Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

  In 1933, the year of Franklin Roosevelt’s inaugural, none of the 16 major-league clubs drew as many as 750,000 fans at their 77 home games. One club, the St. Louis Browns—sportswriters customarily called them the Hapless Browns—drew fewer than 100,000—for an entire season. In the National League, the Philadelphia Phillies—in sportswriter jargon the Phutile Phillies—drew barely over 150,000. We are talking about gatherings of 1,200 to 2,000 fans on sunny afternoons in ballparks built to hold crowds of 35,000. When my father took me to Ebbets Field during the mid-1930s, we could arrive 15 minutes before game time and find good seats between home plate and first base priced at $1.10. Until I grew taller than the old-fashioned Brooklyn turnstiles, I was admitted free. That was the policy, kids shorter than the turnstile gained free admission, provided, of course, that they were accompanied by an adult who paid for his ticket. (The range went like this: bleachers 55 cents; general admission $1.10; reserved seats $1.65; boxes $2.20. Luxury boxes? There was no such animal.)

  Inside, a nickel bought you a scorecard featuring the lineups and an advertisement for Between the Acts Little Cigars. These scorecards appeared in black and white. Glossy color scorecards had not yet been invented. All game long, vendors bellowed, “Hey, frank ’n’ a roll here!” as they hawked Stahl-Meyer hot dogs. I remember those hot dogs as being just about the finest food on earth. They cost 10 cents. The Gulden’s mustard was free.

  In 1934 the Dodgers drew 434,188 for 70 home dates. Empty seats were the order of the day. The team wasn’t much that year, finishing sixth under a novice major-league manager named Casey Stengel. Only one regular, third baseman “Jersey Joe” Stripp, hit .300. The pitching was mediocre except for the great fireballer Van Lingle Mungo, who won 18. But losing games was not the greatest problem facing the Brooklyn National League Baseball Club, Inc. Unable to pay down their bank mortgage, the Depression Dodgers faced a continuing threat of bankruptcy.

  Our family moved from Alsace, in eastern France, to Brooklyn in 1848, and came to develop great pride in their new native ground. But my father kept his civic pride well damped, except at the ballpark. Here, in casual conversations with other fans, he maintained, among the empty seats, that Brooklyn in truth was a great baseball town. The greatest. “If we had a decent team,” he’d say, “we’d draw a million.” (When the Dodgers won the pennant in 1941, after a wretched drought lasting 20 years, home attendance totaled 1,214,910, the highest in the major leagues by a margin of several hundred thousand. Branch Rickey came to agree with my father that Brooklyn was a great and special baseball town. It remained so until Walter O’Malley hijacked the franchise to Los Angeles.)

  Like most other businesses in Depression days, baseball was dominated by frugality. Although Lou Gehrig finally drew $40,000 a year from the Yankees, the average major leaguer’s salary in 1933 was $6,000. Ballplayers took winter jobs as factory watchmen, mill hands and clothing salesmen. (That persisted even into the 1950s when Gil Hodges, the Dodgers’ slugging first baseman, sold Buicks in a Flatbush Avenue dealership during the winter.) The best Depression ballplayers—those with the most crowd appeal—turned to post-season barnstorming for extra revenue. Before television, just to see great big leaguers in uniform was an event to be remembered in a hundred American towns along a million miles of American railroad track. These rolling road shows were less tightly structured than regular-season baseball. Here, every October, in a country badly overdrawn, the common pursuit of cash wiped out the supposedly ineradicable cotton curtain.

  Joe DiMaggio played in exhibition games against black teams in 1937 after his fine rookie season in New York, when he hit .323. He confessed later that doubts lingered about his own ability consistently to hit big-league pitching. But then he said, “When I was barnstorming I came up against [the Negro League right-hander] Satchel Paige, who was the best and fastest pitcher I ever faced. When I lined one of his fastballs for a single, I knew I’d be okay. If you could get a hit off Paige, you could hit anybody.”

  Jay Hanna “Dizzy” Dean, the most famous pitcher in the major leagues, lost an exhibition game to Paige by a single run. Afterward he announced cheerfully, “If Satch and I was pitching on the same team, we’d cinch the pennant by July fourth and go fishin’ until World Series time.”

