Red Smith was the sports columnist for the Herald Tribune. His literacy and humor put him at the top of his class, later winning him a Pulitzer.
This day he wrote in “Views of Sports” on the success of the exhibition season. The fans were eagerly anticipating the return of real baseball after the wartime drought when many of the top players were in the service. They had turned out in large numbers. The paper also ran the gung-ho predictions of the league presidents, an AP story that also ran in the Times that day.
Specifically he wrote about Saturday's game between the Yankees and the Dodgers. His account was so vivid and detailed, the reader almost felt as if he were there. “The crowd came trooping through the cold grayness of the Brooklyn streets,” he wrote, “chattering and jostling and elbowing, converging on seamed and shabby Ebbets Field.” Almost 250,000 people already had paid to see the Yankees in exhibition this Spring. They had to call a game in Baltimore after eight innings because they couldn't get the fans off the field.
Yankee manager Joe McCarthy, his “hands thrust into the pockets of a new woolen windbreaker” shook his head in amazement over the size of the crowd. Later he reluctantly shed the coat for photographs when he was reminded he would look strange wearing a coat if the photo ran in the summer.
The Dodgers took to the field “to a burst of yelling” but manager Leo Durocher was not yet among them. “He turned up later in the press room upstairs, a spectacle of surprising beauty in a camel's-hair topcoat over an electric blue ensemble with a superbly snappy bow tie,” wrote Smith.
“'Get a load of that,'” Smith reported fellow sports writer Tom Meany saying. “'You can't tell whether he's managing the Dodgers or Abercrombie & Fitch.'” Durocher was under attack at this time for his flashy lifestyle and reputed association with gamblers. He would be suspended from the game for a year in 1947.
Durocher had a lot on his mind. He and Branch Rickey had to make a lot of cuts from the team's large spring roster. On top of that, he was doing Fred Allen's radio show Sunday “and they're changing the script.”
Smith wrote that you might have thought the stadium was packed with Yankee fans from the cheers that went up when Joe DiMaggio homered in the eighth but Smith said they weren't cheering for Joe so much as for the return of big league baseball. When Ed Stevens had a two-hit homer in the ninth someone seated near first base flung a milk bottle on to the field either out of exuberance or as practice for the season ahead, according to Smith.