Opening Day

by Jonathan Eig

  If Rickey had global concerns in mind, Higbe, meanwhile, was thinking only about himself. He liked being with the Dodgers and liked living in New York, and, while he had mixed feelings about playing with Robinson, he had resigned himself to the inevitable. He was saddened by the trade.

  “I remember when I was a young boy, my grandfather used to tell me about the Civil War,” he told the writer Peter Golenbock years later. “One grandfather fought for the South, the other fought for the North. Neither grandfather had anything to eat. When I was growing up, it never was no problem. Sure, we were segregated. I reckon that was the old Southern custom. I don’t know. I don’t suppose anyone would have objected if a colored wanted to come to our church when I was growing up as a boy.”

  The southerners playing with Robinson in 1947 were coping, in essence, by splitting themselves in two, just as Higbe had learned to share his love with a northern grandfather and a southern one. Even in the first weeks of the season, the Dodgers were learning to master living in two distinct worlds. During the baseball season, they would refrain from using the words “nigger,” “coon,” and “shine.” They would censor their jokes. But when the season ended, they would go home and fall back into their segregated lives with ease. Higbe had made up his mind that he could do the same. Now, however, he wouldn’t have to. He was headed to Pittsburgh, and vowing to wreck the Dodgers’ pennant hopes if he got a chance.

  • • •

  The mighty Cardinals, defending champs, started slowly. They dropped two of three to the Reds to open the season, dropped two of three again to the Cubs, and then, to everyone’s astonishment, went on to lose nine straight. The season had barely begun, and the team expected to be king of the hill had dug itself an enormous hole, falling seven games back in the standings. If Jackie Robinson was the biggest story of the season, the Cards were the biggest surprise.

  “That there’s dissension on the club is doubtful,” wrote Jim McCulley in the Daily News. “It could be that some dry boredom has set in. . . . But hardly inner discord. There are more close friendships on the Redbird club than anywhere else in baseball, it seems.” But Sam Breadon, president of the team, was concerned enough that he decided to travel to the East Coast to watch his team play.

  “Sure, we’re down in the dumps,” said Breadon, a native New Yorker who still had the accent to prove it, “but any day now we’re going to break out. And when we do, you’ll see the same hard-hitting and tight pitching outfit that won the world championship in 1946.” With reliable stars such as Red Schoendienst, Stan Musial, and Terry Moore all hitting around .200, Breadon assumed the team’s fortunes were bound to improve. Ironically, the man who had built the Cardinals into consistent winners was Branch Rickey. Before coming to Brooklyn, Rickey had run the Cardinals for twenty-three years, from 1919 to 1942. It was in St. Louis that he established his reputation as one of the game’s finest minds, as well as one of its best evaluators of talent. “He could recognize a great player from the window of a moving train,” the sportswriter Jim Murray once said.

  After winning the World Series in 1946, several key members of the Cardinals demanded raises. Breadon resisted. He granted a few raises, including one to Stan Musial, but no one was happy. Those who got pay increases were insulted by the slender margins by which their salaries had risen, and those who didn’t get raises at all were miffed at having been left out. Breadon was the most frustrated of all. A milk-chugging, vitamin-popping, ulcer-ridden man, he found himself in 1947 paying more than ever for a team that wasn’t winning games.

  Perhaps then it was frustration that led some of the Cardinals to lash out at Jackie Robinson. Perhaps it was Dixie Walker’s influence on his younger brother, Harry, an outfielder for the Cards and a more abrasive character than his brother. Maybe it was the rain drenching Brooklyn, which left the players with too much time to sit around and gripe. Whatever the motivation, some players began discussing their discomfort with the idea of sharing a baseball field with a black man. They wondered if they might be better off refusing to play. If enough players on enough teams boycotted, they seemed to believe, they might force cancellation of their games with the Dodgers, and maybe even shut down the league and force an end to the integration experiment.

