1947 World Series: History Lost, but Yankees Rebounded

Nine years before Don Larsen became one of the unlikeliest pitchers ever to throw the first no-hitter in World Series play, an even more unlikely candidate had the opportunity.

As Yankees right-hander Bill Bevens strode to the mound in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game Four at Ebbets Field, the man who would pitch only once more in the major leagues was three outs away from history. Bevens, who somehow lost 13 of his 20 decisions for a Yankees club that went 97-57, had actually pitched to the back of his short-lived baseball card.

Larsen wound up throwing a perfect game in 1956, also against the Dodgers, but Bevens’ performance was about as ugly as it could get for a no-hitter as he entered that ninth inning with eight walks. He had been extremely fortunate that the Dodgers had been unable to do anything with his generosity, thanks in large part to some sparkling fielding behind him, so here he stood on the precipice of ultimate glory.

The Yankees had won two of the first three games and they led in this fourth game by a 2-1 score, though they had just blown a golden opportunity in the top of the ninth to break open what was a tight and tense conflict. They loaded the bases with one out, and Tommy Henrich - one of the great clutch hitters of his era - was due to step into the batters box.

Dodgers manager Burt Shotton lifted Behrman, and as if he was reading from a Hollywood script, he brought in Hugh Casey, the same Casey who in the 1941 World Series who had thrown the third strike pitch that Mickey Owen failed to catch, opening the door for a magnificent Yankee rally and victory. That day, the man at the plate was Henrich, the scene was Ebbets Field, it was Game Four, the Yankees were holding a 2-1 advantage in games, and they were batting in the top of the ninth. The circumstances were eerily similar, but what happened in the next instant couldn’t have been more in contrast.

On Casey’s first pitch, a changeup screwball, Henrich tapped a grounder right back to the mound. Casey fired to catcher Bruce Edwards who stomped on the plate and relayed to Jackie Robinson at first to double up Henrich and end the inning. The crowd exploded in relieved merriment as their Dodgers were still alive, and the place would be going ballistic a few moments later.

Bevens had allowed a run in the fifth when he walked Spider Jorgensen and Hal Gregg, and Jorgensen eventually scored on Pee Wee Reese’s fielders’ choice grounder. But he had the 2-1 lead because of Joe DiMaggio’s bases-loaded walk in the first, and Johnny Lindell’s RBI double which plated Billy Johnson who had led off the fourth with a triple.

“I wasn’t even thinking of the no-hitter,” Bevens said afterward. “I knew it was riding, but never mind about that. I’m trying to win.”

In a matter of 15 breathless and heartbreaking seconds, he lost the no-hitter and the game.

Edwards led off the Brooklyn ninth by hitting a fly ball to left field that for a second seemed deep enough to leave the park, but Lindell went back and hauled it in just in front of the wall for the first out. Bevens’ day-long bugaboo, the base on balls, reared its ugly head as he issued a free pass to Carl Furillo, but he regained control when Jorgensen fouled out meekly to George McQuinn at first base, leaving him one out away.

Shotton sent Al Gionfriddo in to pinch-run for Furillo, and with Casey scheduled to bat, he looked down his bench and pointed to the only left-handed batter he had left, Pete Reiser, who had sprained his ankle the day before and was thought to be unavailable for duty.

With Reiser at the plate, Shotton shocked everyone by flashing the steal sign to Gionfriddo, and when Gionfriddo slipped on his takeoff, it looked as if he was going to be a dead duck and the game would end. Though Yogi Berra’s throw was a bit high, it looked like Gionfriddo was out, but umpire Babe Pinelli saw it differently and called him safe. No instant replay in those days, which probably would have reversed the call.

With first base now open and a 3-1 count on Reiser, Yankee manager Bucky Harris told Bevens to throw ball four. While that took the bat out of the dangerous Reiser’s hands and it set up a force play at every base, it also put the winning run on for Brooklyn.

“I knew it was against baseball tradition to put the winning run on base,” Harris said. “But this was an exceptional case. Who would you rather pitch to, Reiser or Eddie Stanky?”

Harris knew Shotton had already used all his left-handed pinch-hitters, so he assumed Shotton would stick with Stanky, a right-handed slap hitter who Harris felt Bevens could handle. He assumed wrong. Like Harris, Shotton thought Bevens would handle Stanky, so he sent aging veteran Cookie Lavagetto up to hit for Stanky, and he also inserted Eddie Miksis as a pinch-runner for Reiser.

