9. War, Plenty, and the End of Jim Crow

Hank Greenberg was the first baseball star drafted, but not the first big-leaguer. That distinction belonged to Hugh Mulcahy, a right-hander with the Philadelphia Phillies called to army service late in 1940, some three months after President Roosevelt signed the Selective Service Act. Possibly draftee Mulcahy, who’d been charged with so many losses he’d acquired the nickname “Losing Pitcher,” surmised that actual combat couldn’t be any worse than pitching for the Phillies.

Within a matter of days following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Bob Feller enlisted in the U.S. Navy. A number of other major-leaguers volunteered for military service following official U.S. entry into the European and Asian-Pacific conflicts, but most players proved no more anxious to get into anything besides a baseball uniform than their counterparts in previous American wars had. As in 1917–1918, they bided their time in hopes that through some kind of deferment, they would still be able to continue their professional careers.

Meanwhile baseball’s officialdom fretted over how to proceed—and what the government in Washington might do. The picture clarified considerably on January 15, 1942, when President Roosevelt, in an official reply to commissioner Landis’s inquiry about baseball’s status, gave the sport what was widely hailed as a “green light.” Although ballplayers would be under the same military obligation as everybody else and baseball would have to cope with wartime restrictions on travel and materials, the sport was such an important element in national morale, said Roosevelt, that it ought to be allowed to carry on. A year later Paul V. McNutt, head of the War Manpower Commission, announced that ballplayers could leave off-season jobs in “essential occupations” and report for spring training, although they would thereby lose their draft-exempt status.

Thus while World War II would be a much more protracted, demanding, and intrusive experience for the American people than World War I, at no time did professional baseball face the total shutdown it had in 1918. Aided by full employment, high wartime wages, and gasoline rationing that kept people close to home, attendance would hold up well throughout the war years. More night games were played than ever before, as well as occasional contests scheduled in the morning for the convenience of workers coming off the “graveyard shift” in war-production plants. Sooner or later nearly all the majors’ highest-salaried players were in the armed forces, so that payrolls—about a quarter of operating costs—tended to shrink as the war progressed.

In other respects, though, the war presented baseball—all organized sports, for that matter—with an even more difficult set of circumstances than had been the case under the infirm economy of the thirties. By the spring of 1942 the military draft had hit the minor leagues hard; several circuits, including the strong Texas League, decided to suspend operations “for the duration,” in the parlance of the war years. The toll of suspended minor leagues increased year by year, until only ten remained in operation at the end of the 1944 season. Somehow the Southern Association, the Texas League’s counterpart, managed to stay in business, as did the American Association and the International and Pacific Coast leagues, the three top-level minors. In those circuits, as in the majors, nondraftable players became increasingly scarce, the play increasingly substandard.

Through the 1942 season, most of the top major-leaguers still hadn’t been called up, so that the overall level of play changed little. The Yankees won again—their sixth American League pennant in seven seasons—with basically their 1941 team. Although Tommy Henrich departed for military service late in the season, Joe DiMaggio, Joe Gordon, Charlie Keller, and Phil Rizzuto were still on hand at World Series time. Bill Dickey had started to fade; first base was still a problem; and now, with the decline of Red Rolfe, so was third. But the pitching staff—headed by Ernie Bonham (21–5), Spurgeon “Spud” Chandler (16–5), rookie Hank Borowy (15–4), and aging Red Ruffing (14–7)—was still a deep one.

Leo Durocher’s Brooklyn Dodgers won 104 games, four more than in 1941, and might have repeated as National League champions if, in August, Pete Reiser hadn’t crashed into a concrete outfield wall (none were padded as yet) and incapacitated himself for the rest of the race. Winning two games more than the Dodgers, Billy Southworth’s St. Louis Cardinals took the franchise’s sixth NL pennant with a team consisting almost entirely of men who’d matured in the Cardinals’ minor-league empire.

Young and fast, they were maybe the best group of Cardinals so far. Terry Moore, Enos Slaughter, and rookie Stan Musial were a superb outfield; George “Whitey” Kurowski was a solid third baseman; Marty Marion was a tall, far-ranging shortstop; and Walker Cooper provided sturdy catching. Brother Mort Cooper won twenty-two games, one more than rookie Johnny Beazley. After dropping the World Series opener, at Sportsman’s Park, the Cardinals surprised everybody by sweeping four straight, winning twice on complete games by Beazley.

Both the Yankees and Cardinals easily repeated in 1943, the Yankees by thirteen and one-half games over Washington, the Cardinals by a whopping eighteen over Cincinnati. The Yankees won without DiMaggio or any of their other ’42 regulars except Keller, Gordon, and an overage Dickey. Johnny Murphy, who got credit for twelve victories in relief and saved eight others, and Spud Chandler, with twenty wins and the lowest earned run average (1.64) in the majors in nearly a quarter-century, were big reasons why the patched-together Yankees found themselves in still another World Series.

Meanwhile the Cardinals had lost Slaughter, Moore, and Beazley (who would never recover from a bad arm he developed pitching in the military). But the twenty-one-year-old Musial, with a .357 average, captured the first of his seven NL batting titles; Walker Cooper also had a strong year at bat; Mort Cooper again led the league in wins (twenty-one); and lefty Max Lanier (15–7) became the number two man on the staff.

Unaccustomed to going into a World Series as underdogs, the Yankees drubbed the defending champions in five games. Chandler, too old to be drafted, yielded two runs to the Cardinals in beating them in game one, then pitched a 2–0 shutout to end the Series. The Cardinals made ten errors and scored only nine runs off Chandler and the rest of the New York staff.

The caliber of baseball in the American and National leagues from 1943 through 1945, while perhaps not as bad as later depicted, was undoubtedly lower than at any time since 1918. Besides various Cardinals and Yankees, the list of first-rank major-leaguers who’d entered the armed forces before spring training 1943 included Ted Williams (AL batting, home-run, and rbi leader in 1942), Williams’s Red Sox teammates Dom DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky, Brooklyn’s Pee Wee Reese and Pete Reiser, and the Giants’ hard-hitting Johnny Mize. By the next season the Yankees’ Joe Gordon and Charlie Keller, Washington’s first baseman James “Mickey” Vernon, and Dodgers infielders Billy Herman and Floyd “Arky” Vaughan and pitcher Kirby Higbe, among other headliners, had been called to the colors.

As military manpower demands steadily drained the available (white) North American talent pool, some of the major-league clubs sought out acceptable ballplayers from Cuba, Mexico, and other parts of Central America and the Caribbean. Probably the best of the wartime Hispanic Americans were the Puerto Rican Luis Olmo, who batted .313 with 110 rbi’s for Brooklyn in 1945, and Roberto Estalella, a stocky Cuban who had a couple of good seasons at the plate for the Philadelphia Athletics.

Washington president Clark Griffith carried various Hispanic Americans on his payroll, all of whom, with the exception of Cuban infielder Gilberto Torres, had been with the Senators before Pearl Harbor. In the postwar decades the myth would grow that during the war Griffith had loaded his club with draft-proof (and cheap) Latinos. Actually, the maximum number of such players on the wartime Senators’ twenty-five-man roster was seven (in 1944), and as to whether Griffith required them to sign affidavits affirming their racial purity, as was widely rumored, ¿quién sabe?

