In his decade with the Dodgers, Robinson helped win six pennants and one cathartic championship over the Yankees in 1955 that would justify that familiar October Brooklyn proclamation of “Wait Till Next Year.” At the end of the 1956 season, the Dodgers traded the bulky, gray-haired Robinson to a team they had to know he would not join—the Giants. He thought about it for a few minutes and promptly retired.
At thirty-seven, Robinson needed to make money, but he also felt responsibility for other blacks. Despite a decade of watching dozens of blacks prove themselves on the field, baseball had no concept of seeking out minorities for jobs on the field or off.
Baseball was happy enough to discover the next wave of black and Hispanic superstars—Willie Mays in New York in 1951, Henry Aaron in Milwaukee in 1954, Roberto Clemente in Pittsburgh in 1955, Frank Robinson in Cincinnati in 1956. The Yankees, on the other hand, would not bring up their first black player, Elston Howard, until 1955, and the Red Sox, who had Jackie Robinson in their ballpark for a tryout in 1945 but couldn't wait to hustle him out the door, would be the sixteenth and last team to hire a black, Pumpsie Green in 1959.
The sluggishness of the Yankees and Red Sox would affect the balance between the two leagues. Up to Robinson's time, the American League had been clearly superior, but starting in 1947 the National League began to play a more aggressive and intelligent style of ball to go along with its obvious infusion of black talent. From 1933 through 1949, the American League had won 12 of the first 16 All-Star Games, but from 1950, the National League won 32 of the next 39. The only possible way to explain this superiority was that the National League was Jackie Robinson's league.
For all his contributions, Robinson was never offered a meaningful job in the sport, instead working in private industry to open up jobs for blacks and trying to convince his fellow Republicans to provide more opportunities in business. In 1962, Robinson became the first black to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, which he used as a forum to remind the owners that there were no black managers or front-office executives.
Suffering from diabetes, Robinson became nearly blind, having to be escorted onto the field when he made an occasional visit to the ballpark. His family and friends claimed the stress of his first years in the major leagues had weakened his system, as did the troubled adolescence of his first child, Jackie Jr., who came through drug treatment only to die in an auto accident in 1971.
Jack Roosevelt Robinson died on October 24, 1972, at the age of fifty-three. His name has been honored on schools and fields, as well as the Jackie Robinson Foundation, administered by Rachel Robinson, which prepares young people to work in the sports industry. The man who carried the aspirations of an entire race continues to open doors.
XIII
BASEBALL HITS THE INTERSTATE
Whenever I visit Prospect Park in the borough of Brooklyn, my head jerks eastward like a compass, toward the apartment buildings where Ebbets Field once stood. In the tranquil Botanic Garden, I feel sick to my stomach, knowing that my team is long gone. I am not alone in this. I have compared notes with Fred Wilpon, the builder and owner of the Mets, who grew up in Brooklyn. The site of Ebbets Field is like the magnetic North Pole, constantly making us quiver in that direction. In the same way, Giant fans of a certain age feel visceral pain when they drive along the Harlem River Drive in Manhattan, past Coogan's Bluff, the hill that towered over the now vanished Polo Grounds.
Aging fans are the witnesses to the sudden departure of hallowed franchises in the first generation after World War Two. We suffered in the name of continental destiny. In the surge of prosperity after the war, people began to think about going somewhere. Families came back from their first vacation to Florida or California, raving about the weather, the new houses, the beaches, the date-nut shakes. In the frozen Midwest, people woke up on New Year's Day and turned on their brand-new television set to the Rose Bowl parade and football game from Pasadena, California, and pretty soon a family down the block packed up and moved out west. This happened every January.
America had been settled by pioneers twitching toward the west. In 1919, a young Army officer named Dwight D. Eisenhower had taken a two-month trip over rudimentary roads not much better than the rutted paths left by Lewis and Clark and the covered wagons. He never forgot the slow, torturous journey. In 1952, as the leading American general in the victory in Europe, Ike was elected president of the United States. One of his first priorities was to encourage two federal acts that would create over 41,000 miles of interstate highways, a system now named after him.
Baseball owners were not immune from thoughts of relocating. In St. Louis, curly-haired, beer-drinking Bill Veeck began to entertain dreams of turning a profit with the Browns. As the son of the former owner of the Chicago Cubs, also named Bill, Veeck was a baseball man through and through, even if his fellow owners would never accept him because they found him too brash, too imaginative. Having had a leg amputated at the knee following service in the Pacific, Veeck tended to store his pipe ashes in the hollow of his artificial limb. That little routine would come off as amusing in a bar full of war vets or a pressroom full of reporters but was lost on the owners, as were most of Veeck's schemes and dreams. He would become one of the great showmen of postwar baseball, even if the other owners despised him and tried to break him.
After coming back from the service, Veeck had tried to buy the Phillies, until Judge Landis learned of his plan to hire black players. The owners preferred to steer the team to a man with a gambling problem, William Cox. Veeck then bought into the Cleveland team in 1946, touching off a golden age in that city. Veeck had this odd business belief that baseball was a very short step from a carnival: people would spend a few dollars on cotton candy and bright lights and a glimpse of the sword-swallower and the bearded lady. Baseball, in Veeck's humble opinion, was not exactly church—or even the opera. He provided daily gimmicks, including fireworks, giveaways, stunts, and games, setting a major league attendance record of 2.6 million fans in the world championship season of 1948. How that annoyed the other owners. Always short of money, Veeck sold the team in 1949 for twenty times what he had paid.
In 1951 Veeck bought the fading Browns, who had been beaten out by the Cardinals in what had obviously become a one-city baseball town. Once among the top ten cities in the United States, St. Louis could hear the population whooshing westward en route to California. To lure people into the ballpark, Veeck tried some new and outrageous stunts, including hiring a midget. Three-foot, seven-inch, sixty-five-pound Eddie Gaedel was promptly walked by the Tigers and taken out for a pinch-runner, but the league office nullified Gaedel's contract. In accordance with the old baseball cliché of “You can look it up,” on page 916 of my edition of the Baseball Encyclopedia is the career record of Edward Carl Gaedel, born in Chicago in 1925, died in Chicago in 1961. (Bats Right, Throws Left, the Encyclopedia says, although Gaedel never got to show his stuff in the field or the base paths.)
The Gaedel stunt certified Veeck as a troublemaker, as totalitarian states come to brand members of the thinking class. The owners were not smart enough to heed Veeck's prediction that this newfangled medium, television, would soon widen the competitive gap between teams from the larger cities and the smaller ones. Most owners assumed they would keep making money at the turnstile, but peacetime attendance peaked at 20.9 million in 1948, Veeck's big year in Cleveland, and then began a downward spiral.
Losing money in St. Louis, Veeck reasoned that proud old Baltimore, still brooding since losing its major league franchise after 1902, would be an ideal site for his team. Since then, baseball had frozen in place for half a century, still concentrated in the northeast quadrant. At mid-century, California still seemed too far to move twenty-five players and their bats. The traditional overnight train rides from St. Louis to Boston in midsummer, with hot coal smoke blowing back into the Pullman cars (veterans below, rookies above), were long enough, without contemplating a road trip clear across the continent. The s
turdy little two-engine airplanes that a few teams had begun to use for some trips were not capable of supporting a transcontinental schedule, over the Rockies. The Pacific Northwest seemed exotic; the Southwest was just emerging; and the Southeast was still getting over the Civil War.
Veeck's business logic was perfect but his fellow owners were committed to making him go broke right there in St. Louis, and they could make it stick, courtesy of the United States Supreme Court. In a nation that gave lip service to free enterprise, the industry was still protected by the 1922 decision that baseball was a game, not a business. The owners played a cutthroat game with Veeck, openly regulating interstate commerce by allowing only their friends to move.
When Milwaukee, still suffering from having lost its major league status after 1901, began making overtures for a team, Veeck might have moved there. Instead, the owners tipped off one of their good friends, Lou Perini, the construction operator, whose Boston Braves were losing money. In March of 1953, Perini was given hasty permission to beat Veeck to Milwaukee.
