Baseball (14 page)

Many major-leaguers returned with painful injuries and dark memories: Phil Marchildon, a Canadian pitcher for the A's, was shot down as a gunner over Denmark, parachuted 18,000 feet, was captured, and lost forty pounds; Earl Johnson, a left-hander with the Red Sox, earned a battlefield commission in the Battle of the Bulge and the Silver Star; Harry Walker, a future batting champion, later described to writer Richard Goldstein how he killed two German soldiers with a .45 revolver: “Your reaction was to live and that's about it”; and John Grodzicki took shrapnel in his right thigh five weeks before V-E Day, but pitched 19 games for the Cardinals after the war.

The players began to trickle back in 1945, even before the war was over. Hank Greenberg came back and hit a grand slam against the Browns on the final day to win the pennant over Washington. Everybody seemed relieved just to hold a World Series in 1945, with a mixture of stars and replacements, as the Tigers beat the Cubs, four games to three.

Memories of the war did not go away. Fans were reminded of the sacrifices every time Lou Brissie pitched for the Philadelphia A's. Hit by shrapnel in northern Italy late in 1944, Brissie underwent twenty-three operations, begging surgeons not to remove his left foot. He then fought his way back to the majors, wearing a catcher's shin guard to protect him from ground balls. In 1949, Brissie was chosen for the All-Star Game in Brooklyn.

On a personal note, my father took me to that game, pointing out the pitcher with the rather stiff gait. While we rooted for the National League, we also cheered for Brissie as he worked three innings for the other side. His career would last through the 1953 season, as he served as an enduring and visible surrogate for all the brave people who had suffered from the war.

—

Real baseball resumed in 1946, adding to the sense of hope. Having survived a war that threatened the nation's existence, Americans
were eager to get back to family life and jobs and school—plus that familiar gathering place, the ballpark. To accommodate the players who had served in the military, major league rosters were expanded from twenty-five to thirty players. Ted Williams, after serving as an aviation instructor during the war, hit .342 as the Red Sox won the pennant. Stan Musial was back from the Navy, leading the league with .365 and helping the Cardinals beat the Dodgers in a playoff after the two teams had tied for first place.

To avoid growing rusty during the National League's playoff, the Red Sox arranged three exhibitions against teams of service veterans, including Joe DiMaggio, Cecil Travis, and Phil Marchildon. That idea backfired as Williams was hit by a pitch from Mickey Haefner and his left elbow swelled up. While Williams never used the injury as an excuse, he would hit only five singles in 25 at-bats in the Series. Musial would not do much better, with six hits in 27 at-bats.

The 1946 World Series, still regarded as one of the greatest in history, teetered back and forth into the eighth inning of the seventh game, when Harry (the Hat) Walker of the Cardinals, who had fought to survive during the war, plunked a hit into left-center, and Enos (Country) Slaughter raced all the way home from first base.

To this day, hard-core fans still debate the subtleties of Country Slaughter's mad dash with the same rapt attention that historians analyze the battles at Waterloo or Gettysburg. At first, the blame was attached to the Red Sox shortstop, Johnny Pesky, the relay man who allegedly froze with the ball during Slaughter's audacious run. At the time, Pesky accepted the blame, but over the years, as he became a venerable coach on his old team, Pesky recoiled from martyrdom, saying he may have cocked his arm once or twice but hardly “froze” before throwing.

Decades later, history has been updated to note that Leon Culberson, a reserve, had been pressed into center field when Dominic DiMaggio, the smooth smaller brother of Joe, damaged a knee in the top of the eighth. With DiMaggio on the bench, apparently trying to wave Culberson toward left field, Walker slapped the hit exactly where DiMaggio had feared.

The immediate message of the 1946 Series was more success for the Cardinals and more frustration for the Red Sox. But the broader message was that Ted Williams and Stan Musial were back.

—

The Japanese leagues did not resume in the first dreadful years of postwar rebuilding, but in 1949 Lefty O'Doul, a former major league batting star, brought his fabled minor league team, the San Francisco Seals, to Japan for an exhibition series.

