"I ain't much of a fielder," Dusty Rhodes once told the New York World-Telegram, "and I got a pretty lousy arm, but I sure love to whack at that ball."
Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Lemon must have greeted him in the Elysian Fields of the beyond — Rhodes (who was 82) died of heart failure June 16 in Henderson, Nevada — with a hearty handshake and a snort along the line of "You should have been a helluva fielder with a cannon arm who couldn't stand whacking at anything in the bottom of the 10th!"
And another Hall of Famer in waiting, Monte Irvin, must have developed a complex during the 1954 World Series, even if he did know his often-re-injured leg was going to compel his retirement a couple of years later. He was lifted for a pinch hitter thrice in that Series. The same pinch hitter. And all three lifts provided runs batted in for the stand-in.
Even when Arnold Hano's impeccable spot report of the game (A Day in the Bleachers) was republished in 2004, everyone knew the hook immediately — Willie Mays' surrealistic running catch, nearly 465 feet from the plate, Game 1 of the 1954 World Series tied at deuce, of a Vic Wertz drive that would have been bombs away in any other ballpark this side of the original Yankee Stadium but was turned into a long out that kept Larry Doby at least and Al Rosen at most from thinking about scoring.
The poor soul who pinch hit for Irvin with one out in the bottom of the 10th, Mays (a walk, a steal) on second and Hank Thompson (a free pass) on first, and shot Lemon's first-pitch, inside curve ball over the short right field fence, didn't have a prayer.
Not even when he followed up in Game 2 with another stand-in for Irvin, singling home Mays with the tying run, at future Hall of Famer Early Wynn's expense, before lingering long enough to hit another one out, again on Wynn's dollar, leading off the Giants' seventh. Not even when he followed that in Game 3 with another stand-in for Irvin, singling to right off Mike Garcia to send home Thompson and Mays, helping the Giants end the third with a 4-0 lead.
Put it this way: when the Tribe finally dispatched their pinch-hitting nemesis in the top of the seventh, Ray Narleski finally figuring out the way to get rid of Rhodes, with a pounding enough strikeout, it was enough to put a photograph of the punch-out on the front page of the New York Times.
What on earth was manager Leo Durocher thinking in Game 4? Surely he was risking it keeping Rhodes on the bench, where the fun-loving batsman could afford a hearty chuckle at an Indians team that won 111 games on the season, but whom the Giants were manhandling like a squadron of fifth-stringers all Series long.
Rhodes may have been the major manhandler. He'd hit 15 bombs in the regular season, a ducal enough share of them standing in for someone else, but in the World Series he looked like a ringer. He drove in more runs than the Indians produced as a team in the first three games and two fewer than the Tribe produced for the entire Series.
The bad news was that Rhodes may never have seen a bar to which he disliked bellying up. ("I was drinking to everybody else's health so much I about ruined mine.") The good news was that this son of an Alabama corn farmer ("He raised two hundred gallons") didn't mind serving them up as often as he pounded them down; after working as a tugboat captain around New York Harbor and a ticket-taker at the New York World's Fair in 1964-65, he laid down the whiskey at his wife's tavern across from the Bayonne Ferry for a fair enough portion of the two decades to follow after deciding to make Staten Island his home.
I made Henderson my own home when first coming to Nevada over two years ago. I had no idea Rhodes lived here. I'd have loved to buttonhole him, even knowing he wasn't the most loquacious interview on the terrain. If only to ask him whether Monte Irvin demanded a cut of the royalties for all those Series pinch hits.
Knowing what I know of Rhodes, he'd have shut me up with a hearty belt in a hearty glass and hit me with his best stories otherwise. And I'd have seen anything from Staten Island on the harbor to the el train passing by the Polo Grounds, picking up passengers, beyond the right field seats, with every sentence.
Leave a Comment