1
Although Artie Wilson’s name appears in the 1974 edition of The Baseball Encyclopedia, the listing is cursory and the type size approaches invisibility. This abridgment of Wilson’s record was intentional, but not malicious. To qualify for a full listing in the encyclopedia, a player must have had twenty-five turns at bat in the major leagues. Artie Wilson, one of the finest shortstops baseball has known, came to the plate twenty-one times for the New York Giants of 1951. His big league career was a brevity of pathos.
The cavalier way in which Wilson has been treated says something about what is supposed to be baseball’s fundamental reference work. It says more about the game itself, which prevented Wilson and generations of players like him from qualifying for the encyclopedia for a single and, indeed, malicious reason. Artie Wilson is black.
When you dig further, the records on Wilson still yield only a fraction of his truth. He played shortstop, second and first with the Giants, and batted .182. Officially Wilson was thirty during his major league season. Some suggest he was four years older. Whatever, his skills had long since been eroded by having to play professional baseball eleven months a year to support himself and his family. Monte Irvin, who was thirty-one himself before he was allowed to begin a splendid eight-year adventure in the majors, says, “Artie was a superstar before the term was invented. In the old Negro leagues we called him The Octopus, because it seemed as though he had eight arms. He had tremendous range, wonderful speed, a superarm. Beside that he was a first-rate punch hitter, always on base, always making trouble for the pitcher. But by the time they let him join us on the Giants, he wasn’t the ball player we’d known.”
I found Artie late in June among the damp green silences of Portland, Oregon, where his minister, the Reverend Thomas L. Strayhand, says no racial problems exist. Pastor Strayhand smiles slightly. “That’s because there aren’t enough of us blacks here for them to notice.”
Wilson sells Chryslers on commission for a company called Gary-Worth, and through three rich days together he managed to mention in his quiet, relaxed way all the merits of a model called the Cordoba. Artie is a hard-working auto salesman and, yes, I would buy a used car from that man. But mostly we talked baseball, which Wilson looks back on with a warmth that others focus on distant, old romances.
“Oh, but I loved playing the game,” he said in the tidy living room of his two-story white frame house in northeast Portland. “I loved it as a little kid round the sandlots in Birmingham and I loved it playing for the Acipico Cast Iron Pipe Company. Say, you know I played against Willie Mays’ daddy back then. Cat Mays played for Westfield in the Tennessee Coal and Iron League. He could move, but he didn’t have big hands like his boy. I loved it with the Birmingham Black Barons. We used to have an All-Star game in the colored league. I was the starting shortstop. Long about the fifth inning, they’d let Jackie Robinson come in and relieve me. Jackie Robinson. He was my substitute.”
Wilson is a trim, tidy man with a pencil mustache and a soft tenor voice. “I never thought Robinson had a big league shortstop’s arm,” I said.
“Right,” Wilson said, “but Jackie cheated. He studied the hitters good and made up for the arm by playing position. He knew where they’d hit. Alvin Dark done the same thing for the Giants. There wasn’t nobody who saw me and Jackie in 1945 who wouldn’t tell you but one thing. I was the best shortstop. There isn’t nobody with intelligence who wouldn’t tell you something else. For integrating baseball, he was the best man.”
Usually a ball player’s home glares with trophies, placards and awards celebrating his triumphs. The first thing one noticed on entering Jackie Robinson’s flagstone mansion in Connecticut was the silver bat he won for leading National League hitters in 1949. At Mickey Mantle’s contemporary ranch, off a cul-de-sac in Dallas, the walls of one room blaze with color. They are bright with framed magazine covers, Life, Look, Newsweek and the rest. From each cover Mickey Mantle’s visage stares.
“Where are your trophies?” I said to Artie Wilson. Only religious paintings hung in the living room.
“Around,” he said.
“Can I see them?”
“But not around here. I gave some to my boy. He’s a college graduate. He coaches sports in Hawaii. My daughter got some. She works for the conservation department of the state. But to tell you the truth there aren’t all that many. The colored leagues, you know, they wasn’t giving too much away. That’s how they was. I ain’t complaining. I liked being there.”
What Artie loved was his one season playing for Leo Durocher and the Giants. “Leo had the greatest tricks,” he said. “He’d carry a rubber cigar—he didn’t smoke— and he’d come up to some rookie and say, ‘Hey, gimme your matches.’ Twenty minutes later he’d be asking the kid what he was doing in the Thunderbird Club last night. The rookie wondered how Leo knew where he’d been drinking. Leo had looked at the matches, that was how. But after a while the rookies got smart. You can’t stay dumb forever. They stopped carrying matches and bought cigarette lighters. Then Leo would come up with something else. You couldn’t get ahead of that man.”
Putting his children through college meant that Wilson had to supplement his income by playing Caribbean winter ball. “The guys I knew in baseball,” he said, softly. “Luis Tiant’s father down in Cuba. Best lefthanded pick-off move I ever saw. Silvio Garcia, an infielder. Durocher said he’d been worth a million if he was white. Luke Easter. They spoiled him up in Cleveland by getting him to pull. If they left Easter alone, he’d hit ’em 450 feet to any field. Would you believe there was a catcher in the Negro League who was the fastest man behind the plate I ever saw?”
