WE REMEMBER CERTAIN ballgames, certain players, certain plays on vanished fields.
Willie Mays is rushing out from under his cap in mad pursuit of a line-drive, ticketed three-base hit . . . until Willie outspeeds the baseball. The sizzling liner settles in the dark mitt at his belt. “Willie’s glove,” the witty Vin Scully says, “is where triples go to die.”
Stan Musial coils at home plate, slope-shouldered, balanced, taut as the bow of a stout archer. The pitch comes hurtling and Musial uncoils, his swing a mix of grace and violence. A long high drive sails out of Flatbush toward Crown Heights. “The man,” mutters a Dodger fan. “Stan the Man. He’s killing us again. But you can’t root against a guy that hits that great.”
The funny-looking catcher works the Bronx. Thick body. Baggy knickers. Shirt puffing at the waist. Absolutely the shortest neck in town. Yogi Berra doesn’t look like an athlete until he poles a buzzing fastball all the way into the third tier behind right field, the topmost deck of the old Yankee Stadium, the biggest, grandest ballpark in the world.
The old center fielder . . . no one ever looked more like a ballplayer than broad-shouldered Joe DiMaggio. He covered center with a long gliding stride and he punished pitchers. At bat, he did not stride; he didn’t need to. The punishing power flowed up from ankle, leg, and hip. “Every job has drawbacks,” said the great righthander Early Wynn. “The drawback of my job is that I gotta pitch to Joe DiMaggio.”
The memories crowd together, quickly now. Allie Reynolds throws a fastball at the head of Roy Campanella and the sturdy catcher has to dive for mother earth. Nothing personal. Nothing personal, perhaps. Reynolds is staking out his territory. Carl Furillo playing a carom off the right field wall and making a throw, a Carl Furillo throw. The runners stand still, each frozen to a base. Don Mueller spots a hole in the defense and pokes a base hit there. Mickey Mantle, the uptown strongboy, beats out a surprise bunt. Sal Maglie throws at Jackie Robinson. Jackie steals home. The Yankees overshift on Ted Williams, throttling him. Al Dark sprawls awkwardly but makes a play he has to make. The Duke leaps. Preacher throws his spitter. Bobby Thomson swings . . .
Memory revives the vanished ballfields. You see the fields; you see the ball and bat. Yet, as the Era begins, with two overwhelming stories, the fields are secondary, or seem to be. The passion of Leo Durocher and the ordeal of Jackie Robinson lead us very far from second base.
But without second base, without the ballfields in the background, neither story could ever have played out.
* * *
THE HERALD TRIBUNE entombed the story on page 24. It was the sports scoop of the century, but in 1947 managing editors confined sports stories to the back of the newspaper. Blacks rode in the back of the bus. Sports ran in the back of the paper. That was the way things were, the way they’d always been, everyone said, although of course nothing was really the way it had always been anymore.
It was a time of thunder and tectonic change. All at once people were trying to adjust to peace and television and something called “the emerging backward areas.” At last the sun was setting on the British Empire. (Hitler and Mussolini were only two years dead.) But we were also trying to comprehend virulent Stalinism, thermonuclear bombs, a brushfire conflict in Indochina, and the unspeakable revelations of the Holocaust. What was this anyway, peace or war? Had Christianity failed? we asked portentously at campfires beside a cedar-dark summer lake.
In the words of A. A. Milne, we were very young. The heavy world was lightened by dreams of goldfields and pretty girls, and those were things you could consider without furrowing a youthful brow. Assuming the Russians or the right-wingers didn’t blow up the planet, what was more important, we wondered, big bucks that could buy you a Packard convertible or a Saturday night date with blonde Cookie Bernstein, who strutted so prettily in her two-piece Lastex bathing suit, which almost but did not quite reveal the navel?
“Easy,” said Harvey Katz, handsome and bespectacled like Clark Kent, and very worldly-wise. Harvey was six months older than the rest of us, which meant that he had served a tour with the occupying army in Germany. “Make money and the pretty girls will come. In Europe, I got any woman I wanted for a tin of coffee.”
We’d heard that before. We were virgins mostly and we were tired of hearing about European women, all appealing as Eleanor of Aquitaine, all instantly available to Harvey Katz, the white slaver from Empire Boulevard, which ran east-west, just south of Ebbets Field.
We lit our cigarettes, Chesterfields and Camels and Virginia Rounds. We hit the jukebox. For a nickel Frank Sinatra sang:
In dreams I kiss your hand, Mam’selle,
Your dainty fingertips . . .
“And there was this French one,” Katz continued. “What a time I had one night in Paris . . .”
“Shut up, Harv,” we said, our envy turning into anger.
The temperature in New York City dropped to 39 degrees on May 8, 1947. That, decreed George Anthony Cornish, managing editor of the Herald Tribune, was front-page news.
“I think the baseball story should go outside, too,” said Rufus Stanley Woodward, a huge, volcanic, bespectacled sports editor and classicist who insisted on being called “Coach.” The men were arrayed for a story conference in Cornish’s office, five stories above West 41st Street. A bust of Adolf Hitler glowered near a window. Or maybe winced. Bullets from a dozen Garand rifles had pierced the bronze.
“I think not, Stanley,” Cornish said. He was a courtly Alabaman who enjoyed being called “Mister.”
“The baseball story is more important than the weather.”
“I think not,” Cornish repeated in a refined and gelid way.
Cornish controlled the front page; the issue was settled.
The strike against Jackie Robinson, racist and hateful and newsworthy as hell, would have to go inside the paper, twenty-four pages behind the front-pager on the weather.
That chilly May, veterans were saying they could not remember a baseball year like this one, and here we were still in the middle of spring. They could not remember a baseball year like this one for an excellent reason. There had not been a season like 1947 before. It was exciting even in January, four months before feisty, gabby Harry Truman, who was sixty-two, threw out the first ball at Griffith Stadium in Washington.
Leo Durocher, a lifetime .247 hitter, was the loudest .247 hitter in the annals. In a time of ornate nicknames — the Wild Horse of the Osage, the Sultan of Swat — Durocher was simply the Lip. He was a slick shortstop for four different teams and after that a slick manager across twenty-four seasons. He possessed charm and fire and a gambler’s wits, but cruelty marred his character. He is the only person I’ve heard seriously knocked by the knightly Stan Musial of St. Louis.
The cruelty ran strong and deep. Up top Durocher offered flash and glitter, which created a powerfully appealing manner, just the sort of fellow you would love to shoot pool with, even though he’d take your shirt and pants and wallet.
