Impact Player

by Bobby Richardson

  On defense, I played well enough. My inexperience showed on offense, though. The pitching was by far the biggest difference between Class B and what I had faced at even the highest level of American Legion tournaments. In the Piedmont League, the fastballs were noticeably faster and the curveballs noticeably sharper. The pitchers worked the ball around the plate more too, instead of just throwing it down the middle. It didn’t seem like opposing pitchers made many mistake pitches when I was at the plate, and when they did, I wasn’t able to take advantage.

  Segregation was still part of baseball then. The African American fans would sit down the left field line of Myers Field, where the Tars played. For some reason, they seemed to like me as a player. But among the white fans seated throughout the rest of the ballpark, I didn’t have many friends. Loudly and clearly, they made it known that they would have rather had Dick Sanders at shortstop. I can’t say I blamed them. I wasn’t even hitting my weight, and that was before I reached the weight of—ahem—170 pounds that I carried in the majors.

  After I struck out three consecutive times in one game, the booing began. I had never had to deal with any negative fan reaction, and those boos began a bad cycle for me. When the fans booed, my level of play suffered—even my normally steady defense. As my play worsened, the fans grew more vocal with their disapproval.

  On top of all that, I was homesick. I had never been away from home, and I was eating into my family’s finances by calling collect every night. I missed my family, I missed Sumter, and I missed playing well on the field.

  I was ready to quit baseball and go home.

  Then a letter arrived from Sumter. Conley Alexander had been one of my coaches in junior high school. I hadn’t had much contact with him of late, and I don’t know if he had heard or read of my struggles in Norfolk, but apparently he felt inspired to send me a letter of encouragement.

  Coach Alexander wrote that ups and downs were a part of playing professional baseball and that I should keep in mind the words of Matthew 6:33: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”

  I knew that verse well, but I really needed it now. With all the drastic changes in my life—moving into professional baseball, moving away from home—I had lost my sense of priorities, and baseball had become my sole focus. Coach Alexander’s letter, and that verse in particular, reminded me that the Lord should be predominant in my life. Whether or not I played baseball, I needed to put my confidence in Him and let Him work out the details. Remembering that God, in His Word, had stated His desire for me to lean on Him removed some of the pressure I had been placing on myself to perform well.

  Meanwhile, my parents, hearing in my nightly phone calls how homesick I was and knowing how much I was struggling on the field, came to Norfolk to visit me. It had to be difficult for them to hear me being jeered by the home fans around them in the stands. Hearing their son booed was a new experience for them, just as it had been for me.

  As I have described, my dad was not a forceful man. He preferred to sit back and observe my baseball career. But when he saw what was going on, he visited Mr. Dawson, our team’s general manager, to discuss how I was playing. After that meeting, Mr. Dawson decided I would be best served by being sent down the minor league ladder—all the way down. Mr. Dawson asked my dad and me to come to his office. That’s when I learned he had talked with Dad.

  “You’re a good prospect,” Mr. Dawson said, “but we started you too high. You need to start where the others are starting. I want you to go up to Olean, New York.”

  “I think you should try that,” Dad said to me.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m willing.”

  On one hand, I was relieved. I felt overmatched in the Piedmont League, and my numbers weren’t good. In twenty-seven games with the Tars, I had a .211 batting average, and truth be told, I had to go on a little bit of a hot streak (relatively speaking) toward the end to get my average above the measly .200 mark. I simply wasn’t ready for that level of competition.

  But on the other hand, I was disappointed. Such a big deal had been made about me starting in Class B. Now here I was being sent down not one, but two classifications.

  That move probably saved my career, though. The Pennsylvania-Ontario-New York League consisted mostly of rookie players like me. After I joined the Olean Yankees, I started hitting right away and didn’t stop until the season ended. In thirty-two games with Olean, I had the team’s highest batting average, at .412. Baseball was easy again.

  I headed home for the off-season thanking the Lord for all these things He had added unto me after Coach Alexander’s letter helped me reprioritize my life. Not too long before, I had wanted to quit baseball altogether. Now I couldn’t wait for spring training.

  I can do this, I was thinking. I can move up the ladder.

  Chapter 4

  Climbing the Ladder

  The Yankees’ minor league teams held spring training at different sites than the major league team did. But before the 1954 season, I was one of about two dozen Yankees prospects invited to a kind of pre-spring training where the Yankees trained in St. Petersburg, Florida. For ten days, Yankees manager Casey Stengel and his coaches put us through instructional-type workouts and intrasquad games designed to teach us the major league way of doing things and, hopefully, accelerate our development through the farm system.

  It was during those extra sessions that I learned of plans to move me from shortstop to second base. I had played mostly shortstop on my high school team and had been the full-time shortstop on our American Legion teams and in Norfolk and Olean. Shortstop was my favorite position, although second base seemed to feel more natural to me and probably was my best position.

  I liked the challenge of playing shortstop. A shortstop has to make the long throw to first from the hole between short and third. He also has to field the ball cleanly, while a second baseman has time to bobble the ball and still make the shorter throw to retire the runner. I believe that if a player can play shortstop well, he can play any position on the field, and I really wanted to learn to play it well. On the other hand, I preferred playing a full game at second base to spending most of the game on the bench and playing only an inning or two at shortstop. So I began working toward a move to second there in St. Petersburg.

  At the end of that ten-day training session, I received my next assignment. I would be playing with the Binghamton (New York) Triplets—a Class-A team! (The team’s nickname derived from the “Triple Cities” of Binghamton, Johnson City, and Endicott.) On the strength of my first season at Olean and my performance in St. Petersburg, the Yankees were bumping me up three classifications, even bypassing the Class-B Norfolk Tars I had struggled with the season before.

  As a bonus, the Triplets’ spring training was held in Orangeburg, South Carolina, about an hour’s drive from my house. The team was housed in an old hotel downtown that nobody liked, while I had the luxury of driving home each day, sleeping in my own comfortable bed, enjoying Mom’s cooking, and getting to spend extra time in Sumter.

  That spring training went by in a hurry. But before we broke camp, our team played the Tars in an exhibition game in Sumter on what was declared “Robert Richardson Day.” We beat the Tars easily, but I was hitless in four at bats against my old team. Ugh.

  When we made the trip north to Binghamton to start the season, I followed the team bus in my off-season acquisition. It was my first big purchase after signing my first contract: a green 1954 Pontiac that didn’t have air-conditioning.

  During the ’54 season in Binghamton, I made an important friend. Johnny Hunton was a married, twenty-seven-year-old utility infielder who had been with the Yankees’ Double-A team in Birmingham, Alabama, before being sent down to join our team. Johnny was a Christian and had no qualms whatsoever about making that known. He wasn’t overbearing and never tried to force his beliefs on anyone, but he was appropriately public with his Christianity. He carried his Bible with
him and didn’t try to hide it under an arm or set it upside down on a table. He prayed before meals in restaurants. He never missed his devotion time, and he spoke about his faith everywhere, including churches where he was invited to be a guest speaker.

  Johnny also acted like a Christian on the field. He played hard, but he didn’t lose his temper when he struck out or when an umpire missed a call. He always maintained an upbeat, positive attitude, not only for himself but toward his teammates.

  Because he was an older player, Johnny became a mentor to me. He and his wife, Patricia, often invited me to their home for dinner. When Johnny spoke at churches during our team’s road trips, I went with him to listen. Johnny was the person who modeled for me how a person could maintain an uncompromising Christian lifestyle in professional baseball.

  My first season in Binghamton turned out to be Johnny’s last one in professional baseball, so 1954 was the only season we played together. Yet our close friendship lasted through the years, and after our playing days were over, we would work together on the coaching staffs of two different colleges.

