October 1964 (8 page)

As the competition continued, some players told Pete Mikkelsen that he was doing well, but he did not believe them. When there was a report in one of the New York papers about him and his improving prospects, the story referred to him as
Jim
Mikkelsen, which did not leave him optimistic. But he knew that Yogi liked sinker-ball pitchers, and the other players pointed out to him that if his name was in the papers, it was probably because Yogi had put it there—the sportswriters never pushed prospects without getting signals from the manager. But then the day came when he pitched against the Minnesota Twins, and he looked up at the plate to see the immense figure of Harmon Killebrew facing him. Here was the man believed by most players to be the only other hitter in the American League as strong as Mantle.
Harmon Killebrew at bat,
Mikkelsen thought.
I must be getting closer to the major leagues than I ever imagined if I’m pitching to him.
He gave Killebrew nothing but sinkers, and Killebrew drove four of them into the ground, foul. Although in the next inning Tony Oliva hit a ball off him that seemed to go past the flagpole in deepest center field, the fact that he had been able to handle Killebrew was something that the manager and the coaches had to have noticed.

Mikkelsen still believed that he was going to be sent back to a minor-league camp, although at a higher level than he had originally believed possible, when Rube Walker called him over. “Where do you think you’re going next year?” Mikkelsen answered that he was hoping to go to Double A or, maybe with luck, Triple A. “You ain’t going to no Double A, you’re going to New York,” Walker said. Mikkelsen said that they did not have a team in New York. “Yes, they do,” Walker said. “You’re going with the big club, the Yankees.” Mikkelsen still did not believe Walker, but ten days later, when they were set to leave camp, Pete Sheehy, the clubhouse attendant, who knew every rumor ahead of everyone else on the team, asked him where he wanted his things shipped. “What do you mean where do I want them shipped?” he asked. “Where in New York?” Sheehy persisted. That was how Mikkelsen learned he had made the big-league roster. He later heard that there had been a split in the executive ranks—that Yogi and Rube Walker, a former catcher for Brooklyn and a close friend of Yogi’s, had favored him, while Houk preferred Metcalf, but that Yogi had won out. What had made the difference, the other pitchers were sure, was the fact that Mikkelsen had one great pitch, the perfect go-to pitch for a reliever, because it produced ground balls. Metcalf, possibly more talented, had no comparable pitch that would serve a reliever so well.

Bruce Henry, the traveling secretary, asked Mikkelsen how many sports coats he owned. Mikkelsen answered that he owned one, because that was the way young men of limited means dressed in those days: one suit for weddings and funerals and one sports jacket. Henry told him that he had to buy some new clothes, that there was a dress code on the team and that one sports coat was not going to get him through the season.

Tom Metcalf was called in by Yogi Berra and told that he was being sent back to Richmond. Metcalf was sure he had outpitched Pete Mikkelsen, and he became extremely angry. He thought that their competition had been rigged, and that Mikkelsen had had the job from the start. He and Berra exchanged angry words. He asked to be traded, but it was clear that the Yankees had no interest in doing that, that they still saw him as a top prospect. Houk came over to him later that day and apologized, saying that it was Yogi’s decision and Yogi’s team. For a time Metcalf thought of not reporting to Richmond, but he realized that he would be challenging the entire structure of baseball, so he relented. That spring, having apparently learned a lesson in Florida, he began to work on a sinker ball. During one inning he tried to throw a sinker and felt a small, sharp pain in his elbow. When he left the mound, his arm did not hurt that much, but when he went back out to pitch, he bounced the first pitch halfway to home plate to Jake Gibbs, who was catching. Metcalf tried one more pitch and bounced that one too. The next day he had very little feeling in his fingers or in his arm from the elbow down. He had damaged the nerve in his right, or throwing, elbow, and he was done for that year. Though he made one major attempt to come back in 1965, his career was essentially finished, and he never made it back to the major leagues.