“Josh Gibson?”
“No. Poor Josh went crazy and he died. Ol’ Josh hit the longest homers I ever saw. This catcher’s name was Lockett, and he could run so fast that going to back up first he’d beat the runner there. One day somebody hit a ground ball toward the hole and the pitcher forgot to cover. But the guy was out on a play that went from the first baseman to Lockett.”
I thought of Satchel Paige’s tall tale about Josh Gibson swinging so hard in Pittsburgh one day that the baseball simply vanished, heading east. A day later Gibson was at bat in Philadelphia, when the center-fielder suddenly ran backward, leaped and caught a baseball. According to Paige, the umpire looked at Gibson and announced, “You’re out in Pittsburgh yesterday.”
“I might believe your Lockett story if I saw it in a record book,” I said to Artie Wilson.
“Can’t,” he said. A smile flickered, semi-teasing, semi-sad. “There ain’t no records. It’s like that game was never played.”
Wilson did lead the Pacific Coast League in batting once, and when he finds out that you know of that, he beams. “Oh, I was finishing up then. It wasn’t like I had my real good speed. But I still could hit any Triple-A pitcher. I played for Charlie Dressen down at Oakland. He was a sharp one also, almost like Durocher. But not quite. Leo was off there by himself.
“Why, one time with the Giants, Leo came into a Pullman car where a lot of his ball players were shooting craps. Leo took off his jacket, got down on the floor and in half an hour he had every dollar in that Pullman. Then he stood up and told the players, ‘You already been taken to bed. Now it’s time for you to go to sleep.’ ” The memory made Wilson laugh softly in delight.
He grew up in black poverty outside of Birmingham, Alabama, but he says neither poverty nor segregation bothered him as a child. “I didn’t know nothing else, and I was happy long as I could get into a game. For a baseball, we’d find an old golf ball somebody had hit out of bounds. We’d wrap some string around it tight and have our ball. For a bat, we’d saw down a tree branch. When I needed a buck or two for sneakers, I shined shoes.
“I was just naturally happy, long as I played ball. I got a job cutting pipes and playing for the Acipico Company team, and one day I got careless in the factory and lost part of my thumb.” He showed me his right hand. The thumb was cut off at the knuckle. “Didn’t hurt much and I just had to adjust my throwing a little. I pitched once in a while. In the colored leagues you had to play every position. After the accident I could make my fast ball move better.
“With the Black Barons we had an owner who ran a funeral parlor in Memphis. He paid us regular. We went from town to town by bus, always playing, which I loved, and I got so I slept better sitting up in a bus than in a bed. Then Abe Saperstein got the club and took us out barnstorming and we won every game we played. When we got back to San Francisco, Abe wanted to take us to Joe DiMaggio’s Restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf. Then he got the word. A colored ball team wasn’t welcome. I think that got me as mad as anything ever did.”
Integration moved slowly. First Robinson. Then Larry Doby. Then Dan Bankhead. It was 1960 before the majors were truly open.
“But the years you were excluded from organized ball,” I said.
“You’re thinking now, not then. Then, like I say, I was just happy to be a professional baseball player anywhere.”
Wilson drove me about Portland, soft-selling his Cordoba, pointing out the Civic Stadium, where the Portland Timbers were playing soccer, and the Columbia River, crowded not with salmon but with freighters. “Rains a lot and it’s cool, but it’s been my home for sixteen years. You have any plans for tomorrow?”
“No.”
“Well, if I’m not intruding on you and interfering with your sleep, I’d like you to be my guest at church.” It was a hesitant, strangely poignant invitation.
“Thanks,” I said. “Appreciate that,” I said. Then musing aloud, “Is your church integrated?”
“Of course it’s integrated,” Wilson said.
I attended Sunday school class at the Allen Temple Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, where we read II Corinthians and men debated whether sin began with taking a drink or getting drunk. The issue lay in doubt when services began. A youth choir sang “Come, Thou Almighty King.” Wilson, Finance Chairman of the Allen Temple Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, supervised the passing of collection plates. Pastor Strayhand preached and chanted on life’s decisions. Then he introduced a new parishioner, a portly man, gray-haired and short of breath. “Come sit up front, brother,” the minister said. Artie Wilson found a straight-back wooden chair and placed it before the pulpit. The old man made his way forward, panting and wheezing, on a cane.
“You know our tradition,” Strayhand said. “We greet new members of our church the second time they’re here. But you can see the brother’s condition. We never know when the Lord will summon one of us. I think we better greet this brother now.”
The churchgoers ordered themselves into a line. One by one they shook the old man’s hand and bade him welcome. The choir sang “Abide with Me.”
After services, we gathered in the basement for a lunch of fried chicken, corn on the cob and hot apple pie. As they had for the old man, scores of people approached to shake my hand. All were black.
At dinner, Artie Wilson said, “You remember when you asked if my church was integrated.”
“You told me it was.”
“What I meant was that God don’t know no color.”
Then we were back to baseball again. Artie asked me what was happening in Seattle.
“Well, they have their dome, and Danny Kaye and Les Smith have the franchise and for the first few years the team there will be terrible.”
“Is there any chance they might hire Leo to manage?”
“Depends on Durocher’s health and how he’s been getting along with Kaye. What makes you ask?”
The soft voice grew even more quiet. “I know a lot about the game. I can teach good. I’m fine selling cars, but I was just thinking that maybe if Leo got the managing job he might just happen to remember me.”
The old Negro All-Star shortstop looked out a restaurant window into twilight. “My children has grown fine,” he said. “My wife’s a lovely woman. I’m at peace with myself. But I didn’t just love playing that game. I loved being around baseball. The big leagues is the greatest baseball in the world.
“I don’t miss nothing and I don’t resent nothing, ’cept DiMaggio’s Restaurant. But now at my age, if Leo got Seattle and hired me as one of his coaches, I could help him and be back in the major leagues again.
“I’d pray for that,” Artie Wilson said without sadness, “ ’cept you just shouldn’t ask the Lord for too much.”
2
Outside the multipurpose stadium in St. Louis, a hundred yards past the vaulting shadow of the Gateway Arch, a hulking statue purports to represent Stan Musial at bat. It is a triumph of ineptitude over sincerity.
St. Louis baseball writers who had watched Stan Musial play baseball for almost a quarter of a century engaged a sculptor named Carl Mose to cast Old Number Six in bronze. Then Ford Frick composed an inscription for the pedestal:
Here stands baseball’s perfect warrior.
Here stands baseball’s perfect knight.
The shoulders are too broad. The torso is too thick. The work smacks of the massive statuary that infests the Soviet Union. It misses the lithe beauty of The Man.
“I saw the sculptor when he was working on it,” Stan Musial said, beside his pedestal. “I told him I never looked that broad. He said it had to be that broad because it was going to be against the backdrop of a big ball park. He missed the stance, but what kind of man would I have been if I’d complained? The writers were generous. The sculptor did his best. Look, there’s a statue of me in St. Louis while I’m still alive.”
A pregnant woman, armed with an autograph book, charged. “Write for my son Willie,” she commanded. Musial nodded, said, “Where ya from?” and signed with a lean-fingered, practiced hand.
“Thank you,” the pregnant woman said. “Willie is coming soon. After he gets here and learns to talk, I’m sure he’ll thank you, Mr. Musial.”
Inside the round stadium, the St. Louis Cardinals were losing slowly in wet July Mississippi heat. The final score would be Cincinnati 13, Cardinals 2. We had left after the fourth inning, when baseball’s perfect knight passed his threshold of anguish at bad baseball played by the home team.
To reach most old ball players, even millionaire old ball players like Hank Greenberg, you simply call their homes toward dinner time. A pleased, remembered voice comes through the phone. “I had a good day playing tennis. How’ve you been? Who’ve you been seeing? Say, if you’re in town, come over and we can talk about the old days.”
To reach Stan Musial, you call the office of the resort and restaurant corporation called Stan Musial’s & Biggie’s, Inc. When I did, a secretary said politely but crisply, “I’m sorry. Mr. Musial is on a good-will tour of Europe. He’ll be back briefly in two weeks. Then he’s flying to the Montreal Olympics. We’ll try to fit you in, but could I have your name again and could you tell me what this is in reference to?”
It was in reference to one thing. Stan Musial, neither a perfect warrior nor any sort of knight, is my particular baseball hero. I heard a teammate who knew him well call him a choker. “Considering his ability, he didn’t drive in enough runs,” the man said. Echoes reached Musial, who would not stoop to make a response. Across his twenty-two years with the Cardinals, Musial batted in a total of 1,951 runs. That number is so large as to be meaningless, except that it is the fifth highest total in the history of the major leagues. According to Jackie Robinson, Musial remained passive in baseball’s struggle to integrate itself. “He was like Gil Hodges,” Robinson said. “A nice guy, but when it came to what I had to do, neither one hurt me and neither one helped.” But in 1972 Musial worked quietly for the election of George McGovern as President. He is a political activist, and on racial questions he favors the men Robinson almost certainly would have preferred.
Musial is a man of limited education, superior intelligence, a guarded manner, a surface conviviality and a certain aloofness. He knows just who he is. Stan Musial, Hall-of-Famer, great batsman and, thirteen years after he last racked a double to right center field, still an American hero.
We were rambling about baseball in one of his offices in St. Louis, when my wife, who can be more direct than I, interposed five questions.
“By the time you got to be thirty-five,” she said, “and your muscles began to ache, did you still enjoy playing baseball?”
Musial nodded, touched his sharp chin and said, “I always wanted to be a baseball player. That’s the only thing I ever wanted to be. Now figure that I was in the exact profession I wanted and I was at the top of that profession and they were paying me a hundred thousand dollars a year. Yes. I enjoyed playing baseball very much right up to the end of my career.”
