He had separated a cartilage from the ribs and was out for three weeks. Sam Mele, who had been Rookie of the Year the previous season, immediately became a part-time player.
In what turned out to be a roller coaster of a season, the Red Sox came back from an eleven-and-a-half-game deficit to go four and a half games ahead in mid-September--and then began to dribble their lead away. After losing the opening game of what had been expected to be an easy series in St. Louis, the lead was down to one game, with fifteen games to go. By the next morning, McCarthy was so drunk that when it came time to take the team bus to the ballpark, Tom Dowd locked him in his room. The bus arrived at the park, the players filed into the clubhouse, and there was McCarthy sitting on a stool. (“How he beat us to the park,” Dowd would say, “I will never know.”)
Del Baker wrote Mele's name into the lineup, and in the first inning he came up with the bases loaded and two out and cleared the bases
with a double. Two batters later, he was thrown out at third base on an attempted double steal and lay there writhing in agony with a twisted anlde. Eddie Froelich went running out to treat him. Del Baker followed. McCarthy, left unattended, staggered out of the dugout and went wandering up the first-base line and into right field. It was one of those sweltering summer afternoons in St. Louis, with 1,500 fans scattered around the stands. In that sparsely inhabited, hollow arena, the voice of one leather-lunged fan came ringing forth: “When are you going to switch to wine, Joe?”
When McCarthy finally found his bearings and joined the crowd at third base, he bent over the fallen Mele and screamed, “Get up, you fucken dago!” Then he turned to Baker and demanded to know why he had called for a double steal. “You called for it,” said Baker.
Ellis Kinder was one of those drinkers who usually pitched better after a long night on the town. Cronin once offered him fifty dollars to go to bed early the night before he pitched, but after Kinder was knocked out of the box three straight times Cronin handed him a hundred and told him to go out and get drunk. He didn't always pitch better, though. McCarthy's downfall came when Joe got so drunk that he couldn't see how drunk Kinder was. The love affair between Yawkey and McCarthy was over by then, anyway. Yawkey's pets were climbing the stairs to complain about how cruelly their manager was treating them, and Yawkey was ordering McCarthy to lay off.
On the game in question, Kinder got so drunk that it slipped his mind he was supposed to be pitching until Clif Keane, who knew both his habits and his habitats, hurried down to the Kenmore Hotel, interrupted his liaison with a young lady, and broke the not necessarily welcome news to him. Then Keane helped him get dressed and lugged him to the ballpark. In those days, starling pitchers still warmed up in front of their respective dugouts. Drunk as he was, Kinder was throwing the ball all over the place, something everybody in the ballpark except Joe McCarthy could see, possibly because Joe McCarthy was kind of sleeping it off himself.
Kinder, well aware that he needed a stiffener, cut his warm-up short
and went into the clubhouse for “a cup of coffee.” Or something. Slick-haired Jack Kramer, who had the locker next to his, was always complaining that Kinder was drinking his hair tonic.
Clif Keane: “Nellie Fox was the first hitter. The first pitch went up on the backstop. The second one came in on a couple of bounces. Dave Philley was the second batter. The first pitch came bouncing up to the plate, and the second one went up against the backstop.” Birdie Tebbetts, his catcher, was yelling, “Get him out of here. He's drunk.” Eight straight pitches Kinder threw without coming anywhere near the plate, and somewhere along the way Joe McCarthy woke up enough to sense that something was amiss. “I'll never forget this scene,” says Keane. “Here comes McCarthy. Kinder sees McCarthy coming and, thinking quickly, he begins to work his left arm. He's a right- handed pitcher. McCarthy says, 'That costs you five hundred dollars.' He brings in Maurie McDermott. McDermott pitches a four-hit shutout, and McCarthy never takes the money from Kinder.”
The way the story went out over the news wires, it read: “After issuing passes to the first two batters, the right-hander left the game with a kink in his left shoulder.” A not-so-cryptic message to the rest of the baseball world.
McCarthy was indisposed again in Chicago two weeks later, at a time when the Red Sox were losing steadily. It was said that he resigned because of his health. If so, Tom Yawkey was suitably grateful.
McCarthy was replaced by Steve O'Neill, who was Joe Cronin's drinking buddy.
By the time Ted returned from Korea, the manager was Lou Boudreau, who got the job by playing pepper with Yawkey at Fenway Park every morning. The “country club,” otherwise known as the Yawkey follies, was in full flower over the rest of Ted's career.
It all came to a climax, during Ted's last two years, with the hiring and firing of Billy Jurges. Or, if you prefer, the firing and hiring of Mike Higgins.
It began in the spring of 1959 when Joe Cronin was named president of the American League. He was hired because (I) he had always
wanted the job, and (2) Yawkey had confided to his fellow owners that he wanted to get rid of him and (3) it was a job with such limited responsibilities that it didn't matter who held it. What followed with the Red Sox was not so much musical comedy as pure slapstick.
To replace Cronin as general manager, Yawkey hired Bucky Harris-the man Cronin had replaced as manager twenty-three years ear tier. A neat symmetry there. Yawkey had always felt guilty about letting Bucky go.
He was, alas, doing Bucky no favor. Bucky had a gorgeous young wife, and until Yawkey felt the need to go rummaging around in his conscience he had been living a perfectly happy life. Bucky wasn't an administrator. Bucky wasn't an executive. Bucky was a falling-down drunk. By 1959, he was so far gone that the office help had to guide his hand through his signature on official papers. Dick O'Connell, the business manager, was running the club. “Dick,” Bucky would tell him, “I don't want this job. I don't want it.”
Mike Higgins was in his fifth year as the field manager. He was another of Yawkey's drinking buddies, but he was also a very strong and solid man, with a lot of personal problems which he drowned, as he liked to say, with “cherry bombs.” To say he was a player's manager was to understate it. “I love playing for Higgins,” one of the players was quoted as saying. “He never gets mad at us when we lose.” By June of 1959, the Red Sox had fallen into last place, the anti-Higgins faction of the press was howling for his head, and Yawkey dispatched Bucky Harris to Washington with orders to fire him.
Already the geography was unfortunate. Washington was Bucky Harris's home ground, and instead of going to the team's hotel, to make the announcement to the hastily gathered press, he went roaming off to his old haunts and disappeared for two days--although “Bucky sightings” were posted periodically in the press box. From Washington, the Red Sox traveled up to Baltimore by bus. When they arrived at the Lord Baltimore Hotel they found their missing general manager sitting in the lobby.
Within thirty seconds, Harris and Higgins were headed out the door
