A Season in the Sun

by Randy Roberts

  Increasingly in the late 1940s and 1950s Americans opted for private over public entertainment. Movie moguls worried as much as the owners of baseball franchises. As box office receipts fell, Hollywood turned to such innovations and gimmicks as Technicolor, Cinerama, 3-D, and even Smell-O-Vision to pry viewers away from their television sets and lure them back to theaters. But the only theaters that boomed during the period were drive-ins, where families and couples cocooned in their automobiles and watched films in a semiprivate environment. Other public forms of entertainment suffered as well. In New York, for example, fewer and fewer people attended Broadway plays, watched fights at St. Nick’s Arena or Madison Square Garden, made a bet at the Aqueduct or Jamaica racetracks, or visited Coney Island’s Steeplechase Park.20

  If the baseball magnates knew that other entertainment entrepreneurs shared their misery, they didn’t mention it. They appeared blind to their own suffering and deaf to the complaints of their customers. A day at the old ballpark—and, like Griffith Stadium, most were ancient and decrepit—was like time spent in a Soviet gulag. According to Sports Illustrated’s Jim Murray, it was not just that money flew out of spectators’ pockets, though it did. The fan had to pay off one shark who “steered him to a fender-denting hole outside the left-field wall” and another predator to guard his car while he was in the stadium. Once he maneuvered through the turnstile, he dealt out additional dollars to an usher who marched him to his seat and ceremoniously dusted it off to encourage an even more beneficent tip. And if the seat was not behind a pole or some other obstruction, it was distant from restrooms, where long lines quickly formed to get into a facility just large enough “to take care of a Cub Scout den.” And of course there was the game, more often than not played listlessly by “swell-headed performers who won’t even sign autograph books.”21

  The game had become almost Hobbesian—nasty and brutish but not short enough. As one insider told Murray, “Baseball men haven’t done a damn thing to their parks for decades except paint them. Show me another industry that has stood still like that.” At a time of increasing competition for entertainment dollars, baseball was an aging pitcher who had lost his fastball. “Perhaps,” Murray added, “baseball men have swallowed too much of that sentimental pap that baseball is such a super-integral part of the American scene that it will be put on [life support] even if no one shows up except the players—subsidized like farmers, say.” But he doubted it. More likely, he warned baseball executives, “your customers won’t be fans anymore. They’ll be ex-fans.”22

  Rather than looking inward for the cause of the attendance decline, team owners gazed outward. Some thought with T. S. Eliot that April was the cruelest month. An editor for The Sporting News lamented that every year cold, drizzling rain, chilly, blustering winds, and even snow marred baseball’s opening-day celebrations. The weather flattened ticket sales, got the season off to a horrendous start, and was lousy public relations. Since baseball was “not a cold weather game,” the editor mused that the best policy would be to begin the season later in the month. In the meantime, the owners could stop the tradition of announcing game attendance over the loudspeaker. It was a blatant admission of failure. “When the Giants play before 2,500 in the mammoth Polo Grounds, when the Indians have to settle for 18,000 for their first Sunday double-header, do outsiders get an attractive picture of the old game’s drawing power?”23

  But for all of baseball’s troubles, from nasty weather to the appalling absence of easy parking options, television dominated virtually every discussion. One school of thought argued that TV was a Trojan horse that would soon enough kill attendance at ballparks. As legendary boxing manager Jack “Doc” Kearns noted about the impact of the tube on the fight game, “You can’t give it away and sell it at the same time.” As early as 1951 the dean of sportswriters, Grantland Rice, fretted about the long-term threat that TV posed for baseball. The central problem was that the medium and the sport were in competition with each other. Television executives might broadcast baseball games, but their ultimate goal was not to produce baseball fans—it was to cultivate TV viewers. They sought to please their sponsors, not baseball men. For them, baseball was merely a means of selling Gillette razors and Ballantine beer.24

