Sport: Red Victory

In a Cincinnati cemetery one day last week a weeping widow stood at her husband’s grave. Suddenly out of the graveyard solitude came a voice. She listened, caught the word Reds—over & over, louder & louder. A little alarmed but more curious, she picked her way along the row of tombstones, came upon a mound of fresh earth. Peering around it, she discovered the source of the strange voice: a portable radio was keeping a pair of gravediggers posted on what was going en at Crosley Field five miles away.

What was going on at Crosley Field was of prime importance not only to gravediggers but to practically every one of Cincinnati’s 450,000 citizens. Businessmen carried radios to their offices, golfers had caddies tote portables along with their clubs. For the Cincinnati Reds (“Our Boys” to baker and banker alike) were in the throes of their first pennant in 20 years and, like an expectant father, the whole town stood nervously by. At Crosley Field, in what oldtime ballplayers used to call a “crucial serious,” Our Boys were playing the Cardinals—the swaggering, slugging Gas House Gang from St. Louis.

Even Cincinnati’s dog-collared dowagers —to whom Reds usually meant Bolsheviks, flies pests and bunting something one wrapped a baby in—could reel off the minutest details of the Reds’ harrowing experiences the past month: a robust team with a fielding average of .975 (best in the league) and a batting average of .273 (third best), they were leading the National League by twelve games on August i and looked like a cinch to win the pennant; but last week, mind you, they were struggling to defend a precarious 2½-game lead against the Cardinals, who had unfeelingly slugged their way to 20 victories in their last 24 games. Manager Bill McKechnie had lost 23 pounds in six weeks.

On the first day of last week’s crucial series, Our Boys had split a double-header with the Cards. The second day, beloved Bucky Walters, the renovated third-baseman who had pitched 27 victories for Cincinnati this year, suffered a 4-to-o shutout. Then, on the third day, came Our Boys’ last chance to nail the pennant in front of the homefolks. With three games left to play they could still clinch it in Pittsburgh, by winning two games of their final series against the Pirates. But the Reds had been shut out in the last two games, had failed to score a run in 24 innings; their fielding had become butterfingered. Things looked dark in Cincinnati.

At Crosley Field 18,000 agonizing fans crammed into the grandstands. Twisting their scorecards, they watched big Paul Derringer face the formidable bats of Enos Slaughter (.321), Joe Medwick (.333), Johnny Mize (.351) and Don Padgett (.410)—baseball’s hardest-hitting quartet. Derringer had won 24 games this year, had struck out 124 batters and walked only 35. Yet even his most devoted admirers feared the worst.

Sure enough, Big Paul allowed 14 hits (including a home-run, a triple and three doubles), gave one base on balls, and one of his teammates made three frantic errors that let in two runs. But his superb control got him out of the tight spots. In the ninth inning, the Reds were leading 5-to-3. But poor Paul still had to face Medwick and Mize once more. When he struck them out with six straight strikes a roar went up that shook Cincinnati’s seven hills. It was the Reds’ game and Cincinnati’s pennant.

At downtown bars that night, in the noisiest celebration in 20 years, Cincinnatians drank two toasts: i) to good old Pitchers Walters & Derringer, who between them had won 52 games (more than half the team’s total) this season; 2) to canny old Manager McKechnie, who had shoved Cincinnati, the National League’s perennial tail-ender, from last place to a pennant within two years—the first manager in major-league history to lead three different clubs to a pennant (Pirates in 1925, Cardinals in 1928).

Although it was treason to whisper it in Cincinnati, the Reds were promptly quoted 3-to-1 underdogs to win the World Series against the New York Yankees this week.