Carl Erskine, one of the last living Brooklyn Dodgers and a mainstay of a pitching rotation that took the team to four World Series in the 1950s before moving to Los Angeles, has died in his hometown of Anderson, Indiana.
Erskine, a thoughtful man who turned to charity work later in life, died early Tuesday morning after a short illness. He was 97.
Erskine was part of a near-mythical group of ballplayers anointed “The Boys of Summer” by author Roger Kahn, playing alongside Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella and Jackie Robinson, who became his best friend on the team. Later in life, Erskine credited Robinson with teaching him some of life’s most important lessons: tolerance, patience, caring and understanding.
Erskine said he was dismayed by the racial taunts against Robinson after he became the first black player in Major League Baseball. He said Robinson received death threats, was generally prohibited from staying with his white teammates in hotels while on the road, and had teammates who refused to play with him. In Atlanta, he said, black fans could not buy tickets and were forced to watch Robinson play from an embankment behind the right-field fence.
Years later, he said, he visited Atlanta and saw a statue of Henry Aaron where black fans once gathered. “That’s a big step forward,” he told Times columnist Patt Morrison in 2013.
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On the field, Erskine was known for his strong overhand curveball and his reliability as a starting pitcher in twelve seasons with the Dodgers, in Brooklyn and Los Angeles. By the time he retired early in the 1959 season, he had compiled a record of 122 wins and 78 losses and a 4.00 earned run average. He threw two no-hitters: against the Chicago Cubs in 1952, including an hour-long rain delay in which he missed a perfect game after walking a relief pitcher; and in 1956 against the team’s feared rivals, the New York Giants.
The latter was particularly sweet, Erskine said, because Giants scout Tom Sheehan was quoted in a New York newspaper the day of the game that the Dodgers were no longer a powerhouse because Robinson and Campanella were too old and that Erskine “no longer a could be a powerhouse’. “I won’t win with the trash he threw.”
“After the last play, Jackie ran to the Giants dugout where the scout was sitting, pulled the article out of his back pocket, waved it at him and yelled, ‘What do you think of that crap?’” Erskine said in a 2012 interview. interview. “That’s how fierce our rivalry was with the Giants in New York.”
Arguably the highlight of Erskine’s career came in Game 3 of the 1953 World Series against the Dodgers’ other crosstown foe, the New York Yankees. After being shelled and ejected early in Game 1, Erskine returned as the Game 3 starter and retired a then-World Series-record 14 batters – including future Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle four times – in a 3- 2 win at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. .
“I didn’t know anything about the record until I walked into the clubhouse and the writers came in and told me,” Erskine said. “They announced it over the PA system, but I was so oblivious to everything but what I was doing on the hill that I didn’t even hear it.”
The Dodgers ultimately lost the series, four games to two. His World Series strikeout record stood until 1963, when fellow Dodger Sandy Koufax retired 15 Yankees in Game 1 en route to a Dodgers sweep.
Listed at 6-foot-1 and 165 pounds, Erskine made his big league debut on July 25, 1948 against the Pirates at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. He entered the game as a reliever in the bottom of the seventh inning with the Dodgers trailing 5-3 and pitched a scoreless inning, walking two before hitting future Hall of Famer Ralph Kiner, then the National League’s home run leader brought the line. in an inning-ending double play.
Erskine was brought in for a pinch-hitter and the Dodgers scored three runs in the top of the eighth and won, giving him his first victory.
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In his third Major League game, eleven days later against the Cubs, Erskine strained a muscle in his right shoulder, an injury from which he never fully recovered. He pitched in pain for the rest of his career.
“I never wanted to be known as a pitcher with sore arms, so I didn’t say much about it,” Erskine said. “I received the best possible treatment myself. I took a lot of cortisone injections. But I have never opted for a start in my entire career.”
By the time he retired, he had a winning record in eleven of his twelve Major League seasons.
Erskine’s best season came in 1953, when he won 20 games while losing only six, including throwing a now-unheard of 16 complete games while posting a 3.54 ERA. Thanks in no small part to Erskine, the Dodgers won the National League pennant that year before losing another heartbreaking World Series to the Yankees, having taken the series three games to two.