“When I arrived it was terrible. The people were so depressed,” O'Doul would say many years later, recalling how thousands of fans came out to see the Seals play, cheering “Banzai, O'Doul! Banzai!” in the surviving stadiums. Emperor Hirohito personally thanked the Seals at the Imperial Palace after the tour had raised over $100,000 for Japanese charities, but more important the visit led to the return of the Japanese leagues.

General Douglas MacArthur, who supervised the occupation, called O'Doul's mission “the greatest piece of diplomacy ever,” a remark that remains an honored part of Japanese history. In January of 2006, while publicizing the first World Baseball Classic, to be held in March of that year, the Japanese ambassador to the United States, Ryozo Kato, would quote General MacArthur, recalling how baseball had helped heal the memories of war.

H
e is an American icon now, his name perpetuated on an intimate parkway that twists through the hills and cemeteries of Brooklyn, the borough where he played. His number, 42, hangs in every major league stadium, permanently retired from use by future generations. Jackie Robinson is honored as the first black to play in organized baseball in the twentieth century, but he was more than a great man. He was also a great ballplayer, who could win games with his mind as well as his bat and glove.

It is virtually impossible to re-create the conditions of his debut in 1947—the long years without blacks in the major leagues, the taunts, the threats, the fear of failure. In 1947, in the United States of America, white members of the Philadelphia Phillies joined their Alabama-born manager, Ben Chapman, in shouting the most vile racial epithets at the twenty-eight-year-old rookie with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Jack Roosevelt Robinson.

“Hey, nigger, why don't you go back to the cotton field where you belong?”

“They're waiting for you in the jungles, black boy!”

“Hey, snowflake, which one of those white boys' wives are you dating tonight?”

No American has ever carried the weight of racial progress, plus his own career, as publicly as Jackie Robinson did. His daily batting average was one barometer of his success but so was the way he responded to barbs from the opposing dugout. He never faced attack dogs or fire hoses as demonstrators did in the civil rights era that followed him but he marched in his own way, the point man in a tense land. Every black politician, every black rap singer, every black athlete of today, every black citizen vaguely getting by, comes through Jackie Robinson, but without the incredible stress that wore Robinson down before his time.

Robinson was a hero who cut across many lines. Before Robinson, the most prominent black American athletes tended to be
boxers, either “good” Negroes like Joe Louis (who did not voice his opinions) or “bad” Negroes like Jack Johnson (who dated white women). That was the standard. Then along came Jackie Robinson. I can still recall my father, who worked for a newspaper, calling from the office to tell us that our beloved Brooklyn Dodgers had brought up Robinson from the minor leagues for the start of the 1947 season. He became the soul of our team.

I consider myself fortunate that as a child and adult I would get to meet Jackie Robinson. Once, when I was around twelve, under the stands in funky little Ebbets Field, I was waiting to buy a hot dog when I noticed Robinson, who was injured and not playing that day, on line right behind me. I mumbled something about his injury, and he answered me civilly, patiently. I cannot resurrect every detail of that brief exchange but I do recall the blue satiny luster of his Dodger jacket, the gray of his hair, the bulk of his body. How could a man that large steal home so audaciously?

As a young reporter in the mid-1960s, I was working on an article about the status of blacks in sports. I called Robinson at home and asked to interview him, but instead he interviewed me, in his high-pitched, cranky voice: just exactly how many blacks worked in our sports department? “Um, none,” I replied. His point, exactly. I remember that edgy conversation as fondly as I remember our brief chat on the hot dog line.

—

Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born in rural Georgia but grew up in the relatively integrated town of Pasadena, California. He played four sports at the University of California, Los Angeles, but was best known as a running back in football. While Robinson was in college in the early 1940s, black Americans were becoming visible in the military and defense industry, some expressing their resentment over the contrast with their traditional second-class way of life. Although Robinson had been a mediocre baseball player in college, his football exploits made him a candidate for wartime baseball.

After prolonged pressure from Lester Rodney, a reporter with the communist newspaper the
Daily Worker
, the White Sox were
shamed into giving a tryout to Robinson on March 22, 1942. “Jackie is worth $50,000 of anybody's money. He stole everything but my infielders' gloves,” the White Sox manager, Jimmy Dykes, was quoted as saying. However, Robinson was on his way into the service, and was not signed. After being commissioned an Army officer, he refused to go to the rear of a bus in Texas and was courtmartialed, but was later cleared.