  Yankees general manager George Weiss agreed with Rice. Staunchly traditionalist, committed to the bottom line of gate receipts, he had bellowed against radio broadcasts in the past. And television, he maintained, competed even more directly with live attendance, drawing fans away from Yankee Stadium where they not only paid to see the game but bought hotdogs and beer as well. In the late 1940s he fought a rearguard action against television, but it was a lost cause from the very start. Broadcasters won important battles over the number and placement of cameras at the game. In return, Weiss bumped up the cost of broadcasting rights. But he grumbled all the way to the bank.25

  Yet, even as Weiss grudgingly accepted television cameras in Yankee Stadium, veteran New York sportswriter Dan Daniel predicted troubles ahead. Although television sponsors were willing to pay large sums for the rights to televise games, it was becoming increasingly clear that TV was eroding box office receipts and causing many minor-league and semiprofessional teams to close their doors. For Daniel, as for Kearns, the irreducible fact was, “You cannot give away your commodity.… [Y]ou cannot be in competition with yourself… and either hope or expect to stay in business.”26

  Certainly the owners of major-league franchises recognized the threat of television, but in a vicious cycle, as their live audiences shrank, they became even more dependent on the dollars from broadcasters. And the money was very good. In 1956 major-league TV and radio sponsors paid a record $26.2 million to broadcast games. For the thirteen teams that had television agreements—Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and Kansas City were the only teams that did not—this amounted to an average of 10.5 percent of each club’s income. The percentage was even higher for the New York franchises. The Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants received at least twice as much for television rights as did the other teams. Warren Giles, National League president, admitted that TV revenues offset gate losses. Furthermore, he asserted that watching a baseball game on the tube could never replace going to the ballpark. It was like watching a Sunday church service on one’s couch, he said. It was a fine substitute, but “the exhilarating atmosphere is lacking. So are the rewarding emotions one experiences from actual participation.”27

  Giles’s rosy optimism was lost on columnist Walter “Red” Smith, who mourned the marriage of baseball and television. The technology was consuming the sport, he thought. “Baseball isn’t a game any longer. It is a streamlined, high-pressure medium for peddling beer and cigarettes. The carpetbaggers who operate the game for profit alone have sold out shamelessly, without qualm or apology.” The game he learned to love as a boy and the heroes he worshiped as a youth and wrote about as a young reporter had lost their romantic patina. The fans were avoiding the ballpark because salesmen duped them into believing that the game on television was the only game.28

  WHILE TEAM OWNERS grappled with the implications of television, they also wrestled with another issue. Some blamed declining attendance on the changing demographics of inner cities and the neighborhoods that surrounded major-league stadiums. The exodus of white middle-class fans to the suburbs and the increasing migration of working-class minorities into the inner cities troubled them. In 1958, Bill Furlong, a snooping reporter from the Chicago Tribune, eavesdropped on a group of American League owners through a hotel air vent, overhearing Washington Senators owner Clark Griffith explain why he wanted to relocate his team to Minneapolis. “The trend in Washington is getting to be all colored,” he complained.29

  In the South Bronx, the influx of blacks and Puerto Ricans transformed the neighborhoods around Yankee Stadium. In 1950, two-thirds of the residents were white, but by the end of the decade two-thirds were African American or Hispanic. “As more Negroes moved in, followed more recently by Puerto Ricans,” the New York Times re
ported in 1955, “more Jews and Irish have moved out.” The declining number of entry-level manufacturing jobs increased competition for work and intensified racial tensions between whites and minorities throughout the borough. The construction of subsidized housing projects, inhabited mostly by poor blacks, and the rising number of minorities moving into previously white neighborhoods created friction. “We may have to live together,” a longtime white resident said, but “most of us don’t like it.”30

