Larsen's Mom Missed Son Don's WS Perfecto
Mother's Day Baseball Special
Cooperstown HOF Photo
On October 8, 1956, a Yankee Stadium crowd of 64,519 and millions more tuned in to watch World Series Game Five between the decade’s dominant teams, the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers. The series was tied at two games each with the starting pitchers, Don Larsen and Sal Maglie, owning dramatically different career records. Maglie had notched 108 major-league victories with only 49 setbacks, for a sparkling .688 winning percentage. New York countered with Larsen, who had a record of 30-40, .429. Larsen’s teammates were understandably flabbergasted when Yankees’ manager Casey Stengel instructed coach Frankie Crosetti to place a new baseball in #18’s spikes, the unspoken signal that the journeyman pitcher would start.
Maglie and Larsen matched each other pitch for pitch until the bottom of the fourth when Mickey Mantle, who won the 1956 American League MVP, parked one deep into the right field seats. In the Yankees’ sixth inning, Marine Corp Sergeant Hank Bauer knocked in the Bombers’ second run when he drove in third baseman Andy Carey. Plenty of defensive gems helped Larsen maintain perfection. In the top of the fifth, Mantle raced to the left-center field wall to catch a drive off Gil Hodges’ bat. Mantle said it was “the best catch I ever made.” When Larsen struck pinch hitter Dale Mitchell on a check swing to end the game, announcer Vin Scully expressed the opinion of millions when he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s the greatest game ever pitched in baseball history.”
Meanwhile, back in Larsen’s adopted San Diego hometown, his mother Charlotte was the only local who didn’t see her son throw a pitch. Interviewed by the San Diego Union-Tribune where Don had delivered morning newspapers as a boy, Mrs. Larsen admitted at the La Jolla rest home for the aged where she was employed as a housekeeper: “I just couldn’t bear to watch. If I had, I’m afraid I probably would have torn out my hair.” Mrs. Larsen nervously followed her son’s progress through second-hand reports from friends. But she had no inkling that he was pitching a perfect game and no-hitter until the contest was over.
“Every couple of minutes somebody would come and tell me how Don was getting along,” said Charlotte who made headlines in 1954 when she was lost in the Santa Rosa Mountains for four days. “But I had no inkling of the no-hitter. For some reason, that was never mentioned.” Charlotte didn’t know that baseball protocol forbade any mention of no-hitters in progress.
Though Mrs. Larsen refused to watch her son’s historic performance because of a superstition---“he loses when I watch” --- she was a baseball fan of long standing and was often in the stands when Don pitched at Point Loma High in the 1940s. When Larsen signed his first professional baseball contract with the old St. Louis Browns in 1947, his mother traveled to Aberdeen, S.D., where he was assigned, and stayed with him for three weeks. The Browns signed Larsen for a $500 bonus and $150 monthly salary.
Mrs. Larsen expected to see very little of her son during the off-season. “I guess they’ll keep him busy this winter talking about that no-hitter,” she said. “That’s one way to keep him from reading those funny [comic] books all the time. I never saw a boy spend so much time reading funny books.” The pitcher’s mother — happy, delighted, excited — admitted she was surprised by her son’s matchless performance. “I was always worried when he pitched,” she said, candidly. “People keep telling me I should have confidence, but I guess you know how that is. Mothers always worry about their boys. He’s a very good boy; he always has been. Don deserves everything he did today because he has worked extremely hard in baseball.”
No other pitcher in baseball history has thrown a perfect World Series game. Larsen, the 6’4” right-hander, returned to the mound in the 1962 post-season as a San Francisco Giant and was credited with a game four victory over his former Yankees team. Larsen moved on to pitch with little success for the Houston Colt .45s, the Baltimore Orioles and the Chicago Cubs before closing out his career, 81-91, with several minor league teams. Larsen worked in San Jose for 25 years as a paper salesman. When he retired, Larsen and his family moved to the shores of Hayden Lake, not far from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
In 2012 Larsen decided, albeit painfully, to sell his perfect game uniform and use the proceeds to pay for his grandchildren’s college educations. Larsen said, “I have thought about that perfect game, more than once a day, every day of my life since the day I threw it. October 8, 1956, was a mystical trip through fantasyland. Sometimes I still wonder whether it really all happened.” At auction, the uniform brought $756,000. Larsen died in 2020 from esophageal cancer.
Joe Guzzardi is a Society for American Baseball Research member. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com