Rickey & Robinson (3 page)

James Timothy McCarver, a major leaguer at the age of 18 and later a prominent baseball broadcaster, says candidly, “I don’t have fond memories of Branch Rickey.” Tim and I were lunching at a well-known French restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, and as we splurged on fabulous fish, McCarver went on. “In 1963, after the Army discharged me at Fort Knox, I headed to St. Petersburg to join the Cardinals at Al Lang Field.” (That arena has since been renamed Progressive Energy Park.)

Most ballplayers in those days held winter jobs and did not work out year-round. Spring training began with endless hours spent swinging against pitching machines that threw only strikes. No batting gloves, either. You wanted to refocus your hitting eye and toughen your hands, bringing them from the blister phase to callus. Stan Musial says that for position players, not pitchers, spring training was mostly about developing calluses. Except for the pitchers and the publicity value, spring training then, and probably now, could be compressed into about 10 days.

Rickey, 81 years old at the time and a “senior consultant” in his second tour with the Cardinals, sat near the machines, chomping an unlit cigar and repeating the mantra “A good ball, a good ball, a good ball.” He wanted the players to start saying the phrase themselves. If you repeat “a good ball” enough, he believed, you would be unlikely to swing at eye-high fastballs or curves bouncing into the dirt.

“Spring training was reentry,” McCarver said, “and you were always making little adjustments with your feet and how and where you gripped the bat. I was holding mine a little higher than I should have. During the first week, Rickey called a team ‘sit-down’ to discuss aspects of what he had observed. Looking directly at me, Rickey said that one ‘foolish’ player, who will remain nameless, has been around long enough so that he ought to know how to hold a bat. Rickey continued to glare at me. Nameless? The whole team knew Rickey was talking about me.

“We had some solid veterans, [third baseman] Ken Boyer and [shortstop] Dick Groat, and I got some teasing about not knowing how to hold a bat. It was highly embarrassing for a young player, which I was.”

“What did you hit that year?” I asked across a platter of flaky halibut.

“I believe .289,” McCarver said. “I must have been holding the bat properly some of the time.” He considered briefly. “Rickey’s comment was humiliating and needless.”

B
RANCH RICKEY’S SHORTCOMINGS ARE undeniable. Indeed, they caused recurring problems for him both with other baseball executives (notably Walter O’Malley) and with the working press (notably the New York
Daily News
). But his frugality, his sometime pomposity, his militant piousness and his intellectual elitism shrink in the balance when they are weighed against a monumental deed of moral courage performed during a hellacious time.

On August 6, 1945, a United States Air Force B-29 named
Enola Gay
dropped an atomic bomb called Little Boy on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion killed approximately 140,000 people. One Japanese radio announcer reported, “All living things, human and animal, were seared to death.”

Three weeks later, on August 28, 1945, during a highly dramatic first meeting, Rickey agreed to sign Jackie Robinson to a minor-league contract in the Brooklyn Dodgers organization, ending so-called “organized” baseball’s all-powerful, unwritten rule against employing black athletes. Major-league baseball had been rigidly segregated for 61 years. It is not entirely hyperbolic to suggest that signing Robinson in the year of Hiroshima was also a nuclear event, exploding in the
white-washed corridors of big-time, big-money baseball. Hopefully this began the searing to death of American bigotry.

More than 40 years after Rickey’s rich life came to an end in a hospital at Columbia, Missouri, the Rickey–Robinson adventure reverberates within baseball and beyond. Many, particularly young people, in the 21st century wonder how arrant prejudice could have persisted for so long in baseball. That is an underlying consideration of this book. Put briefly right here, if baseball was racist, and it was, so also was America. The game is an aspect of American life and mores, and a reflection of both. Like the moon, it simultaneously is a source of light and a reflector.

Baseball flowered as the segregated national pastime in the United States, the last major enlightened power on earth to renounce black slavery. As we all learned in grade school, the renunciation occurred in 1863 with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. But—and we were not taught this in any classroom syllabus—segregation and bigotry persisted.

I remember my own grade school, a sedate Brooklyn prep called Froebel Academy, where each day began in chapel with the reading of a psalm and the singing of stirring Christian hymns.

Cast thy burden upon the Lord
,

And he shall sustain thee
.

There were no black faces in the chapel, nor on the faculty nor on the sporting fields behind the school building where we played ball. This was the 1930s. A rule, perhaps
the
rule, in privileged upper-class America was simple enough. Whites only. This approach extended far beyond the paneled walls of the Froebel chapel. In a variety of forms and manners, bigotry suffused the entire nation.

Occasional widely publicized exceptions appeared, mostly in college football. A great running back, Frederick Douglass “Fritz” Pollard, entered Brown University on a scholarship endowed by the
Rockefeller family and was named to Walter Camp’s 1916 All-America team. Pollard later coached, played professionally, ran a variety of small businesses and lived to the great age of 92. Currently Brown and the Black Coaches and Administrators cosponsor an annual Fritz Pollard Award, given to the college or professional coach chosen by the BCA as coach of the year. Pollard was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1954 and the Pro Football Hall of Fame, posthumously, in 2005.

In 1917 Paul Robeson, later famous as a basso cantate, actor and political activist, made Camp’s team as an end from Rutgers. “A Rutgers dean once called me in,” Robeson told some friends, “and said his grandfather had traveled north from the same part of North Carolina where I had roots. He wondered if my grandfather had traveled the identical route. I told him no, my grandfather did travel from Carolina, but the dean was using the wrong verb. My grandfather didn’t simply travel. He
escaped
.” Robeson won 15 varsity letters at Rutgers in four sports. He also made Phi Beta Kappa and graduated from Columbia Law School. For a brief period he worked for a prominent law firm, but quit after a white secretary refused to take dictation from him. Subsequently he left the law and became an internationally acclaimed performer and later the most memorable Othello of the 20th century.

