Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (16 page)

Hitting was only part of the story. The MVP award also reflected Campanella’s skills behind the plate. Frank Shaughnessy, the International League’s president, said that the Dodger prospect was “the outstanding catcher in the minors.” Paul Richards, a former big-league catcher who managed the Buffalo team in the International League and would later achieve fame as a major-league manager, agreed, saying that “Campanella is the best receiver in baseball.” And beyond it all was that ebullient personality. It was hard not to like the man. “The Royal farmhands accepted him more readily than Robinson the year before,” said one sportswriter. “Perhaps this was due to the fact,” he added, “that Jackie was more serious.”

However much satisfaction he could take from his record with Montreal, Campanella was feeling anything but confident about his chances of moving up to the Brooklyn club in 1948. The 1947 Dodgers included Bruce Edwards, who had handled the catching responsibilities superbly in 1947 by batting .295, being selected for the National League All-Star team, and earning manager Leo Durocher’s respect as “the best catcher for the National League.” Campanella was well aware of Edwards’ accomplishments and could not help but feel that “it just didn’t look like there was any room for me.”

Still, he was invited to the Dodgers’ spring training camp in the Dominican Republic in February 1948, and, after only a few weeks, Durocher realized that Campanella was far superior to the Dodgers’ other backup catcher—Gil Hodges—and perhaps as good as Edwards. Rickey confirmed Durocher’s conclusion in a private meeting with the young hopeful. “Roy,” said Rickey, “you’re the best catcher we have, and I’m going to bring you up to the Dodgers.” Campanella’s elation was immediately eclipsed by Rickey’s next comment: “You will be brought up as an outfielder.”

Campanella was understandably confused. Rickey explained that, while he knew the former Negro league star had the skills to be a major-league catcher, the Dodger general manager had a higher priority—the further integration of the minor leagues. Campanella would be sent to the club’s farm team in St. Paul, Minnesota, to become the first black player in the American Association league. Playing Campanella in the outfield in spring training would provide the ostensible excuse to send him back to the minor leagues for further training. “Mr. Rickey,” Roy responded, “I’m a ballplayer, not a pioneer.” But he was a good soldier and agreed to the plan.

The experiment in St. Paul was a success and, fortunately for Roy, short-lived. “Roy Campanella has found a new friend in St. Paul,” explained one sportswriter, “the 315-foot fence at Lexington Park, home of the Saints.” The St. Paul catcher set a league record by hitting eight home runs in his first seven games, and after twenty-five games he had blasted eleven home runs and driven in thirty-three runs—a record that Rickey could not ignore, especially because the Dodgers were languishing in sixth place with Edwards on the injured list and Durocher screaming for the return of the Nicetown native. After a doubleheader in Minnesota on June 30 (only days after Ruthe had given birth to their first child, a boy named Roy Jr.), Alston gave Campanella the good news. He was going back to Brooklyn.

When he walked into the Dodger clubhouse at Ebbets Field the next day, the manager greeted Campanella as only Durocher could: “Ha. Fat as ever.” But the most important message had come from Rickey at an earlier meeting in his office. “All our pitchers are white,” the general manager explained, “and you’re going to have to get them to believe in your signal calls.”

That proved to be an easy prescription for Campanella to fill. He was only twenty-six years old, but he already had more than ten years of professional experience and a refined sense of how to guide a pitcher. He would study the statistics of opposing batters before each game and review their strengths and weaknesses with the pitcher. But that was only a starting point. “A catcher must know the pitcher’s emotional stability, his physical characteristics, and his mental capacity,” Campanella would later explain. “He must know just what the other team can do and what it may want to do. He must know the other manager’s philosophy of baseball and his tactics as well as he does his own.”

Campanella’s success with the Dodger pitchers reflected more than detailed information about the opposing team. Campanella also had the personality to make it work. Part of it was the constant chatter emanating from that cherubic face (made smooth by Nair instead of shaving cream). The other part was the never-ending stream of advice. Before the games he would invariably remind the pitcher to “just throw what ol’ Roy calls and I’ll make you a winner.” It was the kind of attitude that inspired confidence (although Carl Erskine would often tease Campanella after a defeat by showing his teammate the box score from the next day’s newspaper which said that Erskine was the losing pitcher and asking “if it shouldn’t say, ‘Campanella, losing catcher’”). If a pitcher encountered trouble during the game, Campanella would saunter out to the mound with some advice to help the pitcher relax. It was a conference that Pee Wee Reese—the Dodgers’ regular shortstop during all of Campanella’s years with the team—would invariably attend. “I don’t want to miss a word he says,” Reese once explained to a sportswriter. “He’s funnier than Bob Hope.”

