by Allen Barra
Why, in fact, did Baker sabotage Mickey’s chance with a professional scout? Perhaps like Willie’s Principal Oliver at Fairfield Industrial, Baker was protecting what he thought were his school’s best interests. Oliver had made a deal with the Birmingham Black Barons that allowed Willie to be paid for playing baseball and still play other sports for the school—just not baseball, which Willie didn’t want to play for the school anyway. If, though, a professional baseball scout had signed Mickey, Baker would have lost him entirely. The rules were lax in black high schools, but the line between amateur and professional was more strictly enforced in white high schools. Had Mickey signed a pro contract, he would have been ineligible to participate in the school’s biggest revenue-producing sport, football.
The date of Mickey’s high school graduation was May 27, but he did not attend—Baker gave him permission to skip the commencement exercises so he could play a game with the Whiz Kids that Greenwade would attend. This suggests yet another reason that Baker had discouraged Alexander, namely, some sort of arrangement he had with Greenwade. Sometime between Greenwade’s meeting Mutt and Mickey in 1948 and the boy’s 1949 commencement, Greenwade, in defiance of the rules, must have been in touch. Apparently, Greenwade was impressed enough by what he saw on the twenty-seventh to invite father and son to a Yankee tryout camp in Branson, Missouri, sometime in June.
Whatever Mickey’s shortcomings when major league scouts first saw him as a sixteen-year-old, by 1949 he was so impressive that by all rights there should have been a swarm of scouts at his commencement, bidding for his services. Yet, somehow, some way, by May 27 all possible competition from major league teams had vanished, and the Yankees had a clear path. Despite all Barney Barnett’s major league contacts and all his players who had signed contracts for other major league farm systems, no other scout showed up to talk to Mickey, Barney’s crown jewel, on the day he was eligible.
Surely the Mantles knew a lot more about Greenwade’s machinations than they ever told. Why didn’t Mickey say more about the peculiar circumstances of his signing in his later books? Possibly because he didn’t want to embarrass Greenwade, who, by the time he died in 1986 (the year Mickey was working on his first memoir with Herb Gluck), had built much of his reputation around discovering the rough diamond from the Oklahoma sticks.
What has never been explained in Greenwade’s account is how Lee MacPhail, the general manager of the Yankees’ Triple-A farm team in Kansas City—and also their Midwest farm director‖—would have authorized a contract for Mantle and given Greenwade money to take the Mantles to Branson if Greenwade had seen so little of Mickey on the field. According to researcher John Hall, the man who tipped Greenwade about Mantle was Johnny Sturm, a former Yankee player turned minor league manager. Sturm was a mere footnote in the history of the Yankees; he didn’t make it to the major leagues until 1941, when he was twenty-five years old, and he got into 124 games and batted just .239. The war and military service ended his hopes of being a career professional ballplayer, but he knew talent and quickly got a job with the Yankees scouting the talent-rich Kansas-Oklahoma-Missouri area. He later said that he was aware of Mickey’s enormous potential before Greenwade and certainly knew him by the time he became manager of the Joplin Miners in 1948.
According to his account, Sturm passed word to Mantle through a friend, an umpire who had seen Mickey play up close, that he would like him to try out for the minors early in the 1949 season. (Exactly why a minor league manager like Sturm could ask a high school player like Mickey to come to a tryout, and a major league scout such as Greenwade wasn’t supposed to even approach him, isn’t clear. But it was common practice in the Kansas-Oklahoma-Missouri region for high school kids to try out for minor league teams.) Mutt and Mickey drove to Joplin—Sturm seemed to remember that it was the Tuesday before Mickey’s graduation—and Sturm watched while Mickey took practice swings from both the left and right side. Sturm recalled Mutt saying, “I have waited for this for seventeen years. It is a dream come true.” (Sturm later said, “That is the gospel truth. Mutt uttered those words.”) Sturm then tried Mickey out at shortstop and noticed that he fielded grounders in the hole with a slight limp. When Mickey’s osteomyelitis was explained, Sturm suggested that he consider the outfield full-time, since base runners were bound to take advantage of his condition.
