Sal Maglie: Baseball’s Demon Barber (review)

Salvatore Anthony Maglie, the subject of Judith Testa’s fascinating new book, won 119 major league games, mostly for the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s. The starting pitcher in the third National League playoff game in 1951 (won on Bobby Thomson’s home run), the first game of the 1954 World Series (highlighted by Willie Mays’s catch), and the fifth game of the 1956 World Series (losing to Don Larsen’s perfect game), Maglie was a central figure in events that have filled several other books.

Testa relives those stories, but she digs much deeper. She tells Maglie’s baseball story beginning with semipro ball around his native Niagara Falls in the late 1930s, through several minor league stops, the Mexican League, the Cuban Winter League, the outlaw Provincial League, and the major leagues as a player and coach. Testa deems it all essential, providing readable detail on his baseball life, sometimes game by game.

But there is more. As the author promises us in the preface, “This is above all a book about a man who played baseball, rather than a baseball book” (xi). Testa unquestionably delivers on this promise. Rather than portraying Maglie as a baseball player who briefly returns home to Niagara Falls every off-season, Testa presents him as a Niagara Falls resident who left for spring training in February and returned in October. Maglie the husband, the father, the friend, the man, is front and center.

Let’s start with the baseball, touching on a few big stories. One of the more fascinating events in Maglie’s career was his two-year stint (from 1946 to 1947) pitching for the Puebla Parrots in the Mexican League. The reader is likely familiar with this baseball tale: the millionaire Pasquel brothers lured several big league players to the Mexican League, leading to disillusionment (and “lifetime” suspensions) for stars like Max Lanier and Mickey Owen. Sal Maglie was the exception. He went to Mexico a fringe major leaguer, but under the tutelage of the great Dolf Luque, Maglie turned into a pitcher with, in the words of Leo Durocher, “three curve balls and the guts of a burglar.” He also employed a fastball that might graze the batter’s chin and a cold stare that gave Maglie his enduring nickname: the Barber. As Testa properly writes, Maglie was the only player of this period to spend time in Mexico and come back the better for it. Without Mexico, without Luque, Maglie’s huge role in 1950s baseball does not happen.

After the Mexican League, Maglie spent two years playing for “outlaw” teams, until Commissioner Albert “Happy” Chandler reinstated the “defectors” before the 1950 season. The thirty-three-year-old Maglie owned four major-league wins. Rejoining the New York Giants, he immediately became one of baseball’s best pitchers, piling up a record of 59-18 over the next three years. His great performances over this period, including the legendary 1951 pennant race, and his central role in the feud with the Brooklyn Dodgers, are retold from Maglie’s point of view. The depths of this rivalry cannot be overstated. Maglie and Jackie Robinson, Maglie and Carl Furillo—these men did not like each other.

In fact, by the time the reader gets to the next big story in Maglie’s baseball life—his May 1956 sale from the Indians to the Dodgers—it seems unimaginable. Maglie was a thirty-nine-year-old pitcher who had been discarded by two teams in less than a year, and he was disliked or hated by many of the Dodger players. Was Buzzy Bavasi out of his mind?

He was not. Maglie was welcomed by the Dodgers, even by Furillo, who became one of Maglie’s best friends on the team. (Testa’s recounting of their initial frosty meeting as teammates is particularly fascinating.) Maglie got a start on May 30, his first win on June 4, and finished 13-5 for a team...