W
HEN A FEW YEARS
later, Marvin Miller, the labor negotiator, visited the various baseball camps during spring training for the first time to explain collective bargaining to the various players, he was quickly struck by the fact that the Cardinal camp was different from every other one he visited. The players were more relaxed, more mature, and better integrated, black with white. The friendships among the players seemed to transcend racial lines, and Miller was especially struck by the fact that not only were the players friendly with each other but their families were too. By the summer of 1964, the question of race hung heavily over the nation at large, as young blacks challenged existing segregation statutes in the South, and baseball too was going through its own period of dramatic racial change. It was now seventeen years since Jackie Robinson had broken in with the Dodgers, and had done it so brilliantly that he had not only helped lead Brooklyn to a pennant but had won the Rookie of the Year Award. That there was a great new talent pool of black athletes was hardly a secret among the white players themselves. The names of such great black players as Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, and Judy Johnson had been well known to the many big-league players who had often barnstormed with them after the regular season was over (and who often made more money barnstorming on the all-white major league all-star teams than their colleagues had made playing in the World Series): they knew that the Negro leagues were filled with players who could hit and pitch, and, above all, who had speed. In the years since Robinson’s historic arrival in the big leagues, certain teams had moved quickly to sign up the best black players. It was the equivalent of a bargain-basement sale at Tiffany’s—great players available at discount prices, even as the price of young, untried white players was going up very quickly.

The talent search was not joined with equal enthusiasm by the two major leagues. In 1954 the Supreme Court of the United States had ruled that white Southern school districts should move with all deliberate speed to integrate; in baseball the National League moved with speed, but the American League moved with deliberation instead of speed. Because the Dodgers soon had Robinson, Roy Campanella, and Don Newcombe in their lineup, there was a ripple effect in the National League. The Dodgers’ crosstown rivals, the Giants, had to move quickly in self-defense, and as both teams were adding speed and power, so other National League teams were forced to move as well. At first, they scouted the Negro league games, and then, as the younger players there were signed up, they began looking for ever younger players from the Deep South. Soon the Milwaukee Braves followed with Bill Bruton and Henry Aaron playing in the outfield, which led to the joke “What’s black and catches flies?” The answer was the Braves’ outfield. Hank Aaron did not think it very funny.

In the American League the tone was set by the New York Yankees. The Yankees were a dominating team, and their ownership in those critical years was, to be blunt, racist. They were winning and winning consistently without black players, about whom the ownership believed many of the existing stereotypes: that blacks were lazy and would not play well under pressure. George Weiss did not even want white rabble at his ball park, he told reporters. He wanted his fans to be from the white middle class, and he most emphatically did not want black fans who came to cheer black players. That, in his mind, would surely drive away his treasured white middle-class customers. In 1945, Weiss had stolen away one of Branch Rickey’s best scouts, the famed Tom Greenwade, a man who worked the Ozarks and the Southwest. It was Greenwade who signed Mantle for the Yankees, but it was less well known that he also had done the vital day-to-day scouting of Jackie Robinson when Rickey was making up his mind as to which black player would be the first to break the color line. Because of that, Greenwade knew as much or more about the available black talent as any white scout in the country, but Weiss was not interested. “Now, Tom,” he told Greenwade in their first meeting working together, “I don’t want you sneaking around down any back alleys and signing any niggers. We don’t want them.” That was that. Greenwade thought it bizarre. He was being tipped on such great young prospects as Ernie Banks, but was unable to move on them because of his marching orders. The Yankees, he later lamented to his son Bunch, lost an important decade by not going after black talent, and he told the story of Weiss setting limits on him with considerable bitterness and regarded it as the great regret of his career. Ironically, Mantle’s greatness increased the arrogance of the front office, for his exceptional speed and power convinced the Yankees that they did not need to change. He helped bring them an additional decade of dominance, and in so doing, he helped create the attitude among their executives that would lead to their eventual decline. As most of the other American League teams followed suit, the National League gradually began to pull away as superior, with better teams and more exciting younger players.

By 1964 the National League had virtually all the best young black players, and it was therefore a league with more speed and power; its best young players flashed their speed on the base paths with increasing aggressiveness. The American League tended to rely on sluggers who were slow of foot (Mantle and Maris were exceptions), and tended toward a more cautious game, its managers by and large waiting for the big inning. The difference between the leagues was dramatic. After the 1963 season, Sandy Koufax, who had dominated the league as well as the Yankees during the World Series, was the National League’s Most Valuable Player. The selection followed a decade in which nine of the previous ten winners were black, and in the one instance that a white player won—Dick Groat of the Pirates in 1960—it could as easily have been his teammate Roberto Clemente (who was enraged by Groat’s selection and was convinced that he had lost because he was Puerto Rican and therefore had encountered an additional layer of prejudice). The black winners were Roy Campanella of the Dodgers, winning the second of his three MVP awards, followed, in order, by Willie Mays, Campanella again, Don Newcombe, Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, then Banks again, then Frank Robinson and Maury Wills. Wills was emblematic of the change taking place. He was, first and foremost, a player who brought speed to the game, and he had languished in the Dodger organization for a long time. He came into his own when they moved from Ebbetts Field, a hitter’s park, to the vast spaces of the Los Angeles Coliseum, which emphasized the importance of baserunning. Soon other National League teams were looking for their version of Maury Wills. By contrast, in the American League, Elbe Howard, the first black Yankee player, who was brought up in 1955, became the league’s first black MVP in 1963. “Well, when they finally get me a nigger, I get the only one who can’t run,” joked Casey Stengel, his manager, whose attitudes on race were schizophrenic enough that he could at once use ethnic slurs and yet still appreciate Howard’s obvious talents.

If, by 1964, the Cardinals had become something of a model in terms of their racial composition and attitudes, it had not always been that way. In fact the Cardinals had come to this more slowly than most National League teams. They were one of the teams that had, for a brief time, considered striking against Jackie Robinson in his first season. Before the Dodgers and Giants moved west in 1958, and before big-league baseball went to Kansas City and Atlanta, St. Louis was not only the farthest west team in professional baseball, it was the most southern as well. St. Louis was for a time the most segregated city in the big leagues, the city that visiting black players liked to visit least. The Chase Hotel, where the ball clubs stayed, was one of the last to admit black players. The regional pull of the surrounding territory affected the Cardinal decision-making, and the team drew some of its players and many of its fans from the South and Southwest, so it was loath to violate their racial prejudices. KMOX, the radio station that beamed the Cardinal games, was a powerful signal throughout the South. It was the custom in the mid-fifties, in such places as Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, for young, white working-class men, their work week finished, to load up a car with beer on Friday afternoons and take off for St. Louis. Driving and drinking, if necessary through the night, they would arrive in time to watch the Cardinals on Saturday and, if possible, in a Sunday doubleheader, before driving home all Sunday night. “In St. Louis they say that fans would never stand for Negroes on the Cardinals or Browns,” wrote the New York newspaperman Dan Daniel, after Larry Doby signed to become the first black player in the American League. “St. Louis, they insist, is too much a Southern city.”

Among the players who agreed with that judgment was Minnie Minoso, the black Cuban player. In 1946, Minoso, one of the most gifted players in the history of the game, was playing in the Negro leagues. He was asked to a Cardinal tryout and arrived there with Jose Santiago, a Puerto Rican pitcher on the New York Cubans. In Minoso’s eyes, he and Santiago were by far the best players at the tryout. Santiago struck out every batter he faced, while Minoso, playing in the infield, was told not to throw so hard to first, because the first baseman could not handle his throws. Nonetheless, Minoso could sense that the Cardinals were not interested in the two of them, that the tryout was a sham, and he left that day bitter and determined never again to attend a tryout for a white man’s team. If white people wanted to scout him, he decided, they could come watch him play at Negro league games; he would pay no more house calls.

When the Cardinals finally did sign their first black player, they went about it ineptly. Gussie Busch was stunned to find that the team he had just purchased was all white. Since Budweiser, its executives believed, sold more beer to black people than any other beer company in the country, Busch was nervous for economic reasons about owning a lily-white team. He could easily visualize a black boycott of his beer, and, to his credit, he also thought it was simply morally wrong to exclude blacks. That first year he visited the team in spring training, he asked his manager and coaches, “Where are our black players?” There was a long silence and one of the coaches finally said, “We don’t have any.” Busch said, “How can it be the great American game if blacks can’t play?” The silence hung heavily over everyone. “Hell,” he added, in words that clearly represented the end of an era, “we sell beer to everyone.”