Jackie and Campy (18 page)

To be sure, Campanella’s leadership of the Dodgers, his easygoing personality, and his refusal to speak out publicly against racial discrimination also endeared him to the white baseball establishment. But those same qualities irked Robinson. No doubt Jackie was jealous of Campanella’s baseball success. As the catcher’s star was rising, Robinson’s was declining, especially after 1954, when his batting average and offensive production tailed off dramatically. His one and only
MVP
Award came in 1949, when he led the National League with a .342 batting average. Afterward he never captured another batting title or led the league in any offensive category except on-base percentage (.440), in 1952.
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Campanella, on the other hand, captured three National League
MVP
Awards in 1951, 1953, and 1955, and during those years he finished among the league leaders in batting average, home runs,
RBI
s, and slugging average.
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What disturbed Robinson more was Campanella’s refusal to speak out against racial injustice. Jackie considered his teammate an “Uncle Tom” because of his behavior as an agreeable black man in a white society.
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Campy got along with everybody and liked it that way, while Robinson didn’t care if he was accepted by others, particularly the white establishment. He realized that his outspokenness alienated him from most whites, but he refused to remain silent because he understood the stark difference between perceived equality and full equality. That is why he could live in the affluent St. Albans section of Queens, Long Island, with such celebrity neighbors as Count Basie, Lena Horne, and Ella Fitzgerald and still
criticize publicly the second-class citizenship of black people. Robinson saw no contradiction in owning a home in an affluent suburb because he had earned the right to live there. But he also wanted other African Americans to enjoy the same right, which would only come with full citizenship. Conversely, Campanella, who lived in the same neighborhood, kept quiet about civil rights because he didn’t want to jeopardize his own status. He simply refused to put his financial success and popularity on the line for other black people. While Robinson may have interpreted his teammate’s example as cowardly, Campy viewed it as practical given the racial climate of the time. “Jackie was militant,” noted Duke Snider. “He knew that history had placed him in a special role, and he never ducked from that role. That’s why he played the game with a chip on his shoulder, why he spoke out against race discrimination; things Campy could never have done.”
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“Jack would get impatient with Campy because he wanted him to speak up more,” recalled Rachel Robinson. “Campy would get impatient with Jack because he thought he spoke up too much, and that is a fact of life.”
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Their different approaches put the two players on an inevitable collision course as the decade of the 1950s unfolded.

Branch Rickey might have been able to mediate the controversy, but he left the Dodgers at the end of the 1950 season. When John L. Smith, a pharmaceutical mogul who owned 25 percent of the team, died in July, Rickey’s days in Brooklyn were numbered. As long as Smith was alive, he could stave off co-owner Walter O’Malley’s efforts to take control of the franchise, perhaps even one day hand the reins over to his son, Branch Jr., who in 1947 had been promoted to the position of assistant general manager. But when Smith succumbed to cancer at age fifty-eight, Rickey became vulnerable to O’Malley’s machinations. The two men disagreed on everything from personnel to contract negotiations, and if Rickey didn’t leave he might find himself working for O’Malley after his contract expired in October. The Dodgers’ president also found himself strapped for cash since he had borrowed heavily on his life insurance to buy into the team in 1943 and his stock portfolio had not performed well. When John W. Galbreath, chairman of the Pittsburgh Pirates and a fellow Ohioan, asked Rickey to take over the Pirates, he sold his quarter-interest in the Dodgers for $1 million and moved to Pittsburgh.
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About the same time, Happy Chandler, the commissioner who had backed Rickey’s experiment with integration, was forced out of his job by the owners. When they elected Chandler to succeed the autocratic Judge Landis, the owners believed that he would be willing to follow their lead. Instead he proved to be independent. While he defended ownership’s right to the reserve clause, Chandler distanced himself from the moguls by arguing for a minimum players’ salary and a pension plan to be paid from World Series profits and vetoing a plan to raise admission prices because he believed it to be unfair to the fans. Still, the owners tolerated these measures. But Chandler’s active support for Rickey’s plan to integrate the game was, for them, unforgivable. Accordingly when the former Kentucky senator asked for an early extension of his seven-year contract as a vote of confidence, the owners voted it down by a 9–7 margin. Chandler resigned in midseason of 1951 and was replaced by National League president Ford Frick.
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As a result, by 1952 Robinson had lost his two most loyal supporters, and his relations with baseball’s white power structure quickly deteriorated.

During spring training in 1952, O’Malley, acting on hearsay, accused Jackie of faking an injury in order to skip an exhibition game. He phoned the second baseman and asked to meet with him and Rachel to discuss the matter. It was unusual for Rachel to be involved in any matters concerning her husband and the team, but she agreed to attend. It may have been a ploy to intimidate Rachel so that she would persuade her husband to temper his behavior or risk losing his job. If that was his intention, he was sorely disappointed. During the meeting O’Malley, who had never been happy with Robinson’s outspokenness or his combative play, sought to lay down the law. He reprimanded Jackie for missing the exhibition game, saying that it was “unfair to the fans.” He also told his second baseman that he had no right to complain about being assigned to a separate hotel while the team was in Florida. “A separate hotel had been good enough for you in 1947,” he added. Insulted by the remark, Robinson exploded. He told O’Malley that he was “dead wrong” if he thought that he was going to tolerate the same deplorable conditions he had been forced to endure in the past. Challenging O’Malley’s character, Jackie added that if O’Malley “had more guts,” he “wouldn’t have to experience such indignities.” As for missing the exhibition game, Robinson said he “resented the
implication that he was pretending to be injured” and accused O’Malley of being “more interested in the few extra dollars he could gain” from the exhibition contest than “protecting the health of the team for the [regular] season.” O’Malley had heard enough. He told Robinson that he was behaving like a “cry baby” and to stop being a “prima donna.” The remark shocked Rachel. Now it was her turn to vent. If O’Malley thought she was going to be an unwitting ally, he was wrong, and she spared no criticism:

Stunned by her remarks, O’Malley realized that he wasn’t making any headway and softened his tone. Insisting that he “meant no harm,” he retreated from his accusatory approach and made a simple request: “Just try to come out [to the game] and play today.”
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“O’Malley’s attitude towards me was viciously antagonistic,” recalled Jackie near the end of his life. “I learned that he had a regular habit of calling me, ‘Mr. Rickey’s prima donna.’ To put it bluntly, I was one of those ‘uppity niggers’ in his book.”
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Making matters worse was O’Malley’s obvious respect and loyalty to Campanella, which reinforced Robinson’s growing resentment of his teammate.

Despite the fact that Campy had gained weight and his batting average dropped to .269 in 1952, O’Malley predicted that Roy had at least five more years as “the best catcher and one of the greatest clutch hitters in
baseball.”
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O’Malley even suggested that Campy’s “intelligence, level-headedness,” and “popularity with the other players” ensured a place for him in the Dodgers organization when his playing days were over.
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Robinson, who had entertained thoughts of managing in the future, interpreted the remark as a personal snub. He never forgave O’Malley for forcing Rickey out of Brooklyn, and he interpreted all of his actions through the prism of that negative bias. O’Malley reinforced Robinson’s suspicions by trading away many of the players Rickey had developed. Some of those transactions were most likely motivated by ego and the desire to assert his authority, just as Jackie suspected. At the same time, baseball was a business, and the need to rebuild the Dodgers by developing younger players and replacing aging stars was necessary for any franchise that hoped to remain competitive. Thus O’Malley was no different from any other owner. Still, Robinson’s relationship with him continued to deteriorate. And O’Malley’s was not the only authority Jackie challenged.

