1956 World Series: Yankees Win Final Subway Series

Don Larsen lived 64 years after he threw the first, and still only, World Series perfect game, and in all that time, it never truly sunk in what he accomplished on the afternoon of Oct. 8, 1956.

“I still find it hard to believe I really pitched the perfect game,” Larsen, who passed away in 2020, said almost every time he was asked about it which, as you might imagine, was often. “It’s almost like a dream, like something that happened to somebody else.”

It was one of those performances that simply defied all logic. Larsen was the last guy in the world you would have expected to make history, unless the competition was carousing.

Two years before he made history in Game 5 at Yankee Stadium, Larsen had fashioned one of the worst pitching records ever (3-21) for a bad Baltimore team which prompted this remark on the back of his 1955 bubble gum card: “It is safe to say that Big Don would have won more games with a better hitting team behind him.”

Then again, maybe not. He’d won his final four decisions of the 1956 regular season to finish 11-5, yet he still brought a deficient 30-40 lifetime mark into his surprise Game 5 assignment. And beyond the perfect game, Larsen went on to win 51 games and lose 51 games before retiring in 1967. He was never more than an average pitcher no matter what team he played on. But for two incredible hours on baseball’s biggest stage he was the best pitcher who ever lived.

Larsen began his career in 1947 and after four years in the minors and two years in the military, he finally made it to the majors in 1953 with the St. Louis Browns where he went 7-12 for the worst team in the American League. The Browns moved to Baltimore in 1954 and became the Orioles, but a change of scenery did them no good. They lost 100 games and Larsen was tagged with just over one-fifth of those defeats. Incredibly, two of his three wins came against the Yankees, and when the Yankees and Orioles concocted a blockbuster 18-player trade, Larsen was included in the package that was shipped off to New York.

“I figure maybe if I hadn’t gone 3-21, I wouldn’t have been a Yankee at all,” he said.

In 1955 he spent half the season in Triple-A Kansas City, but he returned to the Yankees when the team released longtime star Eddie Lopat in late July. He went 9-2 and drew the start in Game 4 of the World Series where he pitched poorly and was beaten by the Dodgers.

At the start of 1956, Larsen’s reputation as a party animal had become well-known. His former manager with the Orioles, Jimmy Dykes, once said, “The only thing Larsen fears is sleep.” Larsen didn’t help matters when, in a celebrated incident during spring training, he wrapped his brand new Oldsmobile around a telephone pole in St. Petersburg and later quipped, “The pole was speeding.”

Upon hearing the news, Casey Stengel said, “Where he was going and what he was doing remains a mystery, but he couldn’t have done it in a museum.”

On a number of occasions Mantle, a man as proficient a drinker as he was a home run hitter, told me “That Larsen can throw ‘em back. I’ve never seen a guy drink the way he can.” Mantle said that. Of all guys, Mantle.

For the first time in their history, the Dodgers entered 1956 as defending World Series champion after they had ended decades of frustration by beating the Yankees in a classic seven-game battle the year before. Both teams rolled to pennants in 1956 to set up the seventh edition of their version of a Subway Series, one that proved to be the last because of the Dodgers’ relocation to Los Angeles two years later.

The festivities started at Ebbets Field under glorious sunshine with Mantle belting a two-run homer off Sal Maglie in the first inning and all of Brooklyn feared painful retribution for 1955. However, by the end of the third inning the Dodgers had tagged Whitey Ford for five runs on the strength of a solo homer by Jackie Robinson and a two-run blast by Gil Hodges. With Maglie baffling the Yankees the rest of the way, Game 1 turned into a frustrating 6-3 defeat for New York.

After a day of rain, Larsen took the mound for Game 2 and it looked like he’d be in for an easy day. Berra’s grand slam highlighted a five-run second inning which put the Yankees ahead 6-0, but then came Brooklyn’s six-run response, followed by seven more runs courtesy of 12 hits and 11 walks from Yankee pitchers as the Dodgers rolled to a 13-8 victory and a two games to none lead.

For only the second time in their history, and not since 1922, the Yankees had lost the first two games of a World Series which meant Game 3 was a must win, Stengel knew it, and even though he was unhappy with the way Ford had pitched in the opener, he gave his crafty lefty the ball.

It was games such as this that built Ford’s legend. When the Yankees had to win, Ford almost always delivered, and he did so here with a complete-game eight-hitter. The 5-3 victory was secured when the ageless Enos Slaughter – a longtime National League star who had been acquired in a roster-bolstering move late in the season - whacked a three-run homer in the sixth.

Down in the clubhouse, a reporter asked Whitey what the difference was pitching in the Bronx as opposed to over in the tiny bandbox in Brooklyn. “The difference between the two ballparks is this,” Ford said. “When spectators come to Ebbets Field they’re all equipped with fielders gloves. When they come to the Stadium, they bring binoculars.”

The sense of urgency for the Yankees didn’t change much the next day. They still couldn’t afford to lose and fall into a 3-1 hole, so the pressure was on young Tom Sturdivant to beat Carl Erskine, and he did. Like Ford, Sturdivant went all the way, giving up six hits and six walks. He wasn’t always pretty, but with Mantle hitting a solo homer in the sixth and Hank Bauer ripping a two-run homer in the seventh, Sturdivant had more than enough support to gain the 6-2 victory.