By the spring of 1943, big-league managers had come to cherish physically deferred “4-Fs”—players with some chronic condition (such as ulcers, allergies, color blindness, subpar hearing, or minor heart irregularities) that didn’t seriously hamper their on-field performance. In that category were three outstanding American Leaguers: Cleveland shortstop Lou Boudreau, named to manage the Indians in 1942 at age twenty-four, who was bothered by heel spurs; Vernon “Junior” Stephens, the St. Louis Browns’ young shortstop, an allergy sufferer; and Detroit left-hander Hal Newhouser, the top pitcher in the majors in 1944–1945, deferred because of a heart murmur.

Also much prized was the occasional star player such as Stan Musial, who could claim enough dependents that his local Selective Service board had spared him; but by late 1944, with upwards of twelve million Americans under arms, that kind of deferment was almost impossible to come by. Eventually reclassified by his board in Donora, Pennsylvania, Musial entered the navy early in 1945.

At the same time, overage veterans often discovered a new vigor (and inevitably an old weariness) in the midst of the worsening wartime talent shortage. In 1943, at age thirty-eight, Luke Appling of the White Sox won his second AL batting title. At thirty-seven and in his twelfth year in the AL, outfielder Bob Johnson batted .324 for the Red Sox. Paul Waner, three-time NL batting champion in the twenties and thirties, hung on through the war years to finish with 3,152 career base hits and a .333 lifetime average. Jimmie Foxx, released by the Red Sox, put in a couple of inglorious seasons with the Cubs and Philadelphia Phillies before quitting with 534 homers and a .325 career average. Even forty-two-year-old Babe Herman, who hadn’t appeared in a big-league game since 1937, became a pinch hitter for the Dodgers.

A number of underage players also made their big-league debuts, although they usually departed for the armed services by the latter part of the war. The extreme example of a “kid big-leaguer” was Joe Nuxhall, a fifteen-year-old Hamilton, Ohio, high-schooler signed by the Cincinnati Reds. On June 10, 1944, the youth pitched two-thirds of an inning during a 19–0 slaughter by the Cardinals, yielding two hits, five walks, and two runs, which would be the extent of Nuxhall’s big-league career until he rejoined the Reds in 1952, after several years in their farm system.

The extreme example of a 4-F big-leaguer was one-armed Pete Gray. Born Peter Wyshner in 1915 in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, Gray lost his right arm in a childhood accident, but he was determined to make his future in baseball. Playing with semipro and “outlaw” professional teams in the U.S. and Canada, he developed amazing batting and outfielding dexterity, and in 1944, after hitting .333 and stealing sixty-eight bases for Memphis, he won Most Valuable Player honors in the Southern Association. Purchased by the St. Louis Browns (mainly to spark attendance, said cynics), Gray appeared in seventy-seven American League games in 1945, batting .218. Although he was released that fall, he would go on to play several more years in the minors.

Pete Gray’s presence in a big-league uniform would always be cited to show just how bad things got before the war finally ended, about a month prior to the 1945 World Series. Of course, one might suggest that even playing with one arm in a talent-depleted American League, Gray still had to exhibit skills superior to those of the great majority of people who’d ever tried to master the game. Gray, moreover, wasn’t even the first one-armed player in major-league history; in the 1880s Hugh Daily had compiled a 73–89 record pitching in the National League and Union and American associations. For that matter, during the same 1945 season that Gray was with the Browns, left-hander Bert Shepard, a former army pilot whose lower right leg had been amputated in a German prison camp, pitched in one regular-season and several exhibition games for Washington.

The willingness of American and National League clubs to employ one-armed and one-legged players and a fifteen-year-old school-boy, while still refusing to tap the abundant talent in the Negro leagues, more than ever highlighted the absurdity and injustice of baseball’s color barrier. That same persistent Jim Crowism, however, also made possible the most prosperous years in the history of the Negro leagues.

Although the basic features of American race relations remained unchanged, labor scarcities and consequent wage increases in the war years did relatively more for urban blacks than for whites. As Satchel Paige later said, “Everybody had money and everybody was looking around for entertainment.” Recalled Buck Leonard, “During the war when people couldn’t get much gas, that’s when our best crowds were.” Then, too, for various reasons the military draft cut less deeply into the ranks of black ballplayers; the quality of play in the Negro leagues probably suffered less than in the white majors.

For the first time, most teams in the Negro leagues showed profits, with the Homestead-Washington Grays, Kansas City Monarchs, and Newark Eagles being the most consistent money-makers. The annual East-West All-Star Game was a bigger attraction than ever, and crowds in the war years filled Comiskey Park for contests that matched many of the finest baseball players in the United States—few of whose names were at all recognizable to white fans.

The Negro-league World Series finally resumed in 1942, with the Kansas City Monarchs, Negro American League champs, defeating the Homestead Grays, titlists in the Negro National League, in four straight official decisions (one disputed). Fine crowds watched the games in Griffith Stadium in Washington, Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, Yankee Stadium in New York, and Muehlebach Field in Kansas City, as Satchel Paige pitched the first and fourth victories for the Monarchs.

In 1943 the Grays won a seven-game series over Birmingham (played in Washington, Chicago, Columbus, Indianapolis, Birmingham, and Montgomery), and the next year they beat the Black Barons in five games in Birmingham, New Orleans, and Pittsburgh. Some of the biggest crowds in the history of the Negro leagues watched the 1945 World Series, played in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Washington, and Philadelphia. In a major upset, Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, and the rest of the powerful Grays fell in four straight to the NAL’s Cleveland Buckeyes.

By the early forties, every honest baseball man recognized that the Negro leagues offered a cornucopia of gifted ballplayers, and a couple of white big-league clubs actually staged meaningless tryouts for selected black players. But when Leo Durocher remarked that he’d seen “a million good colored players” and would have them on his team “if they weren’t barred by the owners,” commissioner Landis privately warned Durocher to keep his mouth shut on that subject. Publicly, Landis continued to insist that nothing kept National or American League owners from signing blacks.

Early in 1943 Bill Veeck, Jr., twenty-nine-year-old president of the profitable Milwaukee American Association franchise and son of the late Cubs executive, was prepared to take the commissioner at his public word. Veeck naively informed Landis that, if allowed to buy the impoverished Philadelphia Phillies from Gerald Nugent, he intended to fill his roster with Negro-league stars and win the National League pennant. Soon Veeck learned that Nugent had pulled his franchise off the market and turned it back to the league, which then arranged its sale to a lumber dealer named William Cox. (Less than a year later, Landis kicked Cox out of baseball for betting on his team’s games.)

Among the many anomalies of the war period was the fact that between 1943 and 1945, because of government restrictions on nonessential railroad travel, American and National League clubs conducted spring training either at home or in such unlikely places as Bear Mountain, New York; Asbury Park and Lakewood, New Jersey; Wallingford, Connecticut; and French Lick, Indiana. That meant, of course, that they spent much of their time performing calisthenics and throwing the ball around indoors in local gymnasiums before getting in a few chilly preseason exhibition games.

Starting in 1943, even the baseball itself was different. Available rubber supplies were diverted to war-production needs; choice Bolivian horsehides and high-grade Australian wool were no longer available. Thus the Spalding company secured its horsehides and woolen yarn at home, while it substituted a South American rubberlike gum called balata for the sheathing around the baseball’s cork center. The result was a ball that was just as durable as the prewar model but, so hitters complained, quite a bit deader. If so, the “balata ball” produced no drastic changes in offensive output.

