by Allen Barra
Chet Brewer, for instance. Willie had gotten two hits off the right-hander in his first game with the Black Barons, and Brewer got his revenge when he faced Willie again. Making no pretense of brushing him back, Brewer simply fired a fastball right into Mays’s left arm. The teenager crumpled to the ground; he would recall that as the hardest he had ever been hit up to that time. Piper Davis knew this was a situation Willie would have to learn to deal with as he moved on up, especially in the big leagues. Kneeling down in the batter’s box, he found his young prodigy on the verge of tears. He quietly asked Willie if he could see first base. Willie said yes; Piper asked him to point to it, which Willie did. Piper then told him to go there, steal second, and then third. Willie rattled Brewer by proceeding to do exactly as his manager had told him. He then scored on a fly ball. When he returned to the dugout, Davis told him that’s how you handle a pitcher.
Even Piper Davis, though, couldn’t prepare Willie for the great Satchel Paige. In a game against Paige’s Kansas City Monarchs, Mays dazzled the crowd by throwing out two base runners, one at third base and another at home. The Monarchs’ manager, Buck O’Neil, decided he’d seen enough; on a single to center field, he held up the runner at third, yelling for all to hear, “Whoa, whoa, that man’s got a shotgun!”1 But that’s not what Willie remembered best about that game. Like every other player in the Negro Leagues, he regarded Satchel as a walking legend: “The man was the most interesting player I had ever come up against. He stood six-four”—actually, most accounts list Paige at about six-five—“and weighed about 170 pounds.… He was about 40 when the Indians brought him up as a rookie [in 1948], but he was no rookie to me. He showed me the darnedest stuff I ever saw, along with some of the screwiest motions and combinations of different speeds. Old Satchel could really drive you crazy.”2
Paige’s famous arsenal, in addition to a multispeed fastball, included a screwball, a knuckleball, and several kinds of curves, any one of which might be thrown from his famous “hesitation pitch” windup: he would stop with his foot high in the air and keep the batter waiting, and then, as Mays remembered, the ball would suddenly appear and the batter would be swinging well in front of it.
Satchel thought that an age advantage of nearly a quarter of a century would allow him to sneak a fastball by Willie the first time up. Mays surprised him, smashing a double down the left-field line. While Willie was dusting himself off at second base, Paige took several steps toward him and said to the bewildered teenager, “That’s it, kid.” What he meant was: no more fastballs. Willie recalled that Paige got him out the next time on curveballs. Biographers before and after would say that those were the only two times the two Hall of Famers faced each other; Mays remembered facing Satchel two other times. Whoever is right, after that first double Willie Mays never got another hit off Satchel Paige.
For Negro League veterans, as most of the Black Barons were, baseball was closer to hard work than fun. To Willie, even during the toughest times, it was an adventure. When leaving Birmingham, the bus would often pick the players up in front of Bob’s Savoy Café. In his first memoir, Born to Play Ball, Willie recalled that Piper Davis, whatever his relationship with the players, was a stickler for professionalism: the bus waited five minutes and then left, whether you were on it or not. Once Willie got so involved in a pool match that he forgot what time it was, and when he heard the final horn, he threw down his pool cue and came running out of the café. “Hey, you can’t leave me behind!” he shouted. “I’m a pro ballplayer!” In another version of the story, Willie missed the bus and had to grab a cab and catch up with the team a few miles out of town. Both versions end with Willie learning the same lesson: he never missed the team bus again.
The team bus was no bargain. It had no air conditioning and seated just twenty-two people, which at least made it big enough to carry the entire team: the Black Barons, like most Negro League teams, usually had just sixteen players. This is why so many of them were skilled at different positions and in different aspects of the game. There were practically no specialists, no platoon players, no utility infielders, no closers. Every player knew every other player intimately; to talk to the surviving players today is to experience a world of solidarity unknown to modern athletes.
