Carl Erskine, Dodgers pitcher and last of ‘Boys of Summer,’ 97
Carl Erskine, a standout pitcher who was the last of the “Boys of Summer,” the celebrated Brooklyn Dodgers team of the 1940s and 1950s that broke baseball’s racial barrier with Jackie Robinson and became a National League power, died April 16 at a hospital in Anderson, Ind. He was 97.
The death was confirmed by Ted Green, a filmmaker who directed a 2022 documentary on Erskine, “The Best We’ve Got.” The cause was related to pneumonia, Green said.
Erskine became an anchor of the Brooklyn pitching staff at a time when New York was the hub of the baseball universe, with three major league teams. The Dodgers overcame a reputation as lovable losers to reach the World Series six times in 10 years — always against their crosstown rivals, the New York Yankees.
The team was the pride of Brooklyn, but after the 1957 season, the Dodgers and New York Giants departed the city for the West Coast, leaving their fans with an enduring sense of loss. Writer Roger Kahn, who covered the Dodgers for the New York Herald Tribune in the early 1950s, sought to show how the spirit of Brooklyn was intertwined with the fortunes of Dodgers in his widely admired 1972 book, “The Boys of Summer.”
His heartfelt account portrayed the Dodgers and their vanished era in almost mythic terms. “In the dead sunlight of a forgotten spring,” he wrote, “the major leaguers were trim, graceful and effortless. They might even have been gods for these seemed true Olympians to a boy who wanted to become a man and who sensed that it was an exalted manly thing to catch a ball with one hand thrust across your body and make a crowd leap to its feet and cheer.”
Erskine, the last surviving player prominently featured in Kahn’s book, played alongside such Hall of Fame stars as outfielder Duke Snider, infielders Gil Hodges and Pee Wee Reese, catcher Roy Campanella and, of course, Robinson, an infielder who in 1947 became the major leagues’ first Black player of the 20th century. (A handful of Black men played in the 1870s and 1880s.) When Erskine joined the Dodgers in 1948, Robinson was the first player to shake his hand.
Erskine was not an intimidating figure, at 5-foot-10 and 165 pounds, but he had an excellent curveball and changeup and was a mainstay of a pitching staff that included Don Newcombe, Preacher Roe, Ralph Branca and Clem Labine. The young right-hander was dubbed, in exaggerated Brooklynese, “Oisk.”
During the first game he started in the majors, against the Chicago Cubs in 1948, Erskine tore a muscle in the back of his shoulder. In those days, medical treatment for injuries was rudimentary, and Erskine feared that if he complained, he would be labeled a “sore armed pitcher” and would lose his spot on the roster. As a result, the injury plagued him throughout his 12-year career, and he often pitched in pain.
Erskine appeared in five World Series and had a dramatic 11-inning complete-game victory over the Yankees in 1952, but the Dodgers fell short of winning the title.
A year later, he had one of his best seasons, with a 20-6 record, as he helped lead the Dodgers to another National League pennant. He took the mound in the third game of the World Series, and through eight innings had recorded 12 strikeouts (including four by Mickey Mantle). In the Yankee dugout, veteran slugger Johnny Mize chided his teammates for swinging at Erskine’s sharply dropping overhand curveball.
“All afternoon I could hear him yelling at the Yankee hitters,” Erskine told Kahn in “The Boys of Summer.” “‘What are you doing, being suckers for that miserable bush curve?’”
Holding a 3-2 lead in the bottom of the ninth, Erskine struck out pinch hitter Don Bollweg. The next batter was another pinch hitter, Mize — who struck out. Erskine’s 14 strikeouts set a new World Series record, which was later broken by Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson.
Despite Erskine’s efforts, the Yankees won the series. The Dodgers finally broke the spell in 1955, defeating the Yankees in seven games for the only World Series title in Brooklyn history. (Erskine started the fourth game, which the Dodgers won, but he did not figure in the decision.)
Throughout Erskine’s time in Brooklyn, the symbolic importance of Robinson made the Dodgers something of a public social experiment. Like many other institutions in American life, major league baseball had been exclusively White for decades. Years before the civil rights movement gained momentum, Brooklyn’s general manager, Branch Rickey, was determined to integrate the majors with Robinson, an Army veteran who had been a multisport star at UCLA.
Robinson and other Black players who later joined him in Brooklyn, including Campanella and Newcombe, were greeted with skepticism and hostility by other clubs and even some of their teammates. But Rickey held firm and built a winning team, with Robinson at its core.
“Everywhere,” Kahn wrote in “The Boys of Summer,” “men and women talked about the Jackie Robinson Dodgers, and as they talked they confronted themselves and American racism.”
Erskine was 21 when he first stepped into the Brooklyn clubhouse, but he was already a Navy veteran and had a little-known personal history that helped make him one of Robinson’s strongest allies on the team.
At one point, Erskine recalled in a 2022 interview with the Indianapolis Star, Robinson asked him, “Hey Erskine, how come you don’t have a problem with this Black and White thing?”
“I said, ‘Well, I grew up with Johnny Wilson.’”
Erskine spent his childhood in a mixed-race neighborhood in Anderson, Ind., and his best friend, Wilson, was Black. They went to the same schools, played on the same teams and ate meals at each other’s homes.
“With a background like that,” Erskine told Kahn, “the Robinson experience simply was no problem. It was really beautiful in a way.”