, whose 11-6 record was a surprise to everyone (including Miller). It was the best year he ever had, but Philly needed him desperately — as the war in Korea was culling the N.L. of some of their best pitchers. By the time the series rolled around, the Phillies had lost stalwart Simmons and fireballer Bubba Church to the service.

The Yankees had won the series in ’49, but they knew the Phillies would be tough. To win, they had to get past their pitching. Their line-up was good, even very good, but these were not the Bronx Bombers of the 1920s. Yogi Berra and Joe DiMaggio were their power hitters, with Phil Rizutto the sparkplug in the middle of the order. Still, Phillies’ fans would be right to wonder why Phil is in the Hall of Fame and not Ennis. “I never thought I deserved to be in the Hall of Fame,” Rizutto once said. “The Hall of Fame is for the big guys.” That’s right, Scooter. The Yankees’ strength was their pitching staff. Vic Raschi (The Springfield Rifle) was the Yanks best starter (he was 21-8 that year), followed by Allie Reynolds and Eddie Lopat. Formidable, sure, but against the Roberts and Ashburn-led Phillies the Yankees knew they were in for a tussle.

Sadly for Phillies’ fans, that’s not how it turned out. In what has to be considered one of the best-pitched and closest World Series ever, the Phillies lost in four — by a combined 11–5 run total. The first game was the surprise, with Phillie closer Jim Konstanty pitching eight innings of one run ball. That how it ended: 1-0. Game 2 was a Robin Roberts’ gem, but he lost the game in the 10th on a DiMaggio home run. The pattern for the series was now well-established, with the Yankees matching the Phillies pitch-for-pitch. The third game ended 3-2, with the Yankees scoring their third run in a walk-off single in the bottom of the ninth. The only game that wasn’t close was the fourth — with the Phillie’s nose-diving, 5-2. The Phillies should have won that fourth game: they were up against a young Yankee hurler by the name of Whitey Ford who’d had only a so-so year.

It seems unlikely that 2009 will see a repeat of the head-to-head pitchers’ duels of 1950. Philadelphia doesn’t have a Robin Roberts or Richie Ashburn or Curt Simmons. In fact, they’re better: with a loaded line-up that makes Ennis and Sisler and Ashburn look like spray hitters (which is, in fact, what they were). Then too, while the current Bronx crew lacks the power and presence of “The Yankee Clipper,” Jeter, Rodriguez and Teixeira hit more like Murderers’ Row than their 1950 ancestors. It will be a real surprise if this is a four-and-out series: and it seems very unlikely to be won by 1-0, 2-1 or 3-2 scores. That said, the 2009 Fall Classic has this one thing in common with the Whiz Kids vs. Empire match-up of 1950: in order for Philly to win, they have to hit Yankee pitching.

Back in July, I took a friend – a lifelong Yankee fan — to a Nats game and we sat reminiscing about all the games we had seen as kids. My friend had grown up in New York when the Trolleys, Giants and Yankees were all the rage in baseball, so he had lots of stories: about Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra and Tom Tresh and the games he had seen them play. As it turned out, the game we attended resulted in one of those unlikely Nats’ victories, and near the end of the game my friend issued this judgment: “There are two good things about being here,” he said. “The first is that that Nats are winning and the second is that we haven’t heard “Sweet Caroline.” I laughed and shook my head: “I’m not a big fan of Neil Diamond,” he added, “and that song drives me nuts.” The other thing that he said that struck me came in about the 7th inning, when we were trading stories: “Remember the harmonica incident?” he asked. I blinked, trying to remember. Harmonica incident? And then it hit me: “Oh yeah, geez. Sure, I remember,” I said. “What in the hell was that guys’ name?” He smiled: “Phil Linz,” he said. And then he told me the story.

