Baseball (15 page)

In the final days of spring training of 1947, the Dodgers promoted Robinson to the varsity. A few Dodgers planned a protest that quickly ended when the fiery Durocher informed them that Robinson was going to put money in their pockets. In early May, several Cardinals planned to boycott games with the Dodgers, but Ford Frick, the president of the National League, told them that anybody who struck would be permanently banned from the game. Frick said, “This is the United States of America and one citizen has as much right to play as another.”

The Cardinals did not strike, but later in the season Robinson was spiked on the foot by Enos Slaughter, the star of the 1946 World Series, who was rumored to be among the players who talked of boycott. Robinson always maintained Slaughter had swerved to spike him intentionally, but Slaughter insisted Robinson had been injured because he had not mastered the footwork of a new position, first base.

Having promised Rickey he would not fight back, Robinson kept silent while bench jockeys like Chapman shouted vile things at him. Most of the Dodgers rallied around Robinson, particularly the captain and shortstop, Harold (Pee Wee) Reese, from Louisville, Kentucky. On the Dodgers' first trip to Cincinnati in 1947, fans began chanting racial epithets from the stands, upon which Reese put his arm around Robinson's shoulders, to demonstrate, in Reese's part of the world, that they were teammates and equals. Reese would later admit that his support of Robinson had not pleased some relatives
and friends. (In 2005, a statue, suggested by Stan Isaacs of
Newsday
, would be unveiled outside a minor league stadium in Brooklyn, depicting Reese putting his arm around Robinson's shoulder.)

The Dodgers won the pennant in 1947 as Robinson, under intense pressure, batted .297 and was named Rookie of the Year. The next year Robinson moved to second base and became a much more productive hitter, with the guidance of George Sisler, who taught him to hit to right field. In 1949, Robinson led the league in hitting with .342. The numbers sound like the normal progress of a great athlete, but there was nothing easy about it.

On the road, he was fighting three battles at once. The game itself was tough enough, but Robinson also had to contend with threats as well as makeshift logistics. The Dodgers and the league office could not arrange for the first black players to stay in the team hotel in St. Louis, so Robinson had to stay at all-black hotels, which did not necessarily have air-conditioning or other amenities. The black neighborhoods treated him like a prince, but he watched his teammates head for the swanky hotel and he knew baseball was not sticking up for him. Every day was a battle. Then he had to go out and try to hit against Robin Roberts or Warren Spahn.

The Dodgers marveled that he did not break, although he and his wife feared he would suffer a nervous breakdown. After he survived his rookie season, the Dodgers began to catch a glimpse of the full Jackie Robinson, the college man, the battler, the officer who would not move to the back of the bus in Texas. After that first year of treading lightly, to keep his promise to Rickey, Robinson began to show his opinionated side, his anger, his gallows humor. One former teammate, George Shuba, observed Robinson up close in the intimate settings of the daily clubhouse. Years later, Shuba described how Robinson defused one tense moment:

“Visiting clubhouse, Cincinnati, 1948,” Shuba wrote in a letter. “Jackie gets an obscene life-threatening letter. It states that he would be shot if he appears on the field that day. He posts it on the clubhouse bulletin board and laughs about it. If he didn't, he would end up in a straitjacket. We read it and are glad we're not him.

“[Gene] Hermanski reads it and turns to Jackie, who is getting suited up with the rest of us, and says, ‘Jackie, I got it figured out. You haven't got anything to worry about. We'll all put Number 42 on our backs and that so-and-so won't know who to shoot.’

“Jackie says, ‘Thanks, Gene, but I think that so-and-so will still be able to pick me out.’”

Robinson was followed quickly by other black players—Larry Doby signing with Bill Veeck in Cleveland later in 1947, the first black in the American League, Monte Irvin with the Giants, Satchel Paige with the Browns, Don Newcombe and Roy Campanella with the Dodgers, plus, briefly in 1949, the first dark-skinned Latino, Orestes (Minnie) Minoso. But Robinson had been the point man for all of them. He was a complicated man, who did not suffer foolishness around him, who could annoy his teammates with his high-pitched opinions. Newcombe, a superb pitcher and hitter, once told Robinson in the crowded clubhouse that he was “not only wrong, but loud wrong.”