Georgia-born Bill Greason, a World War II combat veteran and for the last fifty years a respected pastor in Birmingham, recalled it this way: “Road travel was hot and usually uncomfortable—most guys brought their equipment and suitcases onto the bus. The food wasn’t always good because you had to take what you could find at midnight when you were on the road, and you couldn’t always find places that would serve blacks, even through the back door of the restaurant or hotel.” Sometimes the players were forced to eat out of paper bags or stop at a grocery store for bread and sandwich provisions. “And there were a lot of white people around who still didn’t know that black men had fought in the war. That’s the kind of life it was in 1948. But it was all made tolerable by the fact that the baseball was good and that you were playing it with men who you knew well and respected, and you were playing it for people who really appreciated the game and the fact that you had come so far to play for them.”
For Willie, the long bus rides “gave me a chance to learn, and to dream about big-league baseball. All the guys on the bus had played against the big names and had been in the big stadiums. Johnny Britton, our third baseman, would always take a newspaper with him and study the sports pages. He would keep me up to date on what my hero, DiMaggio, was doing.”3
On the road they played in different cities nearly every night: in Kansas City, home of their hated rivals, the Monarchs, in all the major cities of the South—Atlanta, Memphis, Nashville, Little Rock, and New Orleans, a big favorite as there were always good places to eat—and even in Chicago and New York. While Mickey was playing in sandlots and, if he was lucky, in minor league ballparks in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri, Willie was getting the big league view in Chicago’s Comiskey Park and, on one thrilling trip, the Polo Grounds in Harlem. The old Black Barons bus huffed and puffed, but got the job done.
On a trip to St. Louis, Willie and some teammates decided to go to Sportsman’s Park to see Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers play the Cardinals, and Willie got a firsthand glimpse of one of Mickey’s idols, Stan Musial. Willie, then a professional with the Birmingham Black Barons, could have been one of the black patrons standing in line to purchase tickets on the morning Mickey and his Whiz Kid pals showed up at Sportsman’s Park to see the game.
In 1958, while riding a bus from New York to Syracuse, where Mickey Mantle’s All-Stars would play a barnstorming game against Willie Mays’s All-Stars, Mickey and Willie would joke about who had to play under the worse conditions and whose team bus, the Black Barons’ or the one Mickey’s Joplin Miners rode in, was tougher to ride in. “To hear them,” recalled Rich Ashburn, the Phillies’ All-Star outfielder who played on Willie’s team, “you’d think they both had to get out and push the buses down the road themselves.”*4 (Actually, on more than one occasion, both Mickey and Willie did have to push buses down backcountry roads.) Mickey’s team, though, had it over Willie’s in one very important way: when they stopped at a restaurant, the team got out to eat instead of having to bring food out the back door and eat on the bus.
How good were the 1948 Black Barons? They had four players—shortstop Artie Wilson, who batted .402 for the season and won his second NAL batting title, pitcher Bill Greason, Piper Davis, and Willie Mays—who were signed by the big leagues. As Piper suspected, he, Greason, and Wilson, as well as several other Negro League veterans, were signed merely as window dressing to make it look as if major league teams were willing to integrate. None of them ever got a fair shot; Wilson, well over thirty by the time he got to play in the minor leagues, only got a brief shot in the bigs with the New York Giants.
The Black Barons went on to win the Negro American League pennant that year by beating Buck O’Neil’s Kansas City Monarchs, four games to
three. The Monarchs featured such stars as Luke Easter, a classic case of the waste of Negro League talent. In 1949, when he was thirty-four, he got his big league shot with the Cleveland Indians, playing in 21 games that year. He would play just 470 games with the Indians over the next five seasons, posting some terrific numbers: in 1950 he had 28 home runs and drove in 107 runs. The next season he hit 27 home runs and 103 RBIs, and 31 and 97, respectively, the year after that. Given his level of performance in his midthirties, it’s likely that Easter would have been All-Star and possibly Hall of Fame material had he had a chance to play in the majors while in his physical prime. As much could be said for Artie Wilson and possibly Bill Greason as well.
Overall, Mays thought the talent level in the Negro Leagues in the short time he played there was at least on par with Triple-A in what Piper Davis referred to as “white folks’ ball.”