“It surprised me,” Gionfriddo said of Shotton’s decision to hit for Stanky. “Eddie can get on base. I don’t give a darn who’s pitching, in a tight spot Eddie would get on.”

Lavagetto had batted just 67 times all season and averaged .261. He was 34 years old and playing in what would be his final year in the big leagues. It just didn’t seem to be a smart move. If there was Twitter back then, the platform would have exploded.

Bevens blew his first pitch past Lavagetto, but his second was on the outside corner of the plate and Lavagetto met it squarely, sending the ball careening toward the wall in right field. The crowd rose in unison and let out a primal scream as Henrich drifted back trying to find the ball amid the glaring sun and white-shirted background. Once he located it, he realized he had no chance of catching it so he stopped running in order to position himself to play the carom off the wall.

“I didn’t want it flying back past me toward the infield,” he explained. However, Henrich didn’t plan for the crazy bounce the ball took, causing him to misplay it. By the time he picked ip up and threw to McQuinn in the cutoff position, Gionfriddo was across home plate with the tying run and Miksis was about to slide in with the winning run. McQuinn made the throw to Berra, but it was woefully late and just like that the Dodgers had tied the Series at two games apiece with an improbable 3-2 victory.

“One pitch and I was the hero and he was the goat. That’s sure baseball,” Lavagetto said.

As soon as the ball was hit, Bevens knew it was trouble. “I ran to back up the plate,” he said. “After Miksis slid across almost on Gionfriddo’s heals, I saw (umpire) Larry Goetz move up to dust off the plate. He was so wrapped up in the game he didn’t know it was over. But I did.”

So did all of Brooklyn. Fans poured onto the field in celebration, car horns began blaring a symphony outside the ballpark on Bedford Avenue as fans listened to Red Barber’s call on the radio.

“If I had seen the ball throughout its flight I could have headed straight for the right-field foul line parallel to the wall and adjusted enough to catch it or field it on one bounce and get some steam on my throw,” Henrich said.

Henrich was depressed. He really felt he had let Bevens and the entire team down, but the truth was he couldn’t have caught the ball because it hit too high on the wall. The best he could have done was prevent Miksis from scoring, but even a perfect play might not have cut down Miksis who was running at the crack of the bat.

“Those base on balls certainly kill you,” he said evenly. “I felt strong, I never got tired, but my control was off. I walked 10 and, to me, a walk is as bad as a base hit. You don’t deserve to win when you walk that many.”

Harris was prepared for the onslaught of second-guessing concerning his decision to walk Reiser. “I’d do it again tomorrow if I had to,” he argued. “The count is 3-1 and Reiser is a long-ball hitter. After Gionfriddo steals, a single drives him home and the winning run is on first anyhow. I’m not going to give Reiser a chance to whack one over the fence. The second guess is always the best one, and I only get one.”

The good news for the Yankees is that it was just one game, and the Series was far from over.

New York had gotten off to a wonderful start, winning the first two games at the stadium by counts of 5-3 and 10-5. The opener, played on a crisp, breezy day, drew a new World Series record crowd of 73,365 and was decided by one furious flurry as the Yankees scored all of their runs in the fifth inning after Brooklyn starter Ralph Branca had set down the first 12 Yankees he had faced.

The Yankee bats, mostly silent in the first game, woke with a vengeance for Game Two as they made 15 hits in a runaway victory. Brooklyn starter Vic Lombardi was routed inside five innings as he gave up nine hits and five runs, and Gregg and Behrman were equally ineffective in relief stints. Behrman summed up the day best when he turned to a group of writers seeking answers and belched, “No comment.”

The Yankees broke a 2-2 tie in the fourth when Johnson led off with a triple and came home on Phil Rizzuto’s bloop double. In the fifth, Henrich homered to right-center, and a four-run burst in the seventh off Behrman ended all suspense on another frosty afternoon. “Tomorrow we’ll be at home and it’ll be different,” said Shotton.

He was right.

The Dodgers pummeled Bobo Newsom for six runs in the second inning of Game Three at Ebbets Field, and though the Yankees fought back all day, they came up one run short and lost 9-8. The teams combined for 26 hits off eight pitchers with Joe DiMaggio and Berra homering. Berra’s clout was of particular renown as it was the first by a pinch-hitter in World Series history, a solo shot in the seventh that pulled New York within 9-8.