Team batting averages actually increased somewhat during the 1943–1945 period, while total scoring fluctuated. The American League’s batting leaders did win with lower-than-normal averages: Appling’s .328 in 1943; Boudreau’s .327 in 1944; and the .309 with which Yankees infielder George “Snuffy” Stirnweiss (one of only three .300-plus hitters in the league) took the 1945 crown. With the American League’s foremost power hitters in military service, its home-run output fell twenty percent; but the National League, the more pitching-oriented of the two circuits by the late thirties, produced some nine percent more homers in 1945 than in 1942.

Perhaps the most memorable baseball event of the World War II years was the St. Louis Browns’ only American League pennant. Both on the field and at the gate, the Browns’ AL history had been generally marked by futility. Their peak season’s attendance, 713,000, had been registered in 1922, when George Sisler and a fine supporting cast almost wrested the AL title from the Yankees. While the 1942 Browns finished a distant third, their best showing in thirteen years, they dropped to fifth in 1943.

If not for the war, the Browns probably wouldn’t have remained in St. Louis; in 1941 Donald Barnes, head of a group of stockholders who’d bought the franchise in the mid-thirties, planned to move it to Los Angeles. President Philip K. Wrigley of the Chicago Cubs, who also owned the Los Angeles Pacific Coast League franchise and ballpark, agreed to sell his California holdings to the St. Louis group for $1 million, and Los Angeles civic boosters promised to underwrite any losses the Browns might incur if seasonal attendance fell below five hundred thousand (about four times what they’d been drawing in Sportsman’s Park). After conferences with the commercial airlines and AL schedule-makers, Barnes announced that relocating on the Coast was feasible. At the annual major-league meetings in Chicago, planned for December 8, 1941, he intended to seek the necessary unanimous consent of his AL peers and majority approval of NL owners. The Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on the seventh threw the whole project into limbo.

So in 1944 the Browns were still in St. Louis, where they won with the oldest group of players in the majors, including a pitching staff made up entirely of overage and 4-F moundsmen. Their main competition came from Detroit and Washington, although Joe McCarthy’s Yankees, now fielding a lineup virtually unrecognizable to prewar fans, didn’t fall back until late in the season.

The Browns started with nine straight victories, three of which were shutouts by thirty-four-year-old Sig Jakucki, of late a semipro pitcher in Houston. Jakucki, Jack Kramer, Nelson Potter, and Bob Muncrief made up a steady rotation, while Vern Stephens, the only young player with the team at the end of the season, was the heart of the Browns’ attack. Manager Luke Sewell juggled the rest of his men with sufficient savvy to produce a one-game victory margin over Detroit, which stayed in the race mainly by getting twenty-nine wins from lefty Hal Newhouser and twenty-seven from righty Paul “Dizzy” Trout. The Browns’ 89–65 was the poorest pennant-winning record to date in the century.

With Musial, Kurowski, Marion, the Cooper brothers, Lanier, and Johnny Hopp (a .336 batter in center field) still available, the Cardinals won 105 times, far more than they needed for their third NL title in a row. In the only all–St. Louis (and of course all–Sportsman’s Park) World Series ever played, they dropped two of the first three games, then took three straight to end whatever notions of a world’s championship the Browns’ long-suffering fans may have entertained. The unlikely Series batting star was rookie Emil Verban, the Cardinals’ third regular second baseman in three seasons.

By the spring of 1945 some sixty percent of the men listed on big-league rosters four years earlier were in the armed forces, and baseball writers frequently quipped that various service teams actually made up a “third major league.” Bob Feller was one of the few big-leaguers who saw combat; most spent the war in some kind of duty that left plenty of time for baseball. Although the rosters of service teams changed frequently, those representing Norfolk Naval Training Station (which in 1943 had both Phil Rizzuto and Pee Wee Reese to play shortstop and Dominic DiMaggio in center field), Great Lakes Naval Training Station (where, at different times, Bob Feller, Billy Herman, and Johnny Mize played), or Bainbridge Naval Training Center (where Stan Musial hit line drives in 1945) may have been the equal of most teams in the white majors.

During the war, baseball was played literally around the world. In 1944, in Hawaii, all-star teams represented the army and navy in an “Armed Forces World Series,” with everybody in both starting lineups being either a present or future major-leaguer. The next year another all-star series, also played in Hawaii, pitted navy American Leaguers (including Marine aviator Ted Williams) against navy National Leaguers.

On the home front, baseball’s officialdom decided against holding the 1945 All-Star Game. Difficulty in working out travel arrangements was the announced reason, but the consensus among officials, owners, and baseball writers was that the level of play had deteriorated so much that it was pointless to stage the game with the talent available.

It might not have been the best brand of baseball, but the American League’s last wartime season offered an exciting four-way race between the Browns, Detroit, Washington, and New York. The Browns ended up in third place, a half-game ahead of the Yankees. Having rejoined Detroit in July, after four and one-half years in the army, Hank Greenberg hit a two-out, bases-loaded homer in the ninth inning of the season’s final game, at St. Louis, to give the Tigers the pennant by a margin of a game and a half over Washington. Detroit’s record was a game worse than the Browns’ the previous year; Hal Newhouser was the winning pitcher in twenty-five of Detroit’s eighty-eight victories.

The Chicago Cubs, following three desultory wartime seasons under hard-bitten Jimmie Wilson, again responded to “Jolly Cholly” Grimm’s easygoing presence in the dugout. With Musial and Walker Cooper in military service, Cardinals president Sam Breadon refused to meet Mort Cooper’s salary demands, traded him to Boston, and thereby possibly forfeited a fourth straight pennant. As it was, the Cardinals finished only three games behind the Cubs, who featured the NL’s batting leader in first baseman Phil Cavarretta (.355), the league’s leading pitcher in Hank Wyse (22–10), and critical late-season mound help from Hank Borowy, purchased from the Yankees.

When asked for his pick in the World Series, Chicago sportswriter Warren Brown replied, “Neither team is good enough to win it.” Actually, it was an interesting if unevenly played seven-game Series, performed before capacity crowds in both cities. Behind Newhouser, who pitched his second complete-game victory after lasting less than three innings in the opener, Detroit took game seven, 9–3. Roger “Doc” Cramer, the Tigers’ thirty-nine-year-old center fielder, made eleven hits over the seven games, while Greenberg, now thirty-four, belted two homers and drove in seven runs.

On hand to congratulate manager Steve O’Neill in the Tigers’ locker room was Albert B. “Happy” Chandler, who’d succeeded the late Judge Landis as commissioner of baseball the previous March. Touted mainly by Larry MacPhail (now with the War Department), Chandler was finishing a term as U.S. senator from Kentucky when he received the club owners’ call. Affable and seemingly more tractable than the despotic Landis, Chandler nonetheless was given to plain speaking. Asked shortly after taking office whether he favored lowering the color bar, Chandler unhesitatingly replied, “If a black boy can make it on Okinawa and Guadalcanal, hell, he can make it in baseball.”

Meanwhile Branch Rickey moved ahead with a plan that would ultimately achieve the integration of Organized Baseball, although the full particulars of that plan will probably never be understood. At the end of 1942 Rickey finally broke with Cardinals president Sam Breadon, who’d become increasingly irked by Rickey’s practice of taking ten percent on all player sales, and signed as general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers at a salary of $65,000. Sixty-one years old when he assumed his duties in Brooklyn, Rickey was already something of a baseball legend, not only for his genius in building a farm system and selling its products for big profits but also for his long-winded homilies—a legacy, perhaps, of his pious Methodist upbringing in southern Ohio.

