Today in Baseball History: Furillo's Last Burst
Pregame Pepper
. . . Despite a career-low (as a full-timer) 80 OPS+ in 1952, Carl Furillo made the first of his two National League All-Star teams.
. . . Furillo’s best World Series of the seven in which he played in Brooklyn and Los Angeles was his first, in 1947: he had a .928 OPS, the highest of any Dodger who played in five or more of the Series games. (The Yankees won the Series in seven.)
. . . Applied retrospectively, Furillo’s 11 defensive total zone runs above his league’s average led all National League right fielders in 1955.
. . . He led the NL in assists by a right fielder three straight seasons, 1949-51, and his 1950-51 totals led the entire major leagues among right fielders.
Leading Off
The last burst from the Reading Rifle
Even if Carl Furillo didn’t know it just yet, when pinch hitting on today’s date in 1960.
By Jeff Kallman
Today’s date has history enough to recommend it. Take your pick: New Orleans’s founding (1718); the first inaugural ball of an American president (1789), German forces sinking the Lusitania (1915); the Third Reich’s surrender in World War II (1945); the founding of Sony (as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K., in 1946).
Fourteen years after Sony’s birth, on 7 May 1960, a Dodgers reserve catcher named Norm Sherry did his brother, Larry, one kind favour in the often unkind Los Angeles Coliseum in the bottom of the eleventh against the Phillies. Facing erstwhile Giants pitcher Rubén Gómez with two outs and the bases clear, Sherry parked a 3-1 service on the backside of the Coliseum’s infamous “Chinese Screen” high fence, giving thw Dodgers a 3-2 win.
What’s not often remembered about that game is who made his final major league appearance in it. Even if he didn’t know it in the moment when he checked in at the plate as a fifth-inning pinch hitter.
That would be Carl Furillo, one of the Dodgers’s Brooklyn legends, pinch hitting for first baseman Norm Larker with two on and two out, and tagging Phillies starter Chris Short for a single that tied the game at two each when Dodgers outfielder Wally Moon scored.
Not every player in a major league uniform gets to finish his career with a base hit and a run batted in, of course, but even at age 38, reduced to part-time play, Furillo wasn’t necessarily ready to call it a career. The bad news is that his body, followed by alleged duplicity in the Dodgers front office, did it for him.
A torn calf muscle took Furillo out of action, during which period the Dodgers released him. A man who earns three battle stars and a Purple Heart in wartime, as Furillo did during World War II, is no shrinking violet. “The Dodgers of 1959,” Roger Kahn would observe writing Furillo’s chapter for The Boys of Summer, “were ribbed by Brooklyn veterans.”
Nineteen-sixty was a time to turn over personnel. A team must change constantly if it is to win. The calf injury convinced (general manager Buzzie) Bavasi that Furillo’s gloried were history. He summoned Furillo to his office at the Statler Hilton Hotel and asked, “What do you think of Frank Howard, Carl?”
“I don’t think he hits the curve good.”
“But he has promise.”
“You don’t hit the curve, you don’t belong here.”
“How’s your leg?”
“Coming along, but slow.”
“That Howard’s gonna be something,” Bavasi said.
Bavasi was bearing a message down Byzantine ways. He was suggesting that Frank Howard had arrived and that Furillo, like [freshly-retired pitcher] Carl Erskine, should make way gracefully to the judgment of years. Retire. Then, perhaps, the Dodgers would find him a job.
Like only too many players before and after him, Furillo wasn’t quite ready to make way to the judgment of years, gracefully or otherwise. He was likewise not exactly going to take Bavasi’s word for things. Despite Bavasi agreeing to a rather unique salary arrangement after his 1953 season (he won the National League’s batting title), a $33,000 salary annually, appealing to Furillo’s need for security, the right fielder didn’t trust the general manager he believed was anything but candid and straightforward.
Indeed, it was when the Dodgers finished a road series with the Giants over a week later that the Dodgers let Furillo know he was being given his unconditional release. Furillo’s response was to ponder that, legally, the team could not release an injured player, then to pull out his contract and spot the clause that backed his pondering to the letter.
The man known as the Reading Rifle for a powerful, accurate throwing arm at the peak of his career in Brooklyn decided to do what was then the unthinkable. He sued the Dodgers, with whom he ultimately settled for the $21,000 remaing to be paid him on his $33,000 1960 contract. No further baseball job presented itself to him, leading the often too-proud Furillo to wonder whether baseball blacklisted him formally.