Around the country, there was pressure for baseball to open up to blacks. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia spoke out in favor of it. Joe Bostic, a black reporter, tried to force the Dodgers into signing black players. Leo Durocher, the abrasive manager of the Dodgers, volunteered that he had seen a number of blacks in Cuba whom he would eagerly manage, but Durocher's opinion was promptly slapped down by Judge Landis. The highly respected Wendell Smith of the
Courier
, a black newspaper based in Pittsburgh, lobbied Landis but claimed the response had been, “There is nothing further to discuss.” According to Smith, Landis “died with those words on his lips.”

Shortly after the death of Landis in 1944, the major leagues selected Senator Albert B. (Happy) Chandler of Kentucky as the new commissioner. Not known as a reformer while representing his border state, Chandler rose from his roots to set a tone for a nation in a new age. His finest moment as commissioner came almost immediately, as he promptly assured black journalists that the major leagues would soon be open to blacks.

“For twenty-four years, my predecessor did not let the black man play,” Chandler recalled in 1982. “If you were black, you didn't qualify. It wasn't entirely his fault. It was what the club owners wanted. But I didn't think it was right for these fellows to fight at Okinawa and Iwo Jima, and then come home and not be allowed to play.”

In that spirit, a Boston city councilman, Isadore Muchnick, pressured the Red Sox to take a look at Robinson, now trying to hold a regular position with the Kansas City Monarchs. On Monday, April 16, 1945, a couple of Sox officials put Robinson and two other black players through some perfunctory drills before excusing them. For
the rest of his life, Robinson was so bitter about his brushoff in Boston that he would abruptly cut off any discussion of it. More than half a century later, the new Red Sox management, trying to exorcise its old ghosts, would apologize for the sham tryout.

Yet somebody else was watching out for Jackie Robinson: Branch Rickey, emboldened by the public proclamations of greater racial equality by the new president, Harry Truman, was seeking new talent for the Brooklyn Dodgers. There is a long and reasonable dialogue about whether Rickey was seeking to do the right thing or merely acquire better players for the Brooklyn organization, as he had done in St. Louis. Given the complexities of the man, it was probably both.

In all his years of stockpiling players, Rickey had never tried to hire a black player. As he often did, Rickey had a tale to go with his new actions: when he had coached at Ohio Wesleyan in 1904, the team had taken a road trip to South Bend, Indiana, where a hotel clerk attempted to bar a black player, Charles Thomas, from registering. As Rickey told it, he had insisted on sharing a room with Thomas, who cried and clawed at his own skin, wishing he could make his blackness go away.

Forty-two years later, the time apparently was right to make up for Charles Thomas's anguish. Rickey asked Clyde Sukeforth, a former major league catcher, and George Sisler, Rickey's first great discovery, to scout the Negro Leagues. He was looking for talent, but he was also looking for the right man to integrate baseball.

Rickey invited Robinson to Brooklyn under the subterfuge that he was starting a separate all-black Dodger team. Rickey tested Robinson, first in an abstract discussion about the confrontations Robinson could expect in the majors. “I'm looking for a ball player with guts enough not to fight back,” Rickey said. Then Rickey turned up the heat, imitating the racist hotel clerks, railroad conductors, waiters, opponents, even teammates.

“Now he was a vengeful base runner, vindictive spikes flashing in the sun, sliding into Jack's black flesh,” wrote Arnold Rampersad, a Robinson biographer. “ ‘How do you like that, nigger boy?’ At one point he swung his pudgy fist at Jack's head.” Rickey did not desist
until Robinson promised him he could endure any of that. He already had—in college, in the service, just by being black in America in the first half of the twentieth century.

When Robinson signed a 1946 contract with the Dodgers' farm team in Montreal, it was clear that Rickey was not recruiting him merely to fill out the minor league roster. Robinson and his bride, Rachel Isum, a nursing graduate of the University of California, felt comfortable in the French Canadian city, which did not have the overt racial edge of most of the United States. On the Royals, Robinson was tutored by an older teammate, Al Campanis from New York University, who taught him to play second base.