1941 World Series: DiMaggio, Pearl Harbor, and Another Yankees Triumph

In October 1941, if you had asked 100 people on the streets of New York City what or where Pearl Harbor was, five might have known that it was the home base of the U.S. Naval Pacific Fleet and was located on the island of Oahu, Hawaii.

Within two months every American would come to know exactly where Pearl Harbor was, but at the start of the 1941 World Series, Pearl Harbor’s existence was as mysterious to us as the World Series was to fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Brooklyn had never won the Series and had only played in it three times, the last 21 years earlier. The Yankees were playing in it for the fifth time in six years. So it was easy to understand why more than 10,000 Bum-lovers flocked to Grand Central Terminal to welcome home their heroes after they had clinched the National League pennant in Boston. There were bands, there were balloons, and there was banter, most of that centering around how the Dodgers were going to deal the arrogant Yankees a dose of comeuppance.

A few days later when the regular season ended and the Dodgers had finished with exactly 100 victories, the streets and sidewalks of Brooklyn were lined by nearly one million people as the borough feted its team with a parade that stretched from Grand Army Plaza off Prospect Avenue to Borough Hall in downtown Brooklyn.

The Dodgers smiled and waved from slow-moving cars as banners flapped from buildings and storms of confetti floated down from the skies. It was a glorious day to be a Brooklynite. There was only one small problem: The World Series had yet to begin.

And six days later when it was over, the streets of Brooklyn were once again quiet, the Dodgers cooked in five games, and the only sound decipherable was that of the residents muttering, “Wait ‘til next year,” a refrain that would come to define the Dodgers.

Brooklyn manager Leo Durocher made a strange tactical move in the opener at Yankee Stadium, choosing 38-year-old Curt Davis to pitch instead of his well-rested pair of 22-game winners, Kirby Higbe and Whit Wyatt. While Davis didn’t pitch poorly, he didn’t pitch well enough to win as the Yankees came away with a 3-2 victory.

Joe Gordon homered in the second inning, and Bill Dickey followed a Charlie Keller walk in the fourth with a two-out RBI double to stake the Yankees to a 2-0 lead, and when Red Ruffing escaped a couple of late-inning jams, New York was one game up.

Wyatt was Durocher’s choice in Game 2, and it was a wise one. He scattered nine hits in a complete-game 3-2 victory that evened the Series at a game apiece and kick-started the burgeoning Yankee-Dodger hostilities.

These teams shared a city, but until this year, the only times they had shared a ball field were during harmless exhibition games. Emotions were running high in the opener when Pee Wee Reese slid hard into Phil Rizzuto trying to break up a double play and Johnny Sturm had retaliated against Dodgers second baseman Billy Herman. They nearly boiled over in Game 2.

Mickey Owen went out of his way to upend Rizzuto on a double play ball, and though Rizzuto completed the fifth-inning twin-killing, he was furious with Owen. “He tried to spike me, and he had no reason, the play was over,” fumed the diminutive Rizzuto in the clubhouse afterward. Owen replied, “That’s too bad, I feel so, so sorry for him. Sure I gave him the business, but nobody’s sweet and gentle with me either. That’s baseball. I wasn’t trying to spike him, I was trying to break up a double play. They don’t ask permission to come into me at home plate, they come in hard, and why shouldn’t they?”

Baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis had warned the two teams before the Series about excessive bench jockeying, but the Yankees ignored the edict after Owen’s play and taunted the Dodgers the rest of the game. “They called Mickey some nice names,” said Dressen, the Dodgers third-base coach. “The voice I heard loudest was Art Fletcher’s.”

The Yankees were ahead 2-0 when Brooklyn tied it in the fiery fifth, Owen’s single driving in the second run. The Dodgers manufactured the winning run in the sixth when Dixie Walker reached on Gordon’s error and later scored on Dolph Camilli’s RBI single, ending the Yankees 10-game World Series winning streak that dated back to 1937.

They had waited a long time to play a World Series game at Ebbets Field, so one more day didn’t matter. The third game was postponed due to rain, and it certainly was well worth the wait, though it ended sadly for the Dodgers.

Freddie Fitzsimmons, whom the Yankees had beaten twice in the 1936 Series when he pitched for the Giants, handcuffed the Bombers for seven innings, allowing just four hits, three walks and no runs. Marius Russo was just as effective for New York, matching Fitzsimmons zero for zero on the scoreboard.

The duel came to an end, though, when Russo knocked his counterpart out of the game by lashing a line drive off Fitzsimmons’ left knee. The ball caromed into the air and was caught by Reese for the third out of the seventh inning, but the 40-year-old Fitzsimmons limped into the dugout, unable to continue.

Hugh Casey entered in the top of the eighth and the Yankees immediately went to work, scoring twice as Red Rolfe, Tommy Henrich, Joe DiMaggio and Keller singled in succession. Brooklyn tallied once on Russo in the bottom half, but he worked a perfect ninth to complete the 2-1 victory.

Durocher was frustrated by the turn of events, saying, “If Fitz had been able to stay in there, we’d have won the game 1-0. But that’s baseball.”