“About politics?” Wendy said.
“I’m a Democrat. Tom Eagleton, the Senator, says he remembers sitting in my lap when he was a kid visiting our spring training camp years ago.”
“What do you think of Jimmy Carter?”
Musial laughed to himself. “I’d have to say he’s very unusual for a candidate.”
“You worked for Lyndon Johnson?”
“He asked me to run his physical-fitness program, and I did. I believe in physical fitness. I’m fifty-five years old and I still swim two or three hours every day.”
“But didn’t you find Lyndon Johnson vulgar?” Wendy said.
Musial looked at me impersonally, then at my wife. “No,” he said, “because we only talked politics.”
If I read him correctly, Musial had said in quick succession that Wendy’s first question was naïve, that Carter was a prince of peanut growers and that Lyndon Johnson would have sounded obscene in a roaring dugout. Just as he hit home runs without seeming to strain, Musial had implied all these things without a suggestion of rancor.
People were always mistaking his subtlety for blandness. An agent employed by both Musial and Ted Williams once said, “If you want to make some money selling articles, stick with Williams. The other feller’s nice, but there isn’t any electricity to him.” Then an editor at Newsweek, where I was working, directed me to prepare a cover story on Musial. “Pick up the Cardinals out in Pittsburgh,” the editor said, “and make Musial take you to Donora. It’ll work well, putting him back on the streets of the factory town where he grew up.”
At Forbes Field, Musial said that he was driving to Donora the next day and I was welcome to ride with him, provided I agreed not to write about the trip.
“Why not?”
“I promised someone I’d visit sick kids in the hospital. If you write that, it’ll look like I’m doing it for publicity. Then, my mother lives above a store. That’s where she wants to live. We had her in St. Louis, but she missed her old friends, so she went back home and found a place she liked. No matter how you write that, the magazine can come out with a headline: ‘Stan Musial’s Mother Lives Above a Store.’ ”
“Well, I have to come back with a story.”
“We’ll spend some time,” Musial said, “and maybe get something.”
We talked batting, for three afternoons. To break a slump, he hit to the opposite field. He remembered a day at Ebbets Field when he had gotten five hits, all with two strikes, and he remembered a year when he suffered chronic appendicitis and played 149 games and hit .312. He remembered the double-header at Busch Stadium when he hit five home runs. He could even recall the different pitches that he hit.
“Do you guess at the plate?” I said, finally.
The sharp-featured face lit. “I don’t guess. I know.” Then Musial spun out a batting secret. He had memorized the speed at which every pitcher in the league threw the fast ball, the curve, the slider. He picked up the speed of the ball in the first thirty feet of its flight, after which he knew how the ball would move as it crossed home plate.
About eighty pitchers worked in the National League then. Musial had locked the speed of some 240 different pitches into his memory. I had done my work, asked the right question, and Musial responded with a story that was picked up by a hundred newspapers.
They oversimplified, as newspapers often do. “MUSIAL REVEALS HIS BATTING SECRET”—as though one magic trick could make us all .300 hitters. Even if you or I can identify a specific pitch thirty feet away, we are left with one-fifth of a second, the quickness of a blink, in which to respond. Musial’s lifetime batting average, .331, did not trace to a single secret. It was fashioned of memory, concentration, discipline, eyesight, physical conditioning and reflexes.
Going for his three thousandth hit, Musial neglected to concentrate. The pitch fooled him and he took his stride too early. But he kept his bat back, as all great hitters do. With no batting secret, only sheer reflex, he slugged a double to left.
Under autographed photos of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Bob Hope in his office, Musial at fifty-five looked much as he did fifteen years before. The same surprisingly thin wrists. The same powerful back. A waistline barely thicker than it had been. The deceptive self-deprecation also persists.
“I’m semiretired,” he insisted, but twice he broke off our interview politely to take business calls. Stan Musial’s & Biggie’s, Inc., a family-held company, owns two Florida hotels and a restaurant and a hotel in St. Louis.
“Are you a millionaire like Greenberg?” I asked.
“Just write that I’m not hanging for my pension. See, a long time ago, I knew I couldn’t hit forever and I didn’t want to be a coach or manager. So Biggie Garagani, who died young, and I started the restaurant in 1949. Biggie knew the business and I knew that just my name wasn’t enough. I put in time. I like mixing with people up to a point and my being here was good for business. I still walk around the place six nights a week when I’m in town. So while I was playing, I was building a permanent restaurant business, and that just led naturally into the hotels. What’s my title? President of Stan Musial’s & Biggie’s, Inc.”
Self-made men from poor backgrounds often drift toward such politicians as Reagan, a self-made man from a poor background. Musial’s liberalism developed out of decent respect for others, and has seemed to deepen as he ages.
“I don’t think Polish jokes or Jewish jokes or black jokes are really funny,” he said. “My dad came out of Poland and worked like hell all his life and what was funny about that? Pulaski came out of Poland and helped out in the American Revolution. Was that a joke? I’ve just come back from Poland and I enjoyed the country, the people and seeing them work hard building high-rises. Some of them knew me. I brought my harmonica along and played a little.”
