Subway Series: Deja Vu All Over Again
Oct. 21, 2000 — -- Norman Kurland loved the Brooklyn Dodgers so much as a 12-year-old that he sneaked out of school and slipped into Ebbets Field without a ticket in 1956, just so he could see game two of what turned out to be New York’s last Subway Series — until now.
The editor of The Flushing Faithful, a monthly publication about the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York baseball in the 1950s, is not so excited about this year’s series because he believes the relationship between fans and their teams has grown too impersonal.
But with the first Subway Series in 44 years beginning tonight, a whole new generation of New Yorkers is going gaga over baseball, with a sea of Mets and Yankees paraphernalia on display in the city.
It’s deja vu all over again, as 1950s Yankees great Yogi Berra might say.
“I hope this lasts for four or five years,” Berra said this week. “New York fans, they know their baseball.”
Changing Times
But still, even the most rabid Mets and Yankees fans with memories of subway series agree with Kurland:
Times have changed since the days of 25 cent hot dogs and blue-collar players.
And baseball, while still being good-old-baseball at heart, is different, too.
“The game’s changed and it is probably less subtle,” says David Halberstam, who grew up a Yankees fan and wrote about it in Summer of ’49. “Today’s players are bigger, better and faster. [But] they don’t do certain things as well. They don’t bunt as well.”
Then there’s the designated hitter rule, artificial turf, interleague play, rowdier fans who no longer wear hats and suits to the games, higher ticket and concession prices, free agency, higher player salaries, less-accessible players and longer games.
‘Capital of the World’
Despite all the changes, there was similar excitement in the city over the Subway Series in 1956, the seventh such matchup in a decade, those who remember say.
Back then, newspapers published special editions, business activity ebbed noticably as series games flowed over the airwaves, kids rushed home from school to catch the broadcasts, people asked each other on the street what the score was, and fans gathered in front of storefronts to watch games on televisions.
“There was a sense, and justifiably so, that New York was the capital of the world,” says Roger Kahn, author of The Boys of Summer, about the Dodgers of the 1950s. “Let’s see if [the Mets and Yankees] do it three years in a row. Then we might have something equivalent to the Subway Series of the ’40s and ’50s.”
Kahn thinks it might be possible for the two teams to repeat in coming years, but Berra says in an age of free agency and players moving from team to team it will be hard to keep an all-New York World Series dynasty going.
$33,000 For Mantle
Back in the 1950s, players were bound to their teams by their contracts. It heightened fan loyalty by keeping players in one place, but also kept salaries artificially low.
In 1956, the Yankees had the highest payroll in baseball, at $492,000 per year, proving that “some things never change,” according to Doug Pappas, chairman of the Business of Baseball Committee for the Society for American Baseball Research. The figure would equal about $3 million today if adjusted for inflation. The Dodgers had the second-highest payroll at $472,000, and the Washington Senators the lowest at $215,250.
Among the highest-paid players were Ted Williams at $100,000 — equal to about $605,000 today — and Stan Musial at $80,000, Pappas says. Among the World Series participants, Berra made $50,000, Roy Campanella made $42,000, Gil Hodges made $35,000, Mickey Mantle made $33,000, Phil Rizzuto made $30,000 and Sandy Koufax, a rookie that year, made the major league minimum of $6,000 — a bit more than $36,000 today when adjusted for inflation.
Players have always gotten bonuses for appearing the World Series. That money meant a lot to the old-time players, who often had to work second jobs in the off-season to make ends meet.
This year, as of August 31, the Yankees once again had the highest team payroll, at $112 million, Pappas says. The Mets payroll was $81.8 million, and the average team payroll was $54.7 million.
On Friday, Carlos Delgado of the Toronto Blue Jays signed a four-year contract that will give him baseball’s highest average annual salary, at $17 million. The major league minimum is now $200,000.
Days of the 25-Cent Hot Dog
These days it seems you need a baseball salary to be able to afford the concession stands at games.
World Series tickets at Ebbets Field or Yankee Stadium ranged at least from $2.10 to $10.50, according to ticket stubs and other records cited by researchers. That range would be $12.70 to $63.51 in 1999 dollars.
A World Series program cost 50 cents in 1956, says Tim Wiles, director of research at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. The following season, you could get a Dodger t-shirt at Ebbets Field for $1.50, a baseball cap for $1 or $2, a Dodger yearbook or a pennant for 50 cents, and a Dodger pen and pencil set for 75 cents.
At Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, a hot dog, egg sandwich, cheese sandwich or barbecue beef sandwich cost 25 cents in 1957. An ice cream, soda, popcorn or peanuts cost just 15 cents. At Yankee Stadium in the 1950s, cigarettes cost a quarter, peanuts, a scorecard or candy cost 10 cents and chewing gum cost just 5 cents.
These days, at most parks, it costs about $3.50 for a hot dog and nearly as much for a soda. Face value of tickets to this year’s World Series range from $50 to $160 at both Shea Stadium and Yankee Stadium.
Paradise in Brooklyn
That’s a far cry from the price Kurland payed to see a World Series game in 1956 — nothing.
“I got out of school at 12 [noon] and I told my parents I wasn’t going to come home for lunch,” he says. He tricked a ticket taker at the Ebbets Field bleachers by saying he’d been separated from his father, who had the tickets. The ticket taker told him to get his father to verify the story; he was in. Eventually, a policeman he knew let him beyond the standing-room-only area to where the seats were.
Brooklyn fell behind 6-0 in the second inning, but came back to beat the Yankees 13-8.
Heaven, according to Brooklynites like Kurland.
Unfortunately for them, it didn’t last. As they almost always did, the Yankees came back to beat the Dodgers in the series. Two years later, the Dodgers and Giants were playing in Los Angeles, ushering in a long, cold stretch of New York baseball without a Subway Series.
“My dad was the biggest Brooklyn Dodger fan that you would ever meet,” Kurland recalls. “He bought a television in 1952 for the simple reason to watch the Brooklyn Dodger games, and wouldn’t allow us to turn it on when it wasn’t a Dodger game.
“When the Dodgers left he never spoke about baseball again and never went to another game until he retired to Florida,” Kurland adds. “On a particular Father’s Day back in the mid-60s, I bought tickets to Shea Stadium and he wouldn’t go. It was like the Dodgers had broken his heart. So I think that happened with a lot of people.”
As further proof that those times are gone, kids today won’t be able to sneak out of school and into the game. And they won’t get to listen to Subway Series games on the school radio as a reward for good behavior in class either, as Kurland did. All this year’s games are scheduled at night.
“I’m not going to the current [Subway Series], and I can explain to you why: There isn’t that camaraderie that I saw between the Brooklyn Dodgers, and their fans, and the borough of Brooklyn,” Kurland says. “The Dodgers lived in our neighborhoods. They had time to talk to us. Autographs didn’t cost anything.”
Brooklyn Who? Go Mets!
But if he were 12 again, Kurland admits, perhaps he’d be as Subway Series-crazed as some other Brooklyn Dodgers faithful.
“Baseball is still baseball,” says Marty Adler, president of the Brooklyn Dodger Hall of Fame in Brooklyn. “We in Brooklyn remember our Dodgers fondly.… [But] we’re rooting for the Mets, because the Mets are an extension of the Brooklyn Dodgers.”
“At last, I think people of Brooklyn are saying, ‘We lost the Dodgers and we don’t need them anymore,’” Kahn says. “They have the Subway Series and they have the Mets.”
“However the owners mess it up, baseball is still the greatest game ever created, including Monopoly,” he says.