The New York Times - USA (2020-10-10)

A22 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2020

Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle,

Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, Roger

Maris and his 1950s pitching

mates Allie Reynolds, Vic Raschi

and Eddie Lopat. He survived all

of them. And he joined Lou

Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle and

Rizzuto among the revered fig-

ures who spent their entire play-

ing careers with the Yankees. The

team retired his No. 16 and

mounted his plaque beside theirs

in Monument Park at Yankee Sta-

dium.

Ford had the competitive ad-

vantage of pitching for dauntingly

good teams. But his prowess was

never seriously questioned as he

compiled an impressive 2.75

earned run average in 3,170 in-

nings.

“He could throw any pitch, any

time, for a strike,” Brooks Rob-

inson, the Baltimore Orioles’ Hall

of Famer, was quoted as saying by

Fay Vincent, the former baseball

commissioner, in the oral history

“We Would Have Played for Noth-

ing” (2008). “He had great players

behind him, but Whitey Ford was

the master.”

The Three Musketeers

At 5 feet 10 inches and 180

pounds, Ford seldom overpow-

ered batters. But in his 16 seasons

he mastered them with an assort-

ment of pitches thrown with vary-

ing speeds and arm motions and

delivered just where he wanted

them. “If it takes 27 outs to win,

who’s going to get them out more

ways than Mr. Ford?” the long-

time Yankee manager Casey Sten-

gel once said.

Methodical on the mound, Ford

was irrepressible off it. He joined

with Mantle and Billy Martin for

late nights on the town, inspiring

Stengel to call them the Three

Musketeers. Mantle, too, entered

the Hall of Fame in 1974, and at the

induction ceremony he was asked

about the chemistry behind the

friendship between him, the coun-

try boy from Oklahoma, and Ford,

who grew up on the streets of

Queens. “We both liked Scotch,”

he said.

“In those early years it was

three of us — me, Whitey and Billy

Martin,” Mantle said, adding,

“They were both brash, outspo-

ken guys, and I could stay in the

background.”

With the passing of DiMaggio

and Mantle, Old-Timers’ Day at

Yankee Stadium became very

much the Whitey and Yogi show.

Ford and Berra, his catcher and

baseball’s philosopher, were the

celebrity elders of the hour. (Berra

died in 2015 at 90.)

It was in retirement, too, that

Ford acknowledged what had

been widely suspected: He some-

times doctored the baseball. He

said he created “mud” balls by

mixing saliva and dirt; used a con-

coction of baby oil, turpentine and

resin to make his fingers sticky;

and had a ring made with a spe-

cially attached rasp to cut base-

balls, all to make a pitch break un-

expectedly and produce strike-

outs or ground balls — and to help

win championships.

Ford held a num-

ber of still-standing

World Series

records, among

them 33⅔ consecu-

tive innings of

scoreless pitching.

He was savvy from

the start, a puzzle

that batters strug-

gled to solve.

Walt Dropo, the

slugging Boston

Red Sox first base-

man who beat Ford

out for Rookie of the

Year honors, re-

membered facing

Ford that first sea-

son. “Right away, I

could see this guy

was going to be

trouble,” Dropo re-

called in “Bombers”

(2002), edited by

Richard Lally. “He

was like a master

chess player who

used his brain to

take the bat right out of my hands.

You’d start thinking along with

him, and then Whitey had you be-

cause he never started you off

with the same pitch in any one se-

quence.

“He could start you with a fast-

ball inside, a curveball outside,

then reverse that, or even start

you with a changeup. He played

games with everybody, every hit-

ter I ever talked to. He made them

hit his pitch, and it was usually

something they didn’t like.”

A Hometown Boy

Edward Charles Ford was born

on Oct. 21, 1928, on the East Side of

Manhattan, the only child of Jim

and Edna Ford. His father worked

for Con Edison and played on its

semipro baseball team, and his

mother was a bookkeeper at an

A&P grocery.

He grew up in the Astoria sec-

tion of Queens, idolizing Joe Di-

Maggio. He played first base for

Manhattan High School of Avia-

tion Trades, which he attended be-

cause his neighborhood high

school, William Cullen Bryant, did

not have a baseball team.

In April 1946, his senior year, he

attended a tryout at Yankee Sta-

dium. The Yankee scout Paul

Krichell felt that Ford couldn’t hit

well enough to be a first baseman,

but noticed that he had a strong

arm. After pitching a few innings

near the end of his high school

season, Ford turned in an out-

standing summer as a pitcher for

the 34th Avenue Boys, a Queens

sandlot team sponsored by a beer

garden, and in October 1946 the

Yankees gave him a $7,000 bonus

as a pitching prospect.

After three and a half years in

the minors, Ford made his Yankee

debut on July 1, 1950. Slim and

blond, he was Eddie Ford back

then. Lefty Gomez, the former

Yankee pitcher who managed in

the team’s farm system, had

called him Whitey, but the name

hadn’t stuck yet.

Tutored by Jim Turner, the

pitching coach, and by Lopat,

Ford won nine straight games be-

fore he was beaten on a home run

by the Philadelphia Athletics’ Sam

Chapman.

