1949 World Series: Henrich and Yankees, Reliable as Ever

Good morning everyone. For all the new subscribers, just a note. Every Wednesday through the end of May, I’m writing about each of the Yankees’ 27 World Series championships. We started with the first in 1923, and today we’re up to 1949 which started their amazing, and never to be broken run streak of five straight titles. If you’re interested in going back and reading some of the others, they can be found at the archive for the newsletter at https://salmaiorana.beehiiv.com. Lets get to it.

Yankees broadcaster Mel Allen started calling Tommy Henrich “Old Reliable” sometime during Henrich’s last few years with the club, and there couldn’t have been a more apt nickname for a ballplayer.

“Old Reliable” was the train that ran from Cincinnati to Allen’s home state of Alabama, and it was always on time, just as Henrich was always in the right place at the right time doing whatever it took for the Yankees to win.

Henrich was the definition of clutch during his Yankee career, and he reached new heights during the 1949 season at a time when the injury-ravaged Yankees needed him most.

When Casey Stengel became the Yankees manager in 1949, it didn’t take him long to see how valuable Henrich was to the team, and ‘ol Casey used to pamper Henrich like an infant. He told Henrich to drive carefully, avoid drafts so he wouldn’t get a stiff neck or catch a cold, and “under no circumstances are you to eat fish because them bones could be murder. Sit quietly in the clubhouse until the game begins, I can’t let anything happen to you.”

Despite Stengel’s precautions, Henrich still suffered injuries to both knees, his toe, his ribs and his thumb during 1949 because at age 36, his career nearing its end, like any ballplayer it was unavoidable.

After playing through those nuisances, he finally went down for what many thought would be the rest of the season when he crashed into the right-field wall at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in late August. Henrich fractured two vertebrae in his back and when he returned to New York, he was admitted to St. Luke’s Hospital and fitted for a plaster cast.

But Henrich made it back into the lineup well before the final weekend showdown with Boston when the Yankees swept the Red Sox and turned a one-game deficit into a one-game AL pennant triumph, and when the World Series got underway at Yankee Stadium, Henrich won the first game against the Dodgers with a dramatic bottom-of-the-ninth home run to break up a scoreless pitching duel between Allie Reynolds and Brooklyn’s Don Newcombe.

Joe DiMaggio used to say, “Tommy Henrich is the steadiest ballplayer I’ve ever seen.” High praise from a man who had every right to lay claim to that title, but Henrich indeed was one of the most “reliable” Yankees of them all.

Henrich made it to New York in 1937, and after a quick trip back to Triple-A Newark, he returned for good in 1938 and began carving out his niche in Yankee lore. His career was not as expansive as Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig or DiMaggio, but by the time he retired following the 1950 season, Henrich had left an indelible mark on the franchise.

Henrich was making $22.50 per week as a typist when he took a pay cut to $80 per month to sign his first minor-league contract with the Indians organization in 1933. After three years of being jockeyed around the minors despite outstanding batting averages, Henrich became embroiled in a controversy when the Indians sold his contract to the minor league Milwaukee Brewers.

Not knowing which team he was on, and feeling his career was being shunted by the Indians, Henrich brazenly enlisted the help of baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis to settle the dispute. After weeks of meetings, Landis determined the Indians had wronged Henrich, and he ruled Henrich to be a free agent - the first in baseball history - meaning any team could sign him. Eight pursued the nifty outfielder, but there was only one team he wanted to play for - the Yankees.

Henrich had grown up a Yankee fan and Ruth worshipper in football-crazed Massillon, Ohio, and as luck would have it, Yankee scout Johnny Nee had been following Henrich’s progress that spring before the Landis ruling and he liked what he saw. He met with Henrich, and that was it. The St. Louis Browns had offered more money, but as Henrich told his father, “Suppose I sign with the Browns and find I’m good enough to play major-league ball. Then I’m stuck with the Browns, one of the worst teams in baseball. If I sign with the Yanks and find I can make it as a major-leaguer, I’m sitting pretty with the best team in baseball. I’m willing to take that chance.” Shrewd man that Henrich.

On his first visit to New York he checked into the New Yorker Hotel and was greeted by a bellboy who said, “So you’re Henrich. The papers say you’re going to break into the lineup right away. Hey, wait ‘til you see DiMaggio and Selkirk and Hoag. You ever seen those guys play?” Without hesitation, Henrich replied “You ever see Henrich play?”

“He didn’t care what it took to win,” infielder Billy Johnson said years after he and Henrich had retired. “He was a leader on the Yankees in the years after the war. He was an intense player who would tell young players, ‘If you don’t want to hustle with this club, there’s no use playing. Everybody has to go all out, everybody has to play together or we won’t win.’ Tommy didn’t joke around too much, he was all business.”

And in the first game of the Series against the Dodgers, it was Henrich who broke a scoreless duel between Allie Reynolds and Don Newcombe when he led off the bottom of the ninth with a walk-off solo homer, starting the Yankees on their way to a five-game triumph.

Reynolds completed his nine innings having yielded just two hits and only one runner touched third base. Newcombe, a 17-game winner in his rookie big-league season for the Dodgers, had pitched five-hit ball through eight with 11 strikeouts and no walks.