After coming to Brooklyn, Rickey promoted a venture in black baseball called the “United States League,” although it’s uncertain what the crafty and conniving Rickey really intended. He may have wanted to create a new, viable black baseball organization that would be free of what he regarded as the “racketeer influence” and, not incidentally, bring the Dodgers revenue on the rental of Ebbets Field. Or he may have been thinking of such a league as basically a farm organization, within which the Dodgers would prepare players for the coming integration of the majors. Or it may all have been a cover behind which Dodgers scouts could look over talent in the existing Negro leagues. Whatever Rickey was up to, the United States League never existed anywhere but on paper.

Eventually, though, Rickey did move to erase baseball’s color line. Late in August 1945 he met in his Ebbets Field office with Jack Roosevelt Robinson, who’d just arrived from Chicago in the company of Dodgers scout Clyde Sukeforth. Rickey offered the twenty-six-year-old Robinson the opportunity to become the first black person to play within Organized Baseball in the twentieth century. (At the time, of course, almost no one realized that Robinson wouldn’t be the first-ever such player.)

Jackie Robinson, a native of Georgia who’d grown up in racially integrated circumstances in Pasadena, California, had been a multi-sport star at the University of California at Los Angeles. Commissioned an army second lieutenant in 1942, he wouldn’t go along with Jim Crow practices at Fort Hood, Texas, and was court-martialed. Though acquitted, he made a reputation as a troublemaker, which was the main reason he was discharged in the fall of 1944.

When summoned by Rickey, Robinson was playing shortstop for the Kansas City Monarchs; the previous month he’d appeared in the annual East-West Game at Comiskey Park. Handsome, very dark-skinned, slightly under six feet tall and a powerfully built two-hundred-pounder, Robinson was exceptionally fast and a good hitter.

Though by no means the top player in the Negro leagues, Robinson possessed other qualities Rickey found attractive. Better educated than most ballplayers of any color, an articulate man who spoke in clipped accents, Robinson was also a teetotaler, engaged to a refined young woman, and thus able to meet Rickey’s standards of respectability. His experience as a student and athlete in a predominantly white environment was another factor in his favor. In Robinson, Rickey became convinced, he’d found the right man.

In their first meeting, Rickey subjected Robinson to a lengthy, agitated discourse on the hardships that awaited him as a lonely racial pioneer. Although the young man hardly needed to be reminded of American racial realities (or instructed in racial etiquette, either), he listened patiently and promised to turn the other cheek to tormentors. A proud, naturally excitable and combative person, Robinson nonetheless understood what he would have to do—and also what he couldn’t afford to do.

Sworn to secrecy, Robinson endured two months of anxious waiting before Rickey had him fly to Montreal and there, on October 23, 1945, sign a contract to play the 1946 season for the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers’ farm club in the International League, one notch below the majors. Basing Robinson in the relatively liberal racial climate of the French-speaking Canadian city was a key element in Rickey’s meticulous strategy. In effect, Robinson would integrate baseball from outside the United States.

Inasmuch as Rickey had long regarded Negro-league baseball as a racket, he simply ignored the Kansas City Monarchs’ financial interest in Robinson, thereby establishing a precedent for other major-league clubs. J. L. Wilkinson, the Monarchs’ white owner, told the press that while he was entitled to some kind of compensation, he wouldn’t protest to commissioner Chandler. “I am very glad to see Jackie get this chance,” he said.

No minor-league player had ever been the object of such media coverage as focused on Robinson in the spring of 1946. Besides all the other pressures he faced, he had to learn to play second base, because, according to Brooklyn scouting reports, his arm wasn’t strong enough for shortstop. On April 18, 1946, before more than twenty thousand people at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, Robinson made his debut in Organized Baseball with a home run, three bunt singles, and a pair of stolen bases (one a theft of home) in the Royals’ 14–1 victory over the Jersey City Giants.

From that spectacular beginning, he went on to lead the International League with a .349 batting average and tie for the leadership in runs scored. Although his forty stolen bases (second best in the league) weren’t a large number by earlier (or later) standards, what most impressed observers was his intrepidness—his ability to beat out bunts, stretch singles into doubles, upset pitchers by dancing up and down the basepaths, and generally demoralize opponents’ defenses in ways that reminded a few old-timers of Ty Cobb. Robinson gave International League fans a sample of the speed and dash that characterized Negro-league play, even as those qualities had largely disappeared from white baseball.

“I never had it made,” Robinson would say years later, and almost everywhere the Royals went, he had to deal with hostile and often abusive white fans, pitchers who threw at his head, and base runners who came in with spikes high. Robinson took it and kept his temper under control, but teammate John Wright, a veteran Negro-league pitcher signed by Montreal following his navy discharge in February 1946, couldn’t endure the stress. Optioned to Three Rivers, Quebec, in the lower minors in May and subsequently released, Wright returned to the Homestead Grays, his prewar club. Pitcher Roy Partlow, another Negro-leaguer, also spent part of 1946 with Montreal, but by late summer he had followed Wright to Three Rivers.

Rickey left no doubt about the Dodgers’ commitment to integrating their organization. Catcher Roy Campanella of the Baltimore Elite Giants, already a nine-year professional at twenty-five, and Don Newcombe, a young pitcher with the Newark Eagles, were signed in the spring and sent to Nashua, New Hampshire, in the Class B New England League. Again the Dodgers made no gesture of compensation to the players’ former employers.

Effa Manley, a beautiful, very light-skinned woman whose husband (the local numbers boss) owned the Newark Eagles, would always be bitter over the way Rickey simply dismissed the issue of prior claims to players he signed out of the Negro leagues, yet the feelings of the Manleys and most other black owners were ambivalent. Obviously they wanted to field the best clubs they could; they hoped to be paid for whatever talent they lost and feared that the passing of Jim Crow would doom black professional baseball; yet by and large they supported the sport’s integration and rooted for Robinson and the others who broke the color line.

In 1946 times were still good for black baseball. Crowds for regularly scheduled league games were bigger than ever; the East-West Game in Chicago drew more than forty-five thousand. Satchel Paige was barnstorming with his own team, but Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard were still pounding the ball for the Homestead Grays and an abundance of younger stars—Monte Irvin and Larry Doby with Newark, Sam Jethroe with Cleveland, Artie Wilson with Birmingham—were back from military service. In that fall’s Negro World Series, Irvin and Doby led Newark to victory over Kansas City in seven games, the first of which took place at the Polo Grounds in New York.

The following January, commissioner Chandler presided at a meeting in New York at which the major-league clubs voted 15–1 against adding black players to their rosters, with Rickey the only dissenter. Having arranged the purchase of the Yankees by Del Webb and Dan Topping and having himself gained the presidency of the franchise, Larry MacPhail was more influential than ever in baseball affairs. Professing pious concern over the welfare of the Negro leagues, MacPhail led the opposition to racial integration, with active support from Tom Yawkey of the Red Sox, Sam Breadon of the Cardinals, and Phil Wrigley of the Cubs. Chandler’s stance was one of official neutrality, while he privately assured Rickey that he wouldn’t interfere in whatever plans Brooklyn had for Robinson.

In 1947 both the Dodgers and Montreal trained in Havana, mainly to avoid the housing and other difficulties Robinson and his new wife had encountered in Florida a year earlier. Officially, Robinson remained with Montreal until April 10, when the Dodgers, as long expected, announced his addition to their roster. A half-dozen or so southern-born Brooklyn players immediately tried to persuade their teammates to refuse to play, but stern lectures by Rickey and a barrage of profane threats from manager Leo Durocher, along with the refusal of Kentuckian Pee Wee Reese and other team leaders to join the dissidents, quickly stifled the would-be mutiny.

