Fifth Inning: Blacks in Baseball
As I pushed the tired and aching man farther down the hallway of the nursing home disguised as a rehabilitation center, maneuvering the wheelchair as if I were handling somebody more valuable than a head of state (which I was, since this was Henry Louis Aaron), the accolades for Hank kept coming and so did my calls and texts from CNN. Are you on your way?
Not even close, I wanted to respond, while laughing away that question and the follow-up ones. Instead, I didn’t respond. As we finally reached the doorway for the trip to the golf club, the tired and aching man looked ready for me to swing the wheelchair around, head back down the hallway, and slide under a comfortable sheet with a fluffy pillow nearby. The rain came faster and harder with no end in sight. The car company sent the best for Henry Louis Aaron.
This time, I would have settled for no more than their fourth- or maybe fifth-best choice. The car service ordered by CNN sent a huge SUV that needed something just shy of a fireman’s ladder for the average person to climb from the ground to the seats.
I also had another problem—the driver.
He was an African American male in his mid-40s and when he came around the front of the car to join us from his driver’s seat he suffered one of the biggest attacks of stardom I’d ever seen. “Oh, Mr. Aaron. This is such an honor,” he said. “I’m your biggest fan and I was born and raised here in Atlanta and I’m just so excited to meet you.”
Once again, the tired and aching man in the wheelchair evolved into Hank Aaron again, smiling and nodding before saying, “Why, thank you.” Even so, I was not amused, not with that problem of the distance between the sidewalk to the top of the SUV’s floor, not with CNN still calling and texting from the golf club, not with the rain falling like crazy, and not with this biggest of Henry Louis Aaron fans failing to do anything to help the situation at hand.
The driver did pop open his massive umbrella for all of us. That was a start.
Between pushing the tired and aching man from his room toward the direction of those waiting CNN cameras, I drifted back to the start of Hank’s post-playing career. Hank became Jackie so much that he rarely missed an opportunity as a baseball executive to rip the game for its past and present issues with African Americans both on and off the field. He also blasted major league officials over what he thought was a bleak future for Blacks in the game and he used me as his vehicle for relaying those messages.
Among Hank’s pet peeves? It was the insistence of Major League Baseball officials, along with team executives and scouts, that they really did want more African Americans in the game. While forming sad faces, those baseball folks said they couldn’t find them, hadn’t discovered how to retain them, or believed African American athletes were more interested in football, basketball, and other stuff, or they said the dog ate the homework after somebody forgot to set the alarm clock.
Eight percent. Eight percent! On the high side, 8 percent represented the number of African American players in Major League Baseball during most seasons in the 21st century, and franchises often had rosters with zero African American players, including the Atlanta Braves, Hank’s team of nearly 70 years as a player and executive. In contrast, when Hank broke Babe Ruth’s home run mark on April 8, 1974, the percentage of African Americans in Major League Baseball was three times higher than 8 percent. His 1974 Braves were on the low side since he was one of seven African Americans on their 40-man roster, but that was still 18 percent, and that was more than twice baseball’s 21st century average for teams.
“You look back over all of these things, and I’ve thought about this, when you talk about Blacks in baseball now today,” Hank said over the phone during the summer of 2007. “I may have told you this a long time ago. I do remember telling it [to you], I believe. This is what Major League Baseball is trying to do, trying to make this what they call a World Series, and I say a World Series. I’m not talking about a World Series with the United States. I’m talking about a World Series of Mexico, the United States, all of them. That’s exactly what’s going to happen. That’s what they want to do.”
“That’s interesting,” I said.
“That’s exactly what they want to do. They want to make this a World Series and they want to be able to have—just like for an example—I was just listening to TV last night and looking at this [pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, who left the Japanese professional league in November 2006 to sign a $52 million contract with the Boston Red Sox following a bidding war]. I was just listening to the commentators talking about this and then talking about that and I watched him pitch and I know enough about baseball to know that he ain’t throwing no better than any damn body, no more than [Bob] Gibson. If they tell me he throws better than Gibson, then I’ll [put money] on Wall Street. He ain’t doing no more, but what they have done in baseball, they are trying to build up all of these Japanese players to get these players to play Major League Baseball. They’re trying to get all of these [Latin American players] to come over here to play baseball. They’re trying to get all these people from all over the world to come here to play Major League Baseball. They don’t give a hoot, not one hill of beans, about a Black person. Not one thing about whether we play baseball or not. This game of baseball, and you have to look at it, that this game was so, it was just folding until Jackie Robinson came in and lifted it to another level with playing and trying to make it exciting for the fans—both Black and White.”
Aaron then sighed heavily and slowly raised his voice, “Terence, it is amazing how this game has changed for the benefit of how they want [the public] to perceive it to be, you know? Yeah, just keep your eye on it. Watch what I tell you about this game. I guarantee you [what I say is true].”
It was true. By the 2021 baseball season, which began three months after Hank’s death, the game’s biggest star was Shohei Ohtani, a pitching and hitting sensation from Iwate Prefecture, Japan, located 6,700 miles, a Pacific Ocean, and several times zones west of Mobile, Alabama, the old stomping grounds of an African American who became the greatest Major League player ever. Now baseball has virtually no African Americans.
Courtesy of Hank’s personal experiences as a player and as an executive in Major League Baseball since the early 1950s combined with my 1982 research for the San Francisco Examiner on the state of Blacks in the game to commemorate the 35th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier, Hank had splendid reasons to believe the game he cherished wasn’t loving African Americans as much as it claimed. This vanishing act involving African American players in baseball happened too fast, too dramatically, and too blatantly after the 1970s for The Myth to be more than a myth by the 21st century.
About The Myth: To hear many folks tell it, especially those involved with Major League Baseball, African Americans rolled out of bed one day and just didn’t like the sport anymore. They preferred football, basketball, and even wrestling—at least according to Calvin Griffith, the Minnesota Twins owner who likely wasn’t a card-carrying member of the NAACP. During a 1978 gathering in Waseca, Minnesota, Griffith explained his reason for moving his franchise from Washington, D.C., to the Minneapolis area before the 1961 season by saying, “It was when we found out that there were only 15,000 Blacks here. Black people don’t go to ballgames, but they’ll fill up a wrestling ring and put up such a chant it’ll scare you to death. We came because you’ve got good, hard-working White people here.”
Forget The Myth. This was sinister and deliberate.
Hank and I often discussed the following: contrary to popular belief, Jackie Robinson didn’t prove African Americans could play baseball after he entered the lineup for the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field on April 15, 1947. Those who ran the game knew African Americans could play. (See the Negro Leagues, which included Satchel Paige, who Joe DiMaggio called the best pitcher he ever faced.) Those who ran the game also knew, if they weren’t vigilant, African Americans would dominate their totally White league, which is what they wanted to prevent as much as possible.
Exhibit A: the 1960s, when baseball’s biggest stars were named Hank, Willie, and Frank instead of Babe, Ty, and Stan, which meant those who ran the game knew they needed to do something about it, which they did.
Let’s start with baseball’s dirty little secret, and Hank laughed his wonderful laugh whenever we discussed what involved my Big Red Machine. It was the greatest Major League Baseball team of all time. If not, it was 1B to the 1A that would be the New York Yankees of any given stretch. I’ll stick with my guys, though. Those Cincinnati Reds won more games during the 1970s than anybody in baseball along the way to six division titles, four National League pennants, and consecutive World Series titles in 1975 and 1976. They had a Hall of Fame manager (Sparky Anderson), three Hall of Fame players (catcher Johnny Bench, first baseman Tony Perez, and second baseman Joe Morgan), baseball’s all-time hits king (Pete Rose), a five-time All-Star left fielder who led the National League in home runs twice and grabbed league MVP honors (George Foster), a nine-time All-Star shortstop with five Gold Gloves and two Silver Slugger Awards (Dave Concepcion), a three-time All-Star right fielder (Ken Griffey Sr.), and a center fielder with four Gold Gloves (Cesar Geronimo).
The Big Red Machine was The Big Black Machine since it ranked among the darkest teams in baseball history. Rose and Bench were the only White players in the Machine’s everyday lineup. Morgan, Foster, and Griffey Sr. were African Americans; Perez came from Cuba; Geronimo was from the Dominican Republic, and Concepcion was from Venezuela.
There also was the 1971 All-Star Game—considered among the best ever—and Reggie Jackson provided the biggest highlight after he slammed a rising home run that nearly cleared the right-field roof at Tiger Stadium in Detroit before it banged against a light tower. Jackson was African American, by the way. The same went for the game’s starting pitchers (Dock Ellis for the National League and Vida Blue for the American League) and the game’s Most Valuable Player, Frank Robinson, who homered with two RBIs during the American League’s 6–4 victory. There were 17 African Americans overall in the 1971 All-Star Game, when Africans American players remained dominant around baseball throughout that decade, but 50 years later, when Hank died, African American players in the National Pastime were going, going, nearly gone.
This wasn’t a fluke, not from what I discovered during the spring of 1982, when I acquired a smoking gun that was more like a smoldering nuclear bomb designed to take African Americans out of the major leagues in a hurry. To help me verify what I kept finding back then, I spoke with Henry Louis Aaron for the first time that May during a series of phone conversations.
To get to that moment, along with others that turned me into The Hank Aaron Whisperer, my journey toward becoming a confidant of an American baseball treasure began five years before that “Blacks in Baseball” series, when destiny picked up the pace toward helping me evolve into Jackie and Hank.
I was at The Cincinnati Enquirer, where I served as the first Black intern ever at the then-137-year-old paper during the summer after my junior year at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, located 37 miles away to the north. Eight days after I graduated from Miami (Ohio) on May 7, 1978, I began working as the first full-time Black sports journalist in the history of The Enquirer and as only the second full-time Black reporter of any kind on the paper. Except for one racial incident involving those in the sports department—which I handled with Hank-like wisdom, even before I knew Henry Louis Aaron, the person—The Enquirer and I were a perfect fit.
Jim Schottelkotte, the paper’s managing editor, hired me as both that intern and full-time guy, and whether it was me or anybody else in the newsroom, he fussed, he yelled, he demanded, but he also encouraged. He was Lou Grant, the grouchy yet caring news director from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but in contrast to Grant, Schottelkotte had hair.
Then San Francisco Examiner sports editor Charles “Coop” Cooper called me out of nowhere during a late December night in 1979 at my Cincinnati apartment. Soon, courtesy of an interview the following week at a five-star restaurant in Sausalito, California, along with an offer before dessert to cover the San Francisco Giants and a slew of other things in the San Francisco Bay Area, I agreed to leave the Ohio River for the Pacific Ocean. Then came my last day at The Enquirer, when two White sports reporters couldn’t stand it anymore. They were slightly older than I. Even though I never viewed them as racists, I knew since my summer internship at the paper that they were resentful the bosses allowed me to write frequently on The Big Red Machine, featuring all of those baseball gods I hugged as a youth. I also suspected the two White sports reporters weren’t pleased when the bosses nodded after I asked if I could cover the big stories and games involving Indiana University sports. Bloomington was relatively close to Cincinnati, and the Hoosiers had Bobby Knight as their explosive basketball coach, along with colorful Lee Corso running an Indiana football team featuring several former Cincinnati-area high school standouts.
The combination heightened my rise as a journalist, including to the point of getting that call out of nowhere from the San Francisco Examiner. As I prepared to depart The Enquirer sports office for the last time, the two White sports reporters moved to the middle of the room, and one of them said loudly, “So I wonder how Terry got that San Francisco job.” The other one responded by pointing to the back of his hand—as in his skin color—as in the two White sports reporters suggesting they weren’t able to advance in the business as well as only the second Black reporter of any kind during what was then the 140-year-old history of The Cincinnati Enquirer.
They laughed. I wanted to—but only at them.
Instead, as I turned away without any expression, I left the building, and I remembered. I remembered Mom and Martha at Associates during my earlier life in Cincinnati. I remembered Dad and his boss in Milwaukee mentioning Sammy Davis Jr. to prove whatever his boss thought he was proving. I remembered my brother, Darrell, crying over the racist cowards in the stands at LSU. I remembered my high school football coach using the N-word during his pregame speech and never apologizing. I remembered the title of Jackie’s autobiography: I Never Had It Made, along with long passages from its inspired chapters. Mostly, I remembered to ignore mind games.
During my first year with the San Francisco Examiner in 1980, I had a couple of beats: the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Raiders, and my Jackie Robinson roles continued to multiply. I was the first full-time Black sports journalist in what was then the paper’s 118-year history. I also became the first Black person ever to cover an NFL team on a regular basis for a major daily newspaper and I did so with the Raiders of Al Davis, who had a bunch of his Pro Football Hall of Fame players and a Super Bowl victory for the franchise my first year on the job.
In my second year covering the Giants, they hired Baseball Hall of Famer Frank Robinson as the first Black National League manager. He became the game’s first Black manager period in 1975 as player/manager for the Cleveland Indians, and Frank and I talked often. The conversations were frequently deep, and it didn’t hurt we were both African Americans. I followed Larry Whiteside of The Boston Globe as only the second Black person ever to cover a Major League Baseball team on a regular basis for a major daily newspaper. My dealings with Frank remained professional, but the obvious was always there, and it was unspoken: we both were Jackie in different ways. Frank told me he was too silent on racial issues during his playing days, ranging from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s. He sat only behind Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, and Willie Mays for the longest time in career homers. When I covered Frank, he spoke his mind on racial issues (usually with me as his messenger as a prelude to my role as The Hank Aaron Whisperer), but he lacked the fire of the Jackie I studied. He also had neither the depth nor the insight regarding everything you could name that Henry Louis Aaron would show me often during future years. Still, Frank was as strong as Jackie and Hank with his convictions.
So was Morgan, one of my former Big Red Machine guys, who played for the Giants in 1981 and 1982. Joe often used me to rip baseball’s attitude toward African Americans as players and as potential front-office workers, where the numbers remained mostly extinct. For the Examiner I quickly became more than just the Giants guy or the Raiders guy. Given the glimpses in 1981 of the coming NFL dynasty to the San Francisco 49ers of Bill Walsh and Joe Montana and given the mania around Oakland created by BillyBall under crazy yet effective A’s manager Billy Martin, I was able to bounce between everything and I was allowed to write whatever. Eventually, in 1983, without me asking, I became only the third Black person in the history of major daily newspapers allowed to write his opinion on a full-time basis as a general sports columnist.
To commemorate the 35th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier, I did a seven-day series in June 1982 for the Examiner called “Blacks in Baseball,” and the package exposed (with the help from that smoldering nuclear weapon) that the game had a quota system designed to limit the number of African Americans throughout the sport over the course of years and decades. I was told as much from the prominent to the obscure throughout various levels of major league, college, and high school baseball, and everybody agreed to speak on the record.
That included Henry Louis Aaron.
Nearly a month before the first of my decades worth of conversations with Hank, I got a call in April 1982 at the San Francisco Examiner from a White baseball scout I knew from the Oakland area. “Listen, are you going to be at the A’s game tomorrow? I’ve got something I think you need to see,” the scout said, barely audible, presumably because others were listening nearby. I was excited. If this particular scout claimed his information was huge, it ranked between discovering the next Henry Louis Aaron or determining the sun would fall out of the sky.
“I wasn’t planning to go, but I’ll go now. What is it?”
“Well,” the scout said, stretching out the word, before he paused. “It’s something that needs to come out. I’ve been meaning to tell you about it for a long time, and you are the only person I know who will touch it. I’m just sick of what’s going on, but you’ll see what I’m talking about.”
The next day, I sat at the end of an empty home dugout at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum several hours before that A’s game, waiting for the scout. When he arrived as scheduled, he looked around, making sure nobody else was in our universe before he moved in front of me. He reached into a folder, pulled out a sheet of paper, and then slowly pushed it my way. No, the scout hadn’t signed the next Henry Louis Aaron because there will only be one of those, but as I studied the paper, I did nearly glance upward to make sure everything was in place around the clouds.
I held a computerized free-agent report in my hands from the Major League Scouting Bureau, which was used by 18 of the 26 major league teams at the time. According to the scout, while I examined the smoldering nuclear weapon in my hand, the other eight franchises that weren’t a part of the bureau had similar categories on their free-agent reports.
Last name…first name…middle name …position
Current address
Telephone…date of birth …height…weight…bats…throws
Permanent address (if different from above)
Team name…city…state
Scout…date …race…games…innings.
Wait! What? Race?
“Yeah,” the scout said, still looking around to make sure he wasn’t discovered as my Deep Throat. He wanted no part of baseball’s Watergate—at least not directly. But indirectly, he left it to me. “As far as I know, they’ve always had race there, and you know why, right? They’re trying to control the number of African American players in the game.”
After a few more minutes, the scout hustled toward the other end of the dugout, saying, “I’ll let you take it from here.”
I took it to Coop, who studied every inch of the sheet while leaning back in his chair without uttering a word. Then, he moved forward toward me to say, “Wow, how do you want to handle this?”
I wanted to take a short break from the Giants and take a week or two to investigate. I wanted to do all of the reporting and all of the writing myself to keep leaks to a minimum for such a touchy subject. I wanted the Examiner to dedicate a couple of open pages on the inside of the Sunday paper to what I wrote, starting with coverage on the front page. “Let’s do it like this,” Coop said after listening and thinking. “Just forget about the Giants. They’re nothing compared to this. I want you to take as much time as you need to see where this leads you. Two weeks, a month, I don’t care, but do what you need to do to get everything you can. We’ll play it up big. Let’s plan on doing the whole thing over the course of an entire week. Terry, I have the feeling you’re going to come up with a lot of explosive stuff, and it’s going to be hard on you personally. But I know you can handle it and remember this: the Examiner will have your back no matter what happens. I’ll have your back.”
Coop did have my back like he always did, but except for racially motivated knuckleheads here and there, I was pleasantly stunned. Getting folks to cooperate regarding what was the first expansive investigation of its kind on the decline of Blacks in baseball was easier than I thought. My interviewing and reporting stretched from the major leagues to the minor leagues, and I also went deeply into what was happening to African Americans regarding baseball in colleges and high schools. Nobody I contacted disputed the ugliness of the bottom line—well, unless they were operating with less than sincerity—and the bottom line came in the form of this question: why is a slot for race on baseball’s computerized scouting report?
The following raised more questions. Through my reporting, I knew the National Football League didn’t have anything involving race on scouting reports for its yearly combine. Neither did the Raiders, the only NFL team that wasn’t a member of the combine. The scouting book for the National Basketball Association also didn’t ask for the race of players.
With every interview, I kept thinking about that smoldering nuclear weapon while hearing the voice of that White scout in the back of my mind. “They’re trying to control the number of African American players in the game.”
I needed answers and I started at the top. I called Major League Baseball headquarters in New York for commissioner Bowie Kuhn. As I dialed, I recalled the year before in 1981, when he gave me that soul brother handshake (or whatever he thought he was doing) at Candlestick Park in San Francisco to show he was down for the cause involving African Americans. I also recalled six years earlier, when I asked “Mr. Kuhn” my question as a die-hard Reds fan about Geronimo and the All-Star Game.
Maybe Kuhn still remembered me. It didn’t matter because of the bottom line.
Why is a slot for race on baseball’s computerized scouting report?
I dialed Kuhn’s office and I told the receptionist who I was before I said I needed to speak to the commissioner on an urgent matter.
“What do you wish to speak to the commissioner about?” the receptionist said.
“The plight of Blacks in baseball,” I responded, and soon afterward the secretary switched me to Kuhn’s right-hand man who asked me the same question as the receptionist. Then, when I gave him the same answer while trying to say as little as possible until I spoke to Kuhn himself about the bottom line, his right-hand man added, “I’ll pass it on to the commissioner.”
Later that day, Kuhn returned my call. “Hi, Commissioner. I’m not sure if you remember me. I’m Terence Moore, a sports reporter for the San Francisco Examiner. I met you in the press box at Candlestick Park last season, and we were…”
“Sure, sure. I do. How do the Giants look this year?”
Whether Kuhn remembered me or not was questionable, but it also was irrelevant. After more small talk, I jumped to the bottom line. I asked the commissioner if Major League Baseball was trying to use certain tactics to control the number of Black players in the game.
“Oh, of course not,” Kuhn said before he did his version over the phone of that crazy handshake to me during the previous year. More specifically, he did what baseball folks have done forever when questioned about their attitudes regarding African Americans in the game: They return to April 15, 1947, by saying Jackie Robinson this and Jackie Robinson that, then they try to name every Black superstar who ever played in the major leagues, and then they toss in the name of Martin Luther King Jr. for good measure.
When Kuhn finished, I had another question: why is a slot for race on baseball’s computerized scouting report?
Kuhn denied there was such a slot for race on those scouting reports, but then he caught himself, remembering his lawyer training, and he said, “I’m not aware of anything like that on the scouting reports.”
I told him I would fax him a copy. “I’ll look into it and then I’ll give you a response,” Kuhn said, who issued a statement to me the following day through a phone call from Bob Wirz, his director of information: “The commissioner says, ‘I don’t see where the classification of race on the forms serves a purpose.’”
That was it, but that didn’t mean Kuhn ignored the whole thing. He couldn’t and he didn’t because he knew there was just one answer to the bottom line regarding a slot for race on baseball’s computerized scouting reports. And he knew that answer wasn’t good.
Baseball had a quota system. Period.
Less than 24 hours after my “Blacks in Baseball” series ran in the San Francisco Examiner during the last week of June 1982 (featuring me writing everything, including the two to three pieces for each of the five days of a series that would finish first in the 1982 California-Nevada Associated Press awards), I spoke with Oakland A’s president Roy Eisenhardt about another matter. Then, after a pause, he told me Major League Baseball sent a confidential memo to all of its 26 teams asking them to remove race from their scouting reports and he said the Major League Scouting Bureau was told to do the same. “I had not noticed race on the forms before. I was shocked when you pointed it out,” Eisenhardt said, reflecting back on my questions to him about the practice during my initial reporting on the series. “It certainly has no place on the forms. I think it was just a relic of time.”
No, race on those baseball scouting reports was a flashing red light about the game’s past, present, and future regarding African Americans both on and off the field. The majority of those I interviewed during the spring of 1982 said as much, and they were Black, White, and Hispanic. They were prominent and obscure. They were executives, players, scouts, statisticians, clubhouse workers, and others deep on organizational flow charts.
I spoke to a month’s worth of baseball-related folks, and they were all willing for me to put their names in newsprint. In the end the consensus was: Major League Baseball had a quota system that either consciously or subconsciously remained in effect to limit the number of African Americans in the game. Those scouting reports with race as a category were only part of the evidence, and the momentum from that quota system would travel deep into the 21st century to make African Americans an afterthought in the game of Jackie and Hank. “There are quotas to be followed. No doubt about that,” said Bob Thurman, who was one of just three full-time Black scouts in the 67-person Major League Scouting Bureau during the time of my 1982 interview. “That’s why I didn’t get to the major leagues sooner than I did in 1956 with the Cincinnati Reds. The quota system—it’s something that has always bothered me about this game. Why color?”
Baseball Hall of Famer Marvin Miller, the executive director of the game’s players association for its first 16 years, told me: “From time to time, you hear talk about a quota system, but it’s hard to prove.”