One of the Yankees’ hits was a double by Jerry Coleman in the eighth, and with one out, Stengel was confronted with a tricky decision. Reynolds was due up, he was pitching wonderfully, and he had two of the hits off Newcombe, but the situation seemed ripe for a pinch-hitter. Instead, Stengel allowed Reynolds to bat and he was called out on strikes, then Phil Rizzuto flied to center to end the threat, and it looked as if the teams might play all afternoon.

Reynolds justified Stengel’s confidence by mowing down the Dodgers in order again in the ninth, and Newcombe lumbered out to the mound intent on doing the same, but he would have to wade his way through Henrich, Yogi Berra and DiMaggio. He never got past Henrich.

On a 2-0 pitch, Newcombe tried to throw a hard curve past Henrich and it cost him the game as Henrich smashed it over the right-field fence.

“His curve usually doesn’t break a whole lot,” Henrich said. “It was a fast curve and that was to my advantage because I didn’t have to adjust as much to the difference in speed between that pitch and a fastball. As I was running down the first-base line I was watching Furillo who was running to his left toward the foul line. He lifted his head to follow the flight of the ball and as soon as he did that I said to myself ‘the game is over.’ I knew I had a home run and we had won the game.”

There had only been one other 1-0 World Series game decided by a home run, and Stengel had hit it in Game Three of the 1923 Series against the Yankees. “How that Henrich hit it, what a blast, the touch of a master,” Stengel bellowed.

Stengel wasn’t quite as illuminated the next day when Preacher Roe did to the Yankees exactly what Reynolds had done to the Dodgers - he pitched a 1-0 shutout to even the Series at one game apiece. Vic Raschi was the hard-luck loser, the only run coming in the second inning when Jackie Robinson led off with a double and scored on a single by Gil Hodges.

“Roe pitched a good game, he never lost control of the ball,” surmised Stengel. “The pitching has been good on both sides, ours was all right today, too. Raschi pitched a good game, good enough to win if we got him some runs.”

The scene shifted to Ebbets Field for the next three games, and, as it turned out, the last three games of the Series. New York pulled off a clean sweep, and once again the Bronx celebrated while Brooklyn mourned.

Game Three provided the final vestige of drama. The teams were locked in a 1-1 struggle as Brooklyn’s Ralph Branca allowed a mere two hits through eight innings and the combination of Tommy Byrne and Joe Page had given the Dodgers only five hits. At last, both teams awoke from their offensive slumbers, and the Yankees found one more run than Brooklyn in a wild ninth inning.

In the top half, Berra walked with one out, and after DiMaggio fouled out, the Yankees went to work as Bobby Brown singled and Gene Woodling walked to fill the bases. Stengel sent Johnny Mize up to pinch-hit for Cliff Mapes and Big John - who began his professional career in 1930 and was at long last playing in his first World Series - came through with a two-run single off the right-field fence. Branca left in favor of Jack Banta who allowed Coleman’s RBI single before striking out Page amidst silence at the little bandbox in Flatbush.

Soon the place was rocking again as Luis Olmo and Roy Campanella hit solo homers off Page to close the gap to 4-3. “Those Brooklyn hitters can make life interesting for you,” said Page, who had blown some games early in the season before hitting stride. He appeared fidgety on the mound and he was clearly wilting, but Stengel had relied on him all year to close games longer before closers and saves were a thing in baseball, and Page didn’t let him down. Bruce Edwards pinch-hit for Banta and looked at a called third strike to end the game.

“Say, that big guy came through, didn’t he?” Stengel said of Mize. “And I was satisfied with that man Page. I wasn’t too worried. We were three runs ahead when they started hitting those homers, and we were still in front when Page finished ‘em.”

Brooklyn manager Burt Shotton came back in Game Four with Newcombe on just two days rest, and it turned out to be a bad decision as he was lit up for three runs in the fourth inning - the key hit Mapes’ two-run double - before Shotton rescued him. Joe Hatten took over and he was strafed in the fifth when Brown hit a three-run triple that inflated the Yankee lead to 6-0.

Brooklyn exploded for seven hits in the sixth to chase Eddie Lopat off the mound, but all were singles and they produced only four runs. Stengel turned to Reynolds to douse the flame, which he did, and the Brooks were never heard from again. For the second day in a row Ebbets Field emptied quickly and quietly as Reynolds retired all 10 batters he faced to secure the 6-4 victory.

“Reynolds was my pitcher for tomorrow, but when I saw how things were going I had to get Allie in there,” said Stengel. “What a pitcher he is. I don’t believe in saving pitchers in such a spot. I want today’s game today. Let tomorrow take care of itself.”

The Yankees didn’t need Reynolds in the finale. Raschi went back to work on just two days rest and while he wasn’t very sharp, it didn’t matter as the Yankees routed Rex Barney and five other Brooklyn hurlers during a 10-6 clinching victory.

Robinson was at a loss to explain what had happened to the Dodgers. “They beat us, I don’t know what you can say about that. They really knocked us down and stepped on us. But I still don’t see how a team like ours could have been licked by a team like that. I’m not knocking the Yankees, but I still think we had the better team before the Series started.”

Yet once again, when the Series was over, it was the Yankees who were hoisting the hardware.