On opening day in early April, the Braves' damp, funky old park near the Charles River was vacant and desolate, and so were Braves fans, who could still remember Rabbit Maranville's artistry at shortstop in 1914 and had loved the pitching of Warren Spahn and Johnny Sain. (“Spahn and Sain and pray for rain” was the hopeful ditty of the Braves fan.)
Thus began a modern American phenomenon—the grumpy, aging fan who swears he has not been to a ball game since the Braves (Browns, A's, Dodgers, Giants, Senators, etc.) left town. But for every disgruntled fan back east, there were new fans in new corners of the United States, delighted to finally be labeled Major League. The reception was marvelous in Milwaukee, with the Braves leading the league in attendance five straight years from 1953 through 1957, going over 2 million the last four years. Ownership was able to develop young players, including Henry Aaron, and the Braves would win pennants in 1957 and 1958.
The owners proudly watched Veeck go broke in St. Louis, barely drawing a million fans in the three years from 1951 through 1953. The owners then magnanimously agreed to let the Browns move to Baltimore, so long as Veeck did not go with them. Baltimore, with its long and parochial memories, proved an excellent choice, just as Veeck had known it would. The Philadelphia A's, decimated by Connie Mack's fire sales and now under new ownership, moved to Kansas City in 1955 and promptly drew 1,393,054 fans in their first season, second only to the Yankees.
The profits from the three moves were not lost on Walter O'Malley, a lawyer who had gone to work for the Brooklyn Dodgers and gradually picked up some shares in the team, finally forcing Rickey out in 1950. The Dodgers led the league in attendance five times after the war and were solvent mainly because O'Malley had been quick to negotiate income from television rights, but he could see himself making considerably more money somewhere else.
O'Malley soon pulled off one of the great real estate deals in the history of American sports. Insisting he wanted to replace dumpy but vibrant Ebbets Field with a new stadium in downtown Brooklyn or in Queens, O'Malley really had his eye on Los Angeles. First, he talked the Wrigley family, which owned the Cubs, into trading its minor league Los Angeles franchise to him. Then O'Malley charmed the mayor of Los Angeles into deeding him a ravine on the northern edge of downtown. Wild and crazy spendthrift that he was, O'Malley even promised to build a ballpark with his own money. He knew building a ballpark was a mere operating expense. Land was the main thing.
Next, O'Malley informed Horace Stoneham, the owner of the Giants, of this wonderful opportunity out west. The once proud Giants had slipped to New York's third team, partially because they played too many day games, mainly to give Stoneham more time at night to drink. The Dodgers and Giants, with their heritage going back into the 1880s, played their respective last home games before sullen, modest crowds in 1957.
In California, the Dodgers would play in the football stadium, the Coliseum, while awaiting their new ballpark in Chavez Ravine. Left-handed Duke Snider, remembering the snug right field at Ebbets Field, took one look at the miles of open space in right field in the lopsided Coliseum, and he quietly died inside.
The Giants played in Seals Stadium for two seasons while awaiting the building of their new ballpark, at Candlestick Point a few miles down the peninsula. City slickers from the East, the Giants owners had agreed to the new site, a bayside promontory, during an inspection visit on a warm and sunny high noon. They soon learned that every afternoon a savage gale screeched over the western hills, lashing Candlestick Point with full fury. The signature sound at 4:00 P.M. in Candlestick Park would be beer cans clattering down the concrete steps. Fans would bring blankets and down coats to night games, but were rarely warm.
With baseball finally on the West Coast, the two leagues still consisted of eight teams apiece, which meant the talent ratio was higher in the National League because of black stars like Mays, Aaron, Frank Robinson, Clemente, Bob Gibson, and Ernie Banks. Mickey Mantle, Al Kaline, and Brooks Robinson came along in this era, along with Sandy Koufax, a wild left-hander who came up with his hometown Brooklyn Dodgers, finally becoming the greatest pitcher of his generation, albeit in Los Angeles.