  Another lasting friendship that began at Binghamton was with outfielder Sam Suplizio. Later on, Sam and his wife, Caroline, would become good friends of ours.

  Sam had signed his first contract with the Yankees the same year I had. The first All-American baseball player at the University of New Mexico, he was highly thought of by the Yankees organization. The plan was to bring him up to play center field with the big club and move Mickey Mantle to another outfield position or possibly to first base, to save wear and tear on Mickey’s legs.

  But late in the 1956 season, about a week before the Yankees were going to bring him up from the minors, Sam badly fractured his arm while breaking up a double play. Sam could not fully recover from the injury and never played in the majors, but he remained active in baseball after being forced to retire because of his injury. He worked as a coach and instructor for several major league teams and later went into business in Grand Junction, Colorado. He helped Grand Junction become the host site for the Junior College World Series—the stadium there is named for him—and also was instrumental in helping Denver secure the Colorado Rockies franchise.

  Sam survived two strokes. After the second, he made a wonderful decision for Christ. When Sam passed away in 2006, I was privileged to be asked to be a part of his memorial service, along with Paul Molitor and Robin Yount, two of the many major league players Sam had mentored.

  My ’54 season with the Triplets was a fine one for many reasons. I played in all 141 games—every inning of every game. The transition to second base went smoothly, and I led our team with a .310 batting average, which was high enough to rank me near the top of the Eastern League’s leaders. I also made the league’s All-Star Game.

  The highlight of the season, though, was probably a game that didn’t count in the standings or in the statistics: an exhibition in Binghamton against the parent-club Yankees, who brought with them Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, and Billy Martin, among others. Our fans were excited about having the big Yankees visit, and the game received a lot of publicity. Despite Mickey hitting a homer against us, we beat the five-time defending World Series champions. I hit a double and made a couple of nice defensive plays.

  After the game, Casey Stengel told me, “I’ll see you in spring training next year,” inviting me back to St. Petersburg for another year of his pre-spring training. Casey didn’t throw words around much, especially compliments, so I was ecstatic that, first, he knew who I was, and second, he thought I was climbing the ladder.

  A “Chance” Meeting

  After the 1954 season, when I was back in Sumter, I met the young lady who would become my wife, Betsy Dobson.

  We attended the same church, which had a semicircular seating arrangement. I had noticed a stunning brunette sitting across the way with her mother every Sunday morning. We both were fairly shy. But we obviously had an interest in each other because we would look across the congregation, and when our eyes met, we would both quickly look away in that “Oh, no! I hope he/she didn’t see me!” sort of way.

  After several weeks of exchanging glances, I came up with a plan to meet her. When the service ended, I would cross over to exit out her door instead of the door closest to where I sat among the other youth, thus creating a “chance” meeting at the back of the church. Clearly that was a great idea because Betsy had it too. She came up with the same plan for the same day and decided to exit out my side of the church, which meant our paths crossed sooner than we had planned. Surprised, we offered an awkward “hi” to each other and continued on our journeys out each other’s doors.

  I knew very little about Betsy at that point, but I did some checking around and learned that she played softball. Shortly after our not-so-grand introduction on the way out of church, I spotted her at the Sumter County Fair. I knew her softball coach well enough to ask him to introduce me to Betsy that day. He did, and we exchanged a cordial greeting.

  Man! I thought as I watched her walk away. I want to date that girl. I’m going to ask her out. I gave myself a brief “you can do this” pep talk and set out to find Betsy again. But by the time I caught up with her, she was boarding to ride the Loop-O-Plane ride. I stopped in my tracks. The Loop-O-Plane turned its riders upside down—and fast.

  I am not going to ride that thing, I said to myself. I would have followed her onto the Ferris wheel, but I wasn’t about to get on any ride that would spin me upside down. So I temporarily called off my pursuit.

  The next time I saw Betsy was at a football game. Her brother-in-law, whom I knew, had two extra tickets and offered them to a friend and me. Betsy and I talked a little during the game, but not much.