That was Durocher’s last significant action as Brooklyn manager for 1947. A few days later he received notification from Chandler that he was suspended for the season for “conduct detrimental to baseball.” As Chandler saw things, Durocher’s life-style—especially his friendship with the movie actor George Raft and other big-time gamblers and his gossip-enshrouded marriage to the lately divorced actress Laraine Day—damaged the sport’s image. In retrospect, Durocher appears as considerably less a sinner than a number of others before and after him who escaped chastisement, but most people at the time seemed to share Chandler’s conviction that Durocher’s off-the-field activities diminished the National Pastime’s moral stature.

So it wasn’t “Leo the Lip” who would be Robinson’s first big-league manager but sixty-year-old Burt Shotton, a Dodgers scout and Rickey’s longtime associate and close friend, hurriedly elevated to the job. Moreover, when the Dodgers opened the season on April 15, at Ebbets Field against the Boston Braves, Robinson was at first base, not second, which was occupied by feisty Eddie Stanky. Struggling to master a third infield position in three years, Robinson also had to endure efforts at physical intimidation and torrents of racial invective from opposing players and fans that were beyond anything he’d experienced so far. The Philadelphia Phillies, exhorted by Ben Chapman, their Tennessee-born manager, proved especially vicious in their harassing tactics.

Ultimately Robinson won everybody’s respect as a ballplayer, however grudgingly given. He batted only three points below .300, led the National League with twenty-nine stolen bases, and was second in runs scored. At the end of the season the Sporting News, which had never liked the idea of blacks in Organized Baseball, nonetheless chose Robinson for its first National League Rookie of the Year Award.

Mostly remembering the twin sensations of Durocher’s suspension and Robinson’s arrival, Walter “Red” Barber, the venerated radio announcer of the Dodgers’ games, would later describe 1947 as “the year all hell broke loose.” Actually, quite a lot of hell had already broken loose the previous year, when the return to peacetime baseball brought a succession of unanticipated problems.

Some players returned from military service with strong feelings about the need to change their relations with the owners. As had been true for decades, their grievances mostly concerned the reserve clause, the lack of a regular pension plan, and arbitrary salary cuts. Meanwhile American labor unions, spurred by protective New Deal legislation and wartime manpower shortages, were at the peak of their strength and ambitiousness. Robert Murphy, an attorney for the Congress of Industrial Organizations, persuaded players on various clubs to form an American Baseball Guild, and in August 1946 the Pittsburgh Pirates went so far as to take a vote on whether to strike for better pay and collective-bargaining rights. Although the players rejected the strike, they succeeded in scaring the club owners into conceding on several issues.

Besides more meal money on road trips and $25 per week for spring-training expenses, the players gained a salary minimum of $5,000, a twenty-five-percent limit on cuts from one year to the next, an assured World Series pool of at least $250,000, and a pension plan. Funded mainly by contributions from World Series and All-Star Game receipts, the plan guaranteed a pension to players with five years of big-league service. With most of their immediate concerns taken care of, the players’ militance quickly subsided.

Fully as upsetting to the owners’ equilibrium was the Mexican League threat. In the winter of 1945–1946 Jorge Pasquel, a multimillionaire liquor distributor who controlled the Mexican baseball league, began luring major-leaguers with what for that time were lavish salaries and perquisites. Pasquel envisioned the Mexican League as a full-fledged rival to las ligas grandes up north, and all told, he corralled eighteen players, six from the New York Giants alone. His best-known acquisitions were Max Lanier, undefeated in six decisions when he left the Cardinals early in the 1946 season, and Mickey Owen, still the Dodgers’ number one catcher.

The Browns’ Vernon Stephens also accepted Pasquel’s offer—in Stephens’s case, $25,000 per year for five years—and played two games in Mexico before dropping out of sight. Surfacing in Brownsville, Texas, a few days later, Stephens was full of apologies for having ever left St. Louis.

That quick change of heart saved Stephens from the blacklist proclaimed by commissioner Chandler for the “Mexican jumping beans,” as they were derided in the sporting press. Sooner or later and for a variety of reasons, they all became disenchanted with life south of the border. Some got tired of the food, the gruelling bus travel, and the rickety ballparks. Others resented league president Pasquel’s rank partiality toward his own Vera Cruz Blues (who, despite their name, were based in Mexico City). Still others didn’t like being teammates with black players from the U.S. and the Caribbean.

Ex-Giants pitcher Sal Maglie stuck it out longer than most, winning forty-one games for Puebla in 1946–1947. After that season, Jorge Pasquel’s death and financial troubles for the Pasquels and most other operators caused the Mexican League’s temporary disbandment, and in 1948 Maglie pitched for a touring team put together by Max Lanier, who’d earlier played briefly in Cuba (as had several other jumpers after leaving Mexico).

By 1949, threatened by two antitrust suits—one brought by Danny Gardella, former Giants outfielder, the other by ex-Cardinals Lanier, Freddie Martin, and Lou Klein—the baseball owners decided to give in. They instructed Chandler to lift the blacklist, at the same time that they settled out of court with the plaintiffs. Of the players who’d gone to Mexico in 1946, only Maglie had a significant post-1949 big-league career.

Of course, for all the controversy over Jackie Robinson, players’ unions, and Mexican raids, what captivated most baseball fans in the spring of 1946 was the prospect of the first “normal” season in five years. Nearly all the players who’d been in the armed forces sought to regain their jobs, and by midsummer only about one in five big-league regulars had been in the lineup a year earlier. With such stellar performers as Joe DiMaggio, Bob Feller, Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Hank Greenberg, and Pete Reiser back in action and mostly regaining prewar form, everybody agreed that baseball was about as good as ever.

Attendance climbed to an unheard-of (and rarely imagined) eighteen and a half million, with most franchises reaching new seasonal highs. Brooklyn, drawing more than a million and a half paying customers into Ebbets Field, broke the Cubs’ eighteen-year-old National League record; the Yankees, having finally installed lights, set a new mark for both leagues, and Detroit, where owner Walter O. Briggs also joined the trend toward nighttime baseball entertainment, far exceeded its franchise record. At St. Louis, Cardinals owner Sam Breadon continued to make lots of money by selling players ($358,500 worth in 1946 alone), but for the first time he also sold more than a million tickets. So did the New York Giants, despite finishing dead last.

With the 1941–1943 frontliners all back, the Yankees were favored to regain their eminence in the American League. Although Spud Chandler, still in wartime form, posted twenty wins and Floyd “Bill” Bevens, a big right-hander who’d also remained a civilian, added sixteen, nearly every Yankees regular had a subpar year. Troubled all season by a bad foot, Joe DiMaggio batted under .300 for the first time in his life, and the Yankees struggled to a poor third-place finish without Joe McCarthy, whose inability to get along with the mercurial Larry MacPhail led to his resignation a quarter of the way into the season.

Second-place Detroit still relied on Hank Greenberg, the league’s leader in homers and rbi’s despite batting only .277, and Hal Newhouser, who proved he was no wartime fluke by winning twenty-six times and recording a sparkling 1.94 earned run average. Outfielder Dick Wakefield, paid a princely $55,000 in 1941 to sign with the Detroit organization out of high school, was the first of the “bonus babies” to fizzle in the majors.

Newhouser’s performance was overshadowed by Bob Feller’s heroics with a sixth-place Cleveland entry. Besides throwing his second no-hit game (his second) and matching Newhouser’s twenty-six wins, Feller struck out 348 batters—a figure exceeded in major-league history only by Rube Waddell, who had fanned one more back in 1904. Feller’s pitching was the main reason the Indians passed the magical one-million attendance figure, eclipsing their previous highest total by some 250,000 fans.

