If Bart Giamatti was a fanatic Red Sox fan, then Joe Lelyveld was an equally obsessed Yankee fan. Joe Lelyveld is one of the most distinguished journalists in the country, a veteran New York Times reporter who has reported from all over the world and who recently won a Pulitzer Prize for his book on South Africa. But in 1949 he was a sixth-grader, newly arrived in New York, somewhat lonely in his new environs. At that moment he became, in his own words, a scholar of baseball and the New York Yankees. He owned some 30 books on baseball, all of which adorned his room. His allowance went for The Sporting News and assorted baseball magazines. He collected cards. He played baseball every day that he could. In his room on his bulletin board were the autographed photos of the Yankee team that you could buy at the stadium.
Tommy Henrich was his favorite player. Henrich was a wonderful player, an exceptional clutch hitter who made the most of his skills. Lelyveld was an expert on the life of Tommy Henrich. The articles about him in Sport Magazine were always complimentary. They told how good a family man he was and how respected he was by his teammates. The admiration of Mel Allen, the Yankee broadcaster, who called Henrich “Old Reliable” for his ability to hit in the clutch, was obvious. Henrich was a worthy role model. That spring, with Joe DiMaggio ailing, Henrich had to carry the team, and Lelyveld decided to come to his assistance. He did it by creating a ritual in which he could, through the skillful use of his own mental powers and by fierce concentration, aid Henrich in hitting the home runs required at critical moments. It was nothing less than youthful American voodoo.
He would sit by himself in his room on the West Side of Manhattan, listening to Mel Allen. When Henrich came up in a clutch situation, he would sit there in an armchair with his glove on, and he would bounce a ball off the wall. Then he would look out the window at the New Jersey side: There, right across the river, was a huge Spry factory with a flashing light with the company’s name. It was mandatory for him, at precisely the moment that Henrich was hitting, to look at that sign. In his ritual, his role was clear: If Henrich came up and Lelyveld did not play his part perfectly, if he dropped the ball or if his eye wandered from the Spry sign, his powers—considerable though they might be—became useless.
Lelyveld used his powers carefully, and he was not promiscuous with them. He did not seek unnecessary home runs that merely added to Henrich’s statistical prowess. But when Henrich came up in the late innings with the game tied or the Yankees a run or two behind, Lelyveld turned on his full powers. His eye did not wander from the sign. He did not drop the ball. His powers were nothing less than phenomenonal in the early part of the season. It seemed that his voodoo worked effectively again. Time and time again, Tommy Henrich came up in clutch situations and hit home runs to win the game.
So it was that 40 years later I ran into Lelyveld, by now an executive of the Times, at a party. I mentioned to him that I was writing a book about baseball in the summer of 1949.
“Did you know,” asked Lelyveld, “that in the final third of that season, Tommy Henrich hit something like 16 home runs, and 12 of them were game winners?”
“I knew that, Joe,” I answered, “because I’m immersed in the season. But how did you know it?”
“Because I helped him do it,” said Joe Lelyveld.
THE GOOD OLD DAYS—FOR BASEBALL OWNERS
From the New York Times, May 29, 1989
Roger Clemens of the Boston Red Sox, Doc Gooden of the Mets, Orel Hershiser of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Frank Viola of the Minnesota Twins are all part of the newest club in baseball—the $10,000 an inning club. Assuming they stay healthy and pitch around 200 innings a season, that will be their piece rate. (Mr. Viola, the newest and best paid member, is actually closer to the $15,000 club—or $5,000 an out.)
When I read of today’s salary negotiations, I think of the very different age in baseball 40 years ago, and I think of George and Vic.
George was George Weiss, general manager and skillful architect of great Yankee teams, and Vic Raschi, who died last fall, was one of his great pitchers. They hated each other, and their annual salary struggles were landmarