On Friday, Oct. 24, the 121st World Series will begin—bringing with it daily debates about who deserves to be named the Willie Mays World Series Most Valuable Player. This year will mark the 70th time a World Series MVP award has been given.
The award’s genesis can be found in New York, in July 1954. A portable transistor radio balanced precariously on the top beam of a peeling white picket fence as the voice of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ young radio announcer, Vin Scully, wafted through the hot summer afternoon air. The names of legendary Dodgers like Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Johnny Podres, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese and Gil Hodges peppered Scully’s play-by-play patter as he broadcast the action to the Dodgers’ loyal fans.
Next-door neighbors Ed Fitzgerald—my father—and Gerald Woodall, aka Uncle Gerry, perspired in the July heat as they applied the annual fresh coat of paint to the fence separating our homes on Longview Drive in suburban in Eastchester, N.Y. These two friends and neighbors, when not living the idyllic suburban life, pursued careers in the heart of Manhattan, 15 miles to the south. Gerry was a high-ranking executive at General Motors, and Ed had risen to the rank of editor-in-chief at SPORT Magazine, the only national sports magazine at the time. (Sports Illustrated would not publish its first issue until a month later, in August 1954.)
On this typical afternoon, the two sipped their beers, painted—and, it seems, shared business ideas and objectives. One of the visions shared was to create the Major League Baseball World Series Most Valuable Player Award by utilizing the assets of their employers, along with their personal connections. As conceived, Fitzgerald and SPORT would determine each year’s World Series MVP, while Woodall and GM would deliver the award itself—a white Chevrolet Corvette convertible.
They had no clue that they were birthing a sporting tradition: the awarding of a championship game or series MVP award.
In his career memoir, published in 1985 and titled A Nickel an Inch, Fitzgerald shared the strategic business importance generated by the creation of the World Series MVP Award. It was that 1954 launch of Sports Illustrated as a direct competitor that “inspired us to come up with the idea of giving a sports car to the most valuable player in the World Series every year,” he wrote. “Phil Hyland, our advertising manager, sold the idea to Chevrolet’s ad agency, Campbell-Ewald, and they agreed to sell us a Chevy Corvette, their expensive new sports car, at cost and to support the promotion with six full-color pages (of advertising in SPORT). It was the biggest advertising breakthrough we’d had for our struggling magazine, and the fact that right from the beginning, in 1955, the award made the sports pages of every newspaper in the country gave us a circulation boost, too.”
It wasn’t until more than a year had passed, in the fall of ’55, that the first MVP was chosen—and that’s when the personal advantages of this fledgling partnership finally became apparent to my 6-year-old self, my 9-year-old sister, Eileen, and the rest of the kids in our neighborhood: A fortuitous component of the MLB MVP Award plan was the requirement that the exact Chevrolet Corvette that would be awarded at the conclusion of the 1955 fall classic would arrive in our family’s driveway in August. It was there to be driven by Dad for roughly a month, so that prior to handing the keys to the series’ star player, my father could “work out the bugs” in the car, and make sure that the particular vehicle wasn’t “a lemon.”
On that special August 1955 evening, our family sat on the front lawn as Dad drove up in the white Corvette, sporting its red leather interior and black convertible top. Dinner that evening was a rushed affair, because none of us (Liby, my mom, included) could wait to take turns riding in a real sports car with Dad at the wheel. At that point, the attraction of riding in a car that would be awarded to the best player in the World Series had not hit home yet. I was simply excited to be in the brand-new car with Dad. Believe me: There were not many Corvettes on the streets of Eastchester in those days.
The adults in our neighborhood were too bashful or embarrassed to ask for a ride themselves, but the kids—both my friends and my rivals, along with those of my sister—were anything but. On the first Saturday morning that the Vette sat in our driveway, a line began forming. Dad was stuck: For the next two hours, he’d welcome a neighbor’s child into the passenger seat and take a spin for a few blocks. Then he’d return to our driveway, drop off that kid and pick up another, until everyone had shared the experience. To say that my “street cred” received a serious bump would be an understatement.
One morning in late September 1955 (and in four of the next five Septembers) while the World Series was under way, Dad drove the Corvette to the stadium of one of New York’s three MLB teams: Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, the Polo Grounds (just across the East River in upper Manhattan, home to the New York Giants) or the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Ebbets Field. It just so happened that at least one of those top-rung franchises appeared in the series in each of those years; the exception came in 1959, when the recently relocated Los Angeles Dodgers took on the upstart Chicago White Sox of Nellie Fox, Luis Aparicio, etc.
In 1955, both World Series participants were local, as the Bronx Bombers faced the Brooklyn Dodgers. Dad had arranged with the Yankees to pull the car into Yankee Stadium and out onto the red clay warning track of the venerable outfield. While parked there, the players could check it out while a photographer snapped publicity pictures. The promo event went well, and when Dad returned home in the car that night, he told us over dinner how Mickey Mantle had enjoyed climbing behind the wheel and driving down the track. We were thrilled to hear that “the Mick” himself had sat in “our car.”
