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and proceeded on his way. When Ted woke up the next morning he couldn't
breathe. 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.")
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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.
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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.
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