In the 1955 World Series, in which the Dodgers finally defeated the Yankees after five previous attempts, Erskine started Game 4. He gave up three runs in three innings and was called in for a pinch-hitter. The Dodgers went on to win the game 8-5.
When the Dodgers won the Series three days later, Erskine remembers the contrasting emotions of a team that had waited so long for that moment. As the final out was recorded, the Dodgers heckled starter Johnny Podres during a raucous celebration on the mound.
“But as we pulled into the driveway to our clubhouse after realizing we had finally beaten the Yankees in the World Series, we were more reverent than loud,” Erskine said. “Before the writers came in, there was no noise in the clubhouse and there were tears in the eyes of more than one player.”
By the end of the 1957 season, Erskine was considering retirement as the team prepared to move to Los Angeles. But with Robinson traded to the Giants (he retired rather than play for “the enemy”) and Campanella paralyzed in a car accident, Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley couldn’t afford another of the losing the team’s big names, and he asked Erskine for another year.
Erskine agreed, and he stood on the mound of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on April 18, 1958 for the Dodgers’ first regular-season game in the team’s new hometown against the now San Francisco Giants, whom they defeated and Erskine got the credit for it. the victory. He retired the following year at the age of 32.
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Erskine last appeared on the field at Dodger Stadium on Opening Day in 2008, marking the team’s 50th anniversary in Los Angeles. As the soundtrack to the baseball movie “Field of Dreams” played over the speakers, Erskine was one of 50 Dodger greats who took the field during a pregame ceremony. He was also one of three Dodgers pitchers – along with Koufax and Don Newcombe – who threw out the first pitch at the same time that day.
Ahead of the 60th anniversary of Robinson breaking baseball’s so-called color barrier in 1947, Erskine said he was asked by McGraw Hill Publishing to write about what it was like to be Robinson’s teammate.
In “What I Learned From Jackie Robinson” with co-author Burton Harris, Erskine wrote that his experiences as Robinson’s teammate and close friend helped him prepare for another difficult challenge in life: being a parent to a child with autism syndrome Down.
Erskine’s fourth child, Jimmy, was born with the genetic condition in 1960 – a time when society did not understand the condition or fully accept the children who had it.
“I often felt that Jackie came into my life to teach me how to channel energy and anger into what was happening around me, while Jimmy and society were not accepting of Down syndrome and other birth defects,” Erskine said to Morrison.
“Jackie’s impact created momentum for Americans to see things differently.”
Erskine’s son competed in the Special Olympics as a swimmer, and the chapter on Jimmy from Erskine’s book was consolidated into a pamphlet now distributed by the Special Olympics. Erskine and his wife, Betty, later founded a nonprofit organization to raise money for the Special Olympics.
Jimmy went to work at an Applebee’s restaurant in Anderson, where Erskine dropped him off and picked him up every day. Jimmy died in 2023 at the age of 63.
“Carl was an All-Star, a World Series champion, a true ally of Jackie Robinson and more in the pursuit of equality, and a trailblazing advocate for people with special needs, inspired by his son Jimmy,” the Dodgers said in a rack.
Carl Daniel Erskine was born on December 13, 1926 in Anderson. He played American Legion baseball as a youth and on the high school team. He was drafted into the Navy in 1945-46 and joined the Dodgers organization when he was discharged. He pitched four seasons in the minor leagues before reaching the major leagues.
Read more: Patt Morrison: Dodger great Carl Erskine – pitching parity
After his baseball career, Erskine returned to Anderson and sold insurance for four years before joining First National Bank of Madison County and later becoming president. He also served a term as president of the Indiana Bankers Assn. Erskine retired from banking in 1999.
But Erskine couldn’t get baseball out of his system, and he ended up coaching for 12 seasons at Anderson University, a small private Christian university, where he won four conference championships. He was also a founding member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. In 1971, Erskine Street in Brooklyn, not far from the former site of Ebbets Field, was named after the former pitcher.
In contrast to the high-profile lives of some of his teammates, Erskine took a certain pride in being “bland.”
“I’ve had one hometown, played for one team, had one wife and hit one home run,” he said. “Nothing special.”
Stanton is the former editor of The Times.
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
