YANKS LEGEND WHITEY FORD TURNS 90

Yankee legend turns 90 today

Whitey Ford turns 90 Sunday – and what a wild and wondrous journey it has been for the Yankee legend, who honed his pitching skills on the streets and sandlots of Astoria, Queens, and along the way, amassed the most wins in club history and most World Series wins of any pitcher ever, also partied with the best of them, in a lust for life like few others I’ve ever known.

It is perhaps a testament to the loyalty he always felt to his Astoria roots that whenever he was asked which was the greatest win of his career – whether it was the Game 4 World Series clincher over the Phillies in his rookie season of 1950, the two shutouts he threw against the Pirates in the 1960 World Series, the 2-0 shutout over the Reds in Game 1 of the 1961 World Series – he always maintained the game he was most proud of was the 11-inning shutout he pitched for the 34th Avenue Boys over the Bay Ridge Tigers from Brooklyn in the City Championship game at the Polo Grounds in the summer of 1946.

“The game was 0-0 going into the 11th,” Ford told me in 2002 during a tour of the old Astoria neighborhood he agreed to take me on as part of a book, Pride of October , I was writing on the 100th anniversary of the Yankee franchise. “I had pitched a two-hitter, but the other pitcher for them, a kid named Lou D’Angelos, had a no-hitter until I broke it up with a double leading off the 11th, and the next guy singled me home. We went 36-0 that summer and years later I always got a kick when somebody would come up to me and say they beat us. ‘Not that summer, you didn’t,’ I’d tell them.”

He was little Eddie Ford then. It was not until a few years later when he was pitching for the Yankees’ Double-A farm in Binghamton when the manager there, another Yankee Hall-of-Fame pitcher, Lefty Gomez, began calling him ‘Whitey’ – a nickname Ford said “just kinda stuck.” Through the years he would earn a couple of other nicknames that also stuck – ‘Chairman of the Board,’ for all his accomplishments as the ace of the Yankee pitching staff for more than two decades, and ‘Slick’, the sobriquet which he, Mickey Mantle and Billy Martin all hung on each other after Yankee manager Casey Stengel referred to them as “my whiskey slicks” in admonishing them for their late-night partying habits.

It was while he was at Binghamton in 1949, where he’d gone 16-5 and led the Eastern League with a 1.65 ERA, the ever cocky Ford had the temerity to call Yankee scouting director Paul Kritchell and suggest the Yankees might want to consider calling him up to the big leagues. “I wasn’t being cocky,” Ford insisted. “It was in September and the Binghamton season was over and I still wanted to keep pitching and I really did think I belonged in the majors.”

According to Ford, Kritchell thanked him for his offer to help and congratulated him on his season, but declined to accept his proposition. “I think he did admire me for calling,” Ford said, “and I could envision him giggling under his breath.”

It was not until July the following year when the Yankees finally did call Ford up, from their Triple-A affiliate in Kansas City, and he proceeded to reel off nine straight victories while galvanizing the Yankee rotation behind Allie Reynolds, Vic Raschi and Eddie Lopat. That was enough to earn Stengel’s confidence to start Game 4 of the 1950 World Series against the Phillies. Though the Yankees had won the first three games, all of them were decided by one run, with the Yankee pitchers holding the Phillies to a total of three runs. Game 4 was not much different as Ford took a 5-0 lead into the ninth.

“When Whitey came up to us right around the All-Star break, you could see right away he was a confident kid who had ice water in his veins,” said 93year-old Bobby Brown, the regular third baseman on that 1950 Yankee team. “He had three pitches he could throw for strikes in tough spots and there was no stage fright in him.”

Of particular significance for Brown was the 8-1 win Ford pitched September 15 over the Tigers and their ace, Dizzy Trout, which put the Yankees in first place to stay, and the Game 4 World Series win.

“The game against the Tigers was close until we scored seven runs in the ninth inning,” Brown said. “The World Series Game 4 win Whitey had a shutout going until Gene Woodling lost a fly ball in the sun in left field that bounced off his chest. It should have been the final out. We knew Whitey was special. Even then he was a biggame pitcher. He pitched like a seasoned veteran that year.”

Right after the 1950 World Series, Ford was called into the military service and spent the ’51 and ’52 seasons at Fort Monmouth, N.J., which included a 14-day furlough in April of ’51 to marry his Astoria neighborhood sweetheart, Joan Foran. It was at their wedding reception at Donohue’s Bar in Astoria that Ford first met Mickey Mantle, who was part of a caravan of Yankees the club bussed over

from Yankee Stadium. In the years to come, as the Yankees won two more world championships, in ’53 and ’56, Ford became fast friends with Mantle and Billy Martin, a bond that would last until both of them suffered alcohol-related deaths, Mickey of liver cancer and Billy in a drunk driving accident.

