THIS was well into his 30th year of sobriety, the thing about which Don Newcombe was always most proud. He was the workhorse on those old Brooklyn Dodgers teams — the guy who would take the ball, demand it, give you an honest day’s work as long as there was life in that right arm of his, one time actually pitching both ends of a 1950 doubleheader. Afterward, on the ride back home to New Jersey, he would pound beer after beer, sometimes to help deaden the ache in his arm, more often because that’s how he’d greeted the end of every baseball game he’d ever known, going all the way back to Thomas Jefferson High School in Elizabeth, N.J., through his brief Negro Leagues stint with the Newark Eagles. His father believed beer made children strong. “The game was always the preliminary,” he said that day, during the 50th anniversary season of Jackie Robinson. The Dodgers were at Shea Stadium, and Newcombe had settled into a comfortable life working for the team of his youth in community relations, often having heart-to-hearts with players who thought they might be tipping toward losing everything to the bottle. “I had to learn the hard way,” he said that day, “and hopefully that means I can help some other guys from having to go the same way. Life is a beautiful thing if you let it be beautiful.” Newcombe died Tuesday at age 92, and for old Dodgers fans, there was never a sight more beautiful than the Newk taking the ball every fourth day, because in his prime there have been only a handful of pitchers in the history of the game who were as fierce and as ferocious as Newcombe. When the Dodgers won the World Series in 1955, he was 20-5, but that was just a preview of ’56 — when Newcombe turned in a season that belongs with Ron Guidry’s 1978, Tom Seaver’s 1969 and Dwight Gooden’s 1985 in the pantheon of forever New York pitching performances. He was 27-7 that year, had an ERA of 3.06 and a WHIP of 0.989 pitching half the time in Ebbets Field, a pitcher’s torture chamber. He won the NL’s MVP award that year. In those days only one pitcher in all of baseball won a Cy Young Award, and Newcombe won that, too, in a landslide. Four years later, he was out of baseball, a downfall helped along by a switch from beer to whiskey in his postgame rituals. His fall was so complete, he wound up hocking both his 1955 World Series ring and an expensive watch to make ends meet. Peter O’Malley, son of the Dodgers’ owner, heard about that, bought the items back, and waited until Newcombe finally sought treatment in 1967 before presenting him with an envelope.
When Newcombe opened it, he wept for half an hour.
“I was a strong man,” he told me on another occasion at Shea. “And alcohol had driven me to my knees. I was on top of the world and it tried to kill me. Until I said: ‘I won’t let you kill me.’ ”
Newcombe’s passing is another loss to the fabled Boys of Summer — only Carl Erskine remains of the primary contributors to Brooklyn’s only championship team.
Newcombe was the third and final element of Branch Rickey’s three-part plan to integrate the Dodgers, following Jackie Robinson in 1947 and Roy Campanella in 1948. He was the third African-American pitcher, too, in the post-color-line game, but the first star — winning 17 games as a rookie before becoming the first black pitcher to win 20, in 1951.
He was star-crossed in the postseason. In Game 1 of the ’ 49 World Series he allowed a walk-off homer to the Yankees’ Tommy Heinrich in the ninth inning of a 1-0 Dodgers loss. In 1951, he threw eight brilliant innings of four-hit ball in Game 3 of the NL playoff against the Giants but tired in the ninth, and Charlie Dressen removed him from the game with one out and famously handed the ball to Ralph Branca.
A two-year hitch in the army cost Newcombe two seasons (and old Dodgers fans have long wondered how the ’52 and ’53 World Series losses to the Yankees might have played out if they had their ace), but it also emboldened him. Upon his return, he and Robinson pressured the owner of the Chase Hotel in St. Louis to board the Dodgers’ black players. The owner agreed, as long as they promised not to use the swimming pool.
“I guess he was afraid we’d turn the water black,” Newcombe joked, “but it was a start.”