Introduction

     I was stunned and speechless as I opened the elevator door of our Jackson Heights, NY, apartment building on that spring day in 1948. You tend to get that way when you come face-to-face with a legend. Waiting to leave the elevator was a baseball immortal, the greatest Yankee of them all – Babe Ruth. Looking back at it now, I suppose I should have greeted him with something like, “Hi Babe.” But I was thirteen-years-old and totally tongue-tied.

     Dressed in his usual camel’s hair coat and cap, he was accompanied by our neighbor whose dog I walked after school. I went to her apartment later that day and asked her how she knew Babe Ruth. She told me she was his niece and invited me to come and meet him the next time I saw his big black Lincoln car parked in front of our building.

     Two weeks later, there was the car and upstairs I went with a pounding heart – and an autograph book. Ruth was quite sick at the time – he would die a few months later from throat cancer. But to a thirteen-year-old, he was bigger than life as he strolled out of the bedroom.

     He greeted me with his usual, “Hiya kid,” and proceeded to ask me if I liked baseball and what team I rooted for. When I told him I was a Yankee fan, he voiced his approval. And then he gave me what is still my treasure today, an autograph that says: “To Frankie Strauss, From Babe Ruth.”

     I often think about that meeting with Babe Ruth. It certainly ranks as one of the most unforgettable moments of my life. It takes me back to the days when I would go to Yankee Stadium for a Sunday doubleheader, sitting on the hard and backless bleacher benches in right field, rooting hard for DiMaggio, Rizzuto, Henrich, Berra, and the rest of my heroes. Eating the lunch my mom had packed for me, sitting in the bright sunshine watching my team play baseball was just the perfect way to spend a day.

     It seems like a long time ago. Games were often played in less than two hours. Pitchers hurled complete games more often than not. Doubleheaders on Sundays and holidays were the rule. There were two leagues, no divisions, and eight teams in each league. The American League had teams in New York, Detroit, Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington and St. Louis. The National League teams were in Brooklyn, St. Louis, Boston, New York, Cincinnati, Chicago, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

     The winner in each league won the pennant and played in the World Series. There were no playoffs unless two teams tied for the top spot. And best of all – the designated hitter rule had not yet been born. Most games were played in sunlight so that my father, who never really understood baseball although he tried to make sense of it for his entire lifetime, could at least sit in the stands at Yankee Stadium and get a tan.

     Growing up in New York City, I was a rabid Yankee fan. My dad took me to my first game at the old Yankee Stadium in 1945 when I was ten – Yankees against the Tigers. By the time I was thirteen, I had become such a fan that I began keeping scrapbooks in which I pasted the newspaper accounts and box scores of all Yankee games. The scrapbooks cover the 1947, 1948 and 1949 teams and are filled with stories about the great Yankees of that era – DiMaggio, Berra, Rizzuto, Henrich, Keller, Reynolds, Shea and Page. And of the two managers – Bucky Harris and Casey Stengel.

     Over the years, I’ve had the good fortune to meet some Yankee greats. I still treasure my all-too-brief encounter with Joe DiMaggio. As a teenager, I attended a live broadcast of a radio program DiMaggio hosted and shared an elevator ride with him and his guest of the day, Detroit pitcher Hal Newhouser. And the great DiMaggio showed his class when he obliged the youngster asking for his autograph as Newhouser totally ignored the repeated requests for his own signature.

     Initially, this was to be a book about the amazing Yankee season of 1949 when the Red Sox and Yankees were in a classic struggle that came down to the last two games of the season played at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees, facing a one-game deficit, needed to win both of the final two games to win the flag. And win them they did. However, when I approached Yogi Berra to get his remembrances of that season, he replied that so much had already been written about that season, citing the memorable book of David Halberstram, Summer of ‘49. His 1949 teammate, Jerry Coleman, offered the same opinion when we spoke and I came to the conclusion that they were both right.

     I put my 1949 Yankee scrapbook aside and instead picked up the first one I had assembled as a twelve-year-old, the one that told the story of the 1947 team – a baseball season in which the players who had gone off to serve their country in World War II were all back in their baseball uniforms.

     This is that story.