Willie made a big contribution to the pennant series against the Monarchs in Game 2, singling home the tying run in the ninth inning. The Barons won in the eleventh. In the World Series, though, against the Negro National League champion Homestead Grays, the Barons again played their role of the Brooklyn Dodgers to the Grays’ New York Yankees. The Grays had beaten the Black Barons in 1942 and 1943 and won the 1948 series four games to one. Once again, Willie’s contributions were few but memorable. In Game 2, he crashed into the center-field fence to take away an extra-base hit; he also nailed Buck O’Neil at second base on a terrific one-hop throw. Then, with two out in the ninth, he singled up the middle to win the game in his team’s only victory.
But there was an autumnal flavor to the Negro League postseason that year. Integration was coming to Major League Baseball—and with it the end of black baseball. The previous year, eleven weeks after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier with the Dodgers, Larry Doby had become the first black player in the American League. Satchel Paige, Roy Campanella, and Monte Irvin—future Hall of Famers all—were headed for the big leagues, and interest in the Negro Leagues would soon decline with a swiftness that amazed those who had fought so hard for organized black ball. Over the coming years, the attention of black America shifted dramatically from the Negro Leagues to the major leagues; in many black newspapers the only question of interest regarding the major stars became how soon they would be playing in the American and National Leagues. Franchises folded without their biggest gate attractions; some leagues went to a playoff system in which the winner of the first half of the season played the winner of the second half, but it was no substitute for the Black Barons playing the Kansas City Monarchs.† Within a decade, all traces of the once-proud Negro Leagues had vanished. The year 1948 marked the last Negro League World Series, and within three years the fabled Homestead Grays, the proudest name in the Negro Leagues, would cease to exist.
As the Negro Leagues declined, their hottest young prospect blossomed. In 1949 Willie batted .311 in seventy-nine games and became one of the few remaining stars in the league. On June 1,‡ he finally assumed the position at which he would achieve baseball immortality. Norman Robinson, the Black Barons center fielder, broke his leg, and Piper immediately shifted Willie from left to center. When Robinson came back, Davis put him in left field and left Willie in center. “Willie can go get it, and Willie can bring it back,” his manager was fond of saying.5
How good were the 1949 Whiz Kids? In late May, Mickey Mantle played his first game ever against black ballplayers at Baxter Springs. The Joplin Globe reported: “Baxter Boys Defeat Coffeyville Boosters, a Negro Team, 13–6.”6 The Boosters were a semipro pickup team that included several Negro League veterans, but sadly, the names of the team members were never recorded. Presumably there were several players whom Willie Mays had played against on the road with the Black Barons. Three days after the game in Baxter Springs, the Whiz Kids played the Boosters again at Forest Park and won 8–2. The Coffeyville Daily Journal reported that “Mantle, the slickest looking kid ballplayer seen on the local pond in the post-war era, slashed a line drive home run down the right field line in the seventh.”7 John G. Hall, the authoritative historian of the KOM League, remarks that “the two wins came as a shock to all baseball experts in Southeast Kansas, who hadn’t thought the Whiz Kids were that good.”8
In later years, stories about the men who claimed to have discovered Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays would practically become a light industry. Most of them were nonsense. Mickey and Willie, the two most naturally talented players of their time, were so well coached and prepared that by the time they were in their late teens it wasn’t a question of who would discover them but when. One might just as well say that Mutt Mantle and Cat Mays “discovered” their sons; one might just as well say that Mickey and Willie discovered themselves.
In Mickey’s case, at least one thing can be stated with certainty: the popular story that Tom Greenwade discovered him is false. All Greenwade did was sign him, and for a great deal less money than Mickey could have gotten from other scouts working for other organizations.§
That the Greenwade-Mantle myth has lasted so long can be attributed in large part to Mickey himself. In his 1987 memoir, he said: “Then came a significant event, a milestone in my life. In 1948, at the age of seventeen, my sole ambition was to play professional ball. The where and how meant little, only the chance. Well, there’s such a thing as luck, and some of it rubbed off on me when Tom Greenwade came down the road from Springfield, Missouri, to scout prospects for the Yankee farm system. He was at the Baxter Springs ballpark, evaluating a kid named Billy Johnson, our third baseman. I wasn’t on Greenwade’s list, but whatever he saw in Billy, he apparently found something more to his liking after watching me switch-hit a couple of home runs into the river on one bounce.”