Sure it was a bad break for the Dodgers, losing Fitzsimmons the way they did. But that piece of bad luck was nothing compared to what happened to Brooklyn the next day. In one of the most famous incidents in World Series history, Owen dropped what would have been a game-ending third strike pitch from Casey, setting the stage for a four-run New York rally that turned an apparent 4-3 Series-tying Dodgers triumph into a gut-wrenching 7-4 defeat.

“Is that the most famous strikeout in baseball history?” Henrich once asked a reporter. “It could well be.”

In the moment it took for Henrich to realize that he had just swung and missed at one of the wickedest curve balls he’d ever seen, a thought popped into his head. “If I’m having as much trouble with this pitch, maybe Mickey is, too,” Henrich recounted in the deliriously happy Yankee clubhouse after the Yankees pulled off a comeback for the ages in the bedeviled borough of Brooklyn.

Thanks to a finish that has never been forgotten on either side of the Harlem River, one of the most improbable in World Series history, the Yankees grabbed a commanding three games to one lead and while the Dodgers didn’t know it at the time, there was no coming back from this heartbreak.

“Well, they say everything happens in Brooklyn,” said the normally unemotional Joe DiMaggio, who was genuinely tickled by the remarkable way in which the Yankees won the game. “They’ll never come back from this.”

The Dodgers had the game won, they had the Series tied at two games each, and for proof, there was home-plate umpire Larry Goetz raising his arm as he bellowed “strike three” after Henrich had waved helplessly at Casey’s 3-and-2, two-out offering.

But as Brooklynites ran onto the field in glee celebrating their apparent victory, the ball was dribbling back toward the Dodgers dugout because Owen could not handle the hard-breaking pitch. As soon as Henrich swung through, he looked behind him, saw that Owen had botched the catch, and sprinted to first base, making it easily to the bag to give the Yankees new life.

“When I got there, (Dodger first baseman) Dolph Camilli didn’t say a word,” Henrich said.

How could he? Like the rest of the Dodgers, like the 33,813 disbelieving patrons in the Ebbets Field stands, Camilli knew the Dodgers had just made a potentially calamitous error against a team known for breaking down doors when they are opened just a crack.

And sure enough, here came the Yankees. DiMaggio ripped Casey’s next pitch into left field for a single. Then Keller - after swinging and missing twice leaving the Yankees for the second time just one strike shy of defeat - lashed a double off the screen in right. Henrich scored the tying run with ease and DiMaggio, running hard from the moment of contact, hustled all the way around to slide in with the go-ahead tally.

Unnerved and pitching amidst stunned silence, Casey walked Bill Dickey, then was tagged for another two-run double, this time by Joe Gordon, to add insult to injury.

“It was all my fault,” a red-eyed Owen lamented in the quiet Brooklyn clubhouse. “It was a great breaking curve that I should have had. But I guess the ball hit the side of my glove. It got away from me and by the time I got hold of it, I couldn’t have thrown anybody out at first.”

Lefty Gomez, ever the comedian, announced that, “It was just the way we planned it. We’ve been working on that play for months, on the quiet you understand, and we didn’t have it perfected until today.”

As laughter filled the room, Gordon chimed in, “The game’s never over ‘til the last man’s out, hey.” But therein lies the misery for the Dodgers. They had the last man out.

“I tell you, there are angels flying around those Yankees,” Dodgers left-fielder Jimmy Wasdell said.

Generations of ballplayers, regardless of the sport, have said that the toughest game to win in any championship series is always the last one. That wasn’t the case in this World Series. After Owen’s bobble, the Dodgers were dead, and they played that way the next day. They managed four meek hits off Ernie Bonham on an amazingly hot October day, and in 89-degree heat, the Yankees completed a clean sweep of the three games in Brooklyn and closed out the Series with a 3-1 victory.

One Brooklyn fan called the result “An American Tragedy.” Well, it was certainly a Brooklyn tragedy, but the bottom line is the Dodgers just weren’t good enough, nor lucky enough, to compete with the Yankees.

The Yankees scored twice in the second off Wyatt, who contributed a damaging wild pitch, and after Brooklyn pulled within 2-1, Henrich swatted a solo homer in the fifth to complete the scoring.

Fittingly, it was 1941’s shining star, DiMaggio, who caught the ball that represented the final out. DiMaggio did not have a great go of it against the Dodgers, hitting just .263 with one RBI. But after the season he’d had - 30 homers, 125 RBI, 348 total bases and a .357 average fueled by his 56-game hitting streak - did it really matter?

No one remembers that he batted .263 in the World Series that year. But no one will ever forget that he hit safely in those 56 consecutive games, forever stamping his legacy on the game.

“When I was a kid, I had two separate fastballs I threw to Joe,’’ Hall of Famer Bob Feller once said. “One had this big hop and rose up and in on him. The other jumped away from him. He hit them both.”

DiMaggio hit everybody, and everything, especially in 1941.

And less than two months later, on the morning of Dec. 7, everybody forgot about DiMaggio’s hitting streak, and the 1941 World Series.