When 1947 began, Durocher was manager of the Dodgers, who had narrowly missed the pennant in 46. The Dodgers tied the St. Louis Cardinals across the 154 games of the season but lost two straight in a special playoff and had to go home. Durocher fled West to Hollywood for consolation and presently recovered sufficiently to seduce the popular hazel-eyed movie star Laraine Day. When Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe in 1954, the mating of a ballplayer with an actress so aroused gossip columnists that some called the tortured couple Mr. and Mrs. America. (That marriage lasted nine months, no more.)
The Leo-Laraine affair differed in significant ways. Unlike Marilyn, Laraine was a high-neckline sort of girl, comfortable playing a prim and lovely nurse in lightweight movies about young Dr. Kildare. There was a sweetness to Laraine onscreen and a sense of churchly propriety, characteristics not commonly associated with Monroe. But Laraine was steamy enough to win the heart of Cary Grant in a film called Mr. Lucky, where Grant played a dissolute gambler and Laraine played a noble society lady with what the Freudians might call intense suppressed sexuality. Press releases described her as a devout Mormon who neither drank nor smoked.
Now, incredibly, the Lip, Loud Leo, had seduced the upright, or formerly upright, Mormon beauty. Someone, possibly Leo, said he had consummated the act for the first time with Laraine on her living room piano bench.
An additional consideration further piqued national interest. Laraine was married to somebody else, one J. Ray Hendricks, who ran the Santa Monica airport and who, Laraine charged, drank too much. As the Hendrickses’ marriage staggered toward divorce, the husband went public with his troubles. He’d welcomed Leo Durocher into his home as a friend, Hendricks insisted. Served him food and drink. Now his house guest had seduced his wife. The Los Angeles Examiner summed up Hendricks’s complaints in a clear headline: DUROCHER BRANDED LOVE THIEF.
On January 20, 1947, Laraine Day divorced J. Ray Hendricks in California. On January 21, she married Leo Ernest Durocher in Mexico. A predecessor of Kitty Kelley named Florabelle Muir reviewed matters for the New York Daily News:
Leo (The Lip) Durocher is what they call dynamic, which means that you can’t tell which direction he’s going to explode in. People like that act first and pick up the pieces afterward.
As a result of his dynamism, Durocher and his bride Laraine Day are nervously sitting out their honeymoon while platoons of legal authorities decide whether they are man and wife, parties to bigamy or just very dear friends who have been hasty.
Superior Court Judge George Dockweiler gave Laraine her divorce last Monday. The judge, ordinarily an easy-going fellow, was considerably upset when he heard Laraine had gone to Mexico the next day for another divorce and had then married Lippy in Texas.
“They imposed themselves on the court,” Judge Dockweiler said. “She begged for a decree and then was not willing to abide by the terms: a one year wait before the decree becomes final, a one year wait before she could re-marry.”
The judge now wants to set aside the divorce. . . .
Old baseball hands grumbled. Who needed all this gossip stuff, issues of lust and lawyers?
But the stuff was weightier than gossip. Once Judge Dockweiler calmed down, Durocher and his wife would stay out of prison, but Durocher was riding toward a debacle that profoundly affected the next decade in baseball and, in a sense, the nature of the nation.
Back East, up in the Bronx, and around his ornate offices in the Squibb Building on Fifth Avenue, Larry MacPhail, the president of the Yankees, was drinking too much. Flat-faced, hyperactive Leland Stanford MacPhail had rescued the Dodgers from bankruptcy during the dolorous 1930s. MacPhail signed on to work in Brooklyn when the Dodgers were drawing fewer than 500,000 fans a season. Only 6,500 fans a game in a sports-happy borough of 2 million people within a city of 8 million souls.
Legend insists that the Dodgers were a beloved band of comics during the Depression. “Hey,” yelps the fan in a Flatbush Avenue saloon, according to one story. “The Dodgers got three men on base.”
“Oh, yeah?” says his companion. “Which base?”
My father, a solid college third baseman who smacked rocketing line drives, took me to Ebbets Field as a special treat on spring and autumn days in the 1930s. During that period, afternoon games began at 3:15 and sometimes my father could not make it to the ballpark until three o’clock. No matter. We sat behind third base, first base, or home plate. Plenty of seats. Ebbets Field was never crowded, fortunate for my father and myself, disastrous for the owners, the feuding descendants of old Charley Ebbets and Steve McKeever. The feuding paralyzed the franchise until the Brooklyn Trust Company, which held Dodger mortgages and Dodger paper, demanded — on the threat of foreclosing on Ebbets Field — that competent management be hired. Unlike the Yankees and the Giants, the Dodgers had to spend decades crawling out of debt, which worked mightily on the shape of things to come.
Nor is it accurate to maintain that the few customers in Ebbets Field enjoyed themselves in tolerant merriment while staring at losing pitchers. No Dodger fan was amused in 1937 when the team lost 91 times and finished 33½ games behind the pennant-winning Giants (whose home attendance was 926,887).
A particularly hollow substory holds that “Dem Bums” was a local term of affection. Fantasy portrays Brooklynites washing down flagons of Trommer’s beer while regaling one another with stories of “Our Beloved Bums” hitting doubles that turned into double plays.
Trommer’s beer was brewed in Brooklyn, all right, and there was a fine beer garden serving German food alongside the brewery. But “beloved Bums”? Never happened.
“Them stinking bums” was what you heard among the ball fans, as in “I’m never gonna buy a ticket to see them stinking bums again.”
My father, courtly and elegant, disliked imprecise speech and vulgarisms such as “stinking.” Further, he explained, “bum,” a term of uncertain origin, wasn’t much of a word, and if it was intended to suggest incompetence, that usage was not appropriate. There were no incompetent ballplayers in the major leagues, none at all. Every major leaguer was at least a good ballplayer, else how would he have reached the majors? If a few looked bad, that was because they were coming up against some great ones. “Pay attention now. Let’s watch Van Lingle Mungo spot his fastball. Good pitch. Good pitch. Right up around the shoulders. They call that the high hard one, son. Say, Mungo’s almost as fast as Dazzy Vance.”
Robert Creamer, the author and critic, once began a baseball essay: “Spaniards have the gift for patient melancholy.” My father was sprung from cheerful Alsatian stock, but when I conjure up his face as he sat beside me at Ebbets Field long ago, that’s just what I see, patient melancholy. (Creamer was writing about Al Lopez, a skillful catcher, whose job it was during the 1930s to get Van Lingle Mungo to throw strikes. Patient, melancholy work.)
MacPhail came East from Cincinnati, a whirlwind blowing away dust and apathy. Before he arrived in Brooklyn, in January 1938, he had been promised a “free untrammeled hand” in running the club (and an unlimited expense account). Quickly, he broke New York’s long-standing radio blackout. In collective ignorance, the ballclubs believed that radio broadcasts would reduce attendance. “Hell,” said whirlwind, tradition-breaking Leland Stanford MacPhail. “There’s nothing to reduce. What was our attendance in Brooklyn last year?”