Perhaps Mantle told the story this way because it was the way he had been reading it in magazine articles for years—some of them written by Greenwade himself. As Mickey recalled it, a cloudburst interrupted the game, and during the delay his father brought Greenwade—“a really old guy with a nice friendly smile”—to meet him. “How would you like to play for the Yankees?” Greenwade asked. Mickey was speechless. Greenwade said he couldn’t talk “officially”—Mickey’s word—because he was still in high school, but told him not to sign with anyone else and he’d be back the day Mickey graduated. On the way home from the game, dreams of the St. Louis Cardinals vanished as an excited Mutt envisioned his oldest son playing in Yankee Stadium, walking in the footsteps of Babe Ruth (who was quite ill and would die within a few days of Greenwade’s meeting with Mutt and Mickey), Lou Gehrig, and, perhaps most thrilling of all, Joe DiMaggio, the most famous ballplayer at the time. “No question,” said Mutt, “we oughta wait on Greenwade.”9
The months, however, dragged on with no word from Greenwade. It’s possible that father and son did not fully understand that there were rules that strictly prohibited an agent or representative of a professional team from even approaching a high school student. Anyone caught in violation of the rules would automatically lose all negotiating rights with the prospect. In fact, Greenwade was jeopardizing his position just by shaking hands with Mickey at the Baxter Springs park. Was Greenwade assuming that Mutt was so desperate to get a professional contract for his son that he would be blinded by the dream of Yankee pinstripes? What followed would indicate that was the case.
However, long before Greenwade saw Mantle at Baxter Springs, Barney Barnett had been pushing buttons on all his connections. Several scouts had dropped by to see Mickey, but none of them had been terribly impressed. Why exactly? The most obvious reason is that Mickey was just sixteen at the time. Another is that they saw him playing out of position. By the time he was sixteen, Willie Mays had decided that center field would be his position; one wonders how good a center fielder Mantle might have been had he made a similar decision. In 1947 he simply did not have the footwork or agility to be a middle infielder; in fact, he never would.
The scouts who saw him play simply did not have the imagination to see that
Mantle was a naturally gifted outfielder. And there was another reason, one that would cloud the perception of Mickey’s ability throughout his career: he struck out a lot, too much by the standards of the great stars of his day. Joe DiMaggio, for instance, struck out just twenty-four times in 1946 and thirty-two times in 1947. In contrast, Mantle would, when he reached the major leagues, sometimes strike out that many times per month. What no one was paying close attention to in 1947 (and indeed would not throughout Mickey’s career) was how often he managed to reach base despite those strikeouts and how few times he grounded into double plays.
One scout, a man named “Runt” Marr who worked for the Cardinals organization, had talked with Mutt and Mickey, thus breaking all existing rules, but shied away on the question of bonus money. He told father and son he’d get back to them, but they never heard from him again.
A scout whom Mantle did impress was Hugh Alexander, who lived in Oklahoma City and worked for the Cleveland Indians. Alexander had never been much of a player—his entire career was seven games for the Indians in 1937—but he was a superb judge of talent and made his name in Oklahoma by signing Allie “Big Chief” Reynolds, a legend in the state who became a mainstay in the Yankees’ five consecutive pennant winners from 1949 to 1953. “Uncle Hughie,” as he was called, drove over to Commerce on a tip, probably from Barnett, and did the right thing: he checked in with Mickey’s high school principal, Bentley Baker. But for some reason that has never been discovered, Baker discouraged Alexander, telling him that Commerce High did not have a baseball team for Mickey to play on.
This was not true, of course, though Mickey spent very little time with the team the school did have. Baker certainly knew of Mickey’s incredible athletic ability on the football field and basketball court, and he had read in the local papers about Mantle’s growing reputation as a sandlot baseball player. Further, Principal Baker told the scout that Mickey had bad legs from an injury sustained during football practice—true to a point, but Mantle had recovered from that, and Baker knew it. Alexander drove back to Oklahoma City in a funk. In later years, he would wonder why Mickey’s high school principal had intentionally steered him away.