  In the first half of the 1950s, as the South Bronx became more racially diverse, the New York Yankees remained lily-white. Some critics suggested that the club shaped the team’s roster to appeal to affluent white fans in Westchester County. Robert Creamer, one of the original editors at Sports Illustrated, wrote years later that the Yankees’ segregation “stemmed as much from economic racism, the fear that black players in the Yankee lineup would hurt the sales of tickets to their supposedly upscale audience, as it did from blatant bigotry.” The New York Post’s Leonard Koppett, a Bronx native who grew up a block away from Yankee Stadium, agreed. He believed that George Weiss did not want to offend “his white customers, the upper-middle-class gentry from the suburbs.” Weiss believed that white fans would not “sit with black fans, and he did not think his white players wanted to play with blacks”; “worst of all,” he was convinced that black players were inferior to white ones.31

  Koppett was not alone in suspecting Weiss of racism. On November 30, 1952, Jackie Robinson appeared on a television show, Youth Wants to Know. When a teenager asked him if the Yankees were “prejudiced against Negro players,” Robinson didn’t hesitate. “Yes,” he answered. “I think the Yankees management is prejudiced. There isn’t a single Negro on the team now and very few in the entire Yankee farm system.”32

  The Yankees were not the only segregated franchise. In 1953, six years after Robinson broke the color line in the sport, only six of the sixteen major-league clubs fielded black players. The absence of a single black player on the Yankees inspired protests outside Yankee Stadium. That season the Bronx County Labor Youth League disseminated flyers that read, “How Can We Get Greater Democracy on the Yankees?”33

  Years later Mantle recalled seeing protestors outside the stadium, carrying placards and chanting, “Don’t go past the gate! Don’t go past the gate! The Yanks dis-crim-i-nate!” At the time he said nothing publicly about the demonstrations or the Yankees’ segregated roster. And reporters didn’t ask him about race. On virtually every social and political issue he remained mute. Growing up in Oklahoma, Mantle had no black teammates. His world had been virtually all white. “There were never any black people in our area,” his friend Nick Ferguson recalled. That wasn’t merely happenstance. Mickey’s home county was “closed” to blacks until the early 1950s, and during his childhood signs warned them to leave town. As a major leaguer, he didn’t view himself as anything more than a ballplayer. Segregation was an accepted fact of American society that Mantle and his teammates never challenged.34

  Facing protests, Weiss maintained that neither he nor the Yankees’ ownership harbored racist policies. “The Yankees never have been averse to having a Negro player,” he insisted. But rumors among the press corps suggested a different story. New York Herald-Tribune reporter Roger Kahn recalled that in the early 1950s a high-ranking club official admitted after a few drinks that a black player would never wear Yankee pinstripes. “We don’t want that sort of crowd,” he said. “It would offend boxholders from Westchester to have to sit with niggers.”35

  By the end of the 1953 season, it appeared that Vic Power, a talented young first baseman who led the AAA American Association with a .349 batting average, might break the Yankees’ color line. Power, a black Puerto Rican, showed great ability at the plate and was a superb defensive player, but Yankees management worried about his allegedly flamboyant style of play. They said he lacked discipline and intelligence, ugly code words long deployed against black players as pretexts for keeping them off the team. Sportswriters reported that he didn’t hustle and was obstinate. Even more damaging were rumors that he dated white women. That was enough for the Yankees to ship him to the Philadelphia Athletics. If the team was going to sign a black player, New York Times columnist Arthur Daley noted, he had to fit “the Yankee type,” which Vic Power clearly didn’t.36

  But “the Yankee type” was a myth. If team management disapproved of Power’s defiance and his unwillingness to stand down when opposing players challenged him to fight, club officials mostly turned a blind eye to Mantle’s, Billy Martin’s, and Whitey Ford’s flaunting of club rules. Weiss really wanted a nonthreatening “Negro,” polite and passive on civil rights. In Elston Howard, he found his man.

