To avoid growing rusty during the National League's playoff, the Red Sox arranged three exhibitions against teams of service veterans, including Joe DiMaggio, Cecil Travis, and Phil Marchildon. That idea backfired as Williams was hit by a pitch from Mickey Haefner and his left elbow swelled up. While Williams never used the injury as an excuse, he would hit only five singles in 25 at-bats in the Series. Musial would not do much better, with six hits in 27 at-bats.
The 1946 World Series, still regarded as one of the greatest in history, teetered back and forth into the eighth inning of the seventh game, when Harry (the Hat) Walker of the Cardinals, who had fought to survive during the war, plunked a hit into left-center, and Enos (Country) Slaughter raced all the way home from first base.
To this day, hard-core fans still debate the subtleties of Country Slaughter's mad dash with the same rapt attention that historians analyze the battles at Waterloo or Gettysburg. At first, the blame was attached to the Red Sox shortstop, Johnny Pesky, the relay man who allegedly froze with the ball during Slaughter's audacious run. At the time, Pesky accepted the blame, but over the years, as he became a venerable coach on his old team, Pesky recoiled from martyrdom, saying he may have cocked his arm once or twice but hardly “froze” before throwing.
Decades later, history has been updated to note that Leon Culberson, a reserve, had been pressed into center field when Dominic DiMaggio, the smooth smaller brother of Joe, damaged a knee in the top of the eighth. With DiMaggio on the bench, apparently trying to wave Culberson toward left field, Walker slapped the hit exactly where DiMaggio had feared.
The immediate message of the 1946 Series was more success for the Cardinals and more frustration for the Red Sox. But the broader message was that Ted Williams and Stan Musial were back.
—
The Japanese leagues did not resume in the first dreadful years of postwar rebuilding, but in 1949 Lefty O'Doul, a former major league batting star, brought his fabled minor league team, the San Francisco Seals, to Japan for an exhibition series.
“When I arrived it was terrible. The people were so depressed,” O'Doul would say many years later, recalling how thousands of fans came out to see the Seals play, cheering “Banzai, O'Doul! Banzai!” in the surviving stadiums. Emperor Hirohito personally thanked the Seals at the Imperial Palace after the tour had raised over $100,000 for Japanese charities, but more important the visit led to the return of the Japanese leagues.
General Douglas MacArthur, who supervised the occupation, called O'Doul's mission “the greatest piece of diplomacy ever,” a remark that remains an honored part of Japanese history. In January of 2006, while publicizing the first World Baseball Classic, to be held in March of that year, the Japanese ambassador to the United States, Ryozo Kato, would quote General MacArthur, recalling how baseball had helped heal the memories of war.
XII
JACKIE ROBINSON
He is an American icon now, his name perpetuated on an intimate parkway that twists through the hills and cemeteries of Brooklyn, the borough where he played. His number, 42, hangs in every major league stadium, permanently retired from use by future generations. Jackie Robinson is honored as the first black to play in organized baseball in the twentieth century, but he was more than a great man. He was also a great ballplayer, who could win games with his mind as well as his bat and glove.
It is virtually impossible to re-create the conditions of his debut in 1947—the long years without blacks in the major leagues, the taunts, the threats, the fear of failure. In 1947, in the United States of America, white members of the Philadelphia Phillies joined their Alabama-born manager, Ben Chapman, in shouting the most vile racial epithets at the twenty-eight-year-old rookie with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Jack Roosevelt Robinson.
“Hey, nigger, why don't you go back to the cotton field where you belong?”
“They're waiting for you in the jungles, black boy!”
“Hey, snowflake, which one of those white boys' wives are you dating tonight?”
No American has ever carried the weight of racial progress, plus his own career, as publicly as Jackie Robinson did. His daily batting average was one barometer of his success but so was the way he responded to barbs from the opposing dugout. He never faced attack dogs or fire hoses as demonstrators did in the civil rights era that followed him but he marched in his own way, the point man in a tense land. Every black politician, every black rap singer, every black athlete of today, every black citizen vaguely getting by, comes through Jackie Robinson, but without the incredible stress that wore Robinson down before his time.