Besides Feller’s pitching, the promotional stunts of Bill Veeck, head of a syndicate that purchased the Cleveland franchise in June, kept people coming to watch the Indians. Bringing to the big leagues the same freewheeling philosophy he’d practiced earlier at Milwaukee, Veeck offered his customers fireworks, giveaways, swimsuit pageants, clown acts, and an assortment of other “bonus attractions.” To widespread protests that he was cheapening the National Pastime, the self-described “hustler” answered: “A baseball team is a commercial venture, operating for a profit. The idea that you don’t have to … hustle your product the way General Motors hustles its products is baseball’s most pernicious enemy.”

Although he’d quit playing, Joe Cronin still led the Boston Red Sox, and Ted Williams picked up where he’d left off in 1942, batting .342 with thirty-eight home runs—while resuming his feud with the Boston press. Williams dominated the 1946 All-Star Game in Fenway Park, with two homers, two singles, and five rbi’s in a 12–3 American League victory. With Dom DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, Bobby Doerr, and Rudy York (acquired from Detroit early in 1946) also having outstanding seasons, Cronin’s team built a big early lead and coasted to the franchise’s first pennant in twenty-eight years. Two right-handers—Cecil “Tex” Hughson, ace of the ’42 staff, and Dave “Boo” Ferriss, who’d matured in military baseball—combined for forty-five of Boston’s 104 wins.

The National League offered a pennant battle that couldn’t have been closer. At the end of the 154-game season, the Dodgers and Cardinals showed identical 96–58 records, a unique circumstance in major-league history up to that date. (The famous 1908 tie-breaking game between the Cubs and Giants had actually been a replay of a no-decision regular-season game.)

Although Stan Musial (NL batting champ at .365), Enos Slaughter (the majors’ rbi leader with 130), Marty Marion, and Terry Moore were all service returnees, the Cardinals still had a young ball club, still a group of players developed almost entirely in the Rickey-built farm system. The Dodgers, on the other hand, were a veteran outfit, made up mostly of men Durocher and Larry MacPhail had bought and traded for before Pearl Harbor. Although for three years Rickey had been adding scouts, signing teenage prospects, and accumulating farm-club affiliations, as yet the Brooklyn team didn’t fully bear his stamp.

The Cardinals swept what was scheduled as a two-of-three-game playoff and went into the World Series as pronounced underdogs against the powerful Red Sox. The teams alternated victories for six games; then, with the score tied 3–3 in the eighth inning of the finale at Sportsman’s Park, Johnny Pesky hesitated in relaying the ball on Harry Walker’s long single, and Country Slaughter scored all the way from first. Harry Brecheen, a slightly built left-hander who’d already pitched two complete-game victories, retired the Red Sox in his second inning of relief to get credit for his third Series win, bringing the Cardinals their third world’s championship in five years.

Ted Williams, in what would turn out to be his only World Series, made five singles in the seven games. Throughout the Series, when Williams came to bat with the bases empty, Cardinals manager Eddie Dyer shifted everybody except his left fielder to the right of second base—a variation on the defense Cleveland’s Lou Boudreau had employed that summer. In the opinion of writers covering the Red Sox, Williams’s refusal to try to hit the ball toward left field had probably cost him the batting title to Washington’s Mickey Vernon. Convinced that he was paid mainly to hit home runs, the stubborn Williams resisted Ty Cobb’s and everybody else’s advice, and wouldn’t alter his magnificent swing until much later in his career.

The 1947 season brought a continuation of the postwar attendance boom. Cleveland, for example, drew a million and a half with a club that still did no better than fourth place, and the New York Giants, boasting Johnny Mize, Walker Cooper, and a power-packed lineup otherwise, also finished fourth and drew 1.6 million, despite setting a new major-league record with 221 homers. At Pittsburgh, a group of owners that included the singer Bing Crosby paid Detroit an undisclosed sum for a fast-fading Hank Greenberg. Greenberg closed out his career with twenty-five homers, but it was young Ralph Kiner, with fifty-one round-trippers to tie Mize, who was principally responsible for the big turnouts at Forbes Field. Despite finishing in a tie for last place, the Pirates played before 1,283,000, a half-million more than in 1946.

Although as yet relatively few black people lived in Brooklyn, throngs of them now came from Newark, Harlem, and elsewhere in the New York area to root for Jackie Robinson; and their presence at Ebbets Field more than compensated for whatever white customers the Dodgers may have lost. For the season, 1,807,526 people paid to see the Brooklyn club in its home ballpark, which could accommodate only about thirty-three thousand in the narrowest seats in the majors.

Another aspect of the Robinson phenomenon was that considerable numbers of politically conscious New Yorkers—people who hadn’t paid much attention to baseball previously—now hailed the Dodgers for setting the pace in the drive against Jim Crow. They took Brooklyn for their team, despite Rickey’s insistence that Robinson had become a Dodger not “to solve a sociological problem” but “for one reason: to win the pennant.” Besides the Amsterdam News in Harlem and other major black newspapers, the Communist party’s Daily Worker, which had pushed for the integration of baseball throughout the war years, fell in love with “dem Bums.”

Under the gentle direction of Burt Shotton, the Dodgers finally overcame the Cardinals in a race that was close until mid-September. Young Ralph Branca, a twenty-one-game winner, and Hugh Casey, who won ten and saved eighteen, anchored the pitching staff. The aging Dixie Walker batted .306 and drove in ninety-four runs; Pete Reiser batted .309, although he missed much of the season because of still another collision with a wall and then a broken ankle. Robinson, Stanky, and Reese provided solid infield play and timely batting.

Under Bucky Harris, onetime boy manager at Washington, a revived Yankees club handily won the franchise’s fourteenth pennant in twenty-six years. Charlie Keller, hurt much of the time, was all but finished at thirty; but Joe DiMaggio and Tommy Henrich led a strong attack and Allie Reynolds, obtained from Cleveland for Joe Gordon, won nineteen games. Lefty Joe Page, the AL’s counterpart to Hugh Casey, won fourteen for himself and saved seventeen for Reynolds and others.

Meanwhile Boston’s pitching collapsed and the Red Sox faded to third, even though Ted Williams led the American League in batting, home runs, rbi’s, runs, walks, total bases, and slugging average. (Several games under the newly installed lights at Fenway Park helped keep the turnstiles clicking despite the club’s poor showing.)

In one of the best World Series, the Yankees prevailed in seven games, with the most memorable encounter being the fourth, at Ebbets Field. Bill Bevens, who’d struggled to a 7–13 record that season, had walked ten batters and given up a run but, with two outs in the ninth inning, still held the Dodgers hitless. At that point pinch hitter Cookie Lavagetto bounced a drive off the concave right-field wall to score two runs and give Brooklyn a 3–2 victory. After having come that close to the first World Series no-hitter, Bevens would never pitch in the majors again.

Jackie Robinson made seven hits in that Series and stole two bases, and pitcher Dan Bankhead, late of the Negro American League’s Memphis Red Sox, became the second black man to appear in the World Series when he was used once as a pinch runner. Besides those two Dodgers, fourteen other blacks played somewhere within Organized Baseball in 1947, three of them in the majors.

In July, Cleveland president Bill Veeck broke the American League’s color line—and also exhibited an uncommon regard for the situation of Negro-league owners—when he paid $10,000 for Larry Doby, the Newark Eagles’ twenty-two-year-old second baseman. Used mostly as a pinch hitter, Doby endured much of the same abuse Robinson had met in the other league and batted a forlorn .156.