Back in the late summer of 1964, Phil Linz was a utility infielder with a Yankees team that was struggling to win its fifth consecutive pennant. Locked in pennant race with the pitching heavy White Sox and upstart Orioles, the Yankees were in chaos: Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle and Tony Kubek were battling injuries — and new Bombers’ manager Yogi Berra was having trouble in the clubhouse. The problems had started in spring training, when Berra (who was picked by Yankee owner Dan Topping to replace Ralph Houk — that icon, that marble man), decided that he would set down some rules for how he expected the Bombers to behave. Yogi laid out the rules during his first clubhouse meeting, but when he finished his talk the sound of a scraping chair came from the back of the room. Mantle got up, threw up his arms, and shouted: “I quit” and pretended to stalk from the room. His teammates roared with laughter and Yogi smiled – but the tone for the season was set. The Yankees played horribly and by the end of August they were four games behind the surging Orioles and Pale Hose.

In mid-August, the Yankees made a key midwest swing, traveling to Minnesota for a set against the Twins, before moving on to Chicago to play the Pale Hose. The Twins series would be tough, but there was every expectation the Yankees would triumph in Chicago: they had already beaten the White Sox in ten consecutive games during the season. As Yankees second baseman Bobby Richardson would later tell it, in Minnesota he and Tony Kubek (two of the Yankees self proclaimed “milk shake boys”) visited the U.S. headquarters of Billy Graham’s ministries, where they were given a set of chorus books that Graham used in his “crusades.” Richardson (“the Right Reverend Richardson,” to his Yankee teammates) grabbed some of the chorus books and when he and Kubek returned to their Minneapolis hotel room they decided to sing some of the hymns. They were joined by Spud Murray, the batting practice pitcher — who brought his harmonica. The three sang for several hours and two days later, while the team was in Chicago, Kubek went out and bought four harmonicas — one for himself, one for Richardson and one for Tom Tresh. He gave the fourth one to Phil Linz.

As it turned out, the Yankees were swept by the Pale Hose in four games and seemed finished for the season. When the Bombers boarded their bus after the last loss, Berra (whose job was in danger), didn’t feel like celebrating. But in the back of the bus, Phil Linz broke out his harmonica and started to play. He was just learning and was following the instructions in a book that came with his instrument: “Mary Had A Little Lamb.” As Richardson later remembered: “So now we lost the four games in Chicago, and Phil — who didn’t play an inning of any of those games — was in the back of the bus and decided to choose this time to learn how to play the harmonica. When Yogi heard him, he jumped up and yelled: ‘Put that thing in your pocket.’ Unfortunately, Linz didn’t hear him and when he asked what Yogi had said, Mantle, who was sitting across the aisle, yelled: ‘He said to play it louder.’ So Phil kept playing and this time, Yogi jumped up and he was really mad. He grabbed the harmonica and threw it and it hit Pepitone, who started screaming for the trainer.” The bus broke out in gales of laughter — but Berra didn’t think it was funny. Enraged, he returned to his seat.

Inevitably, the incident reached the New York papers. It was a huge story and viewed as emblamatic of the Yankees’ troubles — and of Berra’s inability to handle the team. “In the end,” Richardson relates, “Yogi had the last laugh. The team got together after that and rallied to win the pennant. I think we went 22-6 in September to finish a game ahead of the White Sox.” The Yankees faced the Cardinals in the ’64 Series and lost in seven, but despite their late season success, Yogi was finished. The harmonica incident had convinced Yankees’ owner Dan Topping that Berra couldn’t handle the team and after the season he was fired — and replaced by Cardinals manager Johnny Keane.

After retiring from baseball, Kubek became a television broadcaster and active Wisconsin Democrat. In 1976, when his friend Bobby Richardson (who had become a minister) was a candidate for a Congressional seat in South Carolina, Kubek refused to campaign for him. Phil Linz did not have as nearly as good as a career in baseball as either Kubek or Richardson (.235 BA in seven years), but his dust-up with Berra made his reputation: after the incident was made public, Linz was offered offered $5000 by the Hohner Company to promote their harmonica and after the season he made so much money on the banquet circuit (telling the story) that he was able to open a successful New York bar. ”Yogi never held it against me,” Linz says. ”All my jobs have been because of that; people remember me because of that one incident. I only hit eleven home runs my whole career, you know, but I’m in all the books and all that.”