Precisely 482,481 for seventy-six home games.
“Then what have we got to lose, goddammit? We’re broadcasting.” And MacPhail brought Red Barber into Brooklyn. In person, Walter Lanier Barber was rather stiff. Small talk made him impatient or uncomfortable.* But turn on a microphone and the Ol’ Redhead became the loving, witty, quietly learned uncle you always wished had sprouted on the southern side of the family. No better baseball broadcaster (or baseball ticket salesman) ever lived.
Next MacPhail ordered lights installed at Ebbets Field. On June 15, 1938, at the first major league night game in the history of New York City, Johnny Vander Meer of the Cincinnati Reds pitched a no-hit game. It was Vander Meer’s second consecutive no-hitter. No other pitcher has accomplished that, to this moment. And the day after that, MacPhail hired a new first base coach, George Herman Ruth. From time to time at Ebbets Field the Great Man stepped up during batting practice and showed some earnest, geriatric, belly-jiggling swings.
Baseball the sport and baseball the business proceed ultimately from those columns of numbers headed Won and Lost. What MacPhail could do as well as anyone who ever lived was assemble a winning ballclub in a hurry. He brought Durocher in from St. Louis to play shortstop and later to manage. (Babe Ruth, who wanted to manage the Dodgers, was released, dismissed like aged Falstaff.) MacPhail spent and dealt for such splendid players as Dolph Camilli, a strong, graceful first baseman; Dixie Walker, a good right fielder and a superb batsman; and Billy Herman, the best second baseman extant. MacPhail stole Pee Wee Reese from a Boston Red Sox farm and bought fine pitchers Whit Wyatt and Kirby Higbe. Quite suddenly the Dodgers rose out of the lower depths and won the 1941 pennant.
They attracted 1,214,910 fans to their small ballpark, a quarter million more than the champion Yankees drew in the cavernous Bronx stadium. (The Giants, slumping to fifth place, fell yet another quarter million back.) In the brevity of four seasons Larry MacPhail had won a pennant and almost tripled home attendance. When someone said of the Dodgers, “It looks at last as though the worms have turned,” even my father smiled.
War came. MacPhail enlisted in the army and that prince of parsons, Wesley Branch Rickey, came in from St. Louis as the new Dodger president. He meant to stay.
On MacPhail’s military discharge in 1945, his old Brooklyn job was taken. No matter. MacPhail decided to buy the New York Giants, who had collapsed into last place in 1943. Larry MacPhail was a great seafarer. His passion was salvaging wrecks.
But the Giants were not for sale, even to a certified redheaded genius.
That left only one team in New York City, the Yankees, owned in 1945 by the estate of Colonel Jacob Ruppert, a beer baron and a bachelor. According to Larry MacPhail’s son Lee, later president of the American League, “My father offered a flat three million dollars and the Ruppert lawyers were de-lighted. But of course my father didn’t have three million dollars. He never was able to hold on to money. He did have a backer. But then that fell through. The backer was too close to racetrack people, too close to gambling. So Dad had this great deal with Colonel Ruppert’s estate. All he was lacking was the cash.”
MacPhail took his grief to the bar of “21,” at 21 West 52nd Street, a long way from the raucous beer bars along Flatbush Avenue. There he encountered Dan Topping, a sports buff and an heir to Anaconda Copper, a great American fortune. The swizzle-stick financing was magic. Topping instantly was interested “for a third.” He had a friend, a contractor in Arizona, who would surely take another third. That turned out to be Del Webb, a cold-eyed man who boasted of the efficiency with which his firm erected concentration camps imprisoning Japanese Americans during World War II.
MacPhail put the package together with his two new partners and commandeered the Yankees for a final price of $2.8 million. For $2.8 million, MacPhail and his rich associates obtained the New York American League team — a monarch of franchises — plus Yankee Stadium (which was later sold), plus the land under Yankee Stadium (later sold in a separate deal), plus signed contracts from people named Rizzuto, Henrich, Keller, and DiMaggio.
It was as good a business deal as anybody in baseball could remember, and it was recognized as a great deal at the time. Why, then, was Larry MacPhail drinking so much so often?
His partners wondered about that, too. Two millionaires and the Whirlwind Promoter, the Yankee troika, soon were moving unevenly toward a World Series, a memorable collision, and fistfights. Not fistfights among the ballplayers. Ballplayer brawls are common as grass. These fistfights broke out among the owners.
Horace Stoneham, the president of the Giants, always drank too much. He had inherited the New York ballclub with the oldest traditions in town, and perhaps the grandest traditions as well. There was no reason in the world for Horace to sell his heirloom.
The Giants had been playing in New York since May 1, 1883, when an early version opened the National League season by defeating Boston, 7 to 5. John McGraw came to manage in 1902 and ran the team for thirty years. He won ten pennants and finished high in the first division twenty-seven times, twenty-seven times out of thirty. Even today the name McGraw speaks banners.
Christy Mathewson, out of Bucknell, was surely the first ballplayer worshiped as a superhero. Tall, fair-haired, handsome as a god, Mathewson affected a cape for his entrance to the playing field on days when he was to pitch at the Polo Grounds. He looked Apollonian and he may have been the best pitcher who ever lived. The one book my father saved from his own early boyhood, and handed down to me, is Pitching in a Pinch by Christy Mathewson, in the Every Boy’s Library Boy Scout Edition of 1912. I still have it. I still read it, and with awe.
Charles Stoneham, a freewheeling broker from the old Curb Exchange, bought the Giants in 1918. He was a financial wizard or a shady operator or both. During the stock market crash of 1929, Charley Stoneham lost scores of millions of dollars, a family member recalls. “He had been very wealthy, but the crash wiped him out. Wiped out everything but the Giants. That was his jewel, the one possession above all others, he would not part with, whatever the cost.”
Keep the Giants Charles A. Stoneham did, for his son Horace to inherit in 1935. The team succeeded for a while under McGraw’s successor, the very gifted, very dour Memphis Bill Terry, winning pennants in 1933, ‘36, and ‘37. But Terry got on everybody’s nerves and he antagonized the sporting press, which had loved old John McGraw. When someone criticized a pitching choice, Terry told a half dozen writers, “I don’t know who you guys think you are. No goddamn forty-buck-a-week reporter tells me what to do.”
Harold Ross of The New Yorker asked the wonderfully talented John Lardner to compose a profile on Bill Terry. Most would have been flattered. Memphis Bill demanded a fee.
“Where were you born, Mr. Terry?” Lardner asked, innocently enough.
“The answer to that question is worth plenty of money to me,” Terry said.
(Atlanta. Memphis Bill was born in Atlanta. He also batted .401 in 1930. Lardner never wrote the profile.)