A month after Doby joined the Indians, the last-place St. Louis Browns plucked Henry Thompson, a young infielder, and Willard Brown, a veteran outfielder, from the Kansas City Monarchs. Signed hurriedly (and without compensation to the Monarchs), neither man had been scouted as well as Robinson or even Doby. Playing in a city that was still mostly Jim Crowed, the Browns’ recruits did poorly; by the end of August both were back with the Monarchs. (Thompson would return to the majors in 1949 with the New York Giants.)

That 1947 season was also one in which long-standing predictions that the integration of Organized Baseball meant the end of the Negro leagues really started to materialize. Even if Josh Gibson hadn’t died in Pittsburgh of a stroke early in the year, not much would have been different. Caught up in the drama of black professionals actually playing with and against whites in Organized Baseball, black fans deserted the Negro leagues en masse. The Newark Eagles, for example, saw their attendance drop from 120,000 in 1946 to 57,000 in 1947. Once Larry Doby joined the Cleveland Indians, blacks by the thousands stopped attending Buckeyes games at League Park and started going to Municipal Stadium, where Bill Veeck based his team full-time in mid-1947.

The story was basically the same throughout black baseball as, year by year, admired veterans retired and the best young players—among them Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, and Ernie Banks—entered Organized Baseball. The NNL disbanded following the 1948 season, and while the Baltimore Elite Giants, Philadelphia Stars, and New York Cubans joined the NAL, the once-mighty Homestead Grays simply ceased to exist. As black baseball’s only league, the NAL managed to keep going for another decade. Reduced to the Kansas City Monarchs and three other franchises, the circuit finally disbanded following the 1960 season.

For a few more years the once-proud Monarchs would survive by staying on the road, appearing mostly in small towns in the Midwest. The Clowns, formerly a strong Indianapolis-based NAL entry, would become literal embodiments of their nickname, traversing the country with a species of baseball burlesque akin to that of basketball’s vastly more successful Harlem Globetrotters.

While the black leagues withered, the white majors and the rest of Organized Baseball were in the midst of postwar plenty, with the 1948 season marking the pinnacle of baseball’s popularity in the pre-television era. Some 20.8 million paying customers watched regular-season games in the major leagues. With their team in the thick of the pennant race and special trains bringing them in from Toledo, Youngstown, and Columbus, more than 2.6 million Indians fans paid their way into Cleveland’s enormous stadium. Several regular-season crowds exceeded 70,000; a doubleheader in June and another in July each drew 80,000-plus. The Yankees attracted 2,373,000 at home; most other clubs broke their previous attendance records.

The Boston Braves far exceeded any previous season’s attendance, drawing a million and a half at Braves Field, still one of baseball’s best facilities. Under Billy Southworth, a three-time winner with the Cardinals, Boston’s National Leaguers gained their first pennant since the Miracle Braves of 1914. Eddie Stanky, acquired from Brooklyn, teamed in the Braves’ middle infield with former Louisiana State University football star Alvin Dark, who batted .322 to win Rookie of the Year honors. Veteran third baseman Bob Elliott enjoyed a strong year, batting .283 with 23 home runs and 100 runs batted in; and center fielder Tommy Holmes, NL batting champ in 1945, hit .325. Johnny Sain, the National League’s best right-hander in the early postwar period, won twenty-four games, while Warren Spahn, a young left-hander who’d registered twenty-one victories in 1947, added fifteen. (The Braves’ pitching, went a saying of the day, was “Spahn and Sain and pray for rain.”)

With much fanfare, Leo Durocher returned from his suspension to manage Brooklyn, then, in June, stunned the Ebbets Field faithful by resigning to succeed Mel Ott as manager of the hated Giants. Burt Shotton, the only manager in street clothes besides Connie Mack, again moved into the Brooklyn dugout. Without Alabamian Stanky and Georgians Dixie Walker and Hugh Casey, the Dodgers ended up third behind the Braves and Cardinals. Walker and Casey had been traded to Pittsburgh, where they joined South Carolinian Kirby Higbe, swapped early in the 1947 season. The commonly understood reason for all those changes was Branch Rickey’s determination to clear the Brooklyn club of any Southerner who still resented Jackie Robinson’s presence.

In June 1948 the Dodgers called up Roy Campanella from St. Paul and made him their number one catcher. With Campanella behind the plate and Robinson at second base (where he relocated after Stanky’s departure), Brooklyn now had blacks at two of the critical “up-the-middle” positions. If, as some believed, Rickey’s trades cost Brooklyn the 1948 pennant, he also gave the Dodgers a preferential position in the market for black players, at the same time that his twenty-five-team farm system became the most talent-rich in baseball.

The American League season produced a nerve-wracking three-way scramble between the Yankees, the Red Sox, and Cleveland. Joe DiMaggio batted .320 and led the AL with thirty-nine homers and the majors with 155 rbi’s; Tommy Henrich enjoyed his best season; Lawrence “Yogi” Berra, a squat, powerfully built second-year man with an affinity for malapropisms and bad-ball base hits, emerged as the AL’s foremost catcher; and Allie Reynolds, Vic Raschi, and left-hander Eddie Lopat were a steady pitching trio.

Now managed by Joe McCarthy, Boston combined lusty hitting with shaky pitching; while the Red Sox scored 907 times, their pitchers yielded earned runs at the rate of 4.20 per nine innings. Ted Williams batted a league-leading .369, and he, Bobby Doerr, and Vern “Junior” Stephens (obtained from the Browns with Jack Kramer the previous November) combined for eighty-one homers and 375 rbi’s.

At Cleveland, Bob Feller slipped to a 19–15 record, but right-hander Bob Lemon, a converted infielder, won twenty, as did Gene Bearden, a tall rookie left-hander with matinee-idol looks and a highly effective knuckleball. Of the Indians’ 155 homers, Larry Doby accounted for fourteen, besides batting .301 and adapting well to center field under Tris Speaker’s coaching. Joe Gordon put in a strong offensive year, as did third baseman Ken Keltner, while player-manager Lou Boudreau batted .355 and earned Most Valuable Player recognition.

On July 19, 1948, Satchel Paige made his major-league debut, pitching two innings in relief for the Indians against the Browns at Municipal Stadium. Cleveland’s signing of the aging pitcher (who’d again attached himself to the Kansas City Monarchs) was roundly criticized as just another of Bill Veeck’s stunts, but Veeck had known Paige personally since the early thirties and kept close track of his peripatetic career, including the arm trouble that had diminished his once-overpowering speed. Satch could still pitch, as he’d demonstrated the previous fall before fifty thousand at Yankee Stadium, when, pitching for his touring black all-stars, he held a team of white major-leaguers scoreless and struck out sixteen in a postseason duel with Bob Feller.

While the jokes about Paige’s age continued, he quickly proved a major asset in the Indians’ pennant drive, as well as a tremendous gate attraction. Pitching seventy-three innings, he started seven times, relieved fourteen, received credit for six victories against a single loss, and threw two shutouts.

Exactly four weeks after baseball’s most popular black performer finally made it into the majors, the most beloved figure in the sport’s history died in New York. Babe Ruth’s death, at fifty-three, was mourned by people in many countries, even by some in war-devastated Japan, where the Babe’s 1934 tour with Lou Gehrig and other big-leaguers had created a national sensation. The Babe had struggled against throat cancer for nearly two years; baseball fans had become accustomed to the sight of the gaunt, white-haired home-run king hoarsely whispering his thanks on the several occasions when the Yankees publicly honored him.

