Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game by Lew Paper Read Free Book Online

could leave the Cubs and return immediately to the Giants. The opportunity arose because lawsuits by the excluded players had persuaded Chandler to drop the ban on the Mexican “outlaws,” as they were called, and allow them to rejoin their teams. Maglie resisted, largely because he wanted to make sure that he was well positioned—physically and emotionally—to make it a success. “I was in such bad shape,” he later explained, “that I was afraid of queering my chances of sticking.” So he decided to wait until the 1950 season.
    When Maglie arrived at the Giants’ training facility in Phoenix the following spring, he was a far different player from the one the Giants had last seen six years earlier. He now had three different curveballs, one of which would break down sharply when it was almost on top of the plate. (“That man can do things with a curve I never saw before,” said Steve O’Neill, his former manager at Buffalo and now a major-league coach.) He also had far more self-confidence than he had possessed as a rookie in 1945. And, perhaps most important, he now had a strategy for keeping the hitters off balance.
    He would often throw a fastball at the batter’s head—sometimes even behind his head—so that the batter could never feel comfortable at the plate. Maglie never intended to actually hit the batter (in part because he did not want to put a man on base). And he picked his targets carefully (Brooklyn catcher Roy Campanella being one—before Dodger games, Maglie would often proclaim to his teammates, “Campanella’s going down on the first pitch”). Still, there were some players—like Don Zimmer of the Dodgers in later years—who would never see a Maglie knockdown pitch because the pitcher knew they might get hurt. (“I didn’t dare throw at him,” Maglie later said of Zimmer, “because I knew he’d freeze.”) But other batters—those he left sprawled on the dirt—believed that Maglie was indeed trying to hit them. Fearing another inside pitch close to the body, the batter would often step back from the plate and be set up for a sharp-breaking curveball on the outside corner. The approach worked wonders for Maglie, and, not surprisingly, he later confessed that the knockdown pitch was “the best pitch in baseball.”
    There was another major change when Maglie arrived for spring training in 1950: Mel Ott was gone and Leo Durocher was now the manager. A man with a fiery temper and an unbridled sense of competition, Durocher was interested in only one thing on the field: winning. And he was prepared to do whatever it might take to achieve that goal. So Maglie took heart when Durocher greeted him in Phoenix by saying, “I’m very happy to see you. I see you want to pitch.”
    Despite that encouragement, Maglie, now thirty-three, did not feel secure when the Giants broke camp and began the season. At first, Durocher used him sparingly in relief, and Maglie began to wonder whether he was, literally and figuratively, on his last legs. But then, on July 14, he was called in to relieve in a game against the Boston Braves in the third inning. Maglie shut the Braves down for the rest of the game, secured the victory, and gave Durocher the incentive to give him a chance. On July 21, the manager called on Maglie to start a game against the St. Louis Cardinals in Sportsman’s Park. The Mexican outlaw pitched the Giants to a 5-4 victory with a performance that impressed his teammates and startled the Cardinals. (“Where have you been keeping that guy?” Stan Musial, the Cardinals’ premier player, asked Giants’ broadcaster Russ Hodges. “He’s got the best curve I’ve ever seen.”)
    Durocher immediately placed Maglie in the Giants’ pitching rotation, and the Niagara Falls native responded with a record that was nothing short of remarkable. He proceeded to win ten more games in a row in less than two months, including four straight shutouts—matching a record held by four other