Joe Page

October 6, 1947. Yankee Stadium, Game 7 of the World Series, and the Yankees' starter was already gone by the second inning. Manager Bucky Harris handed the ball to a 29-year-old left-hander with one of the nastiest fastballs in the league and, historically speaking, no reliable idea where it was going. Joe Page threw five scoreless innings and closed out a championship.

Page was the New York Yankees' left-handed relief pitcher from 1944 to 1950, and the man most credited with inventing the modern closer role. Pitching almost exclusively out of the bullpen (first for Harris, then for Casey Stengel), he anchored two championship teams, set a single-season saves record in 1949, and won the inaugural Babe Ruth Award as World Series MVP -- all while carrying a fastball that, on its worst nights, he couldn't find the plate with at all.

From the Coal Towns to the Bronx

Joseph Francis Page was born October 28, 1917, in Cherry Valley, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Springdale, a coal-and-mill town outside Pittsburgh. He was a big kid -- 6-foot-3, a left arm that made scouts stop what they were doing. Yankees scout Bill Haddock spotted him and pushed head scout Paul Krichell to take a look. The Yankees signed him and sent him through the same farm system that had already developed Rizzuto -- a pipeline that, a few years later, would also produce the pitching staff Page shared a bullpen with.

The arm was never the question. The command was. At Newark in 1943, Page went 14-5 with a 3.05 ERA and three shutouts -- and walked 119 batters against 140 strikeouts (numbers that tell you exactly what kind of pitcher the Yankees were betting on). That's a live fastball with no idea where it was going, and it's a description that followed Page for most of his career.

A Rookie Who Couldn't Find the Zone

Page debuted on April 19, 1944, against Boston -- two scoreless innings, two strikeouts, no walks, a tease of what the command could look like on a good day. He started 16 games as a rookie and relieved in three more, made the All-Star team, and spent the next two years bouncing between promise and frustration as a swingman who couldn't stick in a rotation.

Then came the flight to Detroit.

The Flight That Ended McCarthy's Tenure

Late May 1946. The Yankees had just dropped two straight to Cleveland, and manager Joe McCarthy, drinking hard through a stretch that was wearing on everybody, chewed Page out on the team flight for staying out too late. McCarthy never showed up for the next series in Detroit. He resigned by telegram from his farm days later, citing his health -- the defining moment of a chaotic 1946 season that saw three different managers run the club.

Page didn't cause McCarthy's exit -- the gall bladder trouble and the drinking had been building for years -- but he was the guy standing there when the dam broke. It's a strange footnote for a 28-year-old reliever to carry: you didn't just pitch for the Yankees, you were there when a Hall of Fame manager's tenure ended on a plane over Ohio.

Harris Makes Him a Fireman

Bucky Harris took over as manager in 1947 and made the decision that defined Page's career: he stopped trying to make him a starter. Every appearance out of the bullpen, when the game was on the line, as often as his arm could take it. The results were immediate.

All 14 of those 1947 wins came in relief -- an American League record for a reliever at the time. Page finished fourth in AL MVP voting, behind DiMaggio, and he did it as a guy who'd been unable to hold a rotation spot the year before.

Five Innings That Made Him Famous

The 1947 World Series against Brooklyn went seven games, and Game 7 came down to one man. Spec Shea got knocked out early -- Brooklyn led 2-0 by the second inning -- and Harris turned to Bill Bevens for 2⅔ scoreless innings of bridge work. Then, in the fifth, he handed the ball to Page.

Page threw five scoreless innings. He allowed one hit. He ended it by getting Eddie Miksis to hit into a game-ending double play. Final score: Yankees 5, Dodgers 2, 11th championship in franchise history. The Gionfriddo catch in Game 6 is the moment everybody remembers from that series. Game 7 belonged entirely to Page.

The Collapse

Then 1948 happened. Page was sharp through the first half and fell apart after the All-Star break -- his ERA reportedly climbed past 8.00 in July alone. He finished 7-8 with a 4.26 ERA, more than a run and a half worse than the year before. The command problems that had chased him since Newark hadn't gone away. They'd just been hiding.

Nobody would have blamed the Yankees for giving up on him.

Stengel's Fireman

Casey Stengel took over in 1949 and used Page differently than any manager had used a reliever before -- not as innings depth, but as a dedicated closer, brought in specifically to end games rather than patch them together (a job description that didn't really have a name yet). Page rewarded him with the best season of his career: 13-8, a 2.59 ERA, and 27 saves, a new major league record that shattered the mark of 22 Firpo Marberry had set back in 1926. He led the majors in appearances and games finished. Twenty-three years between records, and the guy who broke it was still walking too many hitters to sleep easy about it.

Game 3, and the Inaugural Babe Ruth Award

The 1949 World Series, again against Brooklyn, is where Page cemented his place in the sport's history rather than just the Yankees'. In Game 3 at Ebbets Field, he relieved starter Tommy Byrne in the fourth inning and threw 4⅔ scoreless innings. Johnny Mize pinch-hit a two-run single off Ralph Branca in the ninth, Jerry Coleman added another RBI single, and the Yankees led 4-1. Then Page gave up back-to-back solo home runs to Luis Olmo and Roy Campanella in the bottom of the ninth -- 4-3, suddenly a one-run game with the tying run at the plate. He struck out pinch-hitter Bruce Edwards to end it.

Across three appearances that series, Page went 1-0 with a 2.00 ERA and 8 strikeouts. He won the first-ever Babe Ruth Award, established that year as the World Series MVP honor and named for a Yankee who'd died the previous August. Nobody had won it before him. That's the whole point of an inaugural award -- somebody has to be first, and in 1949, it was the reliever nobody trusted to throw strikes five years earlier.

The Fade

The command that had always been Page's problem finally caught up to him for good. By mid-September 1950, his ERA had climbed past 5.00, and he wasn't on the roster when the Yankees swept the Phillies in that October's World Series. He hurt his arm in spring training the following year, spent 1951 in the minors, and quit outright after three appearances with Triple-A Syracuse in 1952 at age 34. A brief comeback with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1954 -- mop-up innings, nothing more -- closed out the career for good on May 25 of that year.

Life After the Mound

Page settled back near Pittsburgh and ran bars for a living -- The Bullpen in Irwin, Pennsylvania (fittingly enough), and later Page's Rocky Lodge near Laughlintown. He remained a regular at Yankees Old-Timers' Day through the 1960s. A heart attack in 1970 nearly killed him; open-heart surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital saved him, and he lived another decade before heart failure took him on April 21, 1980, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. He was 62.

The fastball that spent most of a career refusing to find the strike zone found it exactly when it mattered most -- twice, in October, with a championship on the line. That's the whole Joe Page story in one sentence. The command never really arrived. The results, when it counted, did.