If at first he did not have the reputation as an athlete, he always had speed. Everyone at Southern seemed to know about how fast he was except Brock himself. Back where he came from in rural Louisiana, he thought, he was the slow one, and everyone else was faster. In Collinston, everyone could run. But at Southern he soon found himself at the center of a debate over who was the fastest person around. Some of the jocks argued for a young man named Harry Keyes, who was the conference sprint champion, but some argued for this young guy named Brock, who was not even a real jock. They woke him up around midnight and told him that he had to come down to the football field and race against Keyes. “If I do it,” Brock asked, still half asleep, “will you guys let me go back to sleep?” They said yes, and so he went over to the football field, where all the lights had been turned on, raced against Keyes, and smoked him.
Word of his speed got around, and there was even some talk about him trying out for football. While he was still at Southern one of the baseball coaches said that football might now be the sport for young black athletes, even more so than baseball, because the pro receivers had to be fast, and more and more of them, therefore, would be black: this meant that the players who could catch the fastest runners in the world, the defensive players, would also be black. Brock was given a quick inspection by one of the football coaches, who asked him to do one of the most basic drills in the football manual, a kick step. “What’s a kick step?” asked Brock. “Go back to baseball,” said the coach. Baseball would have to be his sport. He loved it; he had played it as a boy and in high school. He sometimes thought that the sound of the bat hitting the ball was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard. He was drawn to the game by its pace, at once languid and then fast. When he tried out for the team, he made it as a walk-on athlete. How good a player he was no one knew. The first thing Buck O’Neil saw was Brock’s speed, the kind of blinding speed he had not seen in a long time. O’Neil thought immediately of Cool Papa Bell, his old friend and teammate, who was by consensus the fastest man in a world populated by very fast players. Of Cool’s legendary speed, his roommate Satchel Paige once said that Cool was so fast, he could turn off the light and be in bed before the light was out.
Cool had been a little bit taller and a little slimmer than Brock, but this young man was already more powerfully built than Cool, with big shoulders and a tiny waist. A body built for power and speed, O’Neil thought. Even in the baggy old uniforms that Southern wore, you could tell he was strong and going to become even stronger. Buck O’Neil sensed that he had a great prospect, and from then on he watched Brock carefully as his talent began to surface. O’Neil also noticed the hunger in Brock. Whenever O’Neil was around Southern, talking with either Bob Lee or Emory Hines, the baseball coaches, somehow Lou Brock was always there too, a little shy, not unlike the young Ernie Banks when he joined the Monarchs. Banks had been full of questions, wanting to know everything about all the great black ballplayers of the past: Buck, tell me about Josh Gibson, Ernie would ask. Banks had always wanted to get better, and he would demand that O’Neil hit fifty grounders to the right of him and fifty to the left of him, and when that was done, he would demand that O’Neil hit more. “You got a few more in you, Skip?” Banks would ask. “I’m going to wear your hands out.” In a way, Banks had been a revelation. He was thinking not about being the best there was in the Negro leagues, he was thinking about playing in the major leagues and being the best there. Brock had that same drive, O’Neil soon decided.
Brock had not played particularly well in his freshman year—he hit only .140 and struck out frequently—but then he began to blossom in his sophomore year, when he hit .545 with 13 home runs in 27 games. Suddenly other scouts began to materialize. Southern became the first black school to win the NAIA title, and Brock became a member of the American baseball team at the Pan Am games in 1959. The Pan Am games became his first big showcase, and there was no way that O’Neil could hide him now, but he knew he had the inside track, for he had been there from the start. Besides, Brock seemed in no rush to sign. He would sign with a National League team, O’Neil was sure, for the scouts from each league were using the racial makeup of the other to their advantage: the National League scouts were pushing the more integrated quality of their league to young black prospects, while the American League scouts were quietly emphasizing to white prospects from the South that if they signed with an American League team, they would play with fewer blacks. O’Neil knew that little game well—he had played it himself whenever there was a young talented black prospect he was interested in.
The real move on Brock came after his junior year, when he was finally eligible to sign. That year had not gone as well as his sophomore year. It had been cold and rainy much of the time, and a number of Southern games had been canceled. The scouts were quick to move on to other cities. It was not a good season in which to be showcased, though he hit well over .300. There was still interest in him, though, most of it from the two Chicago teams, the White Sox and the Cubs, although, ironically, the Cardinals were interested too. A Cardinal scout named Charley Frey scouted him with unusual eagerness, and arranged, Brock believed, for him to come to St. Louis for a tryout. Brock, with almost no money to his name, got on a bus from Baton Rouge to St. Louis, thinking he had an appointment for a Cardinal tryout arranged and chaperoned by Frey. He paid for the ticket himself and had only ten dollars left in his pocket. When he got to St. Louis, there was neither a tryout nor Charley Frey. Frey turned out to have gotten his wires crossed, and was off in the state of Washington signing a pitcher named Ray Washburn. Brock found himself almost broke and friendless in St. Louis. It was a low point in his life. He felt terribly foolish and alone. But he still had the ten dollars in his pocket and one friend from back home in Chicago named Noah Pates, with whom he might stay. With the last of his money spent on the ticket to Chicago, Lou Brock boarded a bus and headed there. He stayed with Pates and worked washing walls and floors at the local YMCA while trying to get a big-league tryout. At least, he thought, he wasn’t quite as green as he had been a year earlier, when he had been invited to join the Pan Am team and had taken his first airplane flight, flying first class. When they had brought him the menu for lunch and asked him which selection he preferred, he had been terrified. There was no price attached to the menu, and he assumed it cost a huge sum, and with only three dollars in his pocket, he told the stewardess that no, he would skip the meal. “I never eat on planes,” he told her, and he arrived in Chicago absolutely starved and determined not to look like some hick in the big city. So, during the entire Pan Am games, whenever he was unsure how to behave, he would say, “Oh, hell, no, we didn’t do it that way at Southern.” Just like never eating on an airplane.
