* Claims about Larsen Series gem seem odd … on Paper

Lew Paper, that is, author of the new book on Don Larsen’s World series no-hitter.

Bill Littlefield offered this commentary on the Oct. 17 episode of Only a Game:

In a new book misleadingly titled Perfect: Don Larsen’s Miraculous World Series Game and the Men Who Made It Happen, Lew Paper, the author, tells a baseball story I’d never heard.

Paper says that years after Don Larsen of the Yankees beat the Dodgers in the only no-hit, no-walk game ever to occur during the World Series, Dodgers outfielder Duke Snider claimed that the man calling balls and strikes during that game, Babe Pinelli, had essentially acknowledged that he bagged the gem for Larsen.

It was the umpire’s final game before retirement, and Paper has Snider saying “Babe Pinelli told me that he wanted to go out on a no-bitter in a World Series. That was the last day he was going to umpire, so anything close was a strike.”

The critical “anything” in this case was the final pitch of the game, the called third strike on Dale Mitchell which all the Dodgers — then of Brooklyn — and most of the Yankees, then, as now, of New York, agreed was well outside the strike zone.

Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. Maybe Mitchell would have swung at and missed the next pitch or maybe he’d have popped it up or maybe hit it far enough to require one of the Yankee outfielders to have made a spectacular catch.

But it does matter, doesn’t it? I mean, if you’re say 61 and you’ve thought since 1956, when you were eight, that Don Larsen’s achievement represented one of the very few flawless performances ever submitted by any athlete in any sport anywhere, how do you like learning that the called strike that sealed the deal was at best dubious and at worst a fraud.

Anybody who’s 61 knows that lots of pro athletes are clods, just as they know that no insurance company is in business to be your good neighbor and that there are any number of beers at least as drinkable and much more satisfying than the one that claims to be the king. But why this story? Because shouldn’t some illusions endure? The one that is inseparable from the image of Yankees catcher Yogi Berra charging out the mound to throw himself into Don Larsen’s arms, for example? The one that had appended to it that most unlikely adjective, “perfect”? The one that transpired when a particular eight year old was still innocent, incapable of even imaging a termite in the edifice of the umpire’s integrity?

As I’ve written here many times, memory can play tricks on a player over the years. Balls go farther, statistics increase, situations get enhanced. But this is something different. How is it we’ve never heard Snider’s allegations before? And why is it buried so deeply within the book? When Joshua Prager came out with The Echoing Green in which he asserted that the Giants stole signs all year, a practice which helped them beat the Dodgers on Bobby Thomson’s dramatic home run, it was big news. I would imagine that similar sentiments about the umpire that called Larsen’s game would rank right up there.