Campanella’s value to the team extended well beyond his skills on the field. His bat was an explosive force. In his first game on July 1, 1948, he rapped out a double and two singles. Two days later he hit two home runs to propel the Dodgers to a 13-12 victory over the Giants. While he batted only .258 in his first season, he hit nine home runs, drove in forty-five runs, and received credit from Durocher as a principal factor in the team’s resurgence from sixth place to third place in the standings. Not surprisingly, Edwards never made it back as the club’s regular catcher. Campanella caught 130 games and was instrumental in the Dodgers’ drive to the 1949 pennant, hitting twenty-two home runs and driving in eighty-two runs while raising his batting average to .287.

His teammates not only appreciated their catcher’s contribution to the team’s success. They also recognized that his perspective on race relations was far different from Jackie Robinson’s. The former UCLA star was ever sensitive to racial slurs and eager to eradicate the remnants of racial discrimination in baseball. Campanella viewed the issue with a different lens. “I tried not to notice the things that bothered Jackie,” he later explained. “Not that I didn’t mind them. It’s just that some men can have the same problems and yet face them differently.” For Campanella, it was enough that he and Jackie had made it to the big leagues. As Erskine commented, “Campy was completely satisfied. Jackie was never satisfied.”

The difference in attitude would manifest itself in numerous ways and on many occasions, especially in those early years of integration. There was the time when Robinson and Campanella could not join the other Dodgers for a steak dinner after a spring training game in some Southern town. Harold Parrott, the club’s traveling secretary, brought dinners to the two black players, who were still sitting on the team bus. Campanella could see his teammate seething and urged restraint with words that could not be found in the dictionary. “Let’s have no trouble, Jackie,” the Dodger catcher cautioned. “This is the onliest thing we can do right now, ’lessen we want to go back to them crummy Negro leagues.” Another time the Chase Hotel in St. Louis agreed to allow the black Dodgers to stay with the rest of the team (although they would not be permitted to eat in the dining room). Robinson jumped at the chance to remove one more barrier to racial segregation, but Campanella, believing it had to be all or nothing, declined, telling his black teammate, “I’m no crusader.”

There were, of course, incidents that pushed Campanella’s carefree approach to the brink (the most notorious being in 1953 when Milwaukee Braves’ hurler Lew Burdette called Campanella a “nigger” after brushing him back with two knockdown pitches, causing Campanella to march toward the mound with bat in hand, only to be intercepted by other players). But those incidents were few and far between, in part because Campanella recognized that opposing players would “always try to get under your skin any way they can.” None of that was acceptable to Robinson, whatever the reason, and he sometimes took exception to Campanella’s passive perspective. “Jackie would get impatient with Campy because he wanted him to speak up more,” Rachel Robinson later acknowledged, “and Campy would get frustrated with Jackie because he thought he spoke up too much.” It was an ongoing difference of opinion, she added, that “often led to periods of tension between them, usually provoked by sportswriters.”

For his part, Campanella never let the tensions escalate to open hostility—no matter what the sportswriters said about his relationship with Robinson. “Listen,” he would tell his young son whenever those stories appeared in the press. “Don’t let that stuff worry you. I only read it in the crapper, and that’s it.” And so, while sportswriters and teammates might take notice of their different perspectives on race relations, the two men retained harmonious relations with each other, sometimes carpooling to Ebbets Field together, often eating together, and always being there to support each other. Never would differences of opinion affect their play on the field. Their commitment to the Dodgers’ success was too deep-seated. Indeed, Campanella always believed that it would be that much better “if I could let my bat do my talking for me.”