“Polish songs?”
“Yeah. Like ‘Red River Valley.’ ”
At the ball park, fans flooded toward his box demanding autographs. It was a Sunday and the autograph board flashed messages welcoming groups from Alton, Illinois, and Springfield, Missouri. Before the Dodgers went to California in 1957, the Cardinals were the only major league team based west of the Mississippi, and they drew fans from Oklahoma, Kansas, even Texas. The new major league teams, Kansas City, Texas and even Houston, have chipped the Cardinals’ huge regional base. But some of the people who approached Musial in the swelter of Busch Stadium wore overalls. They were farmers, and their families had rooted for the Cardinals by radio and then by television, in lonely white houses set far away among the prairies.
Now the Cardinals, like the city of St. Louis itself, were struggling through change. Bob Gibson had retired and Joe Torre had been traded and Lou Brock had edged past thirty-five. The new talent was inferior. Someone lined a single to right and the ball bounced over Willie Crawford’s head.
“It’s tricky playing that artificial surface,” Musial said. “The ball hops high.”
“Crawford plays out there every day,” I said. “This is the major leagues.” Musial winced.
More farmers and children extended scorecards to be signed. “Okay, let’s wait for between innings,” Musial said. “Give a fella a chance to watch a game.”
Someone said, “Sure.” Another clutch of fans arrived. Silent now, Musial kept signing.
The St. Louis ball park, called Busch Stadium, looks very much like Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta, Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati and Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. Vast, white, concrete and circular, designed to accommodate both football and baseball and so ideal for neither. Each old ball park, Forbes Field, the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field, possessed a special character, and a man watching a ball game knew at once where he was. The new modular arenas suggest neither history nor place, only efficiency. With McDonald’s Hamburger stands and Holiday Inns, they are part of the homogenization of America.
Brochures advertising St. Louis as “The Gateway to the West,” boast of The Arch, a mighty curve of steel that rises 630 feet above the west bank of the Mississippi. (Gordon, my older son, studying architecture at Columbia, describes it as “the ultimate McDonald’s.”) The Arch, the new ball park and a restaurant called The Spanish Pavilion were expected to stimulate building in downtown St. Louis. The idea failed and The Spanish Pavilion went bankrupt. For miles west of Busch Stadium one sees drab institutional housing, empty lots, decay.
“St. Louis is getting like Los Angeles,” I complained to Musial. “I can’t seem to find downtown.”
“It’s the suburbs,” Musial said. “That’s where the shopping centers have moved. Downtown’s a problem everywhere, isn’t it? When I wanted a hotel here, I bought one near the airport.”
The Reds were six runs ahead. Fans continued swarming toward us. Still signing, Musial singled out Pete Rose for praise and said he felt embarrassed that so many major leaguers were hitting in the .200s. “There’s no excuse for that. You know why it happens? They keep trying to pull everything, even low outside sliders. And you can’t do that. Nobody can. If you’re a major league ball player, you ought to have pride. Learn to stroke outside pitches to the opposite field. That’s part of your job. A major league hitter is supposed to be a professional.”
“Do you miss playing?” I said. Pete Rose rapped a single up the middle.
“No,” Musial said. “Nice stroke, Pete. I quit while I still enjoyed it, but I put in my time. I like to travel now, but not with a ball club. Have you ever seen Ireland? Do you know how beautiful Ireland is?”
Later we drove back to his restaurant; a crowd surrounded Musial in the lobby. He said to each, “How are ya? Where ya from?” One fiftyish man was so awed that he momentarily lost the power of speech. He waved his arms and sputtered and poked his wife and pointed. Musial clapped the man gently on the back. “How are ya? Where ya from?”
Musial had spoken to him. The man looked as if he might weep with joy. At length he recovered sufficiently to say a single word. “Fresno.”
We found a quiet place to drink. “Does this happen all the time?” I asked.
“Isn’t it something?” Musial said. “And I’m thirteen years out of the business. Say, you know what Jack Kennedy said to me once? He said they claimed he was too young to be President and I was too old to be playing ball. Well, Jack got to be President and two years later, when I was forty-two years old, I played 135 games and I hit .330.”
“Ebbets Field, Stash,” I said. “They should have given you the right-field wall when they wrecked the place. You owned it, anyway.”
“What do you think my lifetime average was in Brooklyn?” Musial said.
“About .480.”
“It only seemed that way,” he said, in a gentle putdown. “Actually, my lifetime average there was .360.”
I can’t imagine Galahad, the perfect knight, as a baseball hero. He was priggish and probably undersized. Which doesn’t matter. Having Stanley Frank Musial is quite enough.
3
On January 19, 1972, Early Wynn, the pitcher, was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Such tidings generally lead to a phone call from a wire service reporter, who asks the ball player for comment, and if you follow that sort of thing, you know what happens next. In a wash of sentiment, the ball player thanks mother, God, truth, justice and the American way of life.
