1953 World Series: Five Straight

When spring training dawned for the Yankees in 1953, it was Casey Stengel’s opinion that four championships in a row were not enough.

“We’re out to win a fifth straight pennant, something no club has yet been able to do in the major leagues,” Stengel said.

And there was no reason to believe the Yankees couldn’t do it. For the first time in Stengel’s tenure the team was set in spring training and was free of distractions and injuries. The lineup would be Joe Collins at first, Billy Martin at second, Phil Rizzuto at shortstop and Gil McDougald at third, Yogi Berra behind the plate, and Mickey Mantle, Gene Woodling and Hank Bauer in the outfield. Off the bench there was Johnny Mize, Irv Noren and Don Bollweg. On the mound, Whitey Ford was returning from the military to join Eddie Lopat and Vic Raschi as regular starters, while Allie Reynolds, Jim McDonald and Johnny Sain would share the fourth slot in the rotation. Those latter three plus Bob Kuzava and Tom Gorman would combine to form a reliable and experienced bullpen.

“The reason this club hasn’t made a deal is why should we?” Stengel said when someone asked him if it had been wise of general manager George Weiss to stand pat in the off-season. “If the players are good enough to win four years in a row, they should be good enough to win five.”

They were.

New York won 11 of its 14 games in April, and on May 11 it moved into first place for good. Yet this season, more than any other, Stengel rode his players like a drill sergeant. In fact there were times when he was downright nasty, and the more the Yankees won, the more of an edge Stengel seemed to have.

“If we’re going to win the pennant, we’ve got to start thinking we’re not as good as we think we are,” he said, though that was tough, especially during the team’s 18-game winning streak which ran from May 27 to June 14.

Oh, Stengel was mad the day the St. Louis Browns snapped the streak and in the process ended their own 14-game losing streak. The Yankees were two wins away from breaking the American League record of 19 straight set by the 1906 Chicago White Sox, but Stengel had his eye on an even loftier target, the 26 consecutive wins achieved by his old mentor with the New York Giants, John McGraw, in 1916 which remains the MLB record today.

Stengel never did break McGraw’s winning streak record, but he did tie him with 10 league pennants, and his seven World Series triumphs were more than double McGraw’s three.

And in 1953, when the Yankees polished off their forever foil, the Dodgers, in six games, Stengel set in stone a record that may never be broken: Five consecutive World Series championships.

When the Series, began, it looked as if Allie Reynolds was going to have almost no role. He had suffered a back injury in a team bus accident in early July and while he continued to make every start, the back always bothered him and Stengel assumed he would be good to go for Game 1.

However, he tweaked it and had to leave in the sixth inning with the Yankees clinging to a 5-4 lead. Johnny Sain relieved and in the seventh he yielded three straight singles that allowed Brooklyn to tie the game, costing Reynolds what might have been a victory in what turned out to be the last of his nine World Series starts.

Not that it mattered to Reynolds because all he cared about was that the Yankees won, and that happened when Joe Collins homered into the right-field stands to put New York back in front in the bottom of the seventh, and Sain’s two-run double in the eighth provided some insurance as the Yankees went on to a 9-5 victory.

“I hurt my back in the third inning and again in the fifth,” said Reynolds. “I thought that I had a big enough lead to start the sixth, but I was wrong. I just didn’t have it. Pitching past the fifth inning was a mistake, my mistake.”

At least he made it that far. Carl Erskine, the ace of the Dodgers staff who had carried the Dodgers to the brink of the 1952 championship with his transcendent 11-inning Game 5 performance, was routed for four runs on two hits and three walks in the first inning, and didn’t come out to pitch the second inning.

“I was wild, I couldn’t get the ball over and some of those I did get over were bad pitches,” Erskine said, singling out the two hanging curves he threw to Billy Martin and Hank Bauer that resulted in triples, Martin’s a three-run shot that gave the Yankees a 4-0 lead.