He got one tryout from the White Sox, but their interest seemed to have waned. The Cubs, well primed by O’Neil, were more serious. At the first workout, a player named Eddie Bouchee, the Cubs’ first baseman, took pity on Brock, so young and scared, and noticed that he was wearing what was quite possibly the shabbiest pair of spikes in baseball history. “Hey, kid, this is the big leagues, and to hit like a big leaguer, you want to feel like a big leaguer,” Bouchee said and handed him a pair of his own shoes. The only problem was that Bouchee wore a size nine and Brock a size ten, so Brock’s feet were badly cramped during the entire workout. The Cubs were impressed with his play, nevertheless, and they scheduled him for a second workout. In the meantime, Brock went out and, with the help of Pates, bought a pair of decent spikes that actually fit. The next workout went very well. Rarely had he seen the ball so clearly and hit it so hard. The Phillies were in town that day, and Gene Mauch apparently told one of the Cub coaches, “I don’t know what you guys are going to do, but that kid is not going to get out of here unsigned. Either you do it or we do it.”
Buck O’Neil was still sure he had the inside track on Brock, for early on he had gotten a promise from him that would allow O’Neil and the Cubs to make the last offer in a bidding war. By 196
0 he was absolutely sure of Brock’s ability. Brock did favor the Cubs because of O’Neil: of all the scouts, O’Neil was the one who hung around after a game, and would take him out for dinner, and would talk to him as a man—about what life in the big leagues was going to be like and how he was supposed to dress, and act. Brock thought that Buck O’Neil was the most elegant and graceful man he had ever met; he seemed to be the embodiment not only of the real world but of the rarest kind of success achieved by a black man. That summer O’Neil was on the road in Memphis when he got a call from John Holland, the Cubs’ general manager, saying that Brock was up in Chicago having a tryout with the White Sox and was going to have one with the Cubs as well. O’Neil flew there immediately. After his second Cub tryout, Brock signed for $12,000 with the Chicago Cubs. The Cubs gave him a check for $5,000, the first installment on his bonus, and he, a young man without a bank account, found a place to cash it in downtown Chicago and was handed back $5,000 in small bills, which he stuffed into his pants pockets as he headed for the Greyhound Station to go back to Baton Rouge.
The first stop in his pro career was in Class C ball in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and he did well. He thought he should be at a higher level, because he had finished his junior year in college, and most of his teammates seemed to be eighteen-year-old boys just out of high school, away from home for the first time, and desperately homesick. He burned up the league, and for a long time that season he even hoped to hit over .400 and perhaps record the highest batting average in the minor leagues. But no matter how well he hit, there was always this one other player who managed to stay a few points ahead of him, whom he could never catch, and about whom he often wondered. A few years later he was at spring training, and the Cubs were supposed to play the Twins, when someone called him over and said, “Lou Brock, I’d like you to meet Tony Oliva.” “How do you spell Oliva?” he asked the slim young man in front of him, who was to win three American League batting titles. Then Brock said, “I’m glad to finally meet you, Tony. I’ve thought about you a lot in the past.”
Because he did so well in his one season in the minor leagues, the Cubs brought him up at the end of 1961. He was in the outfield playing against the Cardinals when Stan Musial came to bat. With one out, Musial hit a rocket to right-center. Brock raced for the ball and made a great catch, but then he held on to the ball. Richie Ash-burn came over from center, and Brock was still holding the ball. “Kid, throw it back,” Ashburn said. But Brock continued to hold the ball, as if it were some kind of souvenir, which for him it was, for he had grown up listening to the exploits of Stan Musial. “Kid,” said Ashburn, “sooner or later, you’ve got to throw it back.” So that was it, he was in the big leagues, and the next season, when the Cubs played against Milwaukee, Warren Spahn hit him with a pitch, and as he ran down the first base line to take his base, he thought, I’ve been hit by the great Warren Spahn, for he believed it a point of honor that Warren Spahn had wanted to take him out. Then he heard Spahn’s voice yelling, “Fall down, fall down ... Goddammit, fall down so it will look like I’m throwing hard.”
12
IT WAS NOT A historic moment. The hitter came up in the fourth inning and drove the ball off Bill Monbouquette into the right-field stands for the first run of the game that the Yankees won. It was his tenth home run of the season, in the fiftieth game of the season, and it was also his third home run in three games in Boston. For many hitters, that might have been encouraging, but for Roger Maris, who had once broken Babe Ruth’s record for home runs in one season, it seemed to show only how much his power had declined in the three years since he and Mantle had chased Ruth’s record.
The year of the record was hard enough, but the year after it was worse; Maris found that, having pursued Ruth, he was now pursued himself by a press corps he did not want to talk to and by adoring fans whose adoration he did not seek. He responded by retreating deep into his shell, increasingly unhappy with how he was perceived by the fans, the writers, and even his employers. He became convinced that no matter what he said or did, he couldn’t win: if he played poorly the fans would get on him for failing, but if he played well they would criticize his presumption in playing well.
From the start he saw New York City as an alien and inhospitable place. He had been upset by the news of the trade that had brought him from Kansas City to New York. “I’m not all that happy about coming to New York,” he told the New York writers on his arrival for his first spring training as a Yankee in 1960. “I liked Kansas City. I expected to play out my career there.” On his arrival in New York as a Yankee he was met at La Guardia Airport by a man named Big Julie Isaacson, a wheeler-dealer who seemed to be right out of the cast of Guys and Dolls. Isaacson had been assigned by their mutual friend, Irv Noren, by then playing in the National League, to pick up Maris and help him find a place to live. Big Julie had been appalled by Maris’s clothes. There he was, this newest Yankee, without a sports jacket, and wearing a sweater, a polo shirt, and what appeared to Isaacson as a pair of inexpensive Pat Boone white bucks. “Roger,” Isaacson tried to explain, “the Yankees don’t dress like that. They wear jackets and shirts and ties. You’ve got to change the clothes.” “If they don’t like the way I dress they can send me back to Kansas City,” Maris said. “At least,” Isaacson suggested, “get rid of the Pat Boone shoes.” The next day Isaacson picked up Maris at his hotel to see if they could find a place for him to live, and Isaacson continued his assault on Maris’s wardrobe. First and foremost the shoes had to go, he said. “Roger, you just can’t dress like that in this city—it’s too hick.” “Where’s the nearest Thom McAn store?” Maris replied. “Why?” Isaacson asked. “Because these are the only pair I have and I want to buy another pair, and Thom McAn is the only place that carries them.” So off they went to Thom McAn, and Maris bought two pairs. That, Julie Isaacson decided years later, was the definitive Roger Maris story. The moral of it could have become his epithet: Don’t tell me what I have to do, don’t lean on me.
Life is filled with self-fulfilling prophecies, and, fittingly enough, the longer Maris played in New York, the less he liked it. He was a small-town boy raised in Fargo, North Dakota, and he remained a small-town boy the rest of his life. He did not lightly accommodate to anything that was different, nor was he ever anxious to change his ways. He was what he was, and the world of New York owners, New York sportswriters, New York fans, and even New York baseball players would have to take him for that or find someone else. The more he was pressured to change, the more he resented that very pressure, and the less flexible he became. Confronted with any kind of resistance, he tended to bristle and pull in. He was a player, said one teammate who never heard the cheers but always remembered the boos. Late into his tour in New York, he bought a memento from a novelty store which he placed on the stool by his locker: it was a plastic hand with the middle finger extended upward into the air.
It was part of the irony of Maris’s celebrated but painful career in the big city that he was made to order for Yankee Stadium and its short right-field fence. He was a great pull hitter—in fact, Mike Shannon thought that he never saw a hitter who was as good at pulling an outside pitch as Roger Maris. A lot of hitters, Shannon thought, could pull the inside pitch, but pulling a ball outside was much harder; it demanded a very good eye and a very, very quick bat and no wasted motion in the swing. Maris was not a particularly big man at six feet tall and 190 pounds, but he was a superb all-around athlete and he had a short, sweet swing. Few baseball players channeled their power and muscle through their bodies as successfully as Roger Maris did. To this day the photos of him swinging at a ball are unusually striking, because his entire body is fused so perfectly: shoulders, arms, and legs, leveraged as one piece, nothing wasted. Because his swing was shorter and more compact than Mantle’s, his home runs were not as majestic; instead of being carried ever higher and higher, going toward the third tier, they were line shots that had extra distance but not that much loft to them. The difference in thei
r swings can be measured by their strikeouts in 1961: in that season Maris came up 590 times, hit 61 home runs, and struck out only 67 times, whereas Mantle came up 514 times, hit 54 home runs, and, with that huge swing, which surrendered contact for power, struck out 112 times.
Maris, who had thought for a time of playing college football, was fast and had an exceptionally strong and accurate arm. Baseball professionals in those days rated him as almost the equal of Al Kaline, then considered the best defensive right fielder in the league. The threat his arm posed to enemy base runners was considerable, and it had kept Matty Alou on third in the crucial play of the 1962 World Series. Maris also ran the bases exceptionally well; in 1961, even though he was pursuing Ruth’s record, he still played hard on defense and went into second base hard, risking personal injury for the good of the team.
October 1964 Page 18