Early Wynn is not inclined toward sentimentality. He had won three hundred games, working through four decades in the major leagues, and he had intimidated generations of American League batters with the best knockdown pitching of his time. He deserved to be in the Hall of Fame, he knew. He pulled the cork from a bottle of Seagram’s Crown Royal. He took a drink.
The telephone rang. It was an enthusiastic young man from a wire service. “Hall of Fame?” Early Wynn thought. “It’s a Hall of Shame. I should have been voted in three years ago.” But Mr. Wynn can drink heartily without losing either his footing or his senses. He buried his impulse and made a measured response. “Naturally I’m happy. I don’t think I’m as thrilled as I would have been if I had made it the first time. I’d like to have been with Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Walter Johnson. They all made it the first year they were eligible.”
The following summer Wynn went to work managing Orlando, the Minnesota farm team in the Class A Florida State League. It pleased him to manage in the Minnesota organization under Calvin Griffith because Calvin’s father, Clark Griffith, had brought Wynn into the majors in 1939. He took a few days off for induction ceremonies at Cooperstown that August and did make sentimental comments in a speech. That may have been an error. Cal Griffith fired him from Orlando in September, making Wynn the only man I know who was trumpeted into the Hall of Fame and booted out of organized baseball in successive months.
The business of baseball offers a full quota of absurdities. In the low minors, where ball players are supposed to be learning, you find one man, the manager, charged with teaching twenty-three different apprentices. In the majors, where ball players are supposed to be finished, you find special coaches for pitching, catching and even base running. The big leagues have expanded chaotically, and clubs that might have become intense and profitable rivals, say Oakland and San Francisco, play in different leagues. It is tempting, then, to regard Wynn’s dismissal as one more instance of thoughtlessness on baseball’s windy heights. Some, knowing the Minnesota organization, suggest that Griffith simply wanted to find someone else who would manage for $500 less. I suspect other considerations were involved.
Wynn is a fierce, direct man who can take a drink. Don Newcombe could take a drink, too, and Newcombe told a Senate subcommittee in March, 1976, that whiskey had cost him everything but his life.
Alcohol has threatened baseball players from the beginning of the professional game. By layman’s standards, a ball player works a short day. He has more idle hours than most in which to raise a glass. A ball player does not have to reach an office by 9 A.M. After a drinking night, he has all morning to recover. A ball player travels. In adolescent fantasy, the road is a roseland of dancing girls, some topless, all beckoning. The road is free. Actual baseball travel quickly becomes a monotony of stations and airports, buses and room clerks—in short, homelessness. For every night when a dancing girl beckons, if that is what one wants, there are five in which a man aches to see his wife, his children, even his backyard. Certain ball players drink to forget their loneliness and keep drinking until they can no longer remember what they had started drinking to forget.
A Penobscot Indian from Maine named Louis Francis Sockalexis batted .331 for Cleveland as a rookie in 1897. He could run a hundred yards in ten seconds, while in full baseball uniform, and is said to have possessed the best throwing arm of his time. He started drinking on the road and, in a wretched enactment of the Indian-firewater cliché, Lou Sockalexis destroyed himself. He dropped out of the majors in three years and, according to the historian Robert Smith, “became a street beggar, shuffling along sidewalks, with the toes out of his shoes, and his hand extended for the few cents he needed to get a mouthful of whiskey.”
Ed Delahanty came out of a Cleveland family that produced five boys who made the major leagues. Ed was the best. In 1893, when the standard baseball was as lively as a roll of socks, Delahanty hit nineteen home runs. He made money and began to worry about keeping it. His wife liked parties. He worried about her fidelity. Drunk, he could forget why he was worrying.
He had been drinking hard on a train in the summer of 1903, when he decided to go for a walk during a layover at the Niagara Falls station. He chose a railroad bridge as his footpath, lost his balance and fell into the Niagara River, boiling below. The day he died, Big Ed Delahanty was batting .333.
Baseball literature bubbles with drinking stories, usually told in macho-romantic style and ending with a snappy punch line. “So when I asked Paul Waner how he could hit when he was smashed, Waner said, ‘I see three baseballs, but I only swing at the middle one.’ ” The late John Lardner once picked his all-time, all-alcoholic All-Stars. It was a funny idea and a championship team. The right-fielder was Babe Ruth.
But alcoholism was humorless to Don Newcombe. “Mr. Chairman,” he began at a Senate hearing, “my drinking started when I was eight. When I joined the Dodgers, my consumption increased tremendously. Baseball managers encouraged drinking beer. They still do. The only way to celebrate a victory is to knock off a six-pack. When Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford brag in a TV commercial that they belong in the beer drinkers’ Hall of Fame, they’re not kidding.
“My problem was that I never knew my capacity. After my biggest season with the Dodgers—in 1956 I won twenty-seven games—I went to Japan with the team. I was so constantly drunk I couldn’t pitch a single game. The following year I went into a prolonged slump. I dropped back into the minor leagues.
“My personal life fell apart. I was divorced from my first wife. I lost my career in baseball. Then I lost a cocktail lounge, a liquor store and an apartment house—all my investments. I went bankrupt and lost the family home.
