REFLECTION : Wonderful Memories of Subway Series

At the first hint that two teams from the same neighborhood are verging on winning the two major-league pennants, the scream goes up and the sports pages react as if on command: “Subway Series!” Thus, some special significance, some historical importance is imputed to the upcoming World Series. It is not ours to reason why.

Already there have occurred 15 of these intramural showdowns. So it has never been a rare event, or an endangered species to be cosseted and preserved. Yet a Subway Series is supposed to make one tingle, and that’s what is coming up again on Saturday -- San Francisco’s Giants versus Oakland’s Athletics, from opposite sides of the bay. The subways are not as much involved as the Bay Bridge but that is easily overlooked.

Chicago is always credited as being the site of the first Subway Series -- the 1906 Cubs vs. the 1906 White Sox -- but in truth Chicago owns that distinction only because baseball’s historians past-posted it. Chicagoans at that time were totally unaware of the city’s place in history. It was no big deal.

“Subway Series” had not yet come into the language, and Chicago, anyway, was an elevated railway town. Also, it was the era of the sports pages’ wonderful slang. The Cubs didn’t simply win the pennant. They “copped the bunting.” And the White Sox more often than not were the “Pale Hose.” For the horse racing at nearby Washington Park, they had a word too, “the bangtails are running.”

The 1906 White Sox were the famed “Hitless Wonders” and proved it by winning the first and third games on four hits each, losing the second on one hit and the fourth on two hits. But then they swung away for 8-6 and 8-3 triumphs and won the Series with a .198 batting average. They also set the tone for Subway Series to come. The American League would go on to win 11 of the 15.

American League dominance in the Subway Series is due almost solely to the New York Yankees, who won 10 of those things from the Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers.

After 1906, the only other AL team to figure in a Subway Series was the wartime St. Louis Browns, who somehow poked their noses into the 1944 Series, hit .183 as a team and were wiped out in six by the Cardinals.

The Yankees would go on to win nine Subway Series in a row but their initiation was not salubrious. They were knocked off in 1921 and 1922 by John McGraw’s Giants in games played in the Polo Grounds before Yankee Stadium was built. However, in 1923 the Stadium-based Yankees beat the Giants in five, Babe Ruth sort of taking charge with three home runs.

In my reckoning, these were the most memorable of the Yankees’ Subway Series victories:

1941 -- Beating the Dodgers in five with the help of the lasting infamy of Mickey Owens in Game 4 when, in Ebbets Field, the Dodgers had a one-run lead in the ninth, Hugh Casey pitching, two out, nobody on, 3 and 2 on Tommy Henrich, and now Casey throwing a strikeout curve at which Henrich swung. But, horrors. The pitch escaped Owens’s mitt for a passed ball that rolled to the backstop. It was Owens’s only muff all season, after 509 errorless chances. And then the deluge: Joe DiMaggio singled, Charley Keller doubled off the right-field wall to drive in the tying and winning runs, and Joe Gordon doubled home two more. Give the Yankees an inch and they’ll take four miles.

1947 -- The Yankees won the first two games and when the Series shifted to Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Eagle greeted them with a genus Brooklyn headline bannered across its front page: “YANKEES, DROP DEAD.” The Dodgers tied the series at 2-2 in what became known as the Cookie Lavagetto game. It was a shocker. In the ninth, pinch hitter Lavagetto whacked in two runs with a two-out double that beat the Yankees, 3-2. It was the Dodgers’ only hit of the game pitched by Floyd Bevens.

That was also the year Commissioner Happy Chandler had suspended manager Leo Durocher for the full season, for hanging out with questionable characters. The Dodgers voted Durocher a full series share anyway. Chandler ruled that a no-no. It was also the year sportswriter Jimmy Cannon, arriving by subway a bit late for the game, heard a newsstand radio blaring the play-by-play. Cannon asked the news dealer, “What’s the score?” And was informed by that Brooklyn cynic, “Yankees leading two-nothing if you wanna believe that thing.”

1953 -- Yankees beat the Dodgers in six, and who’s the most valuable player and leading hitter in the Series? Surprise. ‘Twas Billy Martin, who had 12 hits and batted .500. Billy, no power hitter, hit two homers in that Series, then won Game 6 with a ninth-inning single.

1956 -- The Yankees over the Dodgers again, in seven. In Game 5 they were held to five hits and two runs by Brooklyn’s Sal Maglie. It was useless. Don Larsen, who on Friday had been knocked out in 1 2-3 innings, giving up four runs, was back in there starting the Monday game. Larson was the Yankees’ bad boy, often in early-morning trouble with traffic cops and other people. But that Monday he pitched a World Series game for the ages, allowing nobody to reach base, the only such game in all World Series history. It was, as was written, the perfect game by the imperfect man. Subway Series? That aspect of it, if it was ever important, has long been forgotten.