They were all together that infamous May 16 night at the Copacabana in 1957, celebrating Martin’s 29th birthday, when a fight broke out and another patron claimed he was coldcocked by Hank Bauer. The incident proved to be the final straw for the Yankee brass, who thought Martin was a bad influence on their two stars, Whitey and Mickey, and traded him to the Athletics a month later. Ford’s other close friend during those ’50s and ’60s glory years was Toots Shor, the renowned New York saloon keeper who had his own reputation as a notorious drinker.

“What always used to piss Billy and Mickey off was we’d all go out partying and they’d get drunk and get into trouble but I never did,” Ford once related to me. “But they didn’t understand. I was a professional drinker. I grew up in a bar, which my father owned, a few blocks from one of the apartments we lived in in Astoria. During my playing days, I spent a lot of time in Toots’ joint, especially in the winters. We were great friends right to the end. I was there one day when he and Jackie Gleason got into a drinking contest, which ended with Gleason passing out in the bathroom.”

(Because of declining health in recent years, Whitey confines himself mostly to his home on Long Island and no longer does card shows or interviews.)

One of the great Yankee mysteries, which was never satisfactorily answered by anyone, was why Stengel chose to hold Ford back for Game 3 of the 1960 World Series as opposed to starting him in Games 1 or 2. Ford pitched shutouts in Games 3 and 6, but was unavailable in the fateful Game 7, which was won 10-9 by the Pirates on Bill Mazeroski’s ninthinning walk-off home run. Stengel’s explanation was he wanted to save Ford for the games at the more spacious Yankee Stadium with all the right-handed Pirate hitters.

“I don’t think anybody really bought that,” said Bobby Richardson, the Yankees’ second baseman from 1957-66, “any more than they put any credence in the rumor that Whitey had some sort of sickness. All we knew was we didn’t have Whitey for three starts in that series and that’s what ultimately got Casey fired.” In a way, that was the best thing to happen for Ford’s career. The next year, Ralph Houk took over as Yankee manager and, at the advice of new pitching coach Johnny Sain, decided to put Ford on a four-day starting regimen. Under Stengel, Ford had never had more than 33 starts in a season and had only 29 in each of the previous three seasons. But under Houk, he made a leagueleading 39 starts in 1961, and led the league with 25 wins and 283 innings pitched en route to winning the major league Cy Young Award. Averaging 38 starts per season from 1962-65, Ford won 74 more games under Houk. “Everybody talks about 1961 and all the home runs we hit,” said Richardson. “But that wasn’t why we won that year. We won because of what Whitey and our pitching and defense did.” “Under Casey, I’d go five, even six days between starts,” Ford said, during that 2002 interview in Astoria. “I don’t know why he did it that way. I just know my day to pitch was often a Monday, which was a traditional off-day in those days and I hated sitting in the dugout watching so many of those games when I thought I should have been pitching.” Those ’50’s-’60’s Yankees remained a tight-knit bunch, probably because they won so many championships together. After his playing days, Richardson returned to his native South Carolina and in the ’70s to become head baseball coach at the University of South Carolina. One of his prodigies was a shortstop named Eddie Ford, Whitey’s son.

“Eddie was one of the best players I ever had there,” Richardson related. “He could have been a good major leaguer. He signed with the Red Sox and went right up the ladder quickly to Triple-A, but he just didn’t have the desire to play baseball.

“When I look back, ‘Slick’ was a great nickname for Whitey because he did so much without the benefit of a blazing fastball. He was a joy to play behind. Like Greg Maddux, you knew you were almost always gonna get a two-hour game because he made the most of his pitches and didn’t walk batters.”

“There was a reason Whitey was called ‘Chairman of the Board’ too,” said Tony Kubek, the Yankee shortstop from 1958-65. “When he was on the mound, he controlled the whole game. He didn’t need the manager – or analytics – to do all his positioning. I remember before the 1958 World Series, our two scouts, Mayo Smith and Johnny Neun, met with us with these charts on how to play each of the Braves’ hitters. Whitey said to me: ‘Don’t worry about all that. I’ll tell you where to play.’

“On the mound, he was all business. But off the field, he sure knew how to have fun.’”

At the conclusion of our nostalgic trip to Astoria in 2002, Ford dropped me off at Shea Stadium where I’d parked my car and bid me adieu. I thanked him for giving me a few hours of his day and he replied with a laugh: “You better get all this stuff right in the book or else you’re gonna have to answer to Joanie!”

The thing about Whitey is he’s never changed. I summed up his chapter in the book like this: “Having arrived at his seventh decade, he is a man clearly comfortable and content with who he was and how he got here. His fellow rogues, Mickey, Billy and Toots, are all gone, but he has survived, still the same wisecracking, self-assured son of the city. Whitey Ford always knew the secrets to his survival were his cool, his street smarts and his slickness.”

Sixteen years later, it’s still the same.

Happy Birthday, Whitey.