Unless Sturm was a liar, it’s likely he was the one who spurred Lee MacPhail into moving aggressively to sign Mantle, and that MacPhail sent Greenwade to see Mickey at Sturm’s passionate recommendation. Sturm also claimed that he urged Mickey to “hide out until I get my team [the Miners] back to Joplin.” Sturm knew that a pal of his, Joe Becker, an ace scout for the Boston Red Sox, was hot on the trail after seeing Mickey play several games. He told MacPhail to move quickly before Boston beat them out. With a single move, Johnny Sturm quite possibly saved Mickey Mantle for the Yankees. If not for the combination of Sturm’s fast thinking and Boston’s sluggishness in yielding to the inevitability of integration, the Red Sox could have had Ted Williams, Willie Mays, and Mickey Mantle playing in the same outfield through the 1950s.
Johnny Sturm added one more not so minor detail that, if true, completely explodes the Greenwade myth. He said that his call to MacPhail angered Greenwade, who told him, “I’ve seen that kid, and he ain’t worth a shit.” Sturm claimed that he told Greenwade flat out that if he didn’t sign Mantle, somebody else would—soon—and that the Yankees would be sorry.
In later accounts, particularly Greenwade’s, Sturm’s name was completely dropped from the Mantle signing story. Many years after the fact, Sturm wrote Mickey a letter reminding him about his part in Mickey’s coming to the Yankees organization. He never got a reply, but in 1966, at Yankee Stadium, Mantle came up to him and said, “John, I owe you a hell of a lot.”10 But twenty years later, when working on his memoirs, Mickey had again forgotten Johnny Sturm, who went unmentioned and uncredited.
Greenwade did not sign Mantle on the night he graduated, as Mickey later said he remembered. In fact, it was not until June 13, after the tryout camp, that Mutt and Mickey signed the contract. One thing Mickey did remember, though, was that immediately after an exhibition game in Branson, Greenwade told Mutt that the Yankees were having doubts about “little Mickey,” because of his inconsistent play at shortstop and lack of height. (The latter criticism is particularly silly, since Mantle was several inches taller than the man who was playing shortstop for the Yankees, Phil Rizzuto.) Despite what he told Mutt and Mickey, Greenwade would later tell The Sporting News that when he first saw Mantle, “I knew he was going to be one of the all-time greats. The first time I saw Mantle I knew how Paul Krichell felt when he first saw Lou Gehrig.”11
Despite Mickey’s shortcomings, Greenwade wanted to offer him a contract. After perhaps fifteen minutes of negotiation—and at this point father and son were desperate, as they had no other offers to fall back on—they agreed to $400 for Mickey to finish the season with the Yankees’ minor league club at Independence, Kansas, with a signing bonus of $1,100. Mickey said that when the first figure was announced his father winced and truthfully pointed out that his son could make as much playing Sunday ball and working at the mines on weekdays—he would have earned 87½ cents an hour in the mines and perhaps $15 for every Sunday game. Shamelessly, Greenwade took out a pencil and pad of paper and pretended to be doing serious figuring. Wasn’t that about $1,500, he asked? Mickey recalled the bonus as “the old ballyhoo—a foxy move to get around the possibility of having to offer a heckofa lot more.”12
How much more? An idea of what Mantle might have been worth on the open market can be gauged by the case of Jim Baumer. Though it wasn’t public knowledge at the time, just a couple of months before Mickey signed his contract, Baumer, also a power-hitting shortstop and an Oklahoma boy, signed with the Chicago White Sox for $50,000. Baumer played just eighteen games in the major leagues and batted .206. By that standard, a pretty good case could be made for Mickey Mantle as the greatest
bargain in baseball history. And Willie Mays wasn’t far behind.
By the end of summer, about two months after Mantle signed with the Yankees, the black baseball world from north to south, east to west, was alive with the news that a young black player from Birmingham named Willie Mays would soon be signed by a major league team. It’s likely that there was even more buzz in major league circles for Willie than for Mickey. Several teams had gathered reports on Willie. The Boston Braves had two scouts with notebooks full of observations on Mays: Henry Jenkins, also the Braves’ farm director, and Bill Maughn, who lived in Cullman, Alabama, about forty miles north of Birmingham. (An odd home base for a man who scouted black ballplayers, especially considering that as late as 1963, when the civil rights movement was in full swing, there was a sign at the town’s entrance that read: NIGGER, DON’T LET THE SUN SET ON YOUR HEAD IN THIS TOWN.)