  After barnstorming with blacks, Johnny Vander Meer of Prospect Park, New Jersey, who would later throw consecutive no-hit shutouts for the Cincinnati Reds, said, “I don’t see why the colored guys are barred.” No fewer than four major-league managers, Burleigh Grimes of Brooklyn, Bill McKechnie of Cincinnati, Fred Haney of the St. Louis Browns and Jimmy Dykes of the Chicago White Sox, said that they had seen many Negro players with big-league potential, including Jackie Robinson, whom Dykes watched play ball for Pasadena City College. But when Herman Hill, a reporter for the Pittsburgh Courier, brought a very young Robinson to a White Sox spring camp in Pasadena for a tryout, Dykes turned him away. He said, “An actual tryout would have to be up to the club owners and Judge Landis.” Neil Lanctot reports in his history, Negro League Baseball, that “several white players hovered around Robinson menacingly, with bats in their hands.”

  During the 1937 season, Satchel Paige made an astonishing proposal. He suggested that the World Series winner take on a team of all-stars from the Negro Leagues. Paige of course would pitch for the all-stars. Massive, genial Josh Gibson, “the black Babe Ruth,” would catch. “Cool Papa” Bell, the fastest man in baseball, would play center field. Paige once observed, “If Cool Papa had known about colleges or if colleges had known about Cool Papa, Jesse Owens would have looked like he was walking.” These black athletes would comprise a team of speed and sinew and spirit.

  The 1937 World Series winner was (surprise) the New York Yankees, among the mightiest of ball clubs. Gehrig, at first base, batted .351 and hit 37 home runs. He drove in 159 runs. DiMaggio, in center field, hit .346 with 46 homers and 15 triples. Vernon “Lefty” Gomez won 21 games and led the league with a 2.39 earned run average. This Yankee squad collectively hit .278 and finished 13 games ahead of the second-place Detroit Tigers.

  I believe that the match Paige proposed would have sold out Yankee Stadium, which then could hold 70,000 people. It might well have produced a ballgame for the ages. Paige, no slouch at business and a pretty fair gambling man, wanted all receipts after expenses to go to the ballplayers. He added an interesting proviso: Winner Take All.

  What happened next? Nothing happened next. The white stars simply ignored Paige and this fabulous ballgame never took place. Some Yankees grumbled that they didn’t want to play without a guaranteed check. But a larger consideration was at work. How would it look if the lordly Yankees, rulers of all they surveyed, unchallenged emperors of segregated baseball, were put to rout by nine itinerant black men? Not great for the forces of White Supremacy.

  Organized baseball continued to ignore Satchel Paige until the season of 1948, when Bill Veeck signed him for the Cleveland Indians. During a tryout Veeck placed a book of matches on home plate and said to Paige, “I want to see you throw your fastball over that.”

  Paige asked, “Which match?”

  As a 42-year-old major-league rookie, Paige started seven games for Cleveland. He won six.

  ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

  THE 1930S CONTINUED TO throb with pain and change. The Depression persisted. With Adolf Hitler unbound, the world, including isolationist America, lurched toward war. The alarming drumbeats of pain and change grew ever louder.

  Ben Chapman, a Nashville native, played a strong right field for the Yankees, consistently batting .300 and stealing as many as 61 bases in a season. Chapman was an intelligent man and an accomplished bridge player. He was also a redneck with a trigger temper.

  After he butchered a fly ball early in the 1936 season, fans began to jeer. Some chanted, “Chapman is a bum.” He took the razzing for a while; it goes with the territory. But at length he turned and shouted into the grandstands, “Why don’t you fucking Jew bastards shut up!”


  Fans complained and the Yankee management responded quickly by trading Chapman to the Washington Senators for Alvin “Jake” Powell. Jewish New Yorkers were prominent purchasers of Yankee tickets. Two years later, on July 29, 1938, Bob Elson, a prominent sports broadcaster, was interviewing Powell for a radio program emanating from Comiskey Park in Chicago. “What do you do in the wintertime, Jake?” Elson asked.

  “I’m a cop back home in Dayton, Ohio,” Powell said. Actually, he was a private guard at a General Motors factory.

  “I guess that keeps you in shape,” Elson said.

  “I stay in shape,” Powell said, “by hitting niggers over the head with my nightstick.”

