Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America by David Halberstam Page A

a surprisingly gentle man, a farm boy who had gone to the University of Maryland.
    After Keller’s senior baseball season at Maryland, the scouts had moved in quickly on him. There were other offers, but to Keller there was something special about the Yankees; the mystique because of Ruth and Gehrig was already there. The Yankees gave him a bonus of $2,500, plus $500 so that he could go back to Maryland after the season and get his degree. He was ticketed to play at a lower-level Yankee team in Norfolk, but he hit so well in spring training that the Yankees assigned him to their AAA team in Newark.
    At Newark Keller was an immediate star and helped lead the Newark Bears to two pennants in 1937 and 1938. On the occasion of the Bears’ winning the International League pennant in 1937, Colonel Ruppert invited the entire Newark team to New York City for a party. Keller turned to Hy Goldberg, a local sportswriter, and said, “You know, Hy, it’ll be the first time I’ll have been to New York.” Goldberg was stunned. “Charlie,” he answered, “it’s the greatest city in the world and it’s only twenty minutes away and you’re here a whole season—how can you not have visited it?”“Oh, you know,” Keller replied, “I’m a farm boy—I don’t have any need for a city like that.” Alien the city was, and alien it remained. There were too many people and there was not enough space. He thought it was particularly hard on his children. “Daddy,” one of them said, “there isn’t enough grass here, and when there is grass, the people won’t let you play on it.” That summed up the city, as far as he was concerned.
    His teammates admired Keller’s strength of character. In the absence of DiMaggio, he was a senior player, and he had called his teammates together to exhort them: “If we play like we’ve played the last three games, sloppy and dumb, we’re going to be the laughingstock of this league. We’re going to be a joke to other teams because we’re one team with Joe and another without him.” Such words coming from Keller were sobering. Everyone listened. He is telling us, Henrich thought, that we are in danger of being perceived as a one-man team. There was shame in that.

CHAPTER 3
    T OMMY HENRICH WAS STUNNED by Charlie Keller’s talk. The burden was his, he decided. He would have to treat every game as if it were a big game. When he was a rookie he had talked about the pressure of World Series games with Red Rolfe, the third baseman. Rolfe had said, “When you play in a World Series, you either accept the challenge and do better than you normally do, or the pressure gets to you and you fall beneath your normal level.” More than any member of the Yankees except DiMaggio, Henrich had a reputation for rising to the occasion. His nickname, used again and again by Mel Allen on the radio, was “Old Reliable.” Henrich thought often about why he did well in critical situations. Part of it, he was sure, was his ability to concentrate. An equal part was pure adrenaline. The best analogy he knew was driving a car headed for an accident. Suddenly your reflexes were sharper, you saw better, and you had quicker reactions. Some people fell apart under pressure; others could use it constructively. Seemingly by luck, he was one of the latter. So was Bobby Brown, the young bonus player. For a million dollars in a tough situation, Henrich thought, Bobby Brown will not choke. He might cut down on his swing a little, he might protect the plate a little more carefully, but he would also become more determined.
    Vic Raschi, a Yankee pitcher, was convinced that Henrich had learned concentration from playing with DiMaggio, and that he emulated DiMaggio’s totality of concentration. For Henrich was unsurpassed as a clutch player: more dangerous in big games than small games, more dangerous in late innings than early ones, and more dangerous with men on base than with the bases empty. Just the year before, he had