October 1964

by David Halberstam

  If White was apprehensive about St. Louis, he soon found that the city was changing. The people in the Cardinal organization made an effort to ease his way. Bing Devine was helpful, as was Al Fleishman, who did public relations for The Brewery and thought the integration of the Cardinal team one of the most important things on his agenda. Bob Hyland, general manager of KMOX—the powerful radio station that broadcast the Cardinal games—soon became a friend. Certainly the fiasco of the St. Petersburg breakfast meeting had been an early lesson to them, but they were all, in their ways, exceptional men and, more than most men in baseball in that era, understood the social problems of integration. They helped Bill White to find better housing as the size of his family increased; when he bought his third house in a white suburb, Bing Devine asked his lawyer to represent White in completing the sale, which gave it the imprimatur of the Cardinals and removed many potential racial difficulties. Hyland, as a gift, landscaped the entire grounds, and Johnny Keane, by then the manager, gave him a tree as a housewarming present. Those were, Bill White thought, generous acts at a time when few white people did things like that. Jack Buck, the broadcaster, had also tried to help him buy a house in his neighborhood—but houses there cost about $60,000 at the time and Bill White made only $12,000 a year. These men wanted Bill White to feel that he not only played for their team but was a friend and a part of their world as well.

  He did well in St. Louis. At first he tried to power every ball. He had, after all, hit 22 home runs in the massive Polo Grounds as a Giant rookie, and he was sure he could hit 40 in the smaller Sportsman’s Park, so he swung for the fences every time. After a few weeks he was hitting .091, so he turned to Harry Walker, the hitting coach. Walker was a pure baseball man, and he could talk about the science of hitting for hours. He was an exceptionally talented, albeit demanding coach, a relentless perfectionist. When, either in a game or in batting practice, a hitter did something that displeased him, he would instantly yell out. He hated wasting a single at bat.

  It struck Bill White in his first encounters with Harry Walker that the old racial attitudes might still be there. But Walker was a professional above all, and he was going to teach this big, strong young man how to hit, whether either of them liked it or not. It was obvious to Walker that White needed to learn how to discipline himself, and he had to learn that he could not pull every pitch. Walker had watched Bill White during spring training and thought he was potentially a very good hitter. He sensed White’s problem then: a man that strong on a team that lacked power hitters might be tempted to muscle the ball all the time. White had enjoyed a very good spring and had hit something like seven home runs in the preseason. That early success, Walker thought, would almost surely push him even more toward trying to be a pure power hitter. Spring training, Walker believed, was a deceptive time: the pitchers were not yet ready, and they did not go to their full repertoire, particularly their change-ups. Walker decided that he would not push White, but that he would let him start the season, and if things went wrong, then he would talk with him. But before that could happen, White, by then hitting below .100, came to Walker. “Harry, if we don’t do something, I’m going to be out of this league,” White told the coach. They were in Los Angeles at the old Coliseum, and Walker suggested they go out early each day before the other players were around, to work on his hitting. “You’re trying to hit a home run every time up,” he said. “Don’t do it—just try and hit the ball up the middle.” Walker taught Bill White to use his hands; to go inside out on his swing, but still to swing hard, in order to hit to left field; and, above all, how to use the entire field. “Damn it, Harry,” Harry Caray the broadcaster said, watching their workouts one day, “you’re going to take a power hitter and turn him into a Punch and Judy hitter.” No, said Walker, he was going to make him into a good hitter who could hit to all fields but who still had power. He was still to swing hard, Walker emphasized, but if he would wait just a fraction of a second instead of trying to pull everything, and if he would go with the pitch, he would not lose all his power.

  Despite the immense social, cultural, and generational gaps that lay between them, there developed just the slightest glimmer of friendship. Harry Walker was born to teach; as a coach he had an almost maniacal need to pass on to others everything he had ever learned, and there were few more apt students in baseball than Bill White, a world-class listener. “You have to have one very good year to know what you can’t do,” Walker kept telling White, “and when you have your very best year, then you’ve learned your limitations. Then and only then you can understand what you can and can’t do.” When they discussed subjects other than baseball, such as race, the gulf between them was enormous. Harry Walker would talk about what he thought was wrong with blacks as he knew them in the South—that they were shiftless and lazy, that they did not take care of their property. It was not easy for Bill White to hear such things, but he came to respect Walker’s honesty and fairness; in some ways, at least, his mind was not closed. By July of that first year White was hitting over .360 and he made the All-Star team. He knew he owed a considerable debt to Harry Walker and he came to believe that he never would have lasted thirteen years in the big leagues if it had not been for Walker.

  White’s bat was critical to this Cardinal team. During the 1963 season he dove for a ball along the first base line and bruised his shoulder. Johnny Keane took him aside and said, “From now on don’t dive for any balls. It’s not worth it. And don’t go into second base trying to take out the second baseman. It’s too big a risk. We need you for all one hundred and sixty-two games.” That season, his best year in the majors, he hit 27 home runs, knocked in 109 runs, and hit .304. But the 1964 season, to which he had looked forward, was turning into a disaster because of his shoulder injury. He hated feeling weak and knowing that his physical condition was directly responsible for the team’s poor performance.

  While he was in New York he spent some time with Bob Boyle, who had become a friend when Boyle had written a wonderful piece on the last black barnstorming tour for Sports Illustrated. White told Boyle of his problems. Boyle thought that perhaps White was not getting the absolute best medical treatment available (in fact, Boyle thought that most team doctors in that era got their jobs by dint of being drinking buddies of the owners, an assumption that was sometimes not far from wrong). He suggested that perhaps White might see a specialist in New York. Boyle sent him to a distinguished orthopedic surgeon named Hans Kraus, who had helped Boyle with his severe back problems. Kraus was famous, having helped treat John Kennedy for his chronic back problems. White went to see him and Dr. Kraus immediately gave him a shot. Unlike the team doctor, who had targeted an area in the front of the shoulder, Dr. Kraus went after a spot in the back and White felt immediate relief. A few days later, in a doubleheader in Pittsburgh, White celebrated by getting six hits, including two home runs, and knocking in five runs. The Cardinals swept the series. It was the kind of day a power hitter should have and which he had not had all year. A critical piece had been restored to the Cardinal lineup.

  16

  JIM BOUTON WAS HAVING a hard time pitching in the early summer. His back had been hurting constantly since the spring, and he was not able to throw his fastball with full force. Bouton was a power pitcher without a power pitcher’s body—too small by the usual standards to be a big-league fastball pitcher; in his own words, he was a Volkswagen at the Indianapolis 500. His fastball was, at best, in the low nineties, and if he lost anything on it, then he was immediately vulnerable. Other, bigger, stronger, pitchers might encounter physical problems, but they would be strong enough or experienced enough to pitch their way through them; with Bouton there was no buffer zone, everything had to be perfect. Here he was, in his second big season, after winning twenty-one games in 1963, and he was without his real strength, which meant increasingly that balls hit off him were home runs. Curiously, Bouton was not in unbearable pain. He went to see Dr. Sydney Gaynor, who told him, “Son, if it hurts
, just don’t throw.” It didn’t hurt, but he just could not throw as hard as he wanted to. He kept wondering what he was doing wrong. In June and July he experimented with his mechanics, but things only got worse. He was adjusting, except that his adjustments were the wrong ones.