For better or worse, America was expanding—and so was baseball. Inevitably, the country was too large to permit baseball to remain at sixteen teams. Branch Rickey, the ancient sage, represented various cities eager to join the major leagues in a new entity, the Continental League. Rickey, who had prospered from baseball's exemption from antitrust legislation, now took the other side, lobbying Congress to repeal the 1922 Supreme Court decision that bound players to their clubs for life. Before Congress could pass any such legislation, the owners saw the wisdom of Rickey's argument and voted to expand in 1961.
The Griffith family was allowed to move its team from Washington to the Twin Cities, to be known as the Minnesota Twins, and two new teams were formed from an expansion draft—the new Washington Senators and the Los Angeles Angels. The American League owners were so inadvertently generous in exposing what they considered to be marginal talent in the 1961 expansion draft that National League owners vowed they would never let such a calamity happen to them. When two more teams were formed for 1962, the owners sheltered their best prospects on minor league rosters, leaving only culls and rejects to be drafted by the two new teams.
For the first three years, the Houston Colt .45s, named after the six-shooter that helped win the West, played in a rickety outdoor park, braving heat, humidity, and Texas-sized mosquitoes. I will always remember Richie Ashburn, a wise old outfielder with the New York Mets, demonstrating how he sloshed insect repellent all over him before a twi-night doubleheader in that malarial setting.
The theme park changed in 1965, with the team renamed the Astros, in homage to Houston's space industry. Instead of exploring outer space, the Astros hunkered down under a roof, in the Astrodome, locally called the Eighth Wonder of the World. The builders had installed a grass field under a glass roof, but the glare from the sun blinded the players so badly that the roof had to be painted, as a result of which the grass promptly died. The faulty planning led to a series of green carpets for the playing surface, and ultimately to a product called AstroTurf, which produced erratic bounces and leg injuries, most notably the annoying phenomenon called “turf toe,” from stubbing the toes on the ersatz lawn. Artificial turf, a downright blight on the game, would take more than a quarter of a century to eradicate.
Speaking of blight, the other expansion team was even worse than the one in Houston. The New York Mets—homage to a nineteenth-century team, the Metropolitans—felt the need to emphasize the glorious National League tradition. The front office accumulated old Brooklyn Dodgers plus other grizzled veterans, all of them past their prime, and for a manager hired Casey Stengel, who had won 10 pennants in 12 years with the Yankees.
This nostalgia exercise was responsible for the worst team in the history of baseball. The Mets lost 120 of 160 games but otherwise their first season was
a joyous homecoming in the rusting, pigeon-befouled Polo Grounds. Stengel's rubbery face and caustic truths about his team (“We're a fraud”) helped draw 1 million fans. From the start, the Mets captured a portion of New York fans away from the Yankees, who were merely winning their third consecutive pennant, plus the World Series.
All the old certainties were gone, including the old 154-game schedule that mandated four trips to every city. The new 162-game schedule became controversial in 1961, when Roger Maris of the Yankees hit 61 homers, thereby breaking Babe Ruth's record of 60. At first, Ford Frick, now the commissioner (and a former ghostwriter for Ruth), suggested that both records be recognized because of the unequal lengths of the seasons, but eventually all records were based on a full season, whether 154 or 162 games.
The major leagues continued to spread over the continent, with the Braves deserting Milwaukee, where the novelty had worn off, and moving in 1966 to Atlanta, which was just becoming a major American city. By 1998, there would be thirty major league franchises, including teams across the border in Toronto and Montreal, but only after a major challenge to the way the business was operated.
XIV
FREE AGENCY ARRIVES
By the mid-1960s, Curt Flood of the St. Louis Cardinals was considered the best defensive center fielder in baseball, better even than the aging Willie Mays. He was also one of the many socially conscious African-American players in the most stimulating locker room in the major leagues in the 1960s, with vocal and intelligent players like Bill White, Bob Gibson, and Lou Brock. All but Gibson had been traded from their first teams and understood the cold business of their sport, yet perhaps three pennants had given them a false sense of security.
Baseball Page 12
