Sport: Red Lefthander | TIME

When Leland Stanford (“Larry”) MacPhail was hired to run the Brooklyn Dodgers last winter, the baseball world, with good reason, expected him to pull rabbits from the baseball cap of the Brooklyn club. With a flair for showmanship as conspicuous as his red hair, Larry MacPhail had in three years yanked the Cincinnati Reds out of a decade of doldrums by painting the ball park orange, introducing girl ushers decked in what he called lounging pajamas, starting a Red farm system and inaugurating night baseball. Brooklyn sat up in its seats.

Last week, 40,000 Brooklyn baseball fans crammed Ebbets Field and 20,000 were turned away. What they had come to see was Boss MacPhail’s first big innovation—the first major-league baseball game played under floodlights in New York City.* With his customary extravagance, Larry MacPhail had made the baseball game an incidental of the evening’s entertainment. He had invited famed Olympic Sprinter Jesse Owens to do his stuff before the game, had hired two fife & drum corps and a couple of brass bands. At 9:45 when the grandstand customers who had paid $1.10 (and the 3,000 bleacherites who had paid 55¢) felt that they had just about received their money’s worth, the umpire croaked “Play ball.” The visiting team was the Cincinnati Reds, MacPhail’s old boys, most of whom he himself had rounded up from the minor leagues.

Scheduled to pitch was Johnny Vander Meer, the Reds’ rookie southpaw, who had pitched himself into baseball’s Hall of Fame four days before when he won a no-hit, no-run game against the Boston Bees in Cincinnati. Practically the whole of Midland Park, N. J. (his home town) was in the stands to greet him. Dodger Pitcher Max Butcher threw the first ball, and the fans settled in their seats.

By the sixth inning, the 40,000 Brooklyn rooters began to twist their score cards. No Dodger had succeeded in getting a hit. Even hard-boiled sportswriters screamed “Come on, kid!” as the seventh inning began with young Vander Meer walking two batters. But Vander Meer, revolving through his elaborate windup and mixing his dazzling fast ball and his baffling curve, got out of that tight spot. In the ninth, young Vander Meer walked three more Dodgers. A tense silence settled over the stands as Manager Bill McKechnie, a smart manager of pitchers, strode out to the box and whispered in Vander Meer’s ear. Regaining control, Vander Meer made Ernie Koy hit a grounder for a putout.

With the bases loaded, with two out and the count two and two, Pitcher Vander Meer, who had struck out seven batters, thereupon made the pitch of his young lifetime, a fast one. Dodger Leo Durocher, a dangerous man in a pinch, brought ear-splitting Brooklyn cheers as he was put out on a fly to center. Young Johnny Vander Meer had won (6-to-0) his second no-hit, no-run game. Far, far rarer than two holes-in-one at golf, two loos at trapshooting, two 300s at bowling, it is the pinnacle of U. S. sporting performance. Only nine pitchers in the long history of major-league baseball had ever succeeded in getting two no-hit, no-run games in a lifetime. No one had ever done it twice in one season. Young Vander Meer, in his first full year in the major leagues, had done it twice within five days.

While Brooklyn fans were shouting to each other over this unexpected bargain performance, the unprecedented feat of Johnny Vander Meer spread all over the world. First to congratulate him was Spectator Babe Ruth. “Nice going, kid,” boomed the Babe, a pitcher once himself, as he put his arm around the youngster and blinked into the floodlights, doubtless recalling his own famed streaks of three homeruns in one game in the World Series of 1926, again in 1928.

“Believe me, that was the biggest kick of all,” said the 22-year-old son of a Jersey stone cutter next day as he was besieged by newshawks, radio scouts and theatrical agents. Taking his fishing rod, he went off for the day with the chief of police of his home town while Cincinnati townsfolk went wild. For the first time since 1919 there was talk of a National League pennant for the Reds (in third place and only four games behind the League-leading Giants). The club front office was stampeded for tickets. A sportswriter suggested that a statue of Vander Meer replace that of onetime U. S. President James A. Garfield in Garfield Square. In special session at Columbus, the Ohio Senate passed a resolution in “tribute to the newly crowned king of the baseball world.”

Meanwhile, there was great moaning in Brooklyn when its baseball fans read the life story of young Vander Meer in the newspapers. They were not stirred by the fact that he had pitched five no-hit, no-run games in one season when he was 16 (for New Jersey semi-pro teams), nor the fact that he had played the role of “the typical American boy” in a movie short, nor the fact that he had struck out 295 batters two years ago during the twelve weeks he was pitching for the Durham Bulls (a Red farm)—for an average of 12.33 Per nine-inning game—and was voted the No. 1 minor leaguer of the year. They were not concerned by the fact that he had won six games in a row this season (in which he allowed only three runs), and was leading the league in strikeouts with 65. What riled Brooklynites was the fact that Johnny Vander Meer had once been in the Dodgers training camp but they had let him go to Scranton. It was Larry MacPhail who had the foresight to buy him from Nashville in the summer of 1936 (for $17,500 cash and one player) after the wild young lefthander had been turned down by the Yankees, Red Sox and Giants.

Two days later, General Manager MacPhail again showed his sense of showmanship by signing Spectator Ruth as coach for the seventh-place Dodgers at a salary of $15,000 for the remainder of the season.

* Cincinnati is the only other city where major-league baseball is played at night.

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