  “I heard talk,” Musial told the writer Roger Kahn many years later. “It was rough and racial and I can tell you a few things about that. First of all, everybody has racial feelings. We don’t admit it. We aren’t proud of it. But it’s there. And this is big league baseball, not English tea, and ballplayers make noise. So I heard the words and I knew there was some feelings behind the words, but I didn’t take it seriously. That was baseball.”

  In Brooklyn, where the fans had trouble saying his name, Musial was called Musical. Elsewhere, he was Stan the Man. He’d played with a black boy in high school, a kid named Griffey (whose son and grandson would go on to some renown as big-leaguers), and never had any problem with integration. He was a quiet man, by no means a leader, who would sit in front of his locker with a knife and some sandpaper, carving and smoothing the handles on his bats, oblivious to the noise of the clubhouse. To Musial, it seemed that Jackie Robinson wanted the same thing his own parents had wanted when they came to America: economic opportunity. But either he lacked the courage to tell his teammates or he didn’t know how. “For me at the time—I was twenty-six—saying all that would have been a speech and I didn’t know how to make speeches. Saying it to older players, that was beyond me. Besides, I thought the racial talk was just hot air.”

  It probably was. Most descriptions of the conflict suggest that the Cardinals who discussed a boycott were indeed trying to talk tough, to impress one another, to kill time on a couple of rainy days. They never came close to striking. Bob Broeg, who covered the Cardinals for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, said Harry Walker was the only one he’d ever heard complaining, but Walker had a tendency to “beat his gums,” Broeg said. He talked about all the trouble his brother was having in Brooklyn, trying to stir up trouble. Whether it was bluster or not, it soon became real enough for the Cardinals.

  When Breadon got wind of the uprising, he met with some of the players rumored to be causing the dissension. Still, he wasn’t sure his message got through, so he took a taxi to the office of Ford Frick, the National League president, to tell him what was going on. Like Breadon, Frick was a mild-mannered man, the son of an Indiana farmer. Frick learned to type at fifteen so he could be a sportswriter, but he turned out to be better at public relations than reporting and writing. He ghostwrote columns for Babe Ruth when the Babe was in his prime, then switched sides and became the publicity director for the National League in 1934, and in 1935 became the league’s president. He was adored by baseball’s owners, in no small part because he had a knack for avoiding conflict. It was a trait that had served him well in service of the Babe, and one that would serve him well again now. The plot against Robinson may have been nothing more than a low-grade rumbling and unworthy of attention under normal circumstances, but these weren’t normal circumstances, and Frick was not one to take chances. He knew that the best way to avoid bad press was to get in front of it, to tell the story on his own terms before any of the newspapers got hold of it. The truth? As any good PR man knows, the truth isn’t half as important as what the newspapers print.

  The truth, as Frick recounted it in his autobiography and again in an unpublished interview many years later, was so simple it’s a wonder the story became such a fuss. Frick spoke to Breadon in his New York office that day, the league president recalled. Breadon explained that some players were shooting their mouths about Robinson and hadn’t responded to his order to cut it out. Frick didn’t name the players, but he said he told Breadon to send the players a message: “Tell them this is America, and baseball is America’s game.” In recollecting the conversation, he added: “I don’t know how Sam delivered the message, or to whom he talked. I do know that he called the league office a day or two later to report that the whole matter w
as settled, and everything was under control.”

  In Frick’s view, the ballplayers were merely blowing off steam. The same sort of resentment existed in the Dodger clubhouse, and probably in quite a few more, he said. The only difference was that Sam Breadon didn’t feel equipped to handle it himself and asked for help. “You know baseball players,” he said. “They’re like anybody else. They pop off. Sitting around the table with a drink or two they commit many acts of great courage but they don’t follow through. My feeling was that it was over and done with. We had no more trouble.”