Miller was White, and so was William Weiss, an accomplished statistician for Minor League Baseball on the West Coast since the 1940s. According to Weiss, the number of African Americans in both the major and minor leagues was plunging, and he said during the spring of 1982: “It’s been a gradual trend. One thing has occurred to me over the last 10 or 12 years, and that is when a decision has to be made between a White player and a Black player, the White player is usually chosen. If you have 10 teams in a league and you take away two Black players from each team, then that’s 20 fewer Blacks in the league. Maybe that’s why the trend isn’t as noticeable. I’m sure you have a few individuals in baseball who might think along racial lines when decisions are being made.”
That brings me back to Griffith, the Minnesota Twins owner who was just four years removed from his racist comments involving African Americans and wrestling when I dialed his office during the spring of 1987. He thought he was speaking in private back then, but a reporter was in the room to record words that Griffith later said he regretted saying. I called Griffith during the spring of 1982 for his thoughts for my “Blacks in Baseball” series. He still sounded like a guy dreaming of standing in the door of the home clubhouse at Ebbets Field on April 15, 1947, to keep You Know Who from entering. Griffith told me over the phone from Minneapolis that he wanted to make his team as White as possible. He said, “You look through the stands. How many Blacks do you usually see? Not many. Statistics prove they pay to see wrestling, boxing, and basketball. The truth hurts.”
This also was true: in addition to Griffith’s willingness to speak bluntly about his 19th century racial beliefs to a total stranger such as me during a random phone call, I discovered up close and personal through the decades that more than a few baseball folks were Griffith in body, mind, and soul. Either that or they remained on automatic pilot regarding their racial thoughts and actions. Nothing showed that more than my decades of encountering Griffith clones during other phone interviews, when the person on the other end couldn’t tell they were speaking with an African American reporter.
While doing a profile at the San Francisco Examiner on Robinson, I called one of his fellow Baseball Hall of Fame members for reflections on Robinson’s career. Robinson was Black, and the Baseball Hall of Famer I had on the phone was White. After a few words of general conversation, I told the Baseball Hall of Fame player what I was doing. “That fucking n----r…He’s nothing but a fucking n----r.”
Alrighty then.
I told Coop and several other San Francisco Bay Area writing colleagues about the incident, and a couple of months later when I was at Candlestick Park, one of those colleagues told me that Baseball Hall of Famer was in the press box. “Well, I guess I’ll introduce myself,” I said, smiling, as that colleague laughed, saying he wanted to watch things unfold.
When I approached the Baseball Hall of Fame player, he was pleasant. We shook hands, and then I said, “I just want to thank you for the interview a few months ago. I’m the guy who called you for the story I was doing on Frank Robinson.”
The blood left the face of the Baseball Hall of Fame player. Soon afterward, he rushed from the press box. I didn’t use the Baseball Hall of Fame player’s comments, by the way. Just like I never wrote about the Major League executives and managers, including Baseball Hall of Famers, who often referred to “colored” players whenever they spoke to me about African Americans on their teams or elsewhere in the game.
I did write about my phone conversation with relatively new Reds owner Marge Schott, and this was before she became known for her affinity for Adolph Hitler’s domestic policies, among other things that made her the female Griffith. Nevertheless, Schott invited me to her estate on the exclusive Indian Hill side of town. When I climbed out of my car, she stood on her front porch, and her face indicated she was perturbed that I was much darker than Hermann Goring or Joseph Goebbels. We did the interview in her kitchen.
There also was a former baseball owner I bonded with over the phone. At the end of the interview, he invited me to spend an afternoon reminiscing about his life and his franchise at his massive complex. When I drove up the main driveway, he ran toward me in a rage, waving his hands, screaming, “Go around! Go around!” I went to the back entrance somewhat confused. Before he could explode again while rushing toward me from the distance, I said, “I’m Terence Moore, the sportswriter. We just talked on the phone.”
The former baseball owner frowned, threw up his arms, and said, “Why didn’t you tell me you were Black?”
Anyhow, in my Examiner piece, the commissioner’s office refused to cooperate during our search for historical numbers on African Americans in the game, and among the defiant was Monte Irvin, a special assistant to Kuhn and one of the game’s first Black players. I was tipped off that Irvin kept those numbers in his desk drawer. After I phoned Irvin, he confirmed what I knew. He said, “I complied the figures for my personal records, but somehow, they aren’t there anymore. They just aren’t there. I can’t find them. So let’s leave it at that. We don’t need any more stories knocking Major League Baseball but stories saying things are moving along. I think baseball is doing just fine for Blacks.”
On the 25-man Opening Day rosters on Major League Baseball’s opening week of 1982, slightly less than 19 percent of the players were African Americans. That’s a massive figure compared to the 8 percent one of the 21st century but not compared to this: the peak of African Americans players in the major leagues was around 25 percent in the mid-1970s.