While the Braves clinched and waited, the AL race ended in a dead heat between the Indians and Red Sox, with the Yankees finishing only a game behind them. Opting for a one-game playoff format, AL president Will Harridge determined by coin toss that the decisive meeting would be in Boston’s Fenway Park. It was an easy 8–3 victory for Cleveland, Boudreau’s two homers and Keltner’s one providing all the runs rookie Bearden needed for his twentieth win.

The 1948 World Series was also relatively easy for the Indians, although Sain defeated Feller 1–0 in the opener. The winning run scored on Tommy Holmes’s single, following umpire Bill Stewart’s hotly disputed safe call on a pickoff play at second. Cleveland then won three straight behind Lemon, Bearden, and Steve Gromek, Doby’s homer winning Gromek’s game. The Braves battered Feller in game five, only to have Bearden come on to save a 4–3 clincher in the sixth game at Braves Field. Game five, at Cleveland, was played before 86,200 customers, more people than had ever been in one place at one time for a game in Organized Baseball.

The 1949 season, at least for the minors, was absolutely the best of times. No fewer than fifty-nine minor leagues—now classified from Class AAA down to Class D—were in operation, and total paid admissions reached forty-two million. In hundreds of places across the United States and much of Canada—from cities as big as Los Angeles, Kansas City, Montreal, and Houston to little towns such as Houma in Louisiana, Johnson City in Tennessee, Yakima in Washington, and Three Rivers in Quebec—minor-league baseball was the baseball that mattered to most people most of the time. Although many minor-league operators still wouldn’t allow radio broadcasts of home games, they generally agreed that play-by-play coverage of road games (usually done in local studios off teletyped reports from distant ballparks) encouraged interest in the local club.

In the majors, despite exciting races in both leagues, paid admissions mysteriously fell about six hundred thousand. In retrospect, it’s evident that spreading home-television ownership in the eastern metropolitan areas had already started to affect attendance. The Yankees beat the Red Sox on the final day of the season to take the AL flag, while Cleveland slipped to third, largely because of Feller’s continuing decline and Bearden’s ineffectiveness. At the end of the 1949 season, Bill Veeck sold his holdings in the Cleveland franchise and Satchel Paige, released after winning four and losing seven, drifted back to the Kansas City Monarchs.

In the other league, Burt Shotton’s Brooklyn club edged the Cardinals by one game, defending-champion Boston running a poor fourth behind the no-longer-Phutile Phillies. Still featuring Stan Musial, Enos Slaughter, and other farm-grown standouts, the Cardinals continued to travel on the momentum of the Rickey years, but the St. Louis organization no longer produced a steady stream of talent. The Brooklyn system, besides getting the jump on other clubs in signing blacks, was turning out promising youngsters by the bushel; in 1949, sixteen of the Dodgers’ twenty-five farms finished in the top four in their leagues, and eight won pennants. As he did at St. Louis, Rickey sold his surplus players—for $250,000 following the 1949 season alone—and reinvested much of what he made in the farm system.

In 1949, no longer willing or needing to keep his competitive fires in check, Jackie Robinson ranted at umpires, wrangled with opposing players, and reached full stardom. His .342 batting average and thirty-seven stolen bases led the National League and the majors, respectively. Named the NL’s Most Valuable Player, Robinson also clubbed sixteen homers, drove in 124 runs, and scored 122.

The oft-disabled Pete Reiser had been sent to Boston to play out his frustrating career, but Edwin “Duke” Snider, a cocky, power-hitting, far-ranging Californian, looked even better than Reiser in center field. Buddha-built Roy Campanella, solid behind the plate and at bat, gained general recognition as the NL’s best catcher; slugging Gil Hodges, a converted catcher, finally solved the Dodgers’ first-base problem; Pee Wee Reese still sparkled at shortstop; and Billy Cox, obtained from Pittsburgh, was a master gloveman at third. Ensconced in right field was hard-hitting Carl Furillo, a Pennsylvanian whose throwing arm had earned him the nickname “the Reading Rifle.” Hulking Don Newcombe, the third black player to stick with the Dodgers, won seventeen games in his first season; left-hander Elwin “Preacher” Roe, a bony Arkansan acquired from Pittsburgh in the Dixie Walker trade, contributed fifteen.

The Yankees triumphed again (for the fifteenth time since 1921) under the unlikely leadership of Charles Dillon “Casey” Stengel. After guiding Oakland to a Pacific Coast League title, Stengel signed to manage the Yankees at a salary of $25,000. Although he’d been a respectable ballplayer in the NL during the teens and twenties, as a manager the fifty-nine-year-old Stengel carried a reputation for comedy more than baseball savvy. In nine years with Brooklyn and the Boston Braves, Stengel had provided plenty of laughs, but his teams never finished better than fifth; in Boston he became so unpopular that, when an automobile struck him on a downtown street and shattered one of his legs, many local fans publicly regretted it hadn’t been his neck.

In the minors at Milwaukee, Kansas City, and Oakland, however, Stengel had managed successfully, and George Weiss, who became Yankees general manager in 1948, had long admired him. Still, it was hard to see Stengel—with his whimsical manner and long-winded, frequently unintelligible way of talking (called “Stengelese”)—fitting into the dignified, pin-striped tradition of Miller Huggins, Lou Gehrig, Joe McCarthy, and of course Joe DiMaggio, still the strongest presence on the ball club.

The Red Sox again fell short, despite a batting attack that produced nearly nine hundred runs (of which Williams and Stephens drove in 318) and sterling pitching from lefty Mel Parnell (twenty-five wins) and righty Ellis Kinder (twenty-three). Raschi, Reynolds, Lopat, and Tommy Byrne, bolstered by Joe Page’s matchless relief work, provided the deepest pitching the Yankees had enjoyed since before the war. Stengel adroitly used all of his mound staff, as he did his entire roster. Even if chronic foot trouble hadn’t disabled DiMaggio for half the season, Stengel would still have juggled his personnel inveterately.

The left-handed Stengel had batted only against right-handed pitching when he played for John McGraw between 1921 and 1923; Stengel revered McGraw as a teacher, and his faith in what, by the 1940s, was called “platooning” far exceeded even McGraw’s. At New York, Stengel found himself blessed with more than one good player at almost every position, so that he was able to platoon his men as only George Stallings had done with the 1914 “Miracle Braves.” In 1949 Phil Rizzuto was the only Yankee to register as many as 450 official times at bat.

At the close of that year’s World Series, it was hard to argue with Stengel’s methods. After two 1–0 gems—the first won by Reynolds over Newcombe, the second by Roe over Raschi—the Yankees took three straight. In his third relief appearance, Page stifled a Brooklyn rally in the seventh inning to save Raschi’s game and win the finale, 10–6, at Ebbets Field. With the onetime funny man of the National League at the helm, the Yankees had nailed down still another world’s championship—and Brooklyn had failed for the fourth time in four Series.

Although hardly anyone would have guessed it at the time, the Yankees were starting a run of success such as no major-league team had ever accomplished. Over the next fifteen seasons, thirteen more pennants and eight more Series championships would come to the New York “dynasty”—to use a term the Yankees helped to popularize. Yet the Yankees’ monotonous triumphs—a tribute to expert management both in the front office and on the field, to the value of a winning tradition, and of course to lots of money—would nevertheless be one of the principal ills besetting baseball in the 1950s. There would be plenty of others.