“As far as anyone can learn,” Kahn wrote, “the owners of the eighteen major league clubs operating in 1961* did not collectively refuse to hire him. What they did was react in a patterned way . . . He could have qualified marginally, but once he sued, people in baseball’s conformist ambiance decided he was a ‘Bolshevik.’ Hiring him at thirty-nine was not worth the potential trouble.”
Two months before Furillo settled in 1961, Sherry became one of the catalysts for turning around the career of a former Furillo roommate, a lefthanded pitcher with obvious talent to burn but six years of nothing much special to show for it. He translated a scout’s observation about the young man’s windup obstructing his sight line to the plate as, “You don’t have to throw so hard.”
The young man was Sandy Koufax, whom Furillo loved as a roommate because of two qualities Furillo adored: 1) Koufax loved classical music and was liable to play plenty of it on a portable phonograph he carried on road trips. 2) Koufax wasn’t even half as chatty as other Dodgers, even if he wasn’t exactly a lone wolf, either.
Koufax went from there to becoming a Hall of Fame pitcher with six seasons about which “off the charts” might still be understating the case even in an era which favoured pitching as heavily as did 1961-62 through two years after Koufax’s elbow finished his pitching career.
Furillo went from baseball to half ownership in a Queens delicatessen for a time, selling his share in it following seven years, moving his family back to his Pennsylvania roots, then taking a job with Otis Elevator Company, the job he held when Kahn caught up to him for The Boys of Summer. With Otis, Furillo was one of the team who installed the elevators in the World Trade Center.
That proud old right fielder who’s said to have made peace with baseball, including appearing at some Dodger fantasy camps, who took you at your word once you made him a friend, who hoped to retire permanently after his Otis job was done, ended up working as a night watchman near his Pennsylvania home as his children grew to give him grandchildren.
Leukemia did what a war, Ebbets Field’s unusual array of right field angles, or even the duplicities of the Dodgers adminiatration couldn’t do. It took his life at 66 in January 1989. The man who once feared baseball would forget him didn’t live on earth to see Al-Qaeda murder nearly three thousand people in the Twin Towers of the complex to which he’d contributed his labour and heart.
Jeff Kallman edits the Wednesday and Thursday editions of Here’s the Pitch.
* The American League expanded to ten teams beginning in 1961; the National League’s two expansion franchises, the New York Mets and the Houston Colt .45s (Astros), were operating in 1961 to prepare for starting to play in 1962.
Extra Innings: They Said It, We Didn’t
I worked, that’s [effing] how. I’d be out early and study it . . . Now as the ball goes out you sight it, like you were sighting down a gun barrel. Except you got to imagine where it’s going. Is it gonna hit above the cement? Then you run like hell toward the wall, because it’s gonna drop dead. Is it gonna hit the cement? Then you run like hell to the infield. It’s gonna come shooting out. Now you’re gonna aske me where the scoreboard came out and the angles were crazy. I worked. I worked every angle in the [effing] wall. I’d take that sight line and know just where it would go. I wasn’t afraid to work.
—Carl Furillo, to Roger Kahn, on handling the oddities of Ebbets Field’s scoreboard-bisected, oddly-angled right field wall.
He fits no label. He is too human, too large, too variable, too much the independent. In one voice he talks against welfare, like a [New York Senator James] Buckley, and in another voice, which is the same, he talks about ballplayers’ rights and defies a system, like Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
—Roger Kahn, in The Boys of Summer.
He did not like going out, or drinking or, as he later said, “living it big.” He had enjoyed the road company of the men he had played with when he first came up, if only because they did little but talk about baseball. Furillo had an eighth grade education and suspected his teammates did not think him very bright. He liked to be with his wife and two sons. In the offseason they returned to Stony Creek, Pennsylvania, the town outside of Reading where he had grown up. There he worked on his farm, hunted, and fished.
—Michael Shapiro, in The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and Their Final Pennant Race Together.
In 1987, I lost a gifted son to heroin . . . The telephone rang a few days later, and the caller said, “This is Pee Wee [Reese]. You remember I was captain of the team.”
“I do remember”
“I just want to say,” Reese said, “for all the fellers that we are very, very sorry.”
Our turns come and go. I mean only to say, for all the fellers, Carl, may you walk in green pastures.
—Roger Kahn, in “Carl Furillo’s View of Sports,” The New York Times, upon Furillo’s death in 1989; republished in Games We Used to Play: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World of Sport, 1992.