Stengel, as only Stengel could, summed up the day when he said, “This Series is more even now than it was.”

That set the stage for Larsen’s gem.

Maglie and Larsen matched perfection through 3 1/2 innings before Maglie made a mistake, and it was all Larsen would need. He hung a two-out curveball to Mantle, and as Maglie said, “Mantle just blasted it for a home run. It was a curve that broke, I’d say, right over the middle of the plate.”

The large crowd stirred in the fifth when Gil Hodges lifted a deep fly to left-center which Mantle ran down with a backhanded catch. “I caught up with it at the last instant and made the grab over my shoulder - as good a catch as I ever made,” Mantle said. The next hitter, Sandy Amoros, roped a certain home run down the right-field line, but the ball hooked foul just before it reached the seats. Amoros eventually grounded meekly to second.

After a much more comfortable sixth, Larsen was given an added cushion in the bottom half of the inning. Andy Carey led off with a single and Larsen sacrificed him to second. Bauer then singled to left to chase Carey home and it was 2-0 New York.

All that was left now was to see if Larsen could finish it off.

“Some time during the sixth or seventh inning I realized I had not allowed a man to reach first base,” Larsen remembered. “The guys on the bench wouldn’t even look at me when we were batting. Everyone was nervous, afraid of breaking the no-hitter or jinxing it.”

Said Maglie: “By the seventh, I was still pitching a great game and we were down 2-0 and it dawned on us that Larsen was pitching a smooth game and we didn’t have a hit. Then we realized he hadn’t given up a walk. It kind of snuck up on us.”

Carl Furillo worked Larsen hard to start the ninth, fouling off four pitches, but he finally succumbed on a fly to right. Roy Campanella followed with a grounder to Billy Martin at second, and that brought Dale Mitchell, pinch-hitting for Maglie, to the plate as the last Dodger hope.

“He really scared me,” Larsen said of Mitchell. “I knew how much pressure he was under. He must have been paralyzed. That made two of us. I’m not what you’d really call a praying man, but once I was out there in the ninth inning I said to myself ‘Help me out, somebody.’”

Plate umpire Babe Pinelli, calling the final game of his 24-year-career, provided that help. After looking at a ball, Mitchell took a strike, swung at a fastball and missed, then fouled the next offering into the stands leaving the count 1-2. Mitchell considered swinging at Larsen’s 97th and final pitch of the game, but he deemed it to be a bit outside and checked his swing. Pinelli thought otherwise and called Mitchell out on strikes to end the game.

“Pinelli seemed to take an extra split second, then raised his arm for strike three and the final out,” Mantle recalled. “I had a clear view from center field, and if I was under oath, I’d have to say the pitch looked like it was outside.”

It didn’t matter what Mantle thought. Pinelli punched out Mitchell, Berra jumped into Larsen’s arms, and baseball had another landmark moment courtesy of the Yankees.

Larsen’s gem put the Yankees up three games to two, and as Mantle said, “The celebration for Larsen rivaled any seventh-game victory party.” But now they had to somehow come back down to earth and win the clincher, and they had to do it back at Ebbets Field. “It’s hard to believe,” Bauer said of Larsen’s perfect game. “And it’s hard to realize we have another game tomorrow.”

Though neither Bob Turley for the Yankees nor Clem Labine for the Dodgers pitched a no-hitter or perfect game, both pitched magnificently during a tense, scoreless struggle that wasn’t decided until Robinson’s single to right in the bottom of the 10th plated Gilliam with the only run.

Stengel was spellbound by the randomness by which baseball chose its heroes. “I can’t figger that fella (Turley) out,” Stengel began. “He don’t smoke, he don’t drink, he don’t chase around none. But he can’t win as good as that misbehavin’ feller you know about who was perfect.”

Game 7 provided none of the drama of the previous two games. Elston Howard - who had been unavailable for the first six games due to a hospital stint brought on by strep throat - started in left field in place of the aging Slaughter, and Moose Skowron played first instead of Collins.

As he so often did, Stengel pushed all the right buttons as Howard hit a home run and a double while Skowron crashed a grand slam and the Yankees cruised to a 9-0 victory and regained their baseball supremacy.

It was all set up for the Dodgers to win their second straight championship. They had Newcombe, their 27-game winner, working on four days rest, pitching against Johnny Kucks who had never started a Series game. Newcombe was shelled for five runs within four innings and was bombarded with boos, while Kucks tossed a three-hit shutout.

“I don’t think I ever saw Newk have more stuff when he was getting them out,” Dodgers manager Walter Alston said. “But it seemed like he either struck them out or they hit it out of the ballpark.”

Berra opened the onslaught with a two-run homer in the first, and he continued it with a two-run homer in the third. That gave him 10 RBI for the Series, a new Yankee record. When Howard led off the fourth with his home run to make it 5-0, Alston yanked Newcombe and Ebbets Field directed all its anger at the downtrodden pitcher.

Roger Craig was on the mound for Brooklyn in the seventh when the Yankees added the exclamation point. Martin singled, Mantle and Berra walked, and Skowron - who was miffed by his lack of use in the Series after spending most of the season as the regular first baseman - pulled his home run into the left-field seats.

“It was a great Series,” Stengel said. “New Yorkers ought to be proud that they have the two best teams in Major League Baseball.”

New York wouldn’t be able to make that claim too much longer.