Terry stayed on everybody’s nerves and after he finished fifth in 1941, he was fired in favor of the genial, stumpy home run hitter Mel Ott. Since Ott had made the Giant squad when he was seventeen years old, he drew the nickname Master Melvin.
Although he became the greatest five-foot, nine-inch left-hand-hitting slugger on earth, Master Melvin couldn’t manage much. But the residual loyalty of the old Giant fans was so strong that in 1946, when the team finished last, attendance at the Polo Grounds reached 1,219,873.*
Why in the world would Horace Stoneham want to sell the team? He was reaping major profits in the cellar. Horace had a porky face, fleshy and soft. His baseball intelligence seemed reasonably developed when he was sober, but Stoneham’s drinking bouts were legend.
Back of center field at the Polo Grounds rose a stately blockhouse. Within, one found the clubhouses and, one level higher, a dining room for sportswriters and celebrities. At the very top of the blockhouse, which was painted green, four stories above the deepest center field anywhere, 505 feet distant from home plate, Stoneham maintained an apartment. As far as I can learn, no teetotaler ever crossed that threshold.
One night in the spring of 1947, Horace invited Jim McCulley, who covered the Giants for the Daily News, to imbibe. “C’mon, pally. A few El Beltos.”
They proceeded from the press dining room to Stoneham’s apartment. Toward two A.M. McCulley decided he’d had enough.
“Stay with me, pally,” Stoneham said. “I doan wanna drink alone.”
McCulley moved toward the door. Stoneham had locked it.
“I got the key, pally,” said the president of the New York Giants. “I’m keeping it, pally. You gotta stay with me.”
McCulley came to on the living room floor, hearing “the damnedest hammering.”
Rap.
Rap.
Rap.
McCulley’s head hurt. He crawled to a window and pulled himself erect.
Rap.
It wasn’t hammering at all.
Rap.
It was one o’clock the next afternoon. It was the damn next day. The Giants were taking batting practice.
Rap.
That was Big Jawn Mize, slashing his mighty swings.
Line drive. Line drive. Line drive.
Rapraprapraprap.
As the Era dawned, all three New York ballclubs looked like problem areas. Branch Rickey, master of the Dodger house, was also a master of tergiversation, as he demonstrated with his comment on the sorrows of Durocher. “Leo,” Rickey said genially, “has an infinite capacity for going into a bad situation and making it worse.” In truth, following the Laraine Day affair, the Durocher and Dodger situations were more grave than Rickey admitted.
The Giants were lost in Harlem. In 1946, Stoneham soberly appointed his nephew Charles (Chub) Feeney executive vice president. Feeney was bright and decisive, a graduate of Dartmouth and Fordham Law School. He told a few, but not many, friends a story which is a paradigm for the perfect New York Giant background. “As a baby,” Feeney said, “I was rocked to sleep by John McGraw.” Feeney was the brightest kid in the family, but still a kid. The Giants finished fifth, fifth and last, going into 1947. The kid was young and John McGraw was dead.
Joe McCarthy had managed the Yankees since 1931. Efficient, sour, arrogant, McCarthy won eight championships (helped by supporting players named Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio). After MacPhail asserted his presidency in 1946, McCarthy managed for just thirty-five games more. Then he quit. That season the Yankees employed three different managers. Suddenly they looked as stable as the kingdom of Freedonia, whose ruler was Groucho Marx.
The season of 1946 ended when a wonderful young St. Louis Cardinal team defeated the Boston Red Sox, 4 to 3, in the seventh game of the World Series. Damnedest Series. Stan Musial hit .222. Ted Williams hit .200. They were a .400 hitter, all right, between the two of them! It was tough, as the Era began, to make sense out of what was going on.
Were the Yankees going to collapse into anarchy? Could MacPhail, truly a Dodger, a daffy Dodger, turn into a button-down success in limousine country north of the Flatbush subway line called the BMT? The Polo Grounds stood half a mile from Yankee Stadium. You could walk from one to the other in fifteen minutes. But would old Giant fans continue to populate their hallowed horseshoe and watch a squat left-handed pitcher named Dave Koslo, born George Bernard Koslowski, lead the National League in losing ballgames with nineteen? The nearby, chaotic Yankees played better ball. All this was uptown stuff. The major story was developing somewhere else, in Brooklyn. Until that day in May 1947, where we began, the papers mostly missed it.
Long, long afterward, I find myself, in the approximate present, at the village of Fallbrook, California. It isn’t hard to make your way to Fallbrook. You simply drive to Bonsall and turn right. (Actually, Fallbrook lies an hour north and east of San Diego.) Once this was avocado country. Now developments have overrun the avocado fields, but a sense of spaciousness persists and the air is clear and dry.
Duke Snider sits at his ease in a tasteful, conservative living room. A picture window looks down across tee, fairway, and green. Snider says, “The nicest thing about the view is that I don’t have to mow the grass.” He tosses a rubber ball to his puppy. A leaping, rolling snag. “You know,” Snider says, “I’d only have a dog who could catch.”
Snider went to New Zealand with his firstborn, Kevin, a few years ago to spend time together, father and son. Half a world from home, he suffered a heart attack. “No pain. The only symptom was I coughed up a little blood.”
After that Duke, one of the five or six best center fielders since the dawn of man, had to have a coronary bypass. He doesn’t complain, but I suspect the Duke can now spell forwards and backwards the word cholesterol.
“A lot of the big writers never wanted to come over to Brooklyn to see us play. They’d only catch us when they had to in the World Series. Then they’d tell us what we were doing wrong.
“We resented it. Pee Wee and Jackie and all the rest of us. We didn’t say it out loud. You don’t want to fight all the New York press. But we resented it. We were pretty good ballplayers, and they wouldn’t come to watch, and when they did they said what we were doin’ wrong.”
“Red Smith . . .” I began.
“He didn’t go to Dodger games,” Snider said. “You were there. He wasn’t with you.”
“Jimmy Cannon wrote that Jackie Robinson was the loneliest man he ever saw in sport.”
Snider was wearing eyeglasses. He, who could see a baseball flicking a bat 350 feet away, see it and react in microseconds, was wearing steel-rimmed spectacles.
“I liked Jimmy,” Snider said. “And I liked Jackie. I learned so much from Jack . . .”
“Such as?”
“And I hope he learned a bit from me.”
“Such as?”
“How did Cannon know that Jack was lonely? Did Jack wear his loneliness on the outside?”
Duke lost twenty-five pounds after the coronary bypass. He wears a blue baseball cap marked “Cooperstown” and, with just a little imagination, I see Duke playing ball tomorrow, adding to his 407 home runs. But on this California morning, Snider is sixty-five, beyond ball playing and approaching wisdom. Two presidents, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, have sought his autograph. That thrills Snider, but also leads him to wonder about fame.