Maughn, though, not only liked Mays as a player, but would do him an enormous favor.
At Maughn’s insistence, the Braves had petitioned the commissioner of baseball, Albert “Happy” Chandler, for permission to approach Willie while he was still in high school—after all, they reasoned, he was already playing for money. They were prepared to offer $7,500 to Black Barons owner Tom Hayes for Willie’s contract. Maughn later told Jenkins—early in May, a few weeks before Willie graduated from Fairfield Industrial—that Willie was “the best standout prospect in the nation. When I say he could even pitch for my money, I am not fooling, as he is the fastest human being throwing from 60 feet, 6 inches that I have ever seen.”13
Maughn ultimately decided not to offer Willie a deal, thanks to a report from yet another Braves scout who, after watching Mays play a doubleheader at Rickwood, concluded that he couldn’t hit a major league curveball—a strange criticism of a kid who had not yet been given a chance to hit a curveball against a white minor leaguer. If the Braves’ front office had listened to Maughn, Boston—or rather, Milwaukee, where the Braves would move in 1953, and then Atlanta, where they relocated in 1966—might have enjoyed the spectacular fortune of having Willie Mays and Henry Aaron playing their entire careers alongside each other.
As it turned out, the Braves weren’t the only Boston team interested in Mays. Eddie Glennon, the (white) Barons general manager, had seen Willie play several times at Rickwood Field and used his connection with the Red Sox—the Barons were part of their system—to let the parent team know about Willie. Despite Glennon’s enthusiasm, the Red Sox balked after showing some initial interest. (Their best scout, George Digby, called Mays “the greatest prospect I ever saw.”14) They had just signed Willie’s Black Barons manager, Piper Davis, to a minor league contract, but Davis was never given a shot at the big leagues. It would be ten more years before the Red Sox fielded a black player.
It was at a high school all-star game in Atlanta that Braves scout Bill Maughn finally did Willie that huge favor: he told Eddie Montague, a scout for the New York Giants, what a fantastic prospect Willie was. New York was certainly the best city a young black man from the South could hope to play in, and in fact the Giants were one of the few in either league that would sign more than two black players at a time. (Giants owner Horace Stoneham had already authorized the signing of Hank Thompson and Monte Irvin.)
Montague and another Giants scout, Bill Harris, later went to Birmingham to check out the Black Barons’ power-hitting first baseman, Alonzo Perry. Harris, whom Maughn had convinced to watch Willie’s turn in batting practice, later said, “My eyes almost popped out of my head when I saw a young colored boy swing the bat with great speed and power and with hands that had the quickness of a young Joe Louis throwing punches.” He also had occasion to see Mays throw during fielding practice and watch him run the bases during the game, after which he concluded, “This was the greatest young ballplayer I had ever seen in my life.”15
Either Montague or Harris, or both, phoned Jack Schwarz, director of the Giants’ farm system, and told him to forget about Perry. “Don’t ask any questions,” they told Schwarz. “Just go get [Mays].”
The most exciting possibility of all, the one that would quicken the blood of New York baseball fans for years whenever the subject was mentioned, was that the New York Yankees were also interested in Willie Mays. In 1949, well before Willie’s graduation, GM George Weiss had sent a scout, Bill McCorry, to give him a report. According to Roger Kahn, who would soon be writing about both Mantle and Mays in New York, McCorry was about the last man who should have been sent to watch a black team in Alabama. He was disdainful of the Negro Leagues, regarding their players as not at the level of even the low white minor leagues. His evaluation was that Willie “couldn’t hit a curve ball”—which was pretty much code for “young and black.”16 In retrospect, one wonders why Weiss, who had no interest in signing black players and who acquired a few for the Yankees’ minor league system only to trade them away, bothered to send a scout at all.