“One day my second wife told me she’d had enough.” Newcombe paused and gazed at the politicians around him. “Gentlemen, I would give anything under the sun not to lose my wife. I promised her on the head of my oldest son that I wouldn’t drink again. I haven’t since 1966.”
The difference between Newcombe and Early Wynn defines the borderline between drinking and alcoholism. Wynn could mix hard stuff with wine, across a convivial evening, and run at eleven the next morning. Then with hard stuff of another sort, he’d pitch a shutout.
I heard a baseball writer mention once that Early couldn’t manage well in the major leagues because he drank.
“Write that,” I said, “and you’ll be sued for libel.”
“Don’t you know him?” the writer said. “Haven’t you gone drinking with him?”
“For twenty years and I’ve never seen him drunk.”
To Wynn, convivial gatherings were a delight of big league life. He went to parties and he gave parties, gay raucous evenings, rich in baseball talk and needling, and, with a single exception, he did not overestimate his capacity. On that one careless night he was working for Cleveland and visiting Bill Veeck, who owned the Indians. Martinis preceded dinner. Stingers followed. “Curiously, I don’t remember exactly what we served next,” Veeck says, “but I do recall that at 4:30 in the morning I was mixing grasshoppers. Then it struck Early. He was scheduled to pitch the next day and here he was drinking late with the boss.”
“I better go home,” Wynn said. “One-o’clock game.”
“It’s too late to worry about sleep now,” Veeck said. “You better just keep going.”
Wynn reached the ball park at eleven, put on a rubber jacket and began to run. He sweated and showered and went out and pitched a shutout. “Then the reporters came,” Veeck says, “and Early answered all their questions. He got somebody with the knuckle ball. Someone else was fooled by a high slider. He did just fine until the last reporter left the dressing room. Then he fell over on his face.”
There was nothing bland about Early, nothing subdued, nothing cautious. He didn’t like hitters and he said he didn’t like hitters. He knocked them down.
“Why should I worry about hitters?” Wynn said. “Do they worry about me? Do you ever find a hitter crying because he’s hit a line drive through the box? My job is getting hitters out. If I don’t get them out, I lose. I don’t like losing a ball game any more than a salesman likes losing a sale. I’ve got a right to knock down anybody holding a bat.”
“Suppose it was your own mother?” a reporter said.
Wynn thought briefly. “Mother was a pretty good curve-ball hitter,” he said.
That was humor, but at Yankee Stadium I saw Wynn brush his own son. Joe Early, a tall, rangy boy, was visiting for a day, and Early volunteered to throw a little batting practice. Joe Early hit a long line drive to left center. The next pitch, at the cheekbone, sent Joe Early diving to the ground.
“You shouldn’t crowd me,” Wynn said, with noncommittal tenderness.
He taught himself rope tricks and played supermarket openings. He began a newspaper column and within a month had attacked general managers for their penury and the Sporting News for publishing too much gossip. Flying bothered him, so he took lessons and bought himself a single-engine plane. (It still bothered him to ride as a passenger.) He acquired a cabin cruiser and a motorbike and a Packard and a Mercedes, leading Shirley Povich of the Washington Post to comment, “Early does not lack for transportation.” Wynn seized life with his great hands, implacably determined to wring every syllable of living from his time.
Despite that intensity, his staying power was prodigious. He pitched for the Senators in 1939, moved on to the great Indian staff, with Bob Feller and Bob Lemon in 1949, and, ten years after that, pitched the Chicago White Sox to a pennant and won the Cy Young award. He was a thick-chested, black-haired man with a natural glower, which he directed at batters like a death ray. He seemed eternal. But in the early 1960s, he began to suffer attacks of gout. On a snap throw to first, he strained muscles near his elbow and the gout moved into his pitching arm. It was time to quit, but he wanted to win his three hundredth.
His legs were weakening. “During those last years,” Lorraine Wynn says, “when he’d come back from running, his legs would be so sore we had to work out this routine. He’d lie down on his stomach and I’d take a rolling pin and move it up and down over the backs of his legs. That was the only thing that seemed to relax the muscles.”
The old fast ball was gone. It took him three years to win his final sixteen games, and it would not be until 1963 that he won his three hundredth. He had to pitch in pain and terrible weariness, but three hundred was the goal and he was going to get there. “Hell, I’ve lost more than two hundred,” he said.
His rage to live persisted and one night he asked if there were any interesting parties in New York. We tried one, which was dull, and another, which was worse. “Let’s go to the Village Barn,” he said.
“That’s way downtown,” I said, “and I haven’t been there since college.”
“I just want to see that place one more time.”
The Barn was barren. It was getting very late. We took some drinks.
“The hitters may not know this,” Wynn said. “They aren’t all that smart. But I know it. I can’t get ’em out any more.”
“You’re in your forties, Early. What did you figure? You knew this was going to happen.”
His face assumed a look of inexpressible sadness. “But now it’s happening,” he said.