“Playing in Brooklyn once or twice I didn’t go down to first as hard as I should have. I started hard and then pulled up. Jackie called me aside, just the two of us. This wasn’t black and white. This was two ballplayers.
“‘Duke,’ Jack said. ‘Home to first base. That’s ninety feet. Not seventy-five . . . ’
“I used to watch Robinson get into uniform. Jack could joke and kid and talk about the racetrack. But as he pulled on the Brooklyn shirt and the blue Brooklyn stirrups, and the Brooklyn pants and the blue Brooklyn cap, he just got more and more serious. He was putting on his game face. Jack had a helluva game face. Take no prisoners.
“How did Jimmy Cannon know what he was seeing? A lonely athlete or the best game face in the world?”
* * *
Robinson played for the Dodger farm team at Montreal in 1946. “The beanballs kept coming and coming,” says Homer Elliott “Dixie” Howell, a Kentuckian who caught for Montreal that season. “The pitchers kept throwing fastballs at Robinson’s head, trying to get the black guy out of baseball forever, maybe clear out of this world. It was about the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”
“I was at Montreal for a while in ‘46,” says George “Shotgun” Shuba, who later pinch hit a home run in the 1953 World Series. “It was something the way the other players went at Robinson with their spikes. Looking back, I’m amazed that he wasn’t maimed.”
You did not learn such things from the press at that time. “It probably isn’t fair to say that the sportswriters and the newspaper editors then were downright bigoted against Robinson,” Al Parsley, an excellent Montreal newspaperman, once said. “Let me put it this way. When it came to Jackie Robinson, they were belligerently neutral.”
Robinson played his first game for Montreal at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City on April 18, 1946. He hit a home run, went four for five, and stole two bases. Beat writers, men regularly assigned to the Montreal Royals and the Jersey City Giants, covered the game. So did three reporters from the black press, papers such as the Baltimore Afro-American. None of the major New York newspapers thought to send a man twenty miles to note Jackie Robinson’s spectacular debut. The first appearance by a black in organized baseball since 1891 was overlooked, with belligerent neutrality. Montreal defeated Jersey City, 14 to 1.
Robinson batted .349 that year, stole forty bases, and led the International League in scoring runs. After one triumphant late-season ballgame in Canada, a swarm of white fans pressed toward Robinson on the street outside Montreal Stadium. Unnerved, Robinson began to run. The crowd ran after him. Before outdistancing his pursuers, Robinson was weeping.
“These people,” he said years later, “wanted to pat me on the back. There was no menace in them. When I was running, nI started to think, here I am a black man and these people are running after me, not to lynch me. These white people are running after me to shake my hand. When I thought that, how wonderful that was, I started to cry.”
Such episodes went unreported at the time.
To judge by the papers in 1947, Leo the Lip was the biggest news story in all sport. While Judge Dockweiler was considering whether to charge Laraine Day Durocher with bigamy, Durocher telephoned the judge in chambers. “Your Honor,” said the Lip to the judge, “the least you can do is give me and my wife an opportunity to come to your office [sic] and explain.”
Dockweiler acceded and a few hours later the judge found himself being treated like an incompetent umpire. “The position of the court,” Dockweiler said, “is that by marrying before Miss Day’s divorce was final, just the act of getting married constitutes adultery, whatever else you people did or did not do.”
“Lemme ask you somethin’,” Durocher said. “Would you be makin’ this damn fuss if our names were Sarah Zilch and Joe Blow?”
“Obviously not. I’m not a watchdog. The court cannot watch everyone. But there’s one thing I can do. I can make an example of you two.”
“Oooh,” Durocher said, “you condone what you say is adultery in other people, but you’re not gonna condone it in us. Maybe the only thing you’re interested in, Judge, is publicity for yourself.”
“My concern,” Dockweiler said, “is the dignity of my court and you people have made my court look very undignified.”
Durocher began to shout. Then he and Laraine stalked out of the chambers to a crush of waiting reporters and a blur of photographers. “That judge,” Durocher told the assemblage, “is nothing more than a pious, Bible-reading hypocrite.” Then Leo fled California.
Within baseball, charges against Durocher had been accumulating for some time. He was playing high-stakes card games with ballplayers, and the games were rigged. He was cleaning out his own team, taking serious money from farm boys. In Hollywood he ran with George Raft, possibly the worst actor ever to sustain a career as a leading man. Raft was said to be close to mobsters Owney Madden and Bugsy Siegel, and it was a mobster, specifically Arnold Rothstein, who rigged the 1919 World Series. Rumor — and there was apparently no evidence to back it up — cried that Durocher deliberately mishandled Dodger pitching in 1946 and handed the pennant to the Cardinals in a gambling coup.
Durocher told me in 1990 that the rumor was outrageous. No one ever wanted to win more than he did. But Durocher loved to play cards, shoot craps, make bets, and run up debts, and he was at the very least careless in choosing associates. That was all the pulp that the rumor mills needed.
In two hundred newspapers, Westbrook Pegler, the famous right-wing columnist, described Durocher as “a moral delinquent.” Against this background, Durocher announced to the world that Judge George Dockweiler was a Bible-reading hypocrite.
Durocher had been raised in a devoutly Roman Catholic neighborhood in West Springfield, Massachusetts. His mother, Clara Provost, was born near Montreal. Hard as it is to believe, Durocher the child wore a surplice and served as an altar boy with his oldest brother, Clarence.
By 1947 Durocher, then forty-two, was expanding the definition of lapsed Catholicism. He had been divorced twice. He flouted the dogmas of his youth with swaggering, practically public fornication. He had lost the right to receive communion and have his confession heard. As he put it, he didn’t give a damn. Princes of the Church were not amused.
A popular promotion throughout the major leagues brought youngsters into ballparks free on slow afternoons. Small boys admitted without charge may mature into ticket-buying adults. The Brooklyn version was a heavily promoted venture called the Knothole Gang, from the distant days when children watched ballgames free through the knotholes of wooden outfield fences. The leading single participant in the Dodger Knothole Gang was the Brooklyn Catholic Youth Organization, directed by a zealous priest named Vincent J. Powell and supervised by Monsignor Edward Lodge Curran.
Father Powell gained an audience with Branch Rickey and said that Durocher was a bad example for Catholic youngsters, and indeed for youngsters of all faiths.
“Doesn’t your church,” Rickey said, “still dispense mercy and forgiveness?”
Vincent Powell had not traveled to the Dodger office at 215 Montague Street near Brooklyn Heights to discuss comparative religion with a Methodist. If Durocher remained as manager of the Dodgers, the priest said, he would have no choice but to withdraw the Catholic Youth Organization from the Knothole Gang. He stopped barely short of threatening a Catholic boycott of the Dodgers.