  By all accounts, the Yankees promoted Howard in 1955 because he had not only the skills but the temperament management required. Reporters described him as “clean-cut,” “religious,” and “a nice quiet lad” with a “gentlemanly demeanor.” There is no question Howard was chosen as the first black player to suit up for the Yankees because of his deferential attitude “on race questions.” He was the antithesis of the outspoken Jackie Robinson. “I like that young man,” Yankees head scout Paul Krichell said. “Even though he’s black, he has manners. Both as a man and as a ballplayer this boy Howard looks every inch a Yankee.”37

  Yet the face of the Yankees—Mickey Mantle’s—was white. And by 1956, when Howard remained the lone black player on the team, Mantle’s value as a marketable commodity was tied to his whiteness. His emergence as the biggest star in baseball occurred at the same time that the first wave of great black and Latino players broke the color line. For some whites, it appeared that dark-skinned players were gradually taking over the game. By 1956, there were approximately forty black players out of four hundred players in the major leagues. And there was widespread fear among white players and fans that more blacks were coming soon. “They can run faster,” an anonymous Dodger told a reporter. “They’ll run us white guys right out of the game.”38

  As minorities continued to displace white players, some reporters—black and white—wondered if the owners had established a quota system. In 1954, a writer for Our World, a popular black magazine, asked, “Is the color line being drawn on Negroes in baseball? Has the ‘saturation point’ of hiring Negro players been reached?” Two years later, Newsweek’s John Lardner suggested that the owners had secretly agreed to limit the number of black starters. But it was not just the owners who refused to select more black players. In 1956, baseball fans voted for only one black starter on the All-Star teams—Cincinnati’s Frank Robinson. And on the American League, squad manager Casey Stengel selected only one black substitute—Kansas City’s Vic Power.39

  That season Mickey Mantle effectively made the case that a white player was once again the best in the game, challenging the title held by former National League MVP and home run king Willie Mays, who was part of a group of exceptional black players that also included Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, and Roy Campanella. In boxing, heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano had recently retired, and there were no other serious white contenders; many fans feared a similar situation in baseball. Yet Mantle’s success on the field reminded white fans that their place in the game was secure. His former teammate, Tony Kubek, maintained that Mantle earned his acclaim. “But,” he added, “I really think it was like in boxing, that maybe Mickey was a great white hope.”40

  “NOBODY GOES TO the Bronx,” announced Jerome Weidman in an October 1955 article in Holiday magazine. The borough had slid downhill since Weidman’s youth, a victim of changing demographics, rising crime rates, and Robert Moses’s Manhattan-centric vision for New York City. The Cross Bronx Expressway, whose construction had begun in 1948 and dragged on for more than two decades, scarred the South Bronx physically and psychologically. Yet, for all of the borough’s woes, New Yorkers from Manhattan and Queens, and even some from Staten Island and Brooklyn, continued to board subways destined for 161st Street and River Avenue. There they were joined b
y Yankees fans from Westchester and Fairfield counties, who drove into the Bronx to visit America’s greatest sporting shrine.41

  The original Yankee Stadium was much more than a venue for playing baseball. Opened on April 18, 1923, it signaled, in retrospect, the start of the Yankees dynasty and the birth of modern American sports. Before the stadium was built, professional baseball was played in places like Ebbets Field, Shibe Park, or the Polo Grounds, all of which suggested a calm, bucolic past. In contrast, Yankee Stadium connoted an urban reality, the cacophony of blaring horns, screeching tires, pounding jackhammers, and a thousand languages. At a time when the national census noted that more people lived in cities than in the countryside, Yankee Stadium underscored the new America of factories and immigrants, technology and commerce.42

  It was both a product and an emblem of New York, as much a shrine to the city as the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building. “Yankee Stadium is the Babe Ruth of ballparks, the unforgettable, oversized, off-the-scale standard that changed everything,” noted baseball historian Glenn Stout. The concrete-and-steel structure was nearly twice as big as any other park, built roughly along the lines of the Roman Coliseum to signal its importance as the center of the baseball universe. Like Babe Ruth, like New York City, Yankee Stadium was a draw in and of itself, a monument to the outrageously audacious dreams that made America great.43