1950 World Series: Yankees Wipe Out Upstart Phillies

An hour after the Yankees had rallied in the final two innings to capture Game Three of the World Series and take a commanding 3-0 lead over the Phabulous Phillies of ‘50, Casey Stengel sat in his office conducting one of his long, drawn out bull sessions with “my writers” as he used to call the Yankees press

Vic Raschi and Allie Reynolds had gone the victorious distance in the first two games at Shibe Park. Eddie Lopat had pitched just as well in the third game at Yankee Stadium, but by the time his teammates started scoring, he had been lifted for a pinch-hitter so when Jerry Coleman singled home the winning run in the bottom of the ninth, Lopat wasn’t eligible for the winner’s decision.

Stengel had gotten exactly what he had expected out of his three front-line starters. Now he had a decision to make. Based on the season-long rotation, Tommy Byrne was in line to be the Game Four starter, but there was that brash rookie, Eddie Ford, the kid they called Whitey, to consider. It was hard to ignore what Ford had done in the second half of the season, winning his first nine decisions before dropping a meaningless game after the pennant had been clinched. Byrne was a reliable veteran who’d won 30 games the past two years, so picking Byrne would have been easy. Stengel picked Ford.

“It’ll be Ford tomorrow,” Stengel said. “That kid’s got moxie.”

And then Stengel launched into a story that, in Casey’s roundabout way, explained why he was asking Ford to close out the Series.

The previous year when the Yankees were battling the Red Sox down to the wire for the American League flag, Ford was dominating at Class A Binghamton. Stengel said Ford phoned him in September and told him, “You may think I’m cocky, but I can win for you. I’ve learned all I can in the minor leagues.”

Stengel declined Ford’s offer to come help the Yankees win the pennant, “But I’ll bet he would have done just what he said he would do.”

Funny thing, though. That never happened, it just Casey telling yet another tall tale. “I wouldn’t have called Stengel, I didn’t even know him,” Ford said years later. “Even I wasn’t ballsy enough to call Stengel directly.”

He did dial up head scout Paul Krichell, though, and asked if the Yankees would consider bringing him up because Binghamton’s championship season was over. “I called Krichell because I knew him,” Ford said. “All he said was if I behaved myself they’d take me to spring training the next year.”

Ford was fairly impressive at St. Petersburg, but he started the year at Triple-A Kansas City. Midway through the season Ford didn’t need to call anybody. The Yankees were coming off a poor month of June and were in need of a spark, so they called him. “Maybe you can go out and beat somebody and put some life back into our guys,” Stengel told him. That’s what Ford did.

Ford grew up in the Astoria section of Queens playing youth baseball in the Police Athlete League and the Kiwanis League, mostly as a decent-hitting first baseman. When he tried out with the Yankees and the Giants, that was his position of choice, and both teams liked him. The Giants offered a $6,000 bonus, the Yankees $7,000, and that made the decision easy for Ford.

There was one hitch, though. Krichell wanted Ford to try pitching and when Ford displayed good velocity and excellent movement on his curve, Krichell told him to forget first base. Ford spent his last year in high school honing his pitching skills and Krichell signed him in October 1946. After a 3 1/2-year journey through the minor-league system, during which time he won 51 of 71 decisions, he landed in New York brimming with bravado, a player literally born to be a Yankee.

He made his debut in relief during a game against the Red Sox in Boston, and while he struggled that day, little did the Fenway faithful know that they were witnessing the beginning of a Hall of Fame career. His first start came a few days later, a no-decision against Washington, and then he earned the first of his 236 victories on July 17, beating the White Sox. Right away Ford was a hit and Yankees pitching coach Jim Turner said Ford had, “the guts of a cat burglar.”

With the Yankees embroiled in another tight pennant race, Ford played a vital role as he kept winning every time Stengel trotted him out to the mound. After he won Game Four of the 1950 Series, it was clear Ford was going to become a mainstay in the Yankee rotation, but his meteoric rise was stunted by the Korean War and during the next two years he had to fulfill a military commitment. He returned in 1953 and his 18-6 record helped propel the Yankees to their record fifth consecutive championship.

Over the next 12 years he was one of baseball’s greatest pitchers, and by the time a circulation problem in his left arm forced him into retirement in early 1967, Ford had the highest winning percentage (.690) in major league history of any pitcher with at least 200 victories.

“Ford was the best left-handed pitcher I ever played with or against,” said Moose Skowron, Ford’s teammate for nine years. “It’s who wins, who’s on the pennant winners. The Yanks with Ford on the team won a lot of championships.”

Mickey Mantle, his best friend on the team, agreed. “Whitey was the best clutch pitcher I ever saw, and one of the smartest,” Mantle said. “The tougher the opponent, the bigger the game, the better he was. Whitey’s weakness was that he couldn’t start every day.”

All year long it looked like Brooklyn was once again the class of the National League. The Dodgers had another terrific team with the same cast of characters - Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Roy Campanella, Carl Furillo, Gene Hermanski, Don Newcombe and Preacher Roe. But in 1950 they didn’t even get the chance to lose to the Yankees. They lost to the Phillies.

Entering 1950 the Phillies had finished above .500 twice in the past 32 years and on 16 occasions they closed in last place. They were one of the worst franchises in baseball, but then Eddie Sawyer took over the club late in 1948, and he began assembling a pretty sound unit. Players such as Richie Ashburn, Del Ennis, Granny Hamner, Dick Sisler, Andy Seminick and Puddin’ Head Jones began to jell, and aided by a pitching staff led by Robin Roberts, Curt Simmons and Jim Konstanty, the Phillies finished third in 1949, then held off the fast-charging Dodgers by winning a thrilling down-to-the-last-day pennant race in 1950, and once again tears spilled in Brooklyn. The Phillies franchise had been around since 1883, but this would be just its second World Series appearance. It didn’t last long.

