1958 World Series: Exacting Revenge on The Braves

As anxious as the Yankees were to avenge their 1957 loss to Milwaukee, on the eve of the Series opener at County Stadium they certainly resembled a team ill-prepared to put up a fight. They had played below .500 ball the last six weeks of the season and they looked like an easy mark for the Braves.

The pitching staff was in disarray, third baseman Gil McDougald was in a deep batting slump due to back spasms, shortstop Tony Kubek lost 20 pounds and noticeable strength after having an impacted wisdom tooth removed, first baseman Moose Skowron was slowed by a bad back, Mickey Mantle was playing with a sore shoulder, and Hank Bauer, now 36 years old, barely hit above .200 the last two months.

Off the field, things were equally unnerving. Rookie pitcher Ryne Duren’s reputation as a heavy drinker was proven true during a train ride from Kansas City to Detroit following the team’s pennant-clinching party. Duren, drunk out of his mind, picked a fight with coach Ralph Houk, and during the brief melee Don Larsen was kicked in the mouth. That incident prompted crotchety general manager George Weiss to hire private detectives to follow some of the players around once they arrived in Detroit, though not for long.

Whitey Ford picked up on it immediately, spotting two shady-looking characters across the street from the team hotel in Detroit. Ford decided to test his theory so he, Mickey Mantle and Darrell Johnson walked out the front door to see if the two men would react, and they did. The three players jumped into a cab, and the two detectives hurriedly got into their own car and commenced a chase.

All the players did was take a ride around the block and when they returned to the hotel, they waved to the detectives and laughed out loud. And they weren’t done. An hour later, they played hopscotch on the sidewalk in front of the hotel while providing details of what was going on to a few newspaper writers and the next morning New Yorkers were entertained by the story. A furious and embarrassed Weiss quickly called off his spies.

So to review. The Yankees were beat up, they were pissed at their general manager, and Casey Stengel was wondering how this ensemble was going to compete against Warren Spahn, Lew Burdette, Hank Aaron, Eddie Mathews and the rest of the Braves who had beaten them in seven games in the 1957 Series.

Two days into the Series, Stengel was still wondering. Near the team hotel in downtown Milwaukee there was a movie theater and the week of the Series the main attraction was “Damn Yankees” starring Tab Hunter, Gwen Verdon and Ray Walston. On the marquee, some industrious wise guy added a preface to the movie title. It read: “Beat The” and that’s what the Braves did in the first two games.

The dynamic duo of Spahn and Burdette, who had combined to win all four games in Milwaukee’s 1957 Series triumph over the Yankees, were back at it as they each pitched complete game victories, limiting New York to a combined 15 hits in beating Stengel’s best two pitchers, Ford and Bob Turley.

“We’re not in what I would call a rosy position, but the thing is not over by a long shot,” Stengel said before the team boarded its plane for the gloomy flight back to New York. “Why, only two years ago we lost the first two to Brooklyn. I seem to remember we won it at the end, didn’t we? There’s no law that says we can’t do it again.”

There was also no quantifiable proof that these Yankees were capable of pulling off such a comeback.

In the opener, Spahn and Ford dueled into the eighth with the Yankees - on the strength of home runs by Skowron and Bauer - clinging to a 3-2 lead. When Mathews walked and Aaron doubled to right-center to start the bottom of the inning, Stengel relieved Ford with Duren. The rookie fireballer struck out Joe Adcock, but Wes Covington lifted a fly ball to center that enabled Mathews to score the tying run.

Duren worked out of a two-on, one-out jam in the bottom of the ninth, but in the 10th the Braves strung together three singles by Adcock, Del Crandall and Billy Bruton to win the game 4-3.

Game 2 was over inside half an hour. Turley retired one batter in the first inning, Duke Maas got one man out, and Johnny Kucks recorded the third out but before that the Braves scored seven runs and went on to coast to a 13-5 blowout as Burdette beat the Yankees for the fourth straight time. Mantle hit a pair of home runs and Bauer hit his second in two days, but it mattered little.

“Desperate? Desperate? Who says we’re desperate?” said Stengel. “We’re going home now and someone might get them out. We gotta get more hitting, and we gotta get more pitching, and I think maybe we’ll get more of both now.”

If Stengel was irritated, that paled in comparison to his mood following the Yankees’ off day workout at the Stadium when an incident occurred that served as a harbinger of things to come in the media world. One of the TV reporters asked Stengel, “Do you think your team is choking?” You didn’t ask Stengel a question like that, not after nine pennants and six World Series titles in 10 years.

Stengel was infuriated and he replied, “Do you choke on that fuckin’ microphone?” With that, knowing the camera was still running, he turned around and mimicked like he was scratching his rear end. Stengel then walked past Mantle with a sly grin and a wink and said, “When I cursed I knocked out their audio, and when I scratched my ass I ruined their picture.” That TV reporter? None other than a young Howard Cosell.

When the Series resumed, the Yankees were in need of one of those standout performances by one player that they always seemed to get, and Bauer delivered. The aging veteran, slumping at the plate at the end of the season, continued his torrid streak in the Series with three hits including a two-run single in the fifth and a two-run homer in the seventh, his third round-tripper in three games. Bauer’s four RBI produced a 4-0 Yankee victory as Larsen pitched seven innings and allowed six harmless singles, and Duren completed the shutout despite three walks over the final two innings.

Stengel wrapped Bauer in a hug after the game and said, “You had a pretty good day, you did a big job.” A few minutes later in his office Stengel told the assembled press, “Bauer did all the work. I don’t know where we’d be without him.”