  Finally, a few days later, I worked up the courage to call her and ask her out on a date. She accepted, and on our first date we played miniature golf. As we neared the end of the course, we added up our scores. Betsy was leading by seven strokes. As she tells the story, she thought to herself, I shouldn’t beat him on our first date. He’s an athlete! She also likes to tell how from that point, she began purposely hitting bad shots. But despite her best efforts to sabotage her own score, she still beat me by two strokes.

  Betsy was a very good athlete, so there was no shame in losing to her in miniature golf. In addition to softball, she also played tennis. I couldn’t tell it at the time, but she should have been playing left-handed. Back then, being right-handed was considered better than being left-handed. Betsy’s mother, a schoolteacher, trained her around age two to do everything right-handed. I wish I could have seen what kind of athlete Betsy would have developed into if she had been allowed to play from her natural side.

  At the end of our first date, Betsy told me that she was a Christian and asked whether I was too. I didn’t know then how bold a move that was for her. Much later she told me that she feared I might not go out with her again if she asked that question. But the truth is, her question made me like her even more.

  One of the many things I didn’t know about Betsy at first was her age. She was not quite fourteen, and I was five years older. She looked mature for her age, and I figured her to be about sixteen or seventeen. But even after I did learn her real age, it wasn’t much of a problem. Betsy looked much older than she was, for one. She had been raised by a single mother and had older sisters, so she had always been more grown-up than most girls her age. Besides, in the South in the 1950s, it was very common for a girl her age to be dating. Her mother approved of me, too, so that helped.

  Betsy was a load of fun and a strong Christian. When the spring of ’55 rolled around, as much as I was looking forward to getting back into baseball, I found it difficult to say good-bye to Betsy.

  For the 1955 season the Yankees shipped me westward, having me bypass Class AA to play for their top minor league team, the Triple-A Denver Bears of the American Association. Joining the Bears meant I was only one step from the major leagues. And I would be playing for Ralph Houk, who
was in his first season as a manager after spending eight seasons as a backup catcher with the Yankees.

  As a piece of trivia, it was in Denver where the name etched into my Louisville Slugger bats began reading “Bob Richardson.” I had been Robert growing up in Sumter, but that somehow was switched to Bob during my minor league career. I don’t know how I became known as Bobby, either, but that was the name that stuck throughout the rest of my baseball career.

  Betsy and I kept a steady stream of letters flowing back and forth during that season. I would send her letters on hotel stationery from the cities where we stayed. (She still has two rather large boxes filled with those letters.) Betsy knew our team schedule well. She had to, in order to make sure her letters to me wound up in the right places.

  As soon as one of us received a letter, we would write a reply and drop it in the mail to go out as soon as possible. Often Betsy would get a letter, pen her response immediately, and hurry to the post office to make sure it was postmarked by midnight and thus ensured of reaching me. If she knew I would be leaving a city soon, she would mail the letter ahead of us, so I often arrived in the next city with the special treat of a letter from Betsy waiting for me at the hotel front desk. I really looked forward to having a letter greet me when we arrived.

  Even though Betsy’s letters were great, I sure did miss talking to her in person. “Unchained Melody” was our song. The line “Time goes by so slowly” was certainly true for us while we were apart.

  I continued to play well in Denver and was selected to the league’s All-Star team. We were in the middle of the play-off race in early August, and I was hitting .296, with a career-high twelve triples, six home runs, and fifty-nine runs batted in, when Ralph said he needed to talk to me. “The Yankees want you to report to them tomorrow,” he said with a big smile.

  I was stunned. I had expected to spend the entire season in Denver. The Yankees were set in the infield, with Gil McDougald and Jerry Coleman at second, Phil Rizzuto and Billy Hunter at shortstop, and Andy Carey at third. (Billy Martin, who had been the starting second baseman, was serving his second year of military service.)