There also were these ugly numbers in 1982:
Which brings me to Morgan, an outspoken African American player who followed me from Cincinnati, where he won two National League Most Valuable Player Awards with the Big Red Machine, to San Francisco, where he continued his Baseball Hall of Fame career in 1982 at second base for the Giants. He was my Hank Aaron before I met Hank Aaron since Joe and I huddled often for long stretches to discuss racial issues involving baseball and society. During my research for the “Blacks in Baseball” series, Joe told me those scary numbers for African Americans in the game weren’t by accident and he said they would get worse, especially regarding African American players. “If you’re not looking for Black players, you’re not going to find them, and they aren’t looking for Black players,” Morgan said. “Baseball has a quota system, and that’s it in a nutshell, but you can start with this: how can you expect to sign a lot of Black players if you don’t have a lot of Black scouts?”
Foster took it further. The standout African American left fielder on my Big Red Machine was playing for the New York Mets in 1982. He told me one of the most prophetic things. Hispanic players were represented by single digit percentages in the major leagues during the start of my “Blacks in Baseball” series, but they were at 32 percent by the time of Hank’s death in January 2021. In contrast, the number of African Americans had sunk from that mid-1970s high of around 25 percent to 8 percent. That means Foster was clairvoyant in 1982 when he told me: “It’s reverse discrimination. American Blacks are being phased out and replaced by Latin American players in some cases. I don’t mean that in a negative way, but the Latin American players make eight and 10 times less many than many American Blacks. They’re cheaper to sign.”
It’s called a quota system. “It’s just the way some people in baseball establishment have been brought up,” Bill White told me in May 1982, when he was a Yankees announcer at the time. Before that, he was an eight-time All-Star first baseman from the mid-1950s with the New York Giants through the late 1960s with the St. Louis Cardinals. He later rose to the highest-ranking position for a Black person in the history of professional sports management when he began a five-year term in 1989 as National League president.
Yes, that Bill White verified the existence of a quota system, when I did the research for my “Blacks in baseball” series. “Some of the people who are calling the shots in baseball today were trained by the original owners of the game back before Jackie Robinson broke the color line,” White said. “The offspring of the original owners are creating the same results as before the color line was broken. This situation is partly the fault of Black players who were in uniform during the 1960s. We knew this was going on back then, but we just sat back and said nothing. We should have been screaming. Now it could be too late.”
At that point, I knew I needed to go for the jugular. I needed Henry Louis Aaron.
With apologies to DiMaggio, who insisted before gatherings to be introduced as “the greatest living player,” or to Willie Mays, who deserved that honor more than DiMaggio or anybody else not named Henry Louis Aaron, Hank was the greatest living player. He also was the definitive person to interview for my “Blacks in Baseball” series, and it didn’t hurt he owned a PHD in racism.
Hank grew up in segregated Mobile, Alabama, before he played in the Negro Leagues. He made one of his minor league stops for the Milwaukee Braves in Jacksonville, Florida, during the early 1950s, when Jim Crow reigned. He entered the major leagues in 1954, the same year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled separate but equal was dead courtesy of its ruling on Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka. Even so, Hank spent the peak of his baseball career during the 1960s with the likes of White, Robinson, and Morgan, watching the game operate as if separate but equal still lived. No doubt Hank fretted over the game’s quota system, which began decades before I had that smoldering nuclear weapon—Why is a slot for race on baseball’s computerized scouting report?—to prove it.
I needed Hank because even then I could see Henry Louis Aaron was Jack Roosevelt Robinson. Less than a decade before, he conquered death threats and hate mail to make beloved White hero George Herman Ruth secondary in the record book under career home runs. I needed Hank for my “Blacks in Baseball” series for another reason. During the spring of 1982, he was the highest ranking African American in the front office of any Major League Baseball team. He was months into his new role as director of player development for the Atlanta Braves, his team for 21 seasons before he spent his final two years as a player with the Milwaukee Brewers. His jump to management was courtesy of Ted Turner, the cable television maverick who bought the Braves in January 1976. Eight months later, Turner made Bill Lucas baseball’s first African American general manager. (Hank’s first wife, Barbara, was Lucas’ sister.) Then soon after that, Turner hired Henry Louis Aaron for an unspecified role in the Braves’ front office, following Hank’s retirement as a player after the 1976 season.
While the other major league teams had zero Black executives, the Braves had two. Before long, there was just Hank in May 1979 after Lucas died at 43.
I needed Hank.
I got Hank in May 1982, and my first conversation with Henry Louis Aaron shouldn’t have happened, but it did, and the process was flawless. Destiny demanded as much for the fan-turned-journalist who still used a wall in his home to display his Mona Lisa of a Hank Aaron poster he bought at 12 years old.
Destiny also got me past Susan Bailey.
Bailey was Hank’s Rose Mary Woods, Richard Nixon’s secretary with the reputation of protecting her boss no matter what. Rose Mary Woods was so loyal to the president that in June 1972, she said she stretched the arm and leg on the left side of her body so far apart in opposite directions behind her desk—while operating a tape-recording device and reaching for her phone—that she said she accidentally erased about five minutes of a damaging Watergate tape involving the commander in chief.