When the Dodgers pulled out Game Four they were stoked with confidence and Yankees starter Spec Shea was thrust into a difficult situation. The rookie responded with one of the great pitching performances in Yankee history, limiting the Dodgers to four hits during a complete game gem that sucked the fervor out of Flatbush and put the Yankees back in the lead at three games to two.

It had been a white-knuckler of a game with Shea pitching out of trouble in the sixth, seventh and ninth innings to hold on for the 2-1 victory, and afterward, he was beside himself with joy. “I told you I’d do it,” he said to reporters in the clubhouse afterward. “I told you I’d get even and I did. I wanted to square what they did to Bev yesterday. That hurt me almost as much as it hurt him.”

Ironically, the last batter to face Shea was Lavagetto. Shotton sent him up to pinch hit with two outs and the tying run on second, but Shea whistled a 3-2 fastball past him to end the game. “He never saw it,” said Shea. “Boy, that revenge was sweet.”

The Yankees were one victory away from their 11th world championship, and ace Allie Reynolds was due to pitch the potential clincher, but these Dodgers were nothing if not scrappy. With another Series record crowd of 74,085 wedged into every seat and standing area available at Yankee Stadium, the Dodgers showed remarkable resolve in pulling out an 8-6 Game Six victory. They routed Reynolds for four runs inside three innings, then held on for dear life as the Yankees mounted another charge that fell just short in a game that ranks as one of the most exciting I’ve ever seen.

Harris and Shotton combined to use 38 players in a battle that lasted a then-record three hours, 19 minutes, and it provided a deluge of dramatic moments, none more electrifying than Gionfriddo’s spectacular catch of DiMaggio’s deep fly to left-center in the sixth inning, the famous one where DiMaggio kicked the dirt with his spikes as he neared second base, the only real flash of emotion anyone could ever remember him displaying on a ball field.

The Yankees were trailing 8-5 at the time and they had runners on first and second with two out when DiMaggio flushed a Joe Hatten fastball. Had the game been at Ebbets Field the ball might have cleared the roof, but at Yankee Stadium, left-center was death valley for right-handed power hitters. Gionfriddo, a tiny 5-foot-6 sparkplug of a player who had just replaced Miksis, angled over from left field in a dead sprint and thrust his gloved hand out just before the ball reached the gate in front of the visiting bullpen. Somehow the ball found the glove as Gionfriddo hit the fence, and what should have been a game-tying homer or at least a two-run triple became the third out as the huge crowd screamed in disbelief.

And so it came down to Game Seven, and while they had played in the Series 14 times, the Yankees had been stretched to a seventh game only once, and they had lost it in 1926 to the Cardinals. It looked for a while like the Yankees weren’t going to win this one, either.

Given that Shea had already won two games, Harris was banking on the rookie being able to put together one more solid outing. But Shea had nothing, and when the Brooks grabbed a quick 2-0 lead in the second inning, Harris wasted no time getting him out of there and inserting Bevens.

The Yankees retrieved one of those runs in the bottom of the second when Rizzuto stroked a RBI single, and after Bevens worked two uneventful innings, New York gained the lead for good in the fourth. Billy Johnson walked and after two were out, Rizzuto singled him to second. Even though Bevens seemed to be finding his groove Harris decided to pinch-hit for him in this spot, and Bobby Brown came through with a clutch double that scored Johnson and chased Rizzuto to third. Shotton lifted Gregg in favor of Behrman, and he quickly walked Stirnweiss on four pitches to load the bases, and Henrich took his next pitch to right field for the go-ahead RBI single.

Harris gave the ball to his best reliever, Joe Page, who had pitched superbly in Game One but terribly the day before in Game Six.

“I’m just about the happiest guy in the world,” Page said after he pitched innings of one-hit shutout ball to clinch the championship. “This makes up for everything, particularly that cuffing they gave me yesterday. They had their fun then, I had mine today.”

Page retired the first 13 batters he faced until Miksis singled in the ninth, but by then the Yankees had opened a 5-2 lead. With Miksis on first, Page induced Edwards to hit into a Series-ending double play, Rizzuto to Stirnweiss to McQuinn.

On the Brooklyn side, the Bums were rightfully subdued. They had given it a tremendous effort, and after the way they won the fourth game and then the sixth game, it sure looked like the gods were on their side and they would, at long last, bring a championship home to Brooklyn.

Shotton admitted his team “lost to the better club this time.” He then added, “I’ll tell you this. We’ll beat the Yankees during the next 10 years a whale of a lot more times than they will beat us.”

Well, not so much.