After the Yankees won the first

three games of the 1950 World Se-

ries against the Philadelphia

Phillies’ Whiz Kids, Stengel gave

Ford a start at Yankee Stadium.

He was within one out of a shutout

when Gene Woodling, the Yankee

left fielder, dropped a fly ball, al-

lowing two runs to score. Stengel

eventually took Ford out of the

game, to the displeasure of Yan-

kee fans, and Reynolds finished

off a 5-2 Yankee victory and a

World Series sweep.

Ford missed the 1951 and 1952

seasons while in the Army, but re-

turned with an 18-6 season in 1953.

As he remembered it, Yankee

catcher Elston Howard gave him

the nickname Chairman of the

Board around the mid-’50s.

Ford kept rolling along, winning

53 games from 1954 to 1956.

Then came an infamous night in

Yankee lore. In May 1957, Ford

and Mantle joined with a few

teammates to celebrate Martin’s

29th birthday at the Copacabana

nightclub. A patron wound up on

the floor with a broken nose and

accused Hank Bauer, the Yankees’

strapping right fielder, of decking

him. Bauer denied it, and no

charges were filed, but the Yan-

kees fined all the players who

were there for the embarrassing

headline-making episode. It was

never clear who clobbered the

customer, and Berra famously ex-

plained, “Nobody did nuthin’ to

nobody.” But Martin was soon

banished to the lowly Kansas City

Athletics.

In April 1958, to mark the start

of another baseball season, Ford

did a star turn with Berra, Mantle

and first baseman Bill Skowron on

Ed Sullivan’s popular CBS variety

show with a rendition of “Take Me

Out to the Ball Game.” They were

accompanied by Jack Norwood,

who wrote the lyrics in 1908.

The Yankees concluded the sea-

son by defeating the Milwaukee

Braves in the World Series.

A World Series Maven

The winning ways continued

for Ford into the early 1960s.

He was at his best in the World

Series, his records including most

victories (10) and most strikeouts

(94) along with his 33⅔ straight

scoreless innings.

He threw two shutouts against

the Pirates in the 1960 World Se-

ries, though his pitching was over-

shadowed by Bill Mazeroski’s Se-

ries-winning home run for Pitts-

burgh in Game 7. He pitched an-

other shutout in Game 1 of the 1961

World Series against the Cincin-

nati Reds and pitched five score-

less innings in Game 4 before a re-

liever came in. The Yankees won

that Series in five games, with

Ford’s total of 32 consecutive

scoreless innings in World Series

play eclipsing the record of 29⅔

innings set by Babe Ruth for the

Boston Red Sox in 1916 and 1918.

Ralph Houk, who replaced Sten-

gel as the Yankees’ manager in

1961, used Ford more frequently

than Stengel had, and Johnny

Sain, who became the pitching

coach that year, added to Ford’s

repertoire by teaching him to

throw a slider. Ford won 14 con-

secutive games, posted a 25-4

record and captured the Cy Young

Award as baseball’s best pitcher.

In the 1961 All-Star Game at the

San Francisco Giants’ Candlestick

Park, Ford delivered what might

have been his most confounding

single pitch.

Horace Stoneham, the Giants’

owner, bet Ford that he couldn’t

get Willie Mays out, as Ford told it

in “Whitey and Mickey” (1977), a

joint Ford-Mantle memoir written

with Joseph Durso of The New

York Times. A few hundred dol-

lars were at stake.

Ford recalled that when he

faced Mays in the first inning, “I

threw Willie the biggest spitball

you ever saw” and “it snapped the

hell out of sight, and the umpire

shot up his right hand for strike

three.”

Ford extended his World Series

scoreless string to 33⅔ innings

before the Giants’ Jose Pagan put

down a bunt single that scored

Mays in the second inning of the

1962 World Series opener, at San

Francisco. But Ford won that

game, his final World Series tri-

umph.

He was 24-7 in 1963, his last out-

standing season.

Whitey Ford with Manager Casey Stengel after the Yankees won the World Series in 1950.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ford and Yogi Berra leaving Yankee Stadium after signing new contracts for the 1957 season.

ERNIE SISTO/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Ford, center, with Bill Bevans, Spec Shea, Lefty Gomez and Joe Page at Old-Timers’ Day in

1961. Ford was not then an old-timer. Right, Ford pitching at training camp in 1971.

ERNIE SISTO/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Whitey Ford, 91,

The Final Member

Of a Dynasty, Dies

Acknowledging the
crowd at Yankee
Stadium during
Old-Timers’ Day in

2010. Ford made his
      debut with the Yankees
      60 years earlier.

ULI SEIT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

From Page A1

Whitey Ford still holds all-time

records for both the Yankees

and the World Series.

YANKEES

236

Wins

3,170⅓

Innings Pitched

45

Shutouts

438

Games Started

(tied with Andy Pettitte)

WORLD SERIES

10

Wins

94

Strikeouts

146

Innings Pitched

22

Games Started

Source: baseball-reference.com

Chairman

Of the Board