Hank didn’t have secret recordings, but he had Bailey, who he cherished. She spent decades doing exactly what Hank wanted done, which was to say no in a forceful yet pleasant manner whenever somebody called to speak with Henry Louis Aaron regarding just about anything. I wouldn’t know. In addition to operating as The Hank Aaron Whisperer, I was his Clark Kent as the only media person with ability to contact this Superman of a sports personality at any time. That partly was because I never had a problem with Bailey (you know, courtesy of Hank). As a result, I regularly had local and national reporters begging me to put in a good word for them with her, but they were on their own. Nobody told Susan Baily what to do.
When I contacted the Braves in May 1982 for Hank Aaron, I knew nothing about Bailey or her reputation. I just dialed 404-522-7630, the main number to the team’s headquarters for as long as I could remember, and I asked to be connected to Hank Aaron’s office. Bailey was on the other end. I introduced myself and told her I wanted to do something with Hank Aaron involving my series for the San Francisco Examiner on “Blacks in Baseball,” specifically about the future of African Americans in the game, and she put me on hold for several seconds.
“Hello.”
Destiny responded again. It was Hank.
I didn’t know how much time I would have with the guy we cheered for like crazy as a family in Milwaukee on April 8, 1974, in front of our black-and-white TV set in the kitchen, so I got to the point. Well, almost. With my voice cracking from nervousness, I said we had something in common: a love for Jackie Robinson. I said Hank was speaking to only the second African American ever to cover a Major League Baseball team.
Just like that, Hank wanted to hear more about my groundbreaking things as a journalist, so I told him everything. I mentioned I was the first Black writer for my high school and college newspapers, the first full-time Black sports reporter for The Cincinnati Enquirer, the first full-time Black sports reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, and the first Black sports reporter to cover an NFL team on a full-time basis for a major newspaper.
“How old are you?” Hank said.
“Twenty-six,” I said.
“You did all of that at 26 as a Black man working for newspapers?” Aaron said, chuckling over the phone. Then he said something I would hear often over the decades from Henry Louis Aaron, and every time he said it, I had to deal with the moisture in my eyes. “I’m proud of you.”
Then we got down to business. I told Hank about baseball’s computerized scouting reports with the word “race” screaming in the middle of them. Fresh on the job as Braves director of player development, Hank said he hadn’t seen those forms, but he said he was disgusted by my news and he added he wasn’t surprised. I told Hank about my research showing at least a 7 percent drop in African American players in baseball since the previous decade. I told Hank about Foster joining others by telling me baseball officials were planning to systematically replace African American players with Hispanic ones. I told Hank about the pitiful number of Blacks as major league scouts, coaches, and even secretaries in front offices. I told Hank about Weiss, a respected minor league statistician for four decades, joining Miller and other non-Blacks to conclude the same thing as former and current African American players: baseball was systematically ousting African American players from its game through a quota system.
I told Hank about White, a perennial All-Star player, who blamed much of the situation on himself and other African American players of the 1960s. I told Hank how White got emotional when he told me, “We should have been screaming. Now it could be too late.”
“Oh, I agree with Bill. We should have been screaming. We could see what they were doing to Black players, and that’s what Jackie would have done [as a player in the 1960s]. And after he finished playing, he still was out there screaming about the racism in baseball,” Hank said, sounding comfortable speaking to a stranger over the phone about sensitive topics.
Then again, Hank and I had our Jackie Robinson connection, and destiny controlled our conversation.
Hank added: “Parents are seeing how Blacks are being treated in baseball once they retire and they are telling their kids to go into other sports. That’s why I think there is a lack of participation in baseball on the part of Black kids. The number of Blacks in the front offices of Major League Baseball has always been scarce, and they remain scarce today.”
A few days later, I reviewed my Hank notes. I discovered something I would notice here and there through the decades after the hundreds of times I would speak with Henry Louis Aaron. He would say something, but it wouldn’t be exactly what he meant to say. They were little things—mainly due to his down-home style of speaking through his south Alabama drawl.
I did in May 1982 what I would do over the next four decades. Whenever I wasn’t sure if Hank wished to say something exactly, I would check with him. So I called the Braves again and I reached Bailey again. I told her I needed to speak to Hank again. Just like before, there was Hank within seconds.
“Hello.”
After I told Hank I just wanted to clarify something he said, he thanked me for calling because he said he made a mistake. He told me what he really meant to say, and before we hung up, he added, “You know what, Terence? After all these many years, you’re the only reporter who has ever done that—just flat-out ask me if they were keeping me in context.”
Hank never forgot that May 1982 clarification moment, along with others, and it accelerated our bonding, even though I had him at Jackie Robinson.