The next day, in a battle of aging craft left-handers, 36-year-old Eddie Lopat outdueled 35-year-old Preacher Roe, to give the Yankees a two-game lead. Roe had frustrated the Yankees for six innings, limiting them to two hits, and on the strength of Billy Cox’s two-run double in the fourth he led 2-1. But Martin homered to left to tie the game and then Mickey Mantle followed a Bauer single with a two-run homer that brought a 4-2 victory.

Now the Dodgers were desperate - when weren’t they when they faced the Yankees? - as they headed back to Brooklyn for the next three games. Manager Chuck Dressen had told Erskine before the Series began that he was going to be his horse and that if need be, he would start him three times. Normally that would entail the first, fourth and, if necessary, seventh games, but having gone only one inning in the opener, the time to come back with Erskine was in Game 3, and Dressen did, which proved to be a smart decision.

Pitching much the way he did in the 1952 Series, Erskine set a new post-season record by striking out 14 Yankees and the Dodgers won a thriller at Ebbets Field, 3-2.

“I wasn’t shooting at any record, all I was aiming to do was get our backs away from the wall,” Erskine said in the jubilant clubhouse. “We’re still a long way from being home yet, but at least we’re moving uphill. If nothing else, at least the Yankees know we’re in the Series.”

Like Roe in Game 2, Vic Raschi was a hard-luck loser. The game was tied at 2-2 in the bottom of the eighth when Raschi threw a high fastball to Roy Campanella who crushed it for the game-winning home run. “It wasn’t a strike, but I didn’t get it high enough and Campy belted it,” Raschi said.

The Yankees had just pulled even in the top of the eighth on Woodling’s clutch two-out RBI single, only to see Campanella, playing with a sore thumb that made it hard to swing the bat, homer a few minutes later.

The Yankees had made a habit of playing in pressure-packed World Series games, but Whitey Ford had not. When he took the mound to start Game 4, he hadn’t pitched in the Fall Classic since 1950 when he won the clincher against the Philadelphia Phillies because he had spent 1951 and 1952 in the military. Further, he had never pitched at Ebbets Field, a notorious horror house for most left-handers.

Just like Erskine in the opener, Ford didn’t make it past the first inning. He gave up three runs on three hits and a walk, so Stengel sent him to the showers and two hours later, the rest of the Yankees joined Ford in a somber clubhouse pondering another drag it out brawl with the Dodgers. Brooklyn cruised to a 7-3 Series-tying victory as Duke Snider led the way with a two-run double off Ford in the first, a solo homer off Sain in the sixth and a RBI double off Art Schallock in the seventh.

“Whitey was just bad, he didn’t have it,” Stengel said. Ford wasn’t apt to agree as he said, “I thought I had good stuff, but I guess not. What else is there to say?”

Nothing, unless you were a Dodger. “Somebody asked me what I thought of our chances in the Series and I said I couldn’t answer then,” Dressen said, referring to a question that had been posed to him two days earlier when his team was down two games to none. “Now I’d say it’s going to be a pretty interesting Series.”

It had been Stengel’s plan to go with Reynolds in Game 5, but the Chief’s back condition forced him to reach into the bullpen and use a second-line starter, Jim McDonald, in the pivotal game of the Series. Erskine’s flameout in the opener had Dressen’s rotation off kilter, too, and he had a decision to make. Go with young Johnny Podres, a 21-year-old rookie left-hander who had won nine games during the regular season, to combat the Yankees left-hand power hitters, or veteran righty Russ Meyer.

Meyer had come over from Philadelphia in the off-season and played a major role in the Dodgers third straight NL pennant, winning 15 of 20 decisions. Meyer fully expected to be starting and was admittedly aggravated when he received word that Podres was getting the nod. “You trade for a guy, I start for him all year and win 15 ballgames, and I can’t start in the Series because he’s a big believer in percentages,” Meyer said.

Who knows what would have happened had Meyer started, but he didn’t, and the Yankees jumped on young Podres for five runs inside three innings and rolled to an 11-7 victory.

