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

tied a major-league record of four grand-slam home runs in a season, and had almost broken that record when one of his late-season hits was called foul, a bad call in the eyes of most of the Yankees. Within the league he was known as one of the two or three best clutch hitters in baseball, a man who killed fastballs. (“How are you going to pitch to Henrich?” Zach Taylor, the St. Louis Browns manager, had asked Fred Sanford, then pitching for the Browns, in one close game in 1948. “I’m going to give him four fastballs,” Sanford answered. “What the hell does that mean?” Taylor asked. “It means I’m going to walk him on four pitches,” Sanford answered. “He hits me like he owns me.”)
    Henrich had always been a good player, one whose value belied the more ordinary quality of his statistics. He had come up through hard times, when Ed Barrow ran the team. After one season Henrich asked Barrow for a raise. Barrow replied by citing Henrich’s batting average. It was quite disappointing, Barrow said. In fact, he was thinking of cutting him for the neat year. Henrich stood his ground. “What do you want, a higher batting average for me personally or value to the team? Every day, every at-bat, I do what’s good for the team, I move runners around, and I knock runners in. But if you want batting average I’ll give that to you next year. It’ll weaken the team, but you can have what you want.” Barrow recanted and Henrich got a raise of $2,000.
    But later, after Henrich sustained a serious knee injury, Barrow announced his unilateral decision of what Henrich’s salary would be. Henrich protested, but Barrow explained to Henrich that he was damaged goods: “I’m afraid there’sno guarantee that you’ll be as good as you once were,” Barrow said. “I think your job is to try and get yourself in shape and come to us in the spring and prove that you’re worth this money we’re paying you.”
    After the war, Henrich became, in his teammate Charlie Keller’s view, a much better player. With maturity came confidence and a better sense of the game. Now, with DiMaggio out, Stengel was batting him cleanup. That had not happened before the war. He constantly studied and tried to refine his skills. When it was windy he liked to take extra fielding practice with Frank Shea, the best fungo hitter on the team. Most outfielders hated to practice fungoes on a windy day, because the wind made them look clumsy, but Henrich knew that that was precisely when he needed such practice.
    Throughout his career, Henrich could be counted on to get the game-winning hit. There were no statistics kept in that department in that era, but it was an extraordinary performance: a player systematically rising above his level to help his team win. Henrich was not that strong, he was not that fast, and his arm was not that powerful. “You’ve lost some of your speed, Tommy,” one of his teammates once told him. He answered, “I never had the speed I used to have but I get the job done.” He had no illusions about himself or his abilities.
    He epitomized the ballplayers born and raised in the America that preceded the New Deal. After World War II, in the homes of the large, burgeoning middle class, it was a virtual assumption that even mildly ambitious white males could go to college, even if their parents had not. But Henrich’s generation had come from an America where a few people were rich, a few more were middle class, and a vast number were poor. Those who were rich stayed rich, and those who were poor stayed poor, for the most part, so no opportunity to get ahead could be squandered. At the start of the Depression, the average American salary was about$1,300 a year; in 1949, with the new postwar affluence just starting to affect the country, the average yearly salary was $3,000. The salaries ballplayers received were relatively small by comparison with what they would soon make—perhaps $15,000 for an average player on an