After retiring, he drifted through a predictable mix of baseball jobs: pitching coach, scout, minor league manager. But he never became a politic man. In 1969, when Billy Martin managed the Twins, one columnist’s story enraged Martin. Three sportswriters, Red Smith among them, appeared on the field. Martin began cursing at the perfidy of the press. “Anyone who talks to any of those newspaper bastards is crazy,” Martin yelled.
Wynn had known Smith for fifteen years. He was also Martin’s pitching coach. Before Billy Martin’s popping eyes, Wynn walked over to Smith and welcomed him warmly to the field. He was not Martin’s pitching coach again.
I spent a week with Wynn in Orlando during 1972, riding buses through central Florida, working out with the team when he’d let me, tasting life at the bottom of the minor leagues. He seemed to be an excellent manager. Some of the players, notably pitchers, were awed, so Early took them to dinner or visited their homes. To me he said, “I sort of have to be head counselor.” The Twins resisted the idea of supplying beer for the team bus. Early bought the beer out of his own pocket.
His pitching approach is unusual in that he believes in the high slider. Usually you throw the fast ball up and the slider down. Wynn explained how to use the slider high. “Start with a bad one, that breaks wide. Bad pitch, but till it breaks it looks okay. He goes for it and misses and you have your strike. Try with something else, the curve, or for me the knuckler, and you can get a second strike. Now throw a spinner—not a slider but a ball that spins and looks like it’s gonna slide—just where you threw that first pitch. He thinks it will break wide again. He doesn’t swing, and you’ve got called strike three. Of course, you’ve got to put something on the ball.”
He meant throw hard, but few of the Orlando pitchers were really fast. The team went nowhere and Griffith forced Wynn out of baseball.
Early handled a bat well enough to pinch-hit for Washington. He was a switch hitter who once batted .319. He was a scholar of the game, and whenever I’ve watched him teach, he’s been both stern and patient. The knock-down pitch has been curtailed by a change in the rules, but I don’t think that’s why nobody has hired Wynn.
Baseball executives increasingly favor men who are corporate bland. More and more major league teams are run by syndicates, and syndicates prefer managers and coaches who do as they are told, salute the company president and study statistics rather than spend spirited evenings talking baseball with the press. Veeck might have brought him to Chicago, but Paul Richards wanted to be his own pitching coach. Finley? Proud, independent field leaders are not to Charley Finley’s taste.
With few exceptions, managers today are organization men, who sip coffee and a few beers, praise their superiors, play golf, exude conventionalism. Wynn is an unconventional man, up from the Great Depression, with a record of saying what he thinks, a love of frank talk toward the dawn, a distaste for defeat and an absolute intolerance of anything less than an ultimate effort every game. Who in baseball today would hire a manager like that? The question answers itself pragmatically. Nobody.
Wynn has found work as sales coordinator for Wellcraft, a successful boat-manufacturing company, and flying south I expected to find him depressed, or at least subdued.
He lives in Nokomis, forty minutes south of the Well-craft assembly plant in Sarasota. The Hall of Fame pitcher commutes to his office every morning. “The traffic,” he said, the old rage still intact. “What the hell do government officials think about, if they do think? What the hell do they think the west coast of Florida is, a slum? It was no secret that more and more people would be moving here. We knew it twenty years ago. Why haven’t they put in first-class roads?”
We wandered outside his house, which I first visited in 1954. It stood in the country then. Today other houses crowd close. He started his boat and we headed toward an inland waterway, once a blue corridor of beauty. There were little mangrove islands then, and channel markers. A pelican sat on each marker. As the boat approached, the pelican suddenly flew off. Later we fished in the Gulf of Mexico and I caught a can of Budweiser.
Now the inland waterway runs between huge condominiums with white concrete sundecks and yellow shuffleboard courts. “I didn’t used to know what ecology meant,” Wynn said as we cruised. “I sure as hell do now. I guess while I was up there pitching, somebody forgot to put in zoning laws.”
We turned around and docked and walked into his party room. The bar was supported by bats. Overhead, baseballs from fifteen of his greatest victories hung from the ceiling. He had placed his Cy Young trophy on one wall. From another, three men smiled out of an old picture: Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Early Wynn.
“The Hall of Fame,” I began.
“Look,” he said, “you know I’m honored to be in there. Hartford, Alabama, that’s where I grew, and the biggest thing that happened in that town was a peanut festival. But we had baseball and we’d ride mule wagons many a mile for a town game. They write when I showed up at a pro tryout I was barefoot. I wasn’t, but I was wearing overalls. It’s a long way from Hartford, Alabama, to Cooperstown, but I mean, hell, any man who wins three hundred major league games ought to get voted in as soon as he’s eligible. I mean, don’t people know how much hard work that is?”
I said I thought I did and asked how he liked the job at Wellcraft. “Well, I’ve always been fond of boats,” he said. He took out a catalogue and then, the fiercest competitor I’ve known in baseball, set about selling me a cabin cruiser.
A light checking account blocked the sale, but this wasn’t precisely like a Wynn ball game. Among the trophies and the photographs I knew at last I could resist his will, without getting a fast ball fired at my head.