Another matter was dominating Rickey’s thoughts. The integration of baseball. When the young priest left, Rickey summoned the Dodger lawyer, a Roman Catholic, to deal with what he assumed to be a single rigid cleric. The club lawyer, stout, bespectacled, cigar-smoking — caricature of a Tammany Hall sachem — was named Walter Francis O’Malley.
Walter O’Malley was a political creature, and activity in the Catholic Church, as in the Democratic party, was part of his public presentation of himself Actually he was not prominent in either. Outside of baseball O’Malley was simply a collection lawyer for a bank.
O’Malley spoke to Father Powell in Durocher’s behalf but had no more success than Rickey. On March 1, 1947, Powell issued an announcement: “The Brooklyn Catholic Youth Organization is withdrawing from the Dodgers’ Knothole Club.” Leo Durocher “is undermining the moral training of Brooklyn’s Roman Catholic Youth. The C.Y.O. cannot continue to have our youngsters associated with a man who represents an example in complete contradiction to our moral teachings.”
It may seem surprising to have Walter O’Malley, the Big Oom, the most overpowering baseball executive in history, enter the story losing his first case.
“It doesn’t surprise me,” said William Shea, the late Manhattan lawyer and power broker for whom the Mets’ ballpark would be named. “Walter was one lousy lawyer.”
We were walking toward Gage and Tollner’s, a gaslight restaurant in downtown Brooklyn, on a spring evening after a meeting at the Brooklyn Historical Society.
“How can you say that, Bill? O’Malley made more money out of baseball than anyone in history.”
“That’s right,” Shea said, “but he was one lousy lawyer. O’Malley was the most brilliant businessman I’ve ever met, but we were talking law here, weren’t we?
“Of course he lost when he tried to plead Durocher’s case to that priest. He wasn’t trying to lose to embarrass Rickey. He just lost.
“I wouldn’t have let O’Malley plead a parking ticket for me.”
We move, in our time warp, back to the approximate present, at La Jolla, California, where Emil J. “Buzzie” Bavasi, a man who kept the secrets, has retired to a towering hill. From his living room, Bavasi watches migrating whales stir the surface of the metallic blue Pacific Ocean. “Of course I’m comfortable,” Bavasi says in his affluence. “Always have been. But I worked in baseball for forty-six years and now that it’s over I don’t get a pension. Not a dime. Did you ever hear of anybody else in baseball forty-six years without a pension? Assistant trainers get pensions. Not me.”
Bavasi is bitching without malice, comfortable bitching to someone he first befriended in 1952. “I’m gonna tell you something nobody knows,” Bavasi says. He is heavier than he should be — thirty-five pounds too heavy, he complains — but his eyes flicker with youthful amusement. “You’ve gotta get it right. Well, maybe you won’t, but you gotta try. Agreed? You know Ford Frick brought me into baseball, in the Brooklyn organization, right after the war. So I was there, I was working there, when the idea to integrate baseball hatched.
“This is what really happened. For damn near half a century, Branch Rickey has gotten all the credit and that isn’t right. Rickey owned a quarter of the Dodgers. Twenty-five percent. The other partners were John Smith, who owned Pfizer Chemical; Jim Mulvey, a power at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and our buddy Walter O’Malley.
“There was no way we [the Dodgers] were going to hire a black player without all four partners agreeing. We knew it would be something like a revolution. You had to have the four partners standing together, standing tall. And they did. Give them credit. Give all of them credit, not just Rickey.
“Now, we’d been scouting numbers of black players. There was never a plan to integrate the major leagues with more than one, but to find the right one we scouted all over the old colored leagues.
“I remember the meeting. Lem Jones. Fresco Thompson. A lot of solid baseball people. The scouts agreed that the one best prospect in colored ball was Don Newcombe. Six feet four. Two hundred twenty pounds. A good hitter. Intelligent. And, of course, just an overpowering right-handed pitcher.
“Rickey went with the scouts. He hadn’t seen any of the prospects personally. Practically speaking, at that time, the president of the Dodgers could not go to a Negro League game himself.
“He was accepting the scouts’ recommendation until he got to the entry for Newcombe’s age. Newk was only nineteen. Too young for what he’d have to take, Rickey reasoned. No nineteen-year-old could survive the racist garbage.
“That’s why we integrated the major leagues with Jackie Robinson. He was in his middle twenties. But from a strict baseball viewpoint, Jackie was our second choice.”*
Rickey had been spending many days with a variety of clerical people. He intended to put Robinson on the Dodger roster by Opening Day 1947. That would attract black fans to Ebbets Field and Rickey was concerned about their behavior. He sought out ministers from Brooklyn’s black churches and told them individually what he thought. “Not only will Jackie Robinson, a lone colored man, be on trial next season. So will the entire black community. I want to urge you to impress that on your parishioners. We welcome colored fans, we surely do, but, please, no drinking in my ballpark, no rowdy behavior, no switchblades. If the colored fans act up, it will work to the disadvantage of them and to my team and to my colored ballplayer.” Rickey spoke to seventeen black ministers. Every one agreed to spread his message from the pulpit.
In 1946 Robinson had trained with the Montreal Royals in Florida. One day in Daytona Beach an armed sheriff walked on the field during an exhibition game. “Down here,” he said, “we don’t have nigras mixing with whites. Not marrying with whites. Not playing ball with whites. Now, nigra, git!” Robinson had to leave the game.
Rather than train his athletes in Florida again, Rickey moved both his Montreal and Brooklyn players to Havana for the spring of 1947. The racial climate of Cuba was less charged. He put the Dodgers and the New York sportswriters into the Hotel Nacional, which in those pre-Castro days was enlivened by roulette wheels, dice tables, and prostitutes from several continents. No ballplayer or journalist protested.
White Montreal players were quartered in cadet barracks at the Havana Military Academy. Campanella and Newcombe had been promoted to the Montreal roster. Along with Robinson, they were sequestered in a drab hotel fifteen miles from the Royals’ practice field. Robinson’s anger flared. “I thought we left Florida so we could get away from Jim Crow. What the hell is this, sticking us all out here, segregating us in the middle of a colored country, Cuba?”
Neither the Cuban government of Fulgencio Batista nor the Havana hotels demanded segregation. The idea of segregation inside Cuba sprang directly from Branch Rickey. He was concerned that fights might break out between the black players and the white players if the integrated Montreal squad was billeted together. Someone explained that to Robinson.
“I don’t like it,” Robinson said. “I don’t like it at all. But I’ll go along with Mr. Rickey’s judgment. He’s been right so far.”
Exported segregation was not Branch Rickey’s only curious idea. Another simply seems ingenuous. Rickey believed that Dodger players, seeing how gifted Robinson was, would clamor, petition, insist, demand that he move Robinson to the big squad. “Ballplayers love money,” Rickey told several votaries. “They love World Series checks. When they see how good this colored boy is, when they realize he can get them into the World Series, they’ll force me to make him a Dodger. After the players do that, one problem — Robinson’s acceptance by his fellows — will solve itself “
During the seven exhibition games between the Montreal Royals and the Brooklyn Dodgers — most played on a giddy tour through the Canal Zone — Robinson stole seven bases. He batted .625.