It was 1-1 in the third when the roof caved in on Podres. With Phil Rizzuto on third and two out, Collins hit a grounder to Hodges at first that should have ended the inning, but Hodges booted the ball and Rizzuto scored. Podres then hit Bauer with a pitch and walked Berra to load the bases, so Dressen decided now was the time to bring in the veteran, Meyer, to face Mantle.

His last piece of advice before trotting back to the dugout was, “Make him hit your curveball” because Erskine had struck out Mantle four times in Game 3, all with his curve. Meyer’s first pitch was a curve on the outer half of the plate. Mantle, batting left-handed, took a mighty swing and launched the ball on a majestic flight out toward left-center for a grand slam.

Roger Kahn recalled in his classic book The Boys of Summer that the ball, “sailed and sailed, carried and carried, high into the upper deck, landing with such force some claimed to have heard the sound of furniture splintering. That sort of thing just didn’t happen, a left-handed batter reaching the upper deck in left-center at Ebbets Field. Not many right-handed batters could clout a ball that far. I remember sitting in the press box in disbelief.”

The score ballooned to 10-2 as Martin hit a two-run homer in the seventh and when McDonald encountered difficulty in the eighth, Bob Kuzava and Reynolds closed it out for him.

“Before the game I promised myself I’d win this one if I never did anything else in my life,” McDonald, a Yankee from 1952-54, said of the only appearance he ever made in a World Series. “Winning was the biggest kick I’ve ever gotten out of baseball. It wasn’t so long ago I was pitching for the St. Louis Browns and I never dreamed of working in a World Series.”

Back at Yankee Stadium for Game 6, the Yankees put it away in dramatic fashion in the bottom of the ninth inning on Martin’s walk-off RBI single for a 4-3 victory.

It was a ninth inning that was not soon forgotten by anyone who was there. Sore back and all, Stengel handed the ball to Reynolds after Ford delivered seven outstanding innings and left with a 3-1 lead.

“I was not tired and when Casey removed me I was on the angry side,” said Ford. “Anyway, we won and that’s the most important thing.”

Said Stengel: “I figured Reynolds with a two-run lead would hold it for two innings.”

After an easy eighth, Reynolds retired Gil Hodges to start the ninth but then walked Snider and served up a dramatic game-tying two-run homer to Carl Furillo which lifted the spirits in Brooklyn.

Briefly, as it turned out because in the last of the ninth, Clem Labine, the third Brooklyn pitcher, coughed up the game and the Series. He walked Bauer before getting Berra to line to right, but Mantle legged out an infield hit with Bauer advancing to second. That brought Martin to the plate and he slapped a 1-1 pitch over second base, his 12th hit of the Series which tied an all-time record, and Bauer rumbled home with the clinching run as the crowd went beserk and the Yankee dugout emptied onto the field in celebration.

“When I crossed first base and realized that we had won a thousand sensations seemed to pass through my body all at once,” said Martin. “I just couldn’t believe it. Now I know how Bobby Thomson felt when he hit that pennant-winning home run against Brooklyn. He said he didn’t run around the bases that day, he rode around them on a cloud. Believe me, the cloud I was on after that hit was higher than Thomson’s.”

In the gloom of the Brooklyn clubhouse, Dressen was heard to mutter, “We was beaten by a .257 hitter.” That was Martin’s batting average during the regular season, but he had drummed the Dodgers to the tune of .500 across these six games.

“That’s the worst thing that coulda happened to Martin,” Stengel said. “I ain’t going to be able to live with that little son of a bitch next year.”

As good as the Yankees were, this had truly felt like Brooklyn’s year after it won 105 games during the regular season and won the National League by 13 games.

And while the Dodgers’ time would eventually come in 1955, this was still the Yankees time. “I’m afraid nobody can sell me on their being lucky,” Erskine said. “A team that wins as often as they do has to have something more than luck. They’re a good ballclub.”

When he was interviewed by Peter Golenbock for Bums, Erskine reflected sadly on the Dodgers’ frustrations. “Those suckers were tough,” he said. “I don’t know if psychologically there was a difference, or whether Yankee tradition played a part, I don’t know what it was, but there was a fine line there somehow.”