Of the home run, Bauer said, “It was supposed to be a slider, I guess, but he got it inside and I hit it. Funny thing, just before I homered I heard Warren Spahn ribbing me from the bench, something about me looking out for a close pitch.”

Bauer began the fourth game riding a World Series record 17-game hitting streak. He hadn’t taken a collar since Game 7 of the 1955 Series against Brooklyn, but Spahn had all his magic working and his two-hitter stopped Bauer and the rest of the Yankees cold. Milwaukee walked away with a 3-0 victory and pushed the Yankees to the brink of extinction.

The Braves pitching coach, Whit Wyatt, the old Dodger, said that day, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him sharper than he was today. Del Crandall didn’t have to move his mitt. Once he set it as a target Spahnie hit it.”

With Burdette on the mound for Game 5, things were gloomy in the Bronx, but with Turley looking like the pitcher he had been for most of the regular season when he went 21-7 and won the AL Cy Young award, the Yankees staved off elimination.

Clinging to a 1-0 lead on courtesy of a McDougald homer in the third, Elston Howard made a dazzling catch of a sinking line drive to short left by Red Schoendienst in the top of the sixth and scrambled to his feet and fired the ball back to Skowron at first to complete an inning-ending double play. With the huge crowd still buzzing, the energized Yankees went to work in their half of the inning, shattering Burdette’s hex on them. They erupted for six hits and six runs off Burdette and Juan Pizarro to win by a 7-0 count.

“That was the turning point,” Mantle said of Howard’s catch when the game was still in doubt. “It was the greatest catch I’ve ever seen. I never dreamed Ellie had half a chance to get to that ball.”

While his team was still up three games to two, Braves manager Fred Haney sensed that the momentum had shifted, so he handed the ball to Spahn for Game 6 on just two days rest. Stengel, with his team still pressed against the wall, did the same and tabbed Ford on two days rest, and based on the way the starters performed, this should have been a Braves Series-clinching victory.

Ford was showering before the second inning was over while the indefatigable Spahn was toiling gamely into the 10th inning. However, the Yankee trio of Art Ditmar, Duren and Turley held things together long enough for the Bombers to pull out a thrilling 4-3 overtime victory.

Bauer hit his fourth home run of the series in the first inning, but the Braves tied it on Aaron’s single in the first, then took a 2-1 lead in the second when Ford yielded three straight singles, the last by Spahn. The Yankees tied it in the sixth when Mantle and Howard singled and Berra’s sacrifice fly brought home Mantle and that was all the scoring through nine innings.

McDougald led off the 10th with a home run to left, and after Spahn got two outs, Howard and Berra both singled and Haney had to remove his 37-year-old warrior. “That was the hardest thing I’ve had to do the whole Series was to go out there and take Spahn out,” Haney said. Don McMahon entered and gave up Skowron’s RBI single that made it 4-2, setting up high drama in the bottom of the inning.

Aaron’s RBI single cut the Braves’ deficit to 4-3, but with runners on the corners, Turley - even though he had pitched a complete game two days earlier - was summoned to save the game and on his third pitch he got Frank Torre to pop out to McDougald at second base. “What a feeling of relief when I saw Torre lift that easy shot to me,” McDougald said. “There are no bad hops up there.”

So for the fourth straight year, and second in a row with Milwaukee, the Yankees would be involved in a World Series Game 7. Everyone knew Burdette was pitching for Milwaukee. An hour before the first pitch would be thrown Stengel told Larsen that he was starting, and while it didn’t go well for Larsen early, it could have been worse. The Braves scored in the first, but they also left the bases loaded when Larsen struck out Crandall.

In the second, the Yankees extracted two runs without the benefit of a hit as first baseman Torre made a pair of throwing errors. “I don’t think I deserved the errors,” said the brother of future Yankees manager Joe Torre, “but if you want to have a goat, it might as well be me as somebody else.” Regardless of who was at fault, the Yankees were up 2-1.

When Larsen got into a jam in the third, Stengel lifted him and brought in Turley who had gone the distance in Game 5, thrown briefly in Game 6, and now was being expected to stymie the Braves again. As he would say later, “I was not a bit tired. In fact, I felt better out there today than I had felt at any time this season.”

It showed. He cleaned up Larsen’s mess without allowing a run, and the only mistake he made the rest of the day was a gopher ball served up to Crandall in the sixth that tied the game at 2-2.

Burdette had recovered from the turbulence of the second inning and was frustrating the Yankees again as he had given up just three hits when the eighth inning began. The tension in the ballpark was high, and there was a sense that whichever team scored the next run was going to win the championship. That team was the Yankees.

After McDougald flied out and Mantle struck out, Berra lashed a double off the wall in right-center and Howard followed with a bouncer up the middle that shortstop Johnny Logan just barely missed. Berra lumbered home with what proved to be the winning run, but the Yankees were taking nothing to chance. Andy Carey ripped a single off Mathews’ glove at third, and then Skowron launched a three-run homer into the left-field stands providing Turley a comfortable 6-2 lead, and the Milwaukee faithful began streaming for the exits in disappointment.

It was a wild victory celebration in the clubhouse, the Yankees fully aware that they had accomplished something special in beating Spahn and Burdette back-to-back on the road. “Sure I’m excited,” Stengel said of what proved to be his seventh and final world championship. “And why not? My men proved they’re a great team. They had to be to make that wonderful comeback. This was the greatest Series we ever won.”