Robinson was a hero who cut across many lines. Before Robinson, the most prominent black American athletes tended to be boxers, either “good” Negroes like Joe Louis (who did not voice his opinions) or “bad” Negroes like Jack Johnson (who dated white women). That was the standard. Then along came Jackie Robinson. I can still recall my father, who worked for a newspaper, calling from the office to tell us that our beloved Brooklyn Dodgers had brought up Robinson from the minor leagues for the start of the 1947 season. He became the soul of our team.
I consider myself fortunate that as a child and adult I would get to meet Jackie Robinson. Once, when I was around twelve, under the stands in funky little Ebbets Field, I was waiting to buy a hot dog when I noticed Robinson, who was injured and not playing that day, on line right behind me. I mumbled something about his injury, and he answered me civilly, patiently. I cannot resurrect every detail of that brief exchange but I do recall the blue satiny luster of his Dodger jacket, the gray of his hair, the bulk of his body. How could a man that large steal home so audaciously?
As a young reporter in the mid-1960s, I was working on an article about the status of blacks in sports. I called Robinson at home and asked to interview him, but instead he interviewed me, in his high-pitched, cranky voice: just exactly how many blacks worked in our sports department? “Um, none,” I replied. His point, exactly. I remember that edgy conversation as fondly as I remember our brief chat on the hot dog line.
—
Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born in rural Georgia but grew up in the relatively integrated town of Pasadena, California. He played four sports at the University of California, Los Angeles, but was best known as a running back in football. While Robinson was in college in the early 1940s, black Americans were becoming visible in the military and defense industry, some expressing their resentment over the contrast with their traditional second-class way of life. Although Robinson had been a mediocre baseball player in college, his football exploits made him a candidate for wartime baseball.
After prolonged pressure from Lester Rodney, a reporter with the communist newspaper the Daily Worker, the White Sox were shamed into giving a tryout to Robinson on March 22, 1942. “Jackie is worth $50,000 of anybody's money. He stole everything but my infielders' gloves,” the White Sox manager, Jimmy Dykes, was quoted as saying. However, Robinson was on his way into the service, and was not signed. After being commissioned an Army officer, he refused to go to the rear of a bus in Texas and was courtmartialed, but was later cleared.
Around the country, there was pressure for baseball to open up to blacks. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia spoke out in favor of it. Joe Bostic, a black reporter, tried to force the Dodgers into signing black players. Leo Durocher, the abrasive manager of the Dodgers, volunteered that he had seen a number of blacks in Cuba whom he would eagerly manage, but Durocher's opinion was promptly slapped down by Judge Landis. The highly respected Wendell Smith of the Courier, a black newspaper based in Pittsburgh, lobbied Landis but claimed the response had been, “There is nothing further to discuss.” According to Smith, Landis “died with those words on his lips.”
Shortly after the death of Landis in 1944, the major leagues selected Senator Albert B. (Happy) Chandler of Kentucky as the new commissioner. Not known as a reformer while representing his border state, Chandler rose from his roots to set a tone for a nation in a new age. His finest moment as commissione
r came almost immediately, as he promptly assured black journalists that the major leagues would soon be open to blacks.
“For twenty-four years, my predecessor did not let the black man play,” Chandler recalled in 1982. “If you were black, you didn't qualify. It wasn't entirely his fault. It was what the club owners wanted. But I didn't think it was right for these fellows to fight at Okinawa and Iwo Jima, and then come home and not be allowed to play.”
In that spirit, a Boston city councilman, Isadore Muchnick, pressured the Red Sox to take a look at Robinson, now trying to hold a regular position with the Kansas City Monarchs. On Monday, April 16, 1945, a couple of Sox officials put Robinson and two other black players through some perfunctory drills before excusing them. For the rest of his life, Robinson was so bitter about his brushoff in Boston that he would abruptly cut off any discussion of it. More than half a century later, the new Red Sox management, trying to exorcise its old ghosts, would apologize for the sham tryout.