Later that evening, after the Good Humor ice cream truck had made its routine stop on our block, Eileen took her popsicle stick and went inside to grab a Dixie water cup from the dispenser next to the sink. She returned to the front yard, opened the driver’s side door of the Corvette and began scraping little chunks of red clay into the cup.
“If Mickey Mantle sat in this car today, then this clay must have fallen off his spikes—and I’m going to sell it!” she declared.
That first car went to Dodgers lefthanded pitcher Johnny Podres, who served up two complete game victories, including a 2-0 shutout in Game 7, to help defeat the favored Yankees.
“We never had a jury or a poll to decide who got the car,” Fitzgerald wrote in his memoir. “From ’55 to ’60, I made up my mind about it myself. … It wasn’t really so hard. The winner usually picks himself.”
The award had become an instant hit, so SPORT and Chevrolet followed up by establishing the National Football League Championship Game MVP Award. In 1958, the first NFL winner’s Corvette went to Baltimore Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas.
It was a couple of years later when I learned that not all recipients of the award were pleased with their good fortune. I remember walking with my dad down a tunnel leading to the locker rooms under Yankee Stadium one day in the spring of 1957. Coming toward us was the 1956 World Series MVP, Don Larsen, the Yankee who had pitched a perfect game to help beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in a rematch of the ’55 World Series. He said hello to me, then took Dad by the arm and walked a few yards away. From the bit of the conversation I could hear, it seemed that Larsen was upset that he owed the Internal Revenue Service a hefty sum as a result of accepting the expensive Corvette. (The average major league salary for a starting player at the time was roughly $15,000 to $16,000, while the base price of the 1956 Corvette was $3,120.) He wanted someone to reimburse him.
On the other hand, there were those who craved the honor so much that when they performed well, but weren’t named the World Series MVP, they tried to take out their anger on my dad. In A Nickel an Inch, Fitzgerald wrote, “The only trouble I had was with my last one in 1960. That was the year that the Yankees and the Pirates went down to the seventh game at Forbes Field on Oct. 13 in Pittsburgh. It was some ballgame. … It was 9-9 when the Pirates came up for last licks in the ninth, and the first hitter, Bill Mazeroski, drove the second pitch over the left-field wall for a home run that won the game, the Series and everything. Except the car. I gave the car to Bobby Richardson, the Yankee’s peerless second baseman, who had set a Series record of 12 runs batted in, including the seventh grand-slam homer in Series history.”
It was a wild World Series with many memorable moments, some of which were provided by Pittsburgh’s ace reliever, Elroy Face, who became the first pitcher to save three games in one World Series. But in Game 7, Face allowed the Yankees to score four runs. In light of that, Richardson claimed the coveted Corvette. That marked the first, and still only, time that a losing player walked away with the honor.
From A Nickel an Inch: “While the Yankees were finishing their showers, Harold Rosenthal of the Trib (the Herald Tribune morning daily newspaper in New York City) and I walked up the street past where the press bus was waiting and had a drink at a little neighborhood bar. ‘If these people knew you were the guy who just gave the car to Richardson,’ Harold said, ‘neither of us would get out of here alive.’ And when we got back to the bus, Bob Fishel, the Yankees’ press secretary, said, ‘Hey Fitz, Roy Face was out here a few minutes ago with a champagne bottle looking for you, and he didn’t want to give you a drink, either.’”
The award had become an instant hit, so SPORT and Chevrolet followed up by establishing the National Football League Championship Game MVP Award (which in 1967 became the Super Bowl MVP Award). In 1958, the first NFL winner’s Corvette went to Baltimore Colts star quarterback Johnny Unitas after a hard-fought victory over the New York Giants in a 23-17 overtime thriller. The occasion brought more fun times to our neighborhood, since that car also had to be “road tested” by my dad.
Over the 70-year history of the World Series MVP Award, much has changed—but a lot has also stayed the same. In 2017, the award was renamed by MLB as the Willie Mays World Series MVP Award. For some years in the 1970s and ’80s, Chevy and General Motors relinquished their participation briefly to Ford and even Volvo, but since 2004, General Motors has been the company bestowing a prized vehicle upon the MVP winner. Along the way, GM expanded their MVP universe by sponsoring not only the NFL’s Super Bowl MVP award, but the MLB All-Star Game MVP award as well.
This October (or, if the World Series goes seven games, on Nov. 1), the MVP will again earn a special vehicle. Who will that be? Time will tell, but one thing is certain: In 1955, Ed Fitzgerald, my dad, was the unanimous choice for MVP, Most Valuable Parent, of Longview Drive.