  Then, in mid-season, his shoulder and back began to feel better. His body was somehow healing itself. Later he was diagnosed as having had a low-grade chronic strain of the brachialis muscle, which attaches the biceps to the bone; this injury would, in any real sense, end his career as a power pitcher the next season. In retrospect, the fact that he had chronic arm and shoulder problems was not surprising, because he threw as hard as he could on every pitch, with a delivery so ferocious that his cap often flew off. He was well aware of his tenuous position as a star major-league pitcher. When he was pitching well he was able to get seven or eight strikeouts a game, but the line between being a star major-league pitcher and being out of the business entirely was a thin one for him, and he was well aware of it. He was, as much as anyone, the first fan as player, as a teammate once told him, someone for whom being a major-leaguer was an unlikely, indeed almost giddy, experience. It was not surprising that in some sense at least he always remained an outsider, able to see the frailties and vulnerabilities of big-leaguers in a way that most players, who had always expected to play in the majors, did not. It was not surprising that when his career was over he became not a coach but a writer. He had always had to work hard at being a baseball player. He barely made his high school team. Only in his senior year had he been able to pitch, and until then his nickname had been “Warm-up” Bouton. He was a walk-on player at Western Michigan, and he did not do well there, but then one summer he played for a very good team in an amateur league in Chicago, the Cook’s Sportscraft. Even here his career did not look bright (he was their number-four pitcher) until the National Amateur Championship in Battle Creek, Michigan, a double-elimination tournament. His team went up against a famed team from Cincinnati, which, it was said, never scored fewer than fifteen runs. The place was loaded with scouts, and that day Bouton pitched the single best game of his life, striking out ten, and after the game the scouts swarmed over him. His parents, who were middle class, thought the world of professional baseball a perilous place, and his father had made him agree that he would not sign unless he got a $30,000 bonus. The Yankee offer was considerably under that: a $6,000 bonus and three years guaranteed at $500 a month for five months, plus an additional $10,000 bonus if he made the big-league team. As far as Bouton was concerned, that was $30,000 and more, and his father, knowing, how much his son wanted to try professional baseball, finally gave permission.

  He found himself starting the 1959 season with the Yankee Class D team at Auburn, where very shortly thereafter he was hit in the right hand with a line drive and broke the thumb on his pitching hand. That finished him at Auburn, where his record was a less-than-inspiring 1-4 and his ERA was 5.73. Things were not looking good. After the accident he was sent out to the Yankee rookie team in Kearney, Nebraska, and told to work as hard as he could to keep his right arm from atrophying. His arrival in Kearney was inauspicious; he checked into his hotel, went immediately to the hotel room of the manager, Jimmy Gleeson, and announced eagerly that he was Jim Bouton, the new pitcher who had been sent out by the Yankees. Gleeson looked up at him, shook his head, and said, “Young man, I’m going to give you a great piece of advice. Don’t ever knock on a manager’s door without first calling from the lobby. It just so happens that it doesn’t matter to me, but there may be other managers, if you go higher up, who may be entertaining guests. So I’d be careful about it in the future.” In Kearney he worked out and pitched in a few games, and his record was 2-4 with an ERA of 5.40. For most young players in Bouton’s position, this would have been a dark moment. But Bouton was curiously optimistic. From Kearney he wrote his father a letter that began by saying that he was at the absolute bottom of the barrel, that he had a broken pitching hand, that he was still listed with the Class D team, the lowest ranking one of the thirteen teams in the Yankee organization, and that since there were ten pitchers per team, he ranked himself as the 130th pitcher in the Yankee organization. “But I think I’m going to make it,” he concluded. Years later that confidence astounded him, and he often wondered where it had come from.

  It came, Bouton later decided, from an intuitive sense of how to deal with adversity. In high school, when he had not made the team, his love of the sport had kept him going. Now, he thought, as he grew stronger and a little heavier, perhaps his body was catching up with his hunger for the sport. In addition, he had begun to notice that, although the other young pitchers with him were taller, stronger, and far better credentialed, they seemed emotionally vulnerable. That vulnerability, he thought, came from the easy, early successes in their lives, when they had almost always been the biggest and strongest players among their boyhood peers, and therefore inevitably chosen as pitchers. As such, few had had to deal with adversity before. Now, for the first time, they were being subjected to physical and emotional stress. They had been sent to large, impersonal rookie camps where they were given numbers to put on the backs of their uniforms—and by this act alone, they were shorn of their individuality and perhaps their confidence. In addition, for the first time, they were pitching against other kids who were big and strong, and who had also always been the best. Bouton noticed something else about the other young men: because they had been high school stars, life in general had always been relatively easy for them. They had been invariably treated by their communities as local heroes; good usually not just in baseball but in basketball and football too; captains, it seemed, of all three sports, and thereby catered to; and always favored by the society around them. Now, starting out in these lower rungs of baseball where the amenities of life were quite marginal, they were dealing with being away from home for the first time. They missed their families, and they missed their girlfriends, and they missed those coaches who had been dependent upon them and who had treated them as if they were their own children, and in some cases better than their own children. They became homesick and their confidence had begun to desert them. When things went wrong they did not have the inner resilience to deal with their problems. When things went wrong in a game and their anger flared, they had a hard time controlling their tempers because this had never happened before. When they lost two games in a row, they got down on themselves, and it was harder for them to control their disappointment and depression. When their talent alone no longer carried them, they were not as smart about making adjustments, about listening to older pitchers who might teach them a new pitch. Whatever else, that was not Jim Bouton’s problem. He was by nature mentally tough. Hardship and disappointment had come early for him.