Sartre defined bigotry as passion; and passion is, of course, irrational. That is its nature, like lust and avarice. The core of veteran Dodger players was not roused by Jackie Robinson’s success. The veteran core felt passionate outrage. Bigoted ballplayers would hate Jackie Robinson even if he batted 1.000, which he damn near did. “How dare a colored fella be that good!”
In Panama the Dodgers were billeted briefly in an army barracks at Fort Gulick. There Clyde Sukeforth, called Sukey, a Maine man, went to Durocher with disturbing news. Sukeforth had been the primary scout assigned to watch Robinson in the Negro American League. Now, Sukey told Durocher, he had found out about a petition. A simple petition, really. The signers swore that they would never play on the same team as Jackie Robinson.
Fred “Dixie” Walker, the right fielder who was so popular that Manhattan sportswriters, making fun of Brooklyn speech, called him “the Pee-pul’s Cherce,” prepared the document. A native of Villa Rica, Georgia, who lived in Birmingham, Walker recently had led the National League in batting. Now thirty-six years old, he was the leader of the team. Walker did not glower in solitude. Hugh Casey of Atlanta, the best relief pitcher in baseball, supported the petition. So did a character named Bobby Bragan, from Birmingham, a third-string catcher but an influence because of his loud and caustic manner.
Confederates started the petition. Union forces did not lack for representation. Harry “Cookie” Lavagetto, the third baseman from Oakland who was almost as popular in Brooklyn as Dixie Walker, hurried to sign. Others who also signed included the kid center fielder Carl Furillo of Reading, Pennsylvania, and a fine second baseman out of Philadelphia, Eddie Stanky.
Harold “Pee Wee” Reese, of Louisville, underwent a crisis. He had grown up in a segregated community. Indeed, he remembered his father, a detective for the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, taking him to a tree with strong, low branches. “This is the hanging tree,” the father said. “When a nigger gets out of line, we hang him here.”
In a quiet, non-evangelical way, Pee Wee Reese was a Christian. Now, he wondered, as a Christian, how could he deny Robinson the right to inherit a small portion of the earth? He could not and he would not. Reese was not comfortable opening his heart to Dixie Walker. Instead he said, “Look, Dix. This thing might rebound. I can’t take the chance of signing it. I just got out of the navy. I got no money. I have a wife and baby to support. Skip me, Dixie.”*
Although a few other Dodgers declined to sign, Reese’s statement was as close as any ballplayer came to challenging the preeminent establishment racists, Walker† and Casey.
Leo Durocher was approaching what was probably the finest hour of his life. He could not sleep on the cot in the barracks at Fort Gulick in the Canal Zone. At one o’clock in the morning, Durocher decided that there was no reason why he should sleep. No reason at all. The petition was going to rip apart the ballclub. Get the hell up! In pajamas, Durocher roused his coaches and told them to bring all the players into a big empty kitchen behind an army mess.
The team assembled in night clothing and underwear. “Boys,” Durocher began, in the raspy, brassy voice that rattled spinal disks. “I hear some of you don’t want to play with Robinson. Some of you have drawn up a petition.”
The players sat on chopping blocks. They leaned against stoves.
“Well, boys, you know what you can use that petition for.
“Yeah, you know.
“You’re not that fucking dumb.
“Take the petition and, you know, wipe your ass.”
The Brooklyn Dodgers suddenly were awake.
“I’m the manager and I’m paid to win and I’d play an elephant if he could win for me and this fellow Robinson is no elephant. You can’t throw him out on the bases and you can’t get him out at the plate. This fellow is a great player. He’s gonna win pennants. He’s gonna put money in your pockets and mine.
“And here’s something else. He’s only the first, boys, only the first! There’s many more colored ballplayers coming right behind him and they’re hungry, boys. They’re scratching and diving.
“Unless you wake up, these colored ballplayers are gonna run you right out of the park.
“I don’t want to see your petition. I don’t want to hear anything about it. Fuck your petition.
“The meeting is over. Go back to bed.”
A few days later, the precise March date in 1947 is unknown, Frank Murphy of Michigan, an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, telephoned Albert Benjamin “Happy” Chandler, the commissioner of baseball. Murphy left no record of the conversation. He died in 1949, after nine years on the bench. Chandler, who died in 1991 at age ninety-two, offered a brief account. “Murphy was an honorable and honored man,” Chandler told the sports journalist John Underwood. Chandler reported this conversation:
| MURPHY: | Commissioner, you are a man of character. You must do something to stop this fellow Durocher. |
| CHANDLER: | I will. |
| MURPHY: | If you don’t I’m going to advise the [national] Catholic Youth Organization to prohibit its youngsters from going to ballgames this year. |
Murphy was a pro-labor Democratic senator until President Roosevelt appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1940, moving toward a liberal, some said New Deal, Court. On the bench Murphy wrote few interesting opinions but he did assume a position newspapermen described as “the leading lay Catholic in the United States.” When Murphy spoke to Chandler, he brought to his words the full authority of a militant Church.
Unless Durocher were punished severely, twenty million Catholic children would be forbidden to go to ballgames during 1947. After Frank Murphy’s phone call, Happy Chandler had one thing he had to do. Find an excuse to throw Durocher out of baseball.
Morals? Perhaps. Business? Certainly. The business of the commissioner of baseball is business.
Articles, chapters, entire books have been written about Chandler v. Durocher, 1947. (Chandler’s own contribution is a book entitled Heroes, Plain Folks and Skunks.) The focus centers on specific episodes of that spring, which is naive. After the warning from the Catholic Church, Chandler was going to throw Durocher out of baseball. If the worst infraction Chandler found was jaywalking, so be it. Durocher was gone.
Chandler, himself a former senator, was country-slick. He knew that if he gave Durocher a chance, just a little time, Leo would walk into trouble, jaywalk into trouble along a road that now led nowhere.
Durocher lent his name to a column in the Brooklyn Eagle written by a smallish, rabbit-toothed newspaperman, Harold Parrott. “Shoulda been Harold Rabbitt,” everybody said. Parrott liked to whisper, giving what he said a suggestion of confidentiality and importance.*
The Eagle column was called “Durocher Says.” Durocher claimed that he had nothing to do with writing the material and “I didn’t always read it either.”
Larry MacPhail may or may not have asked Durocher to leave Brooklyn and manage the Yankees as the Era began. Durocher claims that MacPhail made the offer in 1946 and he turned it down. MacPhail did hire a gabby little coach, Charlie Dressen, who had been Durocher’s chief assistant. (As a Yankee, Dressen antagonized Joe DiMaggio with record speed.)