Sawyer’s mound staff had been depleted at the end of the year because of injuries and a military call-up of Simmons, so the manager gave the ball to Konstanty to start the Series opener at Shibe Park. The 33-year-old right-hander had set a major league record by appearing in 74 games, all in relief, and he won 16 while saving 22. He’d started one game in the last five years, so naturally Sawyer’s choice set off shock waves in the press corps, and the Phillies themselves were rather stunned by the news.

You couldn’t argue with Sawyer’s strategy at the conclusion of Game One. Konstanty, the first recognized reliever to start a Series game since Wilcy Moore did it for the Yankees in Game Four of the 1927 Classic, was superb, limiting the Yankees to one run on four hits over eight innings. Unfortunately for him, Vic Raschi was even better as he blanked the Phillies on two hits, never allowing a runner to touch third base, and the Yankees escaped with a 1-0 victory.

In the very first inning Raschi twisted his left knee fielding a bunt by Ashburn, and though he said nothing, there were a few moments when he was apprehensive about whether he could continue. Upstairs in the press box it certainly didn’t seem like anything was wrong. He had a no-hitter going into the fifth before Jones singled, and after Seminick singled to left with two outs, Raschi struck out Mike Goliat. Only one more batter reached base for the Phillies, Eddie Waitkus, who drew Raschi’s only free pass of the game in the sixth.

The Yankees didn’t have much luck with Konstanty, but in the fourth Bobby Brown doubled down the left-field line, took third on Bauer’s long fly to center and scored on Coleman’s deep fly to left, and that’s all they needed, thanks to Raschi’s paralyzing performance.

“Raschi wins because he pitches here, here and there,” Casey Stengel said pointing to his arm, his heart and his head.

In Game Two, Roberts hooked up with Allie Reynolds in a pitching duel just as intense as the Raschi-Konstanty encounter. This time the game wasn’t decided until the top of the 10th when Joe DiMaggio uncorked a long home run into the upper left-field stands for a 2-1 victory. “God bless Joe DiMaggio,” Reynolds said afterward. “If he hadn’t hit it I’d probably still be pitching.”

“I never hit a better one in my life,” DiMaggio said in the jubilant clubhouse, caught up in the excitement of the moment. “That was the greatest homer of my career. This one tops any that I can remember.”

This was the happiest DiMaggio had been all season, and the writers crowded around him as if he was giving us all fifty-dollar bills. But DiMaggio, who hadn’t hit the ball out of the infield in his previous four turns against Roberts and who was hitless in six official at-bats to that point in the Series, wasn’t the lone hero.

Reynolds pitched a great game, even though the Phillies were far more threatening than they had been the day before. They touched him for three doubles and a triple, but he yielded just one run, that in the fifth, which tied the game after Gene Woodling’s RBI infield single in the second.

“Good pitching, that’s what it was today, just as it was yesterday,” Stengel said. “When you get top pitching you can’t blame the hitters. Reynolds was great. So was that Roberts. But good old Joe came back and it was like old times, that’s all there was to it.”

Both teams took the train back to New York, and another close, tense struggle ensued in Game Three. The Phillies fought hard and made the Yankees sweat, but in the end, the result was the same, this one a 3-2 Yankee victory.

The Phillies were clinging to a 2-1 lead on the strength of Sisler’s RBI single in the sixth and Goliat’s RBI single in the seventh, but with two outs in the eighth Philadelphia starter Ken Heintzelman walked Coleman, Berra and DiMaggio in succession to load the bases. Sawyer turned to his ace reliever, Konstanty, and Stengel sent lefty-swinging Brown up to pinch-hit for Bauer. Sawyer should have won the battle as Brown slapped a hard grounder to Hamner at short and all he had to do was field it and flip to second for a force. Instead, the ball handcuffed him, he bobbled it, and by the time he recovered everyone was safe and the game was tied.

In the ninth Russ Meyer came on to pitch for the Phillies, and Sawyer was forced to insert Jimmy Bloodworth at second base because he had pinch-run for Goliat in the previous half-inning. It was a move that came back to haunt the Phillies. Meyer recorded two quick outs before the Yankees put together the winning rally. It started when Gene Woodling hit a slow roller up the middle that Bloodworth reached, but couldn’t make a play on and Woodling was awarded a hit. Rizzuto followed with a hard shot that caromed off Bloodworth’s glove and bounced toward the bag at second and Rizzuto and Woodling were both safe. With the crowd in an uproar, Coleman - who had driven in New York’s first run back in the third - came through with another clutch hit, a single to left-center that chased Woodling home with the winning run.

It was left for Ford, the Yankees own Whiz Kid, to wrap it up now, and the youngster did not disappoint. Before the game began, Stengel told Ford “Let’s get it over with. Remember, this is the last game.” Ford answered “Yes sir” and proceeded to choke the Phillies on five hits through eight innings and took a 5-0 lead into the ninth.

When the Phillies scored twice in their last hurrah thanks to an error by Woodling, and had the tying run at the plate with two outs, Stengel’s nerves could take no more. His heart told him to leave Ford in, his brain told him to get the veteran Reynolds in to close it out. The Yankee Stadium throng booed Stengel, but their mood changed quickly when Reynolds fanned pinch-hitter Stan Lopata to secure the Yankees’ 13th championship.