Splendid as these men were, they were splendid exceptions. They entered mainstream America through portals in the academic community, which was arguably more enlightened than the nation at large, at least in northern states. When Rickey brought a black man into organized baseball for the season of 1946, he did so against centuries of whites-only tradition that extended far beyond academia, and against wide and ferocious opposition.

After the chaotic Reconstruction era, no black had sat in the American Senate, no black had ever been appointed to the Supreme Court and neither major political party had even considered (heaven forfend) a black as candidate for the presidency of the United States.

American schools and colleges largely were segregated. American armed forces, so heroic in defeating the Nazis and the brutal Japanese military, were segregated. Most black soldiers in the Army served in segregated units. Blacks in the Navy were limited to menial work, such as waiting on tables reserved for white officers. It was not until 1943 that the Marine Corps accepted
any
black volunteers. Still, America’s World War II experience chipped away at the wall of racism. Segregated or not, blacks (including Jackie Robinson) did serve in the armed forces, sometimes heroically. Many returned from military duty with a sense of legitimacy and worth that had not been there before.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, president from 1933 until his death in the spring of 1945, is rightly remembered as an enlightened liberal. But his actions against American racism were painfully deliberate. Meeting with A. Philip Randolph, the leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Walter White, director of the NAACP, primarily to discuss the lynching of blacks, Roosevelt insisted that his hands were tied. He could not campaign for a federal antilynching law and his great make-work programs during the Depression, such as the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps, had to remain as rigidly segregated as the military. “I did not choose the tools with which I must work,” President Roosevelt told the black leaders. “Had I been permitted to choose, then I would have selected quite different ones. But I’ve got to get legislation passed by Congress to save America [from economic turmoil that could lead to socialism or even communism]. The segregationist Southerners, by reason of the seniority rule in Congress, are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take that risk.”

Historians generally accept 1968, long after the reign of FDR and three years after Rickey died, as the time when wholesale lynching of blacks finally disappeared from the American scene. A song remains:

Southern trees bear strange fruit
,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
,

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
.

Across the decades, more than one cross-burning Klansman would cheerfully and savagely have strung Branch Rickey from a tree.

Baseball swept into the American South during the 19th century and subsequently prejudices from the American South swept into baseball. Some historians claim to have found evidence that black slaves had begun playing ball as far back as the 1830s. But the records, if any survive at all, are skimpy. A few oral recollections exist, but no written accounts. Other researchers suggest that during the Civil War, Union soldiers between battles spread the game throughout southern red-clay fields and rural hollows. Whatever, it was after the Civil War, during the bitter Reconstruction period, that baseball boomed into the national sport. With that boom came baseball’s hostility toward blacks.

As far as I can learn, the first formal statement of racism in baseball appeared just five years after the Emancipation Proclamation. “On the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three,” Abraham Lincoln wrote, “all persons held as slaves within any State . . . shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” When General Robert E. Lee signed terms of surrender in a private home at Appomattox, Virginia, in 1865, the death of legal American slavery became assured. But bigotry has had a vastly longer shelf life.

In 1868 the National Association of Base Ball Players publicly announced a ban on “any club including one or more colored persons.”
Although a “national association of players” sounds like a union, actually it was a federation of club owners, a primitive major league.

Over the late 1860s and 1870s baseball evolved from an amateur activity, a club sport conducted broadly along the lines of English cricket, toward becoming predominantly professional. When the National Association splintered into competing organizations in 1871, professional teams no longer were restricted by the 1868 racist rule and for a short while—in 1878 and again in 1884—African Americans played in the major leagues. But abruptly, they were excluded in 1885. No written decree, much less a public statement, came to light back then, nor has any since. But black faces vanished, first from the major leagues and then, over about 15 more years, from the minor leagues as well. By the end of the 1898 season, when the minor leagues were finally and totally closed to blacks, the triumph of baseball bigotry became complete.

In 1884 two Negro brothers, catcher Moses Fleetwood Walker and outfielder Welday Wilberforce Walker, played part of a season for the Toledo Blue Stockings of the then major American Association. They are generally accepted as the first blacks in the major leagues. The Walkers came from an upper-middle-class background in Mount Pleasant, Ohio, the sons of Dr. Moses W. Walker, the first African American physician in Mount Pleasant. Fleet Walker, a man of keen intelligence, enrolled in Oberlin College in 1878 and played on the college’s first varsity baseball team in 1881. He transferred to the University of Michigan law school the following fall and played varsity ball for Michigan in 1882. With the Toledo Blue Stockings two years later, Fleet Walker batted .263 in 42 games. His brother, Welday, played in five games and hit .222.

The numbers do not suggest great skills, but Hugh Fullerton, one of the ablest early baseball writers, offered a telling story
. It came from Anthony John “Count” Mullane, a native of Cork, Ireland, who settled in the Midwest and became an early pitching wonder. Mullane was ambidextrous. He threw equally hard from either side and never
used a glove. How, then, did he contend with line drives bashed through the box? Quite simply, as Count Mullane put it, “I got the hell out of the way.”

Mullane signed with Toledo for 1884 and that season pitched 65 complete games. He won 35. “Toledo had a colored man [Fleet Walker] who was declared by many to be the greatest catcher of his time,” Fullerton wrote in the
New York World
, “but Tony Mullane did not like being the battery partner of a Negro.”

“I had it in for him,” Tony admitted years later. “He was the best catcher I ever worked with, but I disliked having a Negro catcher and whenever I had to pitch to him I used to pitch anything I wanted without looking at his signals. One day he signaled me for a curve and I shot a fastball at him. He caught it and walked down to me.