RIP Carl Erskine, Who Was So Much More Than a Bounced Curveball
It would be reassuring to think the Brooklyn Dodgers will never fade from history, since love ’em or hate ’em they played out one of America’s great sports dramas of the 20th century.
It was a story that could have been lifted from parables of the ancient Greek or Roman gods. After decades of futility they built one of baseball’s greatest teams, only to come up excruciatingly short every year until one magic season, 1955, when they defied the universe and won the World Series. Then, as if to say “Our work is done here,” two years later they were gone, decamped to Los Angeles.
Sixty-seven years down the road they are still gone, and if they endure in history, they are vanishing from living memory. You have to be about 75 years old to have seen a game at the long-vanished Ebbets Field or followed the Brooklyn Dodgers on New York area TV or radio.
Perhaps even more tangibly, Tuesday’s death of Carl Erskine, age 97, takes away the last of the “Boys of Summer,” the wistful tag put on the 1950s Dodgers teams by writer Roger Kahn.
Five men remain alive who wore a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform, including Bob Aspromonte, Jim Gentile, Fred Kipp and Tommy Brown, who made his Dodgers debut at the age of 16 in 1944, when most of the older players were wearing the kind of uniform where the other team was Japan and Nazi Germany.
It’s an impressive achievement to make the Major Leagues under any circumstance, so it’s not a dismissal to say those four players were peripheral to the Dodgers. The fifth living man who wore the Brooklyn uniform, fellow named Sandy Koufax, was a bit more consequential, but while he was a Brooklyn native, he made his most indelible mark in Los Angeles.
Erskine played briefly in L.A. But he was a Brooklyn Dodger, and a good one. He pitched two of the seven no-hitters thrown by anyone in baseball in the 1950s, he led the National League in winning percentage in 1953 and for a decade he held the record for most strikeouts, 14, in a World Series game. (That record was broken a decade later by Koufax.)
He finished his career with a 122–78 record, which isn’t a Hall of Fame number, but places him among the best pitchers of his time. It’s notable that he did it with a career-long sore arm, reflecting the fact that the treatment for sore arms in baseball then was taken from the playbook of General George Patton: “Get back out there and fight, you whining malingerer.”
The Boys of Summer included a fascinating mix of human beings as well as terrific athletes. There was Jackie Robinson, of course, who broke Major League Baseball’s color line in 1947, alongside Gil Hodges, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, Preacher Roe, Joe Black, Junior Gilliam, Billy Cox, Carl Furillo, Pee Wee Reese and a revolving cast of characters who all looked majestic on their baseball cards.
Erskine could in many ways be called the normal one. He grew up in the small town of Anderson, Indiana, to which he would eventually return and where he was living when he died. When old-timers dust off the phrase “salt of the earth,” or sigh over good old days that in many cases never existed, they are envisioning a world populated by the likes of Carl Erskine.
Erskine doubtless had moments of anger and petulance, as we all do. But there is virtually unanimous agreement that his public demeanor and behavior reflected the kind of calm, reason and compassion that we’d like to think characterizes the best side of Americans.
Snider, who was Erskine’s roommate on road trips throughout the 1950s, wrote in his 1988 autobiography that Erskine was “the most modest guy in the world . . . [And] he couldn’t tell a falsehood if his life depended on it.”
Robinson, in his 1960 book Wait ’Til Next Year, wrote, “I’ll never forget how Carl Erskine symbolized, at least for me, what a Christian is supposed to be. . . . There was no condescension, no conscious effort to be nice. I got the feeling that because of his religious principles and upbringing, race truly meant nothing to Carl.”
Erskine returned that compliment to Robinson, noting that when he was called up to the Dodgers in 1948, a kid afraid the veterans would want nothing to do with him, Robinson was the first to come over and shake his hand.
Erskine also became good friends with Campanella, explaining to Kahn that when a pitcher and catcher work together for years, they develop a personal bond. After Campanella was paralyzed in an auto accident before the 1958 season, Erskine was the first teammate to visit him in the hospital.
Erskine himself, had he been asked, very likely would have said his most satisfying achievement did not play out on a baseball diamond.
He retired in 1959, his arm so sore he said he sometimes wasn’t sure his pitches could reach the plate. Since baseball pay was a bit lower in those days — Erskine’s peak salary was $27,500 in 1954, reduced to $22,000 by 1958 — players who retired had to immediately find jobs to put food on the table. Erskine was talking with a sportswear company in New York and worrying about whether he could afford a $35,000 house in Westchester.
His wife Betty was pregnant at the time with their fourth child, whom they would name Jimmy. Jimmy was born with Down Syndrome. Carl and Betty were advised to put him in a facility. Instead Carl dropped his New York plans and the family moved back to Anderson, where he felt they could more easily raise Jimmy themselves. They remained there for the rest of Carl’s life — and the life of Jimmy, who stayed home and was eventually employed at a local sheltered workshop until he died in 2023.
Erskine got into finance, becoming president of a local bank. He coached baseball teams and did some radio and TV broadcasting. He was active with the Baseball Assistance Team, a non-profit that helps former players with problems like medical bills. He and Betty helped found a sport medicine and rehabilitation center, and he worked regularly with the Special Olympics. He also donated land for a town school.
Clearly a good guy. But as all long-time Dodgers fans know, there is one seeming shadow that can’t be ignored on Carl Erskine’s record.
On Oct. 3, 1951, the Dodgers and the New York Giants were locked in a winner-take-all playoff game to decide the National League pennant. The Dodgers led 4–2 in the ninth inning when Dodgers manager Chuck Dressen decided to pull Newcombe and bring in a relief pitcher.
He had Erskine and Ralph Branca warming up in the bullpen, and when he called coach Clyde Sukeforth to get a report on how that was going, Sukeforth said Erskine had just “bounced a curveball.” That wasn’t what Dressen wanted to hear, so he summoned Branca, who promptly gave up a three-run homer to Bobby Thomson that clinched the game and pennant for the Giants.
It will forever remain the worst moment in Brooklyn Dodgers history.
Erskine was often asked about that infamous curveball, and he would sometimes joke that it was the best pitch of his career. More seriously, he would explain correctly that a sharply dropping curveball was his money pitch. Campanella even gave it a tag, saying that when Erskine threw it well he had “buried it,” making the batter flail and miss.
The “bounced” curveball, Erskine said, was simply a ball he had “buried.”
In any case, that moment aside, maybe the only person to offer any caution about Carl Erskine was Carl Erskine.
He told Kahn in 1972 that in retrospect, he was troubled by his silence when the Dodgers went on the road in the late ’40s and early ’50s and Robinson could not stay in the segregated hotels that housed the team. “Why?” Erskine said to Kahn. “Why didn’t I say, ‘Something’s wrong here. I’m not going to let this happen. Wherever he’s going, I’m going with him.’ I never did. I sat there like everybody else and thought, ‘Good. He’s getting a chance to play Major League ball. Isn’t that great?’ “
It was, of course, and at the time it felt like an extraordinary advance all by itself. It also helped pave the path toward the next steps, and Carl Erskine was part of that, just as he was part of an exceptional baseball team.