There was no escaping the tense reality that this social experiment depended on Jackie Robinson. If he cracked, or became unpopular, he could set back the cause of blacks in public life by years, even decades. Jack and Rachel Robinson felt the expectations not only from blacks—the invitations, the phone calls, the letters, the articles, the visits by celebrities—but also from whites who were rooting for him to set an example. The marvel is that with all this attention on him, Robinson became a great and versatile player on the best team in the league. He had been a mediocre shortstop in what was not even his best sport, but now, with the weight of the world on him, he willingly moved from first to second to third base and then to left field, depending on the Dodgers' defensive needs that season. He was already athletically middle-aged when he joined the Dodgers at the age of twenty-eight, yet he became a master of the crucial stolen base, the hard slide, the diving catch.

Perhaps the best game Robinson ever played was on the final day of the 1951 season, in the darkening gloom at Philadelphia. Having blown a lead of 13½ games to their rivals, the Giants, the Dodgers
now had to beat the Phillies to force a playoff. In the 12th inning, Robinson dove to his left to snag a line drive by Eddie Waitkus. Tumbling and injuring his shoulder, he held on to the ball, to extend the game. Then in the 14th inning Robinson hit a home run to put the Dodgers into the playoff.

The Dodgers would lose that playoff in the third game on a three-run homer by Bobby Thomson, in what may have been the greatest major league game ever played, taking into consideration the rivalry, the squandered lead, the dramatic home run, and the presence of the acerbic dandy, Durocher, who was now the Giants' manager. Robinson is said to have been one of the few Dodgers who could bear to walk across the corridor at the Polo Grounds to congratulate their hated opponents.

In his decade with the Dodgers, Robinson helped win six pennants and one cathartic championship over the Yankees in 1955 that would justify that familiar October Brooklyn proclamation of “Wait Till Next Year.” At the end of the 1956 season, the Dodgers traded the bulky, gray-haired Robinson to a team they had to know he would not join—the Giants. He thought about it for a few minutes and promptly retired.

At thirty-seven, Robinson needed to make money, but he also felt responsibility for other blacks. Despite a decade of watching dozens of blacks prove themselves on the field, baseball had no concept of seeking out minorities for jobs on the field or off.

Baseball was happy enough to discover the next wave of black and Hispanic superstars—Willie Mays in New York in 1951, Henry Aaron in Milwaukee in 1954, Roberto Clemente in Pittsburgh in 1955, Frank Robinson in Cincinnati in 1956. The Yankees, on the other hand, would not bring up their first black player, Elston Howard, until 1955, and the Red Sox, who had Jackie Robinson in their ballpark for a tryout in 1945 but couldn't wait to hustle him out the door, would be the sixteenth and last team to hire a black, Pumpsie Green in 1959.

The sluggishness of the Yankees and Red Sox would affect the balance between the two leagues. Up to Robinson's time, the American League had been clearly superior, but starting in 1947 the National
League began to play a more aggressive and intelligent style of ball to go along with its obvious infusion of black talent. From 1933 through 1949, the American League had won 12 of the first 16 All-Star Games, but from 1950, the National League won 32 of the next 39. The only possible way to explain this superiority was that the National League was Jackie Robinson's league.

For all his contributions, Robinson was never offered a meaningful job in the sport, instead working in private industry to open up jobs for blacks and trying to convince his fellow Republicans to provide more opportunities in business. In 1962, Robinson became the first black to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, which he used as a forum to remind the owners that there were no black managers or front-office executives.

Suffering from diabetes, Robinson became nearly blind, having to be escorted onto the field when he made an occasional visit to the ballpark. His family and friends claimed the stress of his first years in the major leagues had weakened his system, as did the troubled adolescence of his first child, Jackie Jr., who came through drug treatment only to die in an auto accident in 1971.

Jack Roosevelt Robinson died on October 24, 1972, at the age of fifty-three. His name has been honored on schools and fields, as well as the Jackie Robinson Foundation, administered by Rachel Robinson, which prepares young people to work in the sports industry. The man who carried the aspirations of an entire race continues to open doors.