  Then came the newspaper version of events. Stanley Woodward broke the story in the Herald Tribune, and according to Woodward’s story, it was not a small strike by a few Cardinal players that had been averted but a league-wide work stoppage. Woodward claimed the strike was “instigated” by a member of the Dodgers and “formulated” by “certain St. Louis players.” And if that wasn’t fuzzy enough, he went on: “Subsequently, the St. Louis players conceived the idea of a general strike within the National League on a certain date.” Woodward didn’t name any of the players involved in the alleged uprising. Nor did he reveal how many there were, or on what date they had intended to strike. But he did offer a transcript of Frick’s address to the players, which went like this:

  “If you do this you will be suspended from the league. You will find that the friends you think you have in the press box will not support you, that you will be outcasts. I do not care if half the league strikes. Those who do it will encounter quick retribution. They will be suspended, and I don’t care if it wrecks the National League for five years. This is the United States of America, and one citizen has as much right to play as another. The National League will go down the line with Robinson no matter what the consequence. You will find that if you go through with your intention that you have been guilty of complete madness.”

  Less than a week earlier, at the army prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, a race riot had left one prisoner dead and five guards and six more prisoners hurt. At the same time, school officials in Albany were battling in court over whether to let the left-wing activist Paul Robeson sing in a school auditorium. Now, Frick was proclaimed a hero for defusing what could have been an ugly uprising in baseball. Woodward’s story was praised far and wide as one of the most important pieces of journalism ever to grace a sports page. But in the days after the Herald Tribune story appeared, and for years to come, players up and down the Cardinal roster denied any conspiracy. They denied everything in the story, in fact. Breadon labeled the Woodward article “ridiculous.” Manager Eddie Dyer called it “absurd.” Burt Shotton didn’t believe it either.

  The next day, Woodward submitted a follow-up story in which he said his first report had been “essentially right and factual.” Then he added a few small caveats, admitting, for starters, the fact that he had never tried to interview Frick before writing his initial account. “Knowing him to be an honest man,” Woodward said of Frick, “we decided he would not deny the story. Therefore, we went ahead and printed it.”

  Woodward went on to say he had never intended to suggest that the Frick quotation was entirely accurate, despite the quotation marks surrounding it and the fact that it formed the backbone of his story. “We were wrong, apparently, in stating he personally delivered it to his players. It seems he delivered it to Breadon for relay to said operatives.” Whatever the precise words, the writer went on, “it obviously is the most noble statement ever made by a baseball man.”

  Whereby Woodward printed it again.

  • • •

  At game time on May 6, the Cardinals took the field. All of them.

  Nothing about the contest suggested there had been any behind-the-scenes turmoil. No one threw at Robinson’s head. No one tried to spike him. No one taunted him with any particularly pungent epithets. A big crowd came out—big for a Tuesday afternoon, anyway—to see the rematch of the series that had ended the Brooklyn season seven months before. “You’d have thought it were September the way pennant hysteria gripped the 18,971 flamboyant faithful,” wrote Dick Young.

  The Dodgers scored first, but the Cardinals bounced back to take a 6–3 lead after four innings. Seated behind the Dodger dugout, watching his first game of the year, was Leo Durocher, his Hollywood bride, Laraine Day, at his side. Durocher had been out in California since his suspension, playing golf and chopping down trees on the land where he and Day planned to build a home. He had given up hope of returning to the Dodgers in 1947, but he was campaigning to make sure the job would still be his in 1948.

  In the sixth inning, with the Dodgers still trailing by three, Robinson singled off Red Munger with two outs. As Robinson danced his familiar dance off first base, darting back and forth, Munger lost his control, walking first Reiser and then Walker to load the bases. That brought up Carl Furillo. After watching one pitch go by, Furillo swung and connected, lining a triple to the right-center alley, driving in three runs, and tying the score at 6–6. In the next inning, Pee Wee Reese, stuck in a slump even worse than Robinson’s, poked his first home run of the season into the left-field seats to give the Dodgers the win.