Nonetheless, what might have been is almost too glorious for Yankees fans to contemplate: with Mickey as the driving force, the Yankees won pennants every year from 1951 through 1964 except in 1954 and 1959. In 1959 the Yankees finished third, fifteen games behind the first-place Chicago White Sox, and that kind of gap was probably beyond even Willie Mays’s talents. But in 1954 Mays was the best player in baseball and would win both the National League batting title and the Most Valuable Player Award. And that year the Yankees had their best record under Casey Stengel, winning 103 games, but still finished eight games behind the Cleveland Indians. It’s not far from the realm of possibility that if Willie had been in pinstripes that season, New York could have made up that difference by winning just four more games against Cleveland. If that had happened, the Yanks would have won thirteen pennants in fourteen seasons.
Win or no win, Willie and Mickey would have been far and away and without question the most spectacular pair of teammates ever to play baseball.
Despite many teams’ reluctance to bid on a black player, Willie Mays would have been signed to a major league team before Mickey Mantle if he had not still been in high school. A minor mystery in Willie’s life is why it took him until 1950 to graduate. He was an average student, and Sarah and Ernestine saw that he went to school. Whatever classes he might have missed, and for whatever reason, he made them up in time to graduate on May 31. It’s also not known why he then went unsigned for nearly three weeks when, as the leading local black paper, the Birmingham World, reported, the Braves, Red Sox, Brooklyn Dodgers, and Cleveland Indians (owned by Bill Veeck, who had already signed Satchel Paige, Larry Doby, and Luke Easter) were “hot on the trail of center fielder Willie Mays.”17 The only wonder is that there weren’t more. There’s just one reason that seems to make sense: many major league teams were still skittish about signing black players, and those that weren’t, such as the Dodgers, Indians, and Giants, had already signed their “quota.”
The Giants broke rank first. The day after the World story ran, Montague drove to Tuscaloosa to meet the Black Barons’ bus as they arrived for a game. He walked up to Willie and asked if he could speak to him in private. Willie, wide-eyed, said sure. Montague then asked him if he would like to play professional baseball—ignoring the obvious fact that Willie was already playing professional baseball. Willie’s immediate answer was “Yes, sir.” Montague told Mays that he would speak to the team’s owner about his contract. A surprised Willie replied, “What contract?”18 Montague, his pulse racing, told Willie he would have an offer for him early the next day; he knew he had to move fast because he had already seen a Dodgers scout in Tuscaloosa, obviously there to try to sign Mays for Brooklyn.
The next morning, bright and early, Montague called Aunt Sarah and asked bluntly how much it would take to get Willie to sign with the Giants—$5,000, she answered. The scout quickly called his boss, Jack Schwarz, who told him to go for it. Montague drove like a man possessed to the Mays house, where, at four in the afternoon, Cat, off work from the mill, was waiting. They negotiated for a fe
w minutes. Montague got Cat and Sarah to agree to $4,000, but with a $250-a-month salary. In the course of conversation, it came out that the Giants were going to pay Black Barons owner Tom Hayes $10,000 for the rights to Willie. Cat was indignant, and rightfully so: why were the Giants paying Hayes, who had no contract with Willie, $6,000 more than they were paying Willie? Montague’s reply was weak: “He might sue us later, and we don’t want any trouble.” The truth probably had more to do with wanting to stay on good terms with the Black Barons for future prospects, but whatever the reason, it was clear that the Giants were willing to invest a cool $14,000 in Willie Mays. That wasn’t much considering what the Giants got, but for Willie it sure beat what Mickey Mantle had signed for almost exactly a year earlier.
Willie signed with the Giants on June 21. Aunt Sarah divided the money, giving Cat $250, keeping $750 for the household, and leaving Willie $3,000.
Like Mickey, Willie immediately bought a car—a shiny, brand-new Mercury. (Mickey’s car was secondhand, a bullet-nosed 1947 Fleetline Chevy with a vacuum shift.)a And also like Mickey, Willie would miss a high school function for a baseball game. On June 23, while Fairfield Industrial seniors went to their prom (where, he would later be told, his friends slow-danced to “Till I Waltz Again with You” and “On Top of Old Smokey” before they began jitterbugging), Willie Mays boarded a train at Birmingham’s Terminal Station for a new and unknown world in Sioux City, Iowa, supplied with an enormous bag of sandwiches from Aunt Sarah that he was too nervous to eat. Though Willie would return to Birmingham several times over the years, he would almost never see the old neighborhood in Fairfield again.