W
henever I visit Prospect Park in the borough of Brooklyn, my head jerks eastward like a compass, toward the apartment buildings where Ebbets Field once stood. In the tranquil Botanic Garden, I feel sick to my stomach, knowing that my team is long gone. I am not alone in this. I have compared notes with Fred Wilpon, the builder and owner of the Mets, who grew up in Brooklyn. The site of Ebbets Field is like the magnetic North Pole, constantly making us quiver in that direction. In the same way, Giant fans of a certain age feel visceral pain when they drive along the Harlem River Drive in Manhattan, past Coogan's Bluff, the hill that towered over the now vanished Polo Grounds.

Aging fans are the witnesses to the sudden departure of hallowed franchises in the first generation after World War Two. We suffered in the name of continental destiny. In the surge of prosperity after the war, people began to think about going somewhere. Families came back from their first vacation to Florida or California, raving about the weather, the new houses, the beaches, the date-nut shakes. In the frozen Midwest, people woke up on New Year's Day and turned on their brand-new television set to the Rose Bowl parade and football game from Pasadena, California, and pretty soon a family down the block packed up and moved out west. This happened every January.

America had been settled by pioneers twitching toward the west. In 1919, a young Army officer named Dwight D. Eisenhower had taken a two-month trip over rudimentary roads not much better than the rutted paths left by Lewis and Clark and the covered wagons. He never forgot the slow, torturous journey. In 1952, as the leading American general in the victory in Europe, Ike was elected president of the United States. One of his first priorities was to encourage two federal acts that would create over 41,000 miles of interstate highways, a system now named after him.

Baseball owners were not immune from thoughts of relocating.
In St. Louis, curly-haired, beer-drinking Bill Veeck began to entertain dreams of turning a profit with the Browns. As the son of the former owner of the Chicago Cubs, also named Bill, Veeck was a baseball man through and through, even if his fellow owners would never accept him because they found him too brash, too imaginative. Having had a leg amputated at the knee following service in the Pacific, Veeck tended to store his pipe ashes in the hollow of his artificial limb. That little routine would come off as amusing in a bar full of war vets or a pressroom full of reporters but was lost on the owners, as were most of Veeck's schemes and dreams. He would become one of the great showmen of postwar baseball, even if the other owners despised him and tried to break him.

After coming back from the service, Veeck had tried to buy the Phillies, until Judge Landis learned of his plan to hire black players. The owners preferred to steer the team to a man with a gambling problem, William Cox. Veeck then bought into the Cleveland team in 1946, touching off a golden age in that city. Veeck had this odd business belief that baseball was a very short step from a carnival: people would spend a few dollars on cotton candy and bright lights and a glimpse of the sword-swallower and the bearded lady. Baseball, in Veeck's humble opinion, was not exactly church—or even the opera. He provided daily gimmicks, including fireworks, giveaways, stunts, and games, setting a major league attendance record of 2.6 million fans in the world championship season of 1948. How that annoyed the other owners. Always short of money, Veeck sold the team in 1949 for twenty times what he had paid.

In 1951 Veeck bought the fading Browns, who had been beaten out by the Cardinals in what had obviously become a one-city baseball town. Once among the top ten cities in the United States, St. Louis could hear the population whooshing westward en route to California. To lure people into the ballpark, Veeck tried some new and outrageous stunts, including hiring a midget. Three-foot, seven-inch, sixty-five-pound Eddie Gaedel was promptly walked by the Tigers and taken out for a pinch-runner, but the league office nullified Gaedel's contract. In accordance with the old baseball
cliché of “You can look it up,” on page 916 of my edition of the
Baseball Encyclopedia
is the career record of Edward Carl Gaedel, born in Chicago in 1925, died in Chicago in 1961. (Bats Right, Throws Left, the
Encyclopedia
says, although Gaedel never got to show his stuff in the field or the base paths.)

The Gaedel stunt certified Veeck as a troublemaker, as totalitarian states come to brand members of the thinking class. The owners were not smart enough to heed Veeck's prediction that this newfangled medium, television, would soon widen the competitive gap between teams from the larger cities and the smaller ones. Most owners assumed they would keep making money at the turnstile, but peacetime attendance peaked at 20.9 million in 1948, Veeck's big year in Cleveland, and then began a downward spiral.