Campanella’s hopes on that score were soon fulfilled. In 1950, he was on the verge of breaking the team’s home run record (Babe Herman’s thirty-five round-trippers in 1930) when he broke his thumb trying to catch a foul tip in early September and had to settle for thirty-one. In 1951, he smashed thirty-three home runs before being beaned by Turk Lown of the Chicago Cubs about two weeks before the season ended. Bleeding profusely from the ear, the Dodger catcher was rushed to the hospital with general manager Buzzie Bavasi in tow. “You don’t have to stay with me, Buzzie,” said Campanella. “You know I’m all right.” “If I don’t stay,” Bavasi replied, “you’ll walk out of here.”

Bavasi’s caution was justified. Campanella was dizzy for almost two weeks and had to remain in the hospital until the last days of the season. When he returned, he pulled a muscle trying to stretch a double into a triple. By the time the Dodgers reached the play-offs with the Giants, the pain in his right thigh was considerable. “I couldn’t swing, I couldn’t run, and it even hurt when I threw,” he later recalled. Still, he wanted to play. His team needed him, and he was not one to disappoint his teammates. But the laws of physics could not be ignored. His play in the first play-off game was weak and, after the Dodgers lost, he asked manager Charlie Dressen to bench him and use backup catcher Rube Walker. When Bobby Thomson hit his historic home run in the ninth inning of the third game, Campanella was on the bench, crying out, “Sink, you devil. Sink!” But the ball did not sink until it reached the left-field stands.

Although there was no World Series for Campanella that fall, his performance during the year (which included 108 runs batted in and a .325 batting average) was rewarded by his selection as the National League’s Most Valuable Player.

The following season was a different story. Roy suffered multiple injuries to his thumbs, his elbows, and his hands from foul tips, collisions at the plate, and wild pitches from opposing hurlers. He played in only 128 games and saw his home run production drop to twenty-two and his batting average fall to .269 (although he did drive in ninety-seven runs). The Dodgers did win the National League pennant, but their catcher was of little help in the World Series against the Yankees. He had only six singles in the seven-game series and did not drive in a single run.

There was no reason to think that Campanella was nearing the end of his career, but Walter O’Malley later met with the Dodger catcher to ask if he might be interested in becoming a coach after retirement. “Nobody knows more than you about catching,” O’Malley explained, “and you know more about pitching than most pitchers. Besides,” he added, “you have a way with you. You’re popular with the players. There’s no question in my mind but that you’ll make a fine teacher.” O’Malley said there was only one condition to his offer: Campanella had to take off weight so that he could set an example for the other players.

Whether the coaching offer was real or feigned, it had an immediate impact on the Dodger catcher. When he reported to spring training in February 1953, Campanella weighed only 205 pounds—about eighteen pounds less than he weighed the previous season. The results were reflected not only on the scales but also in his performance. He established new major-league records for both home runs by a catcher (forty-one) and runs driven in by a catcher (142). Not surprisingly, when the baseball writers later met to select the league’s Most Valuable Player, Campanella easily outdistanced the competition. “That’s exactly as it should have been,” Arthur Daley observed in
The New York Times
, “because Round Roy, the Jolly Dodger, was easily the most valuable operative in the league.”

Campanella’s good fortune in 1953 appeared to evaporate in 1954. Beset by severe injuries to his hands, he could not regain the batting form he had enjoyed the year before, and his batting average sank to a lowly .207 while playing in only 111 games (although he did steal home for the first time in a game against St. Louis in June). Once again, however, the former Negro league star seemed to rise from the ashes the following year.

The 1955 season did not have a promising start. Mindful of his injuries and poor performance in 1954, Alston had Campanella batting eighth in the lineup and, unlike Carl Furillo, the Dodger catcher did not take kindly to the gesture. “That’s fine encouragement he is giving me,” Campanella sarcastically told a sportswriter, “sending me to hit with the batboy.”

However angry he may have been with his manager’s decision, Campanella did not let it affect his performance. Although an injury to his knee from a foul tip had him out of the lineup for two weeks, he soon began hitting the ball with authority and moving up the lineup. As the Dodgers moved to a thirteen-game lead in the standings by the middle of the summer, Campanella’s picture graced the cover of
Time
magazine, which paid tribute to his considerable contribution as the team’s catcher. “No active player in American baseball fills that formidable job better than the burly, bulging, cocoa-colored catcher named Roy Campanella, currently enjoying one of the best seasons of his long career on the best team in baseball.” The magazine then presciently observed that, “to Dodger rooters, 1955 is the year of destiny, and destiny is the bulky shape of Roy Campanella.”