Yet somebody else was watching out for Jackie Robinson: Branch Rickey, emboldened by the public proclamations of greater racial equality by the new president, Harry Truman, was seeking new talent for the Brooklyn Dodgers. There is a long and reasonable dialogue about whether Rickey was seeking to do the right thing or merely acquire better players for the Brooklyn organization, as he had done in St. Louis. Given the complexities of the man, it was probably both.
In all his years of stockpiling players, Rickey had never tried to hire a black player. As he often did, Rickey had a tale to go with his new actions: when he had coached at Ohio Wesleyan in 1904, the team had taken a road trip to South Bend, Indiana, where a hotel clerk attempted to bar a black player, Charles Thomas, from registering. As Rickey told it, he had insisted on sharing a room with Thomas, who cried and clawed at his own skin, wishing he could make his blackness go away.
Forty-two years later, the time apparently was right to make up for Charles Thomas's anguish. Rickey asked Clyde Sukeforth, a former major league catcher, and George Sisler, Rickey's first great discovery, to scout the Negro Leagues. He was looking for talent, but he was also looking for the right man to integrate baseball.
Rickey invited Robinson to Brooklyn under the subterfuge that he was starting a separate all-black Dodger team. Rickey tested Robinson, first in an abstract discussion about the confrontations Robinson could expect in the majors. “I'm looking for a ball player with guts enough not to fight back,” Rickey said. Then Rickey turned up the heat, imitating the racist hotel clerks, railroad conductors, waiters, opponents, even teammates.
“Now he was a vengeful base runner, vindictive spikes flashing in the sun, sliding into Jack's black flesh,” wrote Arnold Rampersad, a Robinson biographer. “ ‘How do you like that, nigger boy?’ At one point he swung his pudgy fist at Jack's head.” Rickey did not desist until Robinson promised him he could endure any of that. He already had—in college, in the service, just by being black in America in the first half of the twentieth century.
When Robinson signed a 1946 contract with the Dodgers' farm team in Montreal, it was clear that Rickey was not recruiting him merely to fill out the minor league roster. Robinson and his bride, Rachel Isum, a nursing graduate of the University of California, felt comfortable in the French Canadian city, which did not have the overt racial edge of most of the United States. On the Royals, Robinson was tutored by an older teammate, Al Campanis from New York University, who taught him to play second base.
In the final days of spring training of 1947, the Dodgers promoted Robinson to the varsity. A few Dodgers planned a protest that quickly ended when the fiery Durocher informed them that Robinson was going to put money in their pockets. In early May, several Cardinals planned to boycott games with the Dodgers, but Ford Frick, the president of the National League, told them that anybody who struck would be permanently banned from the game. Frick said, “This is the United States of America and one citizen has as much right to play as another.”
The Cardinals did not strike, but later in the season Robinson was spiked on the foot by Enos Slaughter, the star of the 1946 World Series, who was rumored to be among the players who talked of boycott. Robinson always maintained Slaughter had swerved to spike him intentionally, but Slaughter insisted Robinson had been injured because he had not mastered the footwork of a new position, first base.
Having promised Rickey he would not fight back, Robinson kept silent while bench jockeys like Chapman shouted vile things at him. Most of the Dodgers rallied around Robinson, particularly the captain and shortstop, Harold (Pee Wee) Reese, from Louisville, Kentucky. On the Dodgers' first trip to Cincinnati in 1947, fans began chanting racial epithets from the stands, upon which Reese put his arm around Robinson's shoulders, to demonstrate, in Reese's part of the world, that they were teammates and equals. Reese would later admit that his support of Robinson had not pleased some relatives and friends. (In 2005, a statue, suggested by Stan Isaacs of Newsday, would be unveiled outside a minor league stadium in Brooklyn, depicting Reese putting his arm around Robinson's shoulder.)
The Dodgers won the pennant in 1947 as Robinson, under intense pressure, batted .297 and was named Rookie of the Year. The next year Robinson moved to second base and became a much more productive hitter, with the guidance of George Sisler, who taught him to hit to right field. In 1949, Robinson led the league in hitting with .342. The numbers sound like the normal progress of a great athlete, but there was nothing easy about it.