  The radio station cut off the program, but even in the raw racial climate of the time, Powell had crossed a line. Commissioner Landis suspended Powell for six games. “Judge Landis,” wrote the black journalist Ed Harris in the Philadelphia Tribune, “is giving a lesson in decency and good sense.”

  Powell visited the Harlem offices of the Amsterdam News, where he read a statement prepared with the help of Yankee management. He had “high regard for the Negro people,” Powell said. He employed black servants in his home. Should major-league integration ever come to pass, he would have no trouble accepting it.

  Black fans and some whites booed Powell around the league and he never fully recovered. He was out of baseball a few years later. After being arrested in Washington, DC, on a bad-check charge in 1948, Jake Powell committed suicide.

  A journalist named Jim Reisler has gathered the work of 10 black sportswriters into a collection called Black Writers/Black Baseball. In some areas of the integration story, Reisler is shaky. But we are not talking serious criticism, such as the prose of Alfred Kazin here, just basic research. Reisler has done very good work studying and transcribing the sports pages of defunct black newspapers. Less anger and fewer demands for integration appeared there than one might expect.

  The two most renowned black sportswriters of my acquaintance were Sam Lacy of Baltimore, who wrote for a chain of Afro-American weekly newspapers, and Wendell Smith, a Detroit native who worked for the Pittsburgh Courier, then spent his halcyon years with white-owned newspapers and television stations in Chicago. Although each had to endure such humiliations as being barred from press boxes and press drinking rooms, neither was a firebrand. Sam was short and wiry, with sharp features inherited from his mother, a Shinnecock Indian. Wendell was bespectacled and mustached, mild mannered and with a ready smile.

  Lacy said once, “Black players in general weren’t bothered by the fact that they couldn’t be in the majors. It’s like Redd Foxx used to say, ‘I never knew I was poor because everybody around me was poor, too.’ Most of the black players [and perhaps Sam Lacy himself] were satisfied with what they were doing and thought the closed society was just something to be endured.” In 1948 Lacy became the first black member of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. In 1997, on the day before his 94th birthday, he was admitted to the writers’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Sam died on May 8, 2003, acclaimed as a pioneer, although the man I knew was soft-voiced, courteous and decidedly diffident.

  Cancer killed Wendell Smith in 1972, when he was 58. The “strange tribe” story cited earlier was about as militant as Wendell got. I remember mostly a man of great geniality. Widely liked, he became part of the Establishment.

  The one black journalist directly to confront the baseball color line was Joe Bostic, who was as much a promoter as a newspaperman. Bostic, who lived in Brooklyn and rooted for the Dodgers, spent three years as sports editor of the People’s Voice, a short-lived Harlem weekly founded by the flamboyant preacher and congressman Adam Clayton Powell. The People’s Voice carried a motto on its masthead: “A Militant Paper Serving All the People. The New Voice for the New Negro.” Before settling in for a few years as sports editor of the People’s Voice, Bostic had been a radio announcer and a theatrical publicity man.

  During World War II, train transportation in the United States was hard to come by and baseball teams took spring training in the north. The Dodgers based at Bear Mountain, a resort renowned as a rugged playground and ski-jumping center about 50 miles north of New York City. Under the mountain, ample grassy meadows stretched on the west bank of the Hudson River. The Bear Mountain Inn, a rustic stone-and-timber structure with an upscale dining room, served as Dodger headquarters. Nearby stood the sprawling US Military Academy at West Point. When the days were mild, the ballplayers drilled on a meadow diamond called, pro tem, Durocher Field. When the weather turned cold and snowy the Dodgers worked out inside the vast Army field house. “The whole place surprised me,” said young Duke Snider, a Southern California kid. “I’d never seen snow and I’d never owned an overcoat. Mr. Rickey gave me a very modest signing bonus, $500. My dad was away in the merchant marine and I gave almost all the money to my mom. Now at Bear Mountain I didn’t have a coat and I couldn’t afford to buy one. What did I do? What do you think I did? I was cold a lot.”

  With zero advance warning, Joe Bostic appeared at Bear Mountain on April 6, 1945, bringing along two athletes from the Negro National League. This was less than a month after Governor Dewey had signed the fair employment act, and Bostic now demanded tryouts. Terris McDuffie was a right-handed pitcher with the Newark Eagles. Dave “Showboat” Thomas was a big first baseman with the New York Cubans. According to their contemporaries, McDuffie and Thomas were journeymen rather than stars. The greatest Negro League players of the time were Paige, Bell and Josh Gibson, “the Black Bambino.” Close behind came third baseman Ray Dandridge, pitcher–catcher Ted “Double-Duty” Radcliffe, and a rookie shortstop named Jackie Robinson.