  In the end, the response to Woodward’s story proved far more informative than the story itself. Most of the nation’s big-name columnists and countless letters to the editor came through in support of Robinson, essentially labeling the Cardinals a bunch of ignorant bigots. Woodward’s story, followed by his clumsy partial retraction, offered no help in making clear how many Cardinals were involved, much less which ones. As a result, the whole team was tarred. Dan Parker of the Mirror wrote: “Sports writers have been studiously trying to avoid the racial angle in Baseball this Spring but, despite their best efforts, it keeps bobbing up. Obviously, it must be faced squarely, sooner or later. . . . If it is our national pastime, embodying American ideals, let us proceed to conduct it along those lines with no more racial barriers in its playing fields than there are at its turnstiles.”

  Even the Sporting News, based in St. Louis and generally skeptical of Robinson, suggested ballplayers had better get used to him because “the presence of Negroes in the major leagues is an accomplished fact.”

  Between the purported strike and the attack by Ben Chapman, Robinson’s most bitter foes were turning out to be his best friends. Their feeble attacks served mostly to help paint a picture of the black ballplayer as a victim and to coalesce support for him. Suddenly, the newspapers weren’t talking about Robinson’s batting slump but about his enormous strength of character. Jimmy Cannon called Robinson “a big leaguer of ordinary ability” but said that was beside the point. “There is a great lynch mob among us and they go unhooded and work without rope,” the New York Post columnist wrote. “We have been involved in a war to guarantee all people the right to a life without fear. . . . In such a world it seems a small thing that a man be able to play a game unmolested. In our time such a plea should be unnecessary. But when it happens we must again remember that all this country’s enemies are not beyond the frontiers of our home land.” Cannon’s column struck such a chord that left-wing political groups purchased advertising space in order to reprint it in newspapers throughout New York.

  By checking his temper and remaining stoic, Robinson established an image of strength and courage. Still, he would admit at the end of the season that the controversy affected his performance on the field, and he worried that he would survive the taunting only to find himself back in the minors because he couldn’t hit.

  The Cardinals bounced back after the first game to take two out of three from the Dodgers. Though he made solid contact several times and seemed to be swinging the bat somewhat better, Robinson managed only four hits in fourteen tries. Less than a month into the season, he was hitting a dispiriting .241. Dan Burley of the Amsterdam News reported on an overheard snippet of street-corner conversation: “Man, they just don’t pitch Jackie the kind of balls they throw them white fellows.”

  But Burley went on to say that Robinson was getting
a break at the moment—thanks to the color his skin. He wouldn’t be pulled from the starting lineup as long as the Dodgers kept winning, predicted the columnist, because Branch Rickey didn’t want “a whole lot of hemming and hawing about Jackie being benched because he’s colored.”

  Robinson wasn’t so sure. He checked the lineup card every day, still expecting to see someone else’s name penciled in at first base. He remained a Dodger in uniform but hardly felt like a part of the team. It was at about this time that Cannon, called him “the loneliest man I have ever seen in sports.”

  EIGHT

  THE GREAT ROAD TRIP

  The Dodgers’ train hissed out of New York early on the morning of May 9, headed for Philadelphia. Along the way, the players read and discussed Woodward’s article about the purported strike by the Cardinals, which appeared in that day’s paper. Rather than quieting as the season went along, the strife over baseball’s integration seemed to be growing. The men who had predicted in spring training that Robinson’s presence would be a distraction may have felt some validation. Now there would be more news stories, fresh mobs of fans, and a higher degree of scrutiny with every town the Dodgers visited on the National League circuit.

  Baseball players were not adventurers. They did not choose their line of work to see exotic places, meet new people, or learn new languages. They were lovers of routine, revelers in the familiar, heroes in a world of countless precise rules and consistent facts. Change was not what they’d expected. Ralph Branca, as sensitive as any of his teammates to Robinson’s plight, said he couldn’t remember anyone talking to Robinson during the trip to Philadelphia. It hadn’t occurred to Branca to ask his teammate how he was doing.