As the 1950s unfolded, Robinson became more antagonistic toward the National League umpires, sometimes at his own expense. Jocko Conlan, widely respected for his accuracy and fairness, earned the second baseman’s wrath in 1950 when he called him out on strikes. When Jackie glared at him disapprovingly, Conlan remarked, “It was right over the middle!” Robinson lashed out in a hailstorm of abuse before being thrown out of the game. The ejection ended a streak of hitting safely in sixteen straight games and a streak of reaching base in fifty-five consecutive games.
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In April 1951 Robinson was called out on strikes by umpire Dusty Boggess. Throwing his bat down at home plate, Jackie trotted out to his position at second base, shouting a derogatory remark. Either Boggess didn’t hear Robinson or simply ignored him. But Babe Pinelli, who was umpiring behind third, refused to let the remark go unnoticed and berated Robinson. Tempers flared, and Dodgers manager Charlie Dressen had to intervene. Later, when asked about the incident, Jackie insisted that the umpires were “out to get me.” “I know what they’re doing,” he said. “I’m not blind. One of the umpires even went up to Dressen before the season started and told him that I’m trying to show them up and they weren’t going to stand for it.” Although he claimed that he wasn’t trying to “show anyone up,” he insisted that he was “entitled to make a beef as much as anyone else.” Even some of his closest friends began to lose patience with him. Clyde Suke
forth, the scout who discovered Robinson, reminded him that he had been a model player with the umpires during his first two years in the Majors and asked, “So why can’t you be quiet now?”
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By 1953 Robinson had created so many enemies among the umpires that the National League’s new president, Warren Giles, had no sympathy for him. When Giles censured Brooklyn for unmercifully riding umpire Frank Dascoli for a controversial call, he singled out Robinson as “particularly offensive,” even though Dascoli ejected just one Dodger, Chris Van Cuyk, from the game.
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If the umpires were baiting Jackie, he had nobody but himself to blame. He tended to overreact to any call that went against him, interpreting those judgments as being racially motivated. Robinson had tremendous difficulty separating his role as a civil rights pioneer from the arbitration of the game, even when his prickliness jeopardized personal or team success. His personal makeup wouldn’t allow him to respond any other way. Jackie’s fiery attitude and indomitable spirit—the very same qualities that made him the most attractive candidate to break the color barrier—worked against him after he was freed from the “no striking back” ban. In fact, unwittingly or perhaps consciously, Robinson was telling baseball’s white establishment that they “couldn’t have it both ways” each time he challenged an umpire’s decision. Just because the color barrier had been broken didn’t mean that human nature had also been reformed. Umpires were only human, and no doubt many still harbored racist feelings. To expect those umpires to divorce their decision-making process from personal prejudice was just as naïve as expecting Robinson to simply dismiss any call that went against him. Essentially Jackie was placed in an impossible situation, but he only made it worse by challenging any umpire who ruled against him.

Robinson’s antagonistic attitude toward the umpires, his outspokenness on civil rights, and his growing difficulties with Walter O’Malley did not escape the scrutiny of the sportswriters, who became increasing critical of him. They were accustomed to dealing with accommodating black athletes like Joe Louis, the heavyweight boxing champion, and Jesse Owens, the Olympic track star. Predictably they flocked to Campanella, who was considered “one of the boys,” according to Jack Lang, who covered the Dodgers in the 1950s for the
Long Island Press
. “Campy was just a fun-loving guy,” said Lang. “He got along with everybody. All the
writers loved him.”
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Similarly Arthur Daley of the
New York Times
regarded Campanella as a “delightfully warm and wonderful guy.”
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Campy endeared himself to the sportswriters by providing insightful analyses of games and humorous quotes. He also knew which writers to cultivate, like Dick Young of the
New York Daily News
, the most scrutinizing of all the city’s scribes. After Campanella won his first
MVP
Award in 1951, Young approached him about a biography. Not only did the catcher agree to several interviews, but he refused to accept any of the royalties after the book was published.
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Because they favored him, the press protected him. When, for example, he requested that the sportswriters avoid any mention of his quitting high school because he didn’t want his children to know, they readily complied.
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