  Bostic later described his trip as “an epochal break in baseball’s stone wall of Jim Crow.” It was not exactly that. As Robinson later demonstrated, it would take nothing less than a super athlete to tear down that wall. (Make no mistake, Robinson was a super athlete. He won letters at UCLA in baseball, basketball, football and track. Some maintain that he was the greatest all-around athlete who ever lived. Jack and I competed once at a ping-pong table in Vero Beach, after I had defeated a string of Dodgers, mostly pitchers. Jack held the paddle facing downward, as some Chinese world-class players did, and no matter how hard or where I hit the little white ball, it came back harder and with a devilish spin. Robinson was totally concentrated, his face without expression. My ping-pong winning streak abruptly came to an end. “Now,” Robinson said, finally smiling and meeting my gaze, “would you like to take me on in gin rummy? For dough?” I declined.)

  On Durocher Field, Bostic approached peppery, toothy Harold Parrott, a former Brooklyn Eagle sports columnist, who was the Dodgers’ traveling secretary and publicist. Bostic said he intended to see Branch Rickey. “I want him to give these fellows here a tryout.”

  Spring training tends to be informal, but asking to see the president of a ball club without first having made an appointment was and is a stretch. (Seeing some executives, such as George Steinbrenner in his later years, was a stretch—even with an appointment. Baseball organizations generally are about as transparent as carbon.) Parrott told Bostic that Rickey was watching an intrasquad game on another diamond and said, “I’ll see if he’ll talk to you later.”

  After 15 minutes Parrott returned with one of Rickey’s assistants, an elderly front office aide named Bob Finch. “Mr. Rickey says to tell you that there is no bias in his organization,” Finch said, “but we won’t look at the players until we’ve set up workouts for them. That will take a little time. Now Mr. Rickey would like you and the ballplayers to be his guests for lunch.”

  In the dining room at the Bear Mountain Inn, Rickey told Bostic that personally he detested prejudice. Then, with great intensity, he repeated the story of Charles Thomas and the hotel in South Bend. Carried away by the memory, or by his own words, Rickey suddenly burst into tears. Embarrassed, Bostic focused on his roast beef. When Rickey recovered, he was not congenial.

  “Look,” he said
. “You’re pretty cute.”

  “No, I’m not cute,” Bostic said. “I’m not concerned with being cute. I brought you two ballplayers.”

  “Yes,” Rickey said, “but if I give these men a tryout, you’ve got the greatest sports story of the century. And if I don’t give them a tryout, you’ve got the greatest sports story because it’s an absolute showdown. I don’t appreciate being backed into this kind of corner.”

  Rickey then agreed to look over McDuffie and Thomas a day later. He was true to his word, but apparently never forgave Bostic for publicly pressuring him. According to Bostic, subsequently he found himself cut off from Dodger press releases, not invited to Dodger press conferences and unable to reach Dodger people by telephone. In an angry outburst Bostic said, “Rickey treated me as though I was a ‘fresh nigger.’”

  The tryout took place early on a Saturday afternoon, April 7. McDuffie and Thomas reported to the Dodger dressing room in the West Point Field House, where uniforms had been laid out for them. Jackie Robinson was not the first black to wear a Brooklyn Dodger uniform. That man was either Terris McDuffie or Showboat Thomas. (I have been unable to determine which one first finished lacing up his spikes.)

  It was a cold day and the tryout took place entirely in the field house. As he observed, Rickey was accompanied by two baseball men who had no racial prejudice: Dodgers manager Leo Durocher, later a surrogate father to Willie Mays, and Clyde Sukeforth, a onetime catcher from the village of Washington, Maine, who would later do extensive scouting work on Robinson.

  At Rickey’s direction the two athletes ran laps and then threw to one another. Sukeforth put on catching gear—the tools of ignorance, in the baseball phrase—and McDuffie began pitching. After a bit Rickey began calling pitches: curve, fastball, change. According to Bostic, Rickey “marveled at Mac’s control.”