Durocher stayed in Brooklyn for 1947, but MacPhail had “stolen” a Dodger coach. Under the heading “Durocher Says,” Harold Parrott wrote:
This is a declaration of war. I want to beat the Yankees because of MacPhail and Dressen. MacPhail tried to drive a wedge between myself and all these things I hold dear. When MacPhail found I couldn’t be induced to manage the Yankees . . . he resolved to knock me and make life as hard as possible for me. . . . Surely people recognize it is the same old MacPhail.
“Just a little friendly controversy,” Durocher maintained later. “Just stirring some stuff up to sell some tickets.”
MacPhail disagreed. He wrote Commissioner Chandler in rage. “The New York Yankees request a hearing to determine responsibility for these statements.”
Then, just before a Dodger-Yankee exhibition game in Havana, an odd episode occurred. Larry MacPhail ordered his publicity man, Arthur E. “Red” Patterson, to leave tickets for a pair of gamblers, Max “Memphis” Engleberg, a bookmaker, and Connie Immerman, a heavy roller who owned the Cotton Club in New York. The two had been visiting the casino at the Hotel Nacional and had met the notorious mobster Lucky Luciano for purposes unknown.
“Don’t you know those guys?” Dick Young of the Daily News asked Durocher in the Dodger dugout. He pointed to Engleberg and Immerman.
“Damn right,” Durocher said, “but if I go near them, I’m dead. Where does MacPhail come off flaunting his company with gamblers right in the players’ faces? They’re sitting in his fucking box. If I even spoke to either one of them, MacPhail’s guests, Chandler would have me fucking barred.”
Young, a merciless reporter, printed a laundered version of Durocher’s comment.
Early in April, Chandler summoned Branch Rickey to his home in Versailles, Kentucky. As commissioner, Chandler maintained an office in Carew Tower, an early Cincinnati skyscraper. He liked to point across the brown Ohio River toward the Kentucky hills beyond. “God’s Country,” Chandler said.
This meeting was too important for the office. Too private. Chandler led Rickey into his Kentucky study, paneled in walnut. On the desk sat signed photographs from Roosevelt, Churchill, David Ben-Gurion.
Rickey believed that the meeting was to consider integration of the major leagues, now less than a month away. He came prepared to discuss his plans for Robinson and to ask for Chandler’s support. But integration was not on the agenda.
“Branch,” Chandler began, “I’m going to have to sit [suspend] your manager.”
“You can’t do that,” Rickey said.
“I have no choice.”
On April 9, Chandler announced that Durocher was suspended for the balance of 1947 “for [unspecified] conduct detrimental to baseball.”
The Brooklyn ballclub was fined $2,000.
The Yankee ballclub was fined $2,000.
Harold Parrott was fined $500.
By order of the commissioner, all parties were forbidden to discuss crimes, real or alleged, and punishment.
Durocher had been driven out of baseball. He looked at reporters outside a Manhattan hotel suite and told them he had only one thing to say: “Now is the time a man needs a woman.” Then he led Laraine Day into the suite. The couple remained within for forty-eight hours.
On April 11, the Catholic Youth Organization rejoined the Dodger Knothole Gang.
Chandler had kept his promise to Frank Murphy. The Church forgave Baseball for having sinned.
On April 9, a press release announced that Jackie Robinson was being added to the Dodger roster. He would play first base, a new position. But with Durocher exiled, who would lead the team?
Rickey pleaded with the deposed Yankee manager Joe McCarthy to take over. McCarthy declined. Casey Stengel, managing the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League, said he hadn’t been approached and wasn’t really interested. He liked California. Of course, he did have some nice Brooklyn memories. Stengel was never asked.
Clyde Sukeforth ran the Dodgers on Opening Day. Robinson went hitless. The Dodgers defeated the Braves. Then Rickey brought in an old boy from Ohio whom Rickey had known for forty years. Burton Edwin “Barney” Shotton would manage from the dugout in civilian clothes. At sixty-two, Shotton said he was too old to put on a uniform.
The Dodgers started well. Robinson seemed quiet, poised, swift. The Yankees were playing good ball. The Giants looked improved. The weather was cold, but ahead lay a summer of promise.
Then the Herald Tribune broke its story. The St. Louis Cardinals, champions of the baseball world, were planning a strike. They were going to strike against Jackie Robinson themselves and they were going to enlist cohorts on every other team in the league.
The strike would last until Robinson was thrown out of baseball.
The boys from what Stanley Woodward called “the Hookworm Belt” had one thing only against Robinson.
The color of his skin.
You see what you want to see, I suppose. The racists saw ominous black. To others, Jackie Robinson’s color was something else.
Imperial Ebony.
*Leaving a St. Louis hotel with Barber once, I was struck with 95-degree heat and said one word: “Hot.” Barber’s response: “You have to expect heat in St. Louis if you want to be a baseball writer, young man.”
*This may indicate that the Giants, rather than the Dodgers, were truly the beloved bums.
*The Brooklyn organization did sign Newcombe and Roy Campanella, but both were sent to play under circumstances of obscurity and minimal confrontation with the Nashua ballclub of the old New England League in the summer of 1946. Bavasi went to Nashua to oversee a sensitive situation and run the club. On one road trip, a rival general manager refused to turn over the Nashua team’s share of the gate receipts “because you’re just dirtying up our town with your two niggers.” Thus exposed to the peaceful tolerance of New England, Bavasi decked the other man. He got his money.
*Reese says today, “People tell me that I helped Jackie. But knowing my background and the progress I’ve made, I have to say he helped me as much as I helped him.”
+In 1976, Walker approached me at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles and asked if we could drink wine together after a game. He was working as a Dodger coach and had just finished giving batting tips to Steve Yeager, a white catcher, and Dusty Baker, a black outfielder. Walker turned out to be an oenophile and we sipped a marvelous Margaux. He told me of a recent trip to England to search for ancestral roots, and he spoke of Salisbury Cathedral and Devonshire gardens. Then Walker got to his point. “I organized that petition in 1947, not because I had anything against Robinson personally or against Negroes generally. I had a wholesale hardware business in Birmingham and people told me I’d lose my business if I played ball with a black man. That’s why I started the petition. It was the dumbest thing I did in all my life. If you ever get a chance, sometime, please write that I am deeply sorry.” Walker died in Birmingham on May 17, 1982.
*In 1948 Parrott quit journalism and became traveling secretary for the Dodgers. In time, he moved up to ticket manager, a position that provides a limitless opportunity for private profit, through off-the-book deals on tickets to sold-out games. O’Malley fired Parrott, who by this time owned a yacht, at Los Angeles in 1968. Parrott spent his remaining years firing salvos toward O’Malley.