On the road, he was fighting three battles at once. The game itself was tough enough, but Robinson also had to contend with threats as well as makeshift logistics. The Dodgers and the league office could not arrange for the first black players to stay in the team hotel in St. Louis, so Robinson had to stay at all-black hotels, which did not necessarily have air-conditioning or other amenities. The black neighborhoods treated him like a prince, but he watched his teammates head for the swanky hotel and he knew baseball was not sticking up for him. Every day was a battle. Then he had to go out and try to hit against Robin Roberts or Warren Spahn.
The Dodgers marveled that he did not break, although he and his wife feared he would suffer a nervous breakdown. After he survived his rookie season, the Dodgers began to catch a glimpse of the full Jackie Robinson, the college man, the battler, the officer who would not move to the back of the bus in Texas. After that first year of treading lightly, to keep his promise to Rickey, Robinson began to show his opinionated side, his anger, his gallows humor. One former teammate, George Shuba, observed Robinson up close in the intimate settings of the daily clubhouse. Years later, Shuba described how Robinson defused one tense moment:
“Visiting clubhouse, Cincinnati, 1948,” Shuba wrote in a letter. “Jackie gets an obscene life-threatening letter. It states that he would be shot if he appears on the field that day. He posts it on the clubhouse bulletin board and laughs about it. If he didn't, he would end up in a straitjacket. We read it and are glad we're not him.
“[Gene] Hermanski reads it and turns to Jackie, who is getting suited up with the rest of us, and says, ‘Jackie, I got it figured out. You haven't got anything to worry about. We'll all put Number 42 on our backs and that so-and-so won't know who to shoot.’
“Jackie says, ‘Thanks, Gene, but I think that so-and-so will still be able to pick me out.’”
Robinson was followed quickly by other black players—Larry Doby signing with Bill Veeck in Cleveland later in 1947, the first black in the American League, Monte Irvin with the Giants, Satchel Paige with the Browns, Don Newcombe and Roy Campanella with the Dodgers, plus, briefly in 1949, the first dark-skinned Latino, Orestes (Minnie) Minoso. But Robinson had been the point man for all of them. He was a complicated man, who did not suffer foolishness around him, who could annoy his teammates with his high-pitched opinions. Newcombe, a superb pitcher and hitter, once told Robinson in the crowded clubhouse that he was “not only wrong, but loud wrong.”
There was no escaping the tense reality that this social expe
riment depended on Jackie Robinson. If he cracked, or became unpopular, he could set back the cause of blacks in public life by years, even decades. Jack and Rachel Robinson felt the expectations not only from blacks—the invitations, the phone calls, the letters, the articles, the visits by celebrities—but also from whites who were rooting for him to set an example. The marvel is that with all this attention on him, Robinson became a great and versatile player on the best team in the league. He had been a mediocre shortstop in what was not even his best sport, but now, with the weight of the world on him, he willingly moved from first to second to third base and then to left field, depending on the Dodgers' defensive needs that season. He was already athletically middle-aged when he joined the Dodgers at the age of twenty-eight, yet he became a master of the crucial stolen base, the hard slide, the diving catch.
Perhaps the best game Robinson ever played was on the final day of the 1951 season, in the darkening gloom at Philadelphia. Having blown a lead of 13½ games to their rivals, the Giants, the Dodgers now had to beat the Phillies to force a playoff. In the 12th inning, Robinson dove to his left to snag a line drive by Eddie Waitkus. Tumbling and injuring his shoulder, he held on to the ball, to extend the game. Then in the 14th inning Robinson hit a home run to put the Dodgers into the playoff.
The Dodgers would lose that playoff in the third game on a three-run homer by Bobby Thomson, in what may have been the greatest major league game ever played, taking into consideration the rivalry, the squandered lead, the dramatic home run, and the presence of the acerbic dandy, Durocher, who was now the Giants' manager. Robinson is said to have been one of the few Dodgers who could bear to walk across the corridor at the Polo Grounds to congratulate their hated opponents.
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