San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
ERSKINE SPUN EPIC TALES
Late Dodgers pitcher shed new light on Robinson, Doby and baseball history
Jackie Robinson was the perfect choice to break baseball’s color barrier in 1947, and we can’t honor him enough for his courage, strength and perseverance. At the same time, we should never forget Larry Doby, who became the first player to integrate the American League just 11 weeks after Robinson’s MLB debut.
A few years back, former Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Carl Erskine, who was extremely close with Robinson, told me something I had never heard about the Robinson-Doby dynamic. Erskine, who died Tuesday at 97, was the last surviving member of Brooklyn’s fabled “Boys of Summer” who were forever romanticized in Roger Kahn’s epic 1972 book.
“Branch Rickey did something he doesn’t get any credit for,” Erskine claimed in our conversation. “When Jackie broke in, the second guy on the list was Larry Doby. Mr. Rickey could have brought Larry Doby to the Dodgers. We needed him. We never did find the left fielder we were looking for. We had Duke (Snider) in center and (Carl) Furillo in right, and we had different guys playing left.
“If we had a guy like Doby in left field alongside Duke and Furillo, I’d have all those rings instead of Yogi.”
Instead, Doby was signed by the Cleveland Indians when owner Bill Veeck bought his contract from the Newark Eagles of the Negro Leagues for $15,000. As Erskine remembered not so fondly, the Boys of Summer went on to lose five World Series to Yogi Berra’s Yankees but did beat them once, in 1955.
“Mr. Rickey called Bill Veeck of Cleveland and asked him to take Doby so that both American and National leagues would be integrated at about the same time,” Erskine said. “You see what significance that is? To not have one league with Black players and the other league none? Mr. Rickey gave up a great player, a Hall of Famer. He never got credit for that.”
Here are some other gems Erskine shared with me:
• One of his two no-hitters came against the dreaded New York Giants at Ebbets Field in 1956. He remembers just one ball that could have been a hit, a scorcher off the bat of Willie Mays that Robinson, playing third base that day, snagged.
“Willie hit a shot. I mean a bullet,” Erskine said. “It was going to go between third and short. Jackie was as quick as a cat and turned that ball into an easy out. I remember when I had gotten to the clubhouse that day, there was a newspaper article quoting the Giants’ chief scout, Tom Sheehan, saying the Dodgers are over the hill; (Roy) Campanella can’t catch anymore, Jackie was out of shape and Erskine can’t win with that garbage he’s throwing.
“When I got Alvin Dark out to finish the no-hitter, Jackie and Campy came out to the mound to congratulate me, and this is the God’s truth. Jackie turned back to the Giants’ dugout and pulled out the newspaper clip from his uniform hip pocket. He took it over to the Giants’ bench and Sheehan, who was sitting next to the dugout, waved it and said, ‘How do you like that garbage?’
“The irony of it was, Campanella called the game, Jackie saved the game and I pitched the game. The three guys Sheehan said were over the hill.”
• Erskine was warming up in the Polo Grounds bullpen alongside Ralph Branca on Oct. 3, 1951, when Dodgers manager Charlie Dressen summoned Branca to pitch to Bobby Thomson, whose pennant-clinching homer, the Shot Heard ’Round the World, lifted the Giants to the World Series.
“Rube Walker was catching that day because Campy was hurt, and Walker was slow afoot,” Erskine said. “At the Polo Grounds, there was a big distance between home plate and the backstop, and I was bouncing my curveball in the bullpen. The best guess for me was our coach, Clyde Sukeforth, told Dressen that I was bouncing my curveball, and Dressen thought, ‘We can’t afford any wild pitches with Walker so let me have Branca.’ That was a pivotal decision in that historic game.”
What if the call went to Erskine?
“Well, I’d been in the league since the middle of ’48, so I faced Thomson a few times,” he said. “He was a fastball hitter. I got a lot of strikeouts with my curveball. Who knows? It seemed like destiny was playing a part in this. If we brought in Cy Young, I think Thomson still would’ve hit a home run.”
• Those 1951 Giants overcame a 13 1 ⁄ -game deficit in August,
2 and Erskine was not about to dispute they illegally stole signs with a telescope, wire and buzzer system that was revealed a half-century later.
“The Polo Grounds clubhouses were in deep center field, and there was a window on the Giants’ side that was always up about 8 inches, and it was dark behind it,” Erskine said. “We’d sit on the bench and say, ‘I bet those guys are cheating.’ It was said often. But it’s all in the books. The statute of limitations ran out. It’s history, and we just happened to be on the wrong side of it.”
• Erskine shed light on why he thought Rickey chose Robinson to break the color barrier.
“Not only did he have all the skills and all the other elements, but I think when Mr. Rickey met Rachel, his wife, an educated and charming individual, he said, ‘This guy’s got the whole package.’ Mr. Rickey had a quirky thing with his players. We were all in our 20s, and he wanted us all to be married, I guess assuming we’d behave better on the road.
“Don Newcombe was being considered to be the first, but it was decided it would be a bad move to bring in a pitcher as the first one because if he hit somebody, there was potential for things to happen that you don’t want. I played in Cuba one winter, and we had a shortstop, Silvio Garcia, who was on Mr. Rickey’s list but was an older player.
“A lot of people thought Campy would’ve been a good first one, but he had such a passive personality. Mr. Rickey said a personality like that wouldn’t have made it, he’d get killed. He wanted a guy who wanted to fight but had enough control not to, and that was Jackie.”