  His career seemed fluky from the start. In 1960 he was sent to Greensboro in the Class B League, expecting that as the players moved downward in the beginning of the season (a few pitchers released from the major-league team would go to Triple A, and they in turn would move the Triple A pitchers to Double A, etc.), he would end up in Class C or perhaps Class D again. But right before the cut, a pitcher named Dooley Womack, who was supposed to pitch a game, had a sore arm, so Bouton pitched and won. A few days later, with Womack still unable to pitch, Bouton won again. They kept him in the rotation and he was 4-0 when it was time to make the cut, so he stayed with Greensboro and made the All-Star team. He pitched well there, winning 14 games and losing only 8, with a league-leading earned run average of 2.73, and that won him a chance to go to spring training with the major-league team.

  No one was more surprised than he at having gone so far in so short a time. He was nothing if not a quick study and an eager student. In 1961 he already possessed at least a fair fastball, a good curve, a slider, and a knuckler, and he went over to Johnny Sain during spring training and asked him what he needed to do to become a big-league pitcher. Sain told him he needed to define himself better—that he had a good selection of pitches, but that h
e had to figure out which was his best pitch and then devote a disproportionate amount of time to developing it. He had to make that basic pitch his strength, so that the people in charge of the team knew what kind of pitcher he was. “What they look for down here is potential—that is, velocity and movement,” Sain said. “That can’t be taught. The other stuff, location, finesse, how to work against the hitters, they figure they can teach you. But the speed of the fastball—and whether it has movement—that’s what matters and that’s what you have to show them from the start. That’s what they’ll look for in the very small amount of time that you have to work with them watching.” Then Sain told him his own highly idiosyncratic philosophy of how the body behaves, that the body was all about memory: “It wants to do today what it did in the last few days. If you’ve run a lot in recent weeks, it wants to run today. If you’ve been throwing hard, it wants to throw hard. If you’ve been sitting down and doing nothing, it wants to sit down and do nothing.” Therefore, he said, the best thing Bouton could do for his body was to throw hard, because in the end that was what his body would respond to. So Bouton worked religiously on his fastball that spring and summer, experimenting with how he held the seams of the ball to see which grip allowed it to move the most. Told as well that he needed a change, he studied how Pete Mikkelsen threw his exceptional palm ball—Mikkelsen reared back and seemingly threw as hard as he could, but despite the violent arm motion, the ball traveled very slowly to the plate—and got Mikkelsen to teach it to him.

  During the 1961 season he pitched at Amarillo in the Texas League, which was Double A ball. There he played with Pepitone and Linz. That was a good team and, even more, a wild team. The Texas League was so grim, the bus rides so long and so rarely air-conditioned, that they all played hard, in fear of being returned there for the next season. Then, exhausted by the bus rides and the heat, they played hard both on and off the field. In the middle of the season their manager, Sheriff Robinson, was called home, and for a time it was as if the inmates truly ran the asylum. Then one day they were at the pool next to their motel, practicing dives, and Bouton was on the diving board when he heard a voice saying, “Bouton—you hit the water, and it will cost you fifty dollars.” The Sheriff was back, and the party was over. It was a good season: he had made the All-Star team and, in a brutal hitter’s league, where the ball always seemed to carry, he won 13, lost 7, and kept his earned run average at 2.97—a major victory of sorts.