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THE CLASSIC PERFECT GAME  DON LARSEN of the YANKEES ...he delivered a perfect game masterpiece |
Once Upon A Magic Time:
Don Larsen’s Series Gem
ofTheColumnists.com
Pardon the ego but
in the wake of Roy Halladay’s playoff game no-hitter last
week, a few people have asked about my story on Don Larsen’s
perfect game. It ran the day after the game in the Oct. 9, 1956
edition of Newsday. It appeared with the headline, “Don
Larsen Pitches Perfect Game” under a large photo of
Larsen throwing a pitch. Behind him loomed the scoreboard line
score of the game that read:
Bklyn….000 000 000-0
0 0
Yanks….000 101 00x-2 5 0
The story read:
New York--
Don Larsen pitched baseball into the arts yesterday. He gave it his masterpiece.
On a scorecard it shows as three men an inning for nine innings. Twenty-seven outs, all neat and orderly. Really, quite simple; as simple as all masterpieces.
Larsen did it with 97 pitches before 64,519 tingling persons at Yankee Stadium. He struck out seven hitters; he got seven on grounders; nine on flies to the outfield; three on pop flies to the infield; and one on a line drive to the outfield. He went to three balls on only one hitter. It took only two hours and six minutes. Those last minutes in the Stadium shadows were an eternity.
There is something about a no-hitter-let alone a perfect game-that makes it unique to anything in sports. The winning touchdown, the end of a foot race or the last seconds of a basketball game explode with a suddenness that brings one up to a quick climax and immediate relief.
A no-hitter builds slowly. It’s just a germ of a thought in the early innings. It becomes worthy of notice around the fourth inning and then gets serious in the sixth inning. The seventh has everybody in on the thing and the eighth and ninth are extreme. Sometimes it gets so tense it’s almost unbearable.
It caught hold in the Stadium yesterday just about the seventh inning. Up till then the beauty that is Sal Maglie on the pitching mound held the fans. But after Sal was touched for a second run in the sixth, it was all Larsen.
A strange quiet descended upon the arena as Larsen went through the last three innings. There was conversation, the call of the refreshment boys and the clatter of telegraph keys in the press section, but the sum of it all was an eerie calm that belied the presence of more than 60,000 keyed up people.
The tall, lonely figure on the mound
went through the motions without any flourish….He threw
a fast ball, slider and curve, all delivered with magnificent
control.
When he and his rooters came down to the ninth….if a person
wasn’t tingling all over by this time, he didn’t belong
there. One wondered about the people who edged toward the exit
gates. If they couldn’t sit in their seats to watch this
last inning, why did they bother to come in the first place?
Anybody who was there has his own image of the drama. Remembered here is the sight of Irving Rudd, a Dodgers official, screaming from the rear of the press section at Roy Campanella in the ninth: “The hell with history, Roy, let’s get on base and start something.”
The Dodgers never started anything. Larsen did the finishing.
Then, starting with the jumping Yogi Berra and the pounding and kissing of his teammates, a new ordeal began. He was rushed into the Yankee clubhouse to run into a horde of photographers and reporters clawing to get at him. While his Yankee teammates bellowed profane shouts of joy, the photographers bombed him with flashbulbs and the reporters took over. We pumped questions at him as he stood in front of his locker.
It went like this:
Question-“When did you first start thinking about the no-hitter? Answer-“In the seventh. I had been aware of it a little before that, but that was when it really took hold, I guess.”
Q-“What pitches worked best?” A-“All my pitches were pretty good. My control was the thing.”
Q-“What were you thinking in the ninth?” A-“I don’t know.”
Q-“What did you throw to [last batter Dale] Mitchell?” A-“I was trying to give Mitchell my best pitch. ‘If he gets it, well, he gets it, I thought’ ”
Q-“Do you think any plays saved you?” A-Well, Mantle’s catch and the one by Carey, and McDougald’s.”
Q-“Have you resented any of the nasty things some reporters have written about you {in relation to Larsen’s playboy reputation]?” A-Well, they gotta write about something and I suppose I give them more to write about than other guys.”
Q-“How did you feel?” A-“For a while I didn’t know if I would hold up. My knees got a little shaky.”
Jackie Robinson came in to congratulate him and then the reporters, wave after wave, asked him the same questions. It took a long time till he got out of the clubhouse, but it had taken much longer for someone to pitch a perfect game in a World Series.
Until Don Larsen nobody came close.
* * *
A sidebar story noted that “In all of Yankee Stadium
yesterday there was only one man who wasn’t nervous in the
terribly tense ninth inning--Yogi Berra. “I guess I was
too much involved in the thing and worrying that we win the game,”
he said.
Mickey Mantle expressed how the rest of the Yankees felt. “You know I usually don’t get nervous,” he said. “But I was actually shaking out in center field. Can you imagine how he was feeling?”
Casey Stengel said, “I sat there myself like a stick in the ninth till there were two out. Then everybody on the bench got scared we weren’t playing the outfield right. I never seen so many managers.”
The three plays that saved the no-hitter were analyzed by the key players.
On the fifth-inning drive by Gil Hodges which Mantle caught with a back-handed catch, Mickey said, “I thought it would be an easier catch than it turned out to be. I was with it all the way.”
On the second inning liner by Pee Wee Reese which Gil McDougald handled after it bounced off Andy Carey’s glove, Gil said, “I was doing the routine thing by backing Andy up. When the ball bounced my way, it was up to me to throw to first base as hard as I could and I’m glad I got a lot on it.”
On the soft liner by Hodges in the eighth which Carey grabbed, Andy said, “I thought I could get it on a bounce, then I caught it before it hit the ground.”
Carey added that he was well aware of the danger of a bunt in the last two innings and was playing for it on every hitter.
Berra said Larsen made only one bad pitch-on the ball Hodges hit to Mantle. It was a “slider that hung. He can pitch when he wants to,” Yogi said.
©2010 by Stan Isaacs. Our thanks to Newsday for use of Stan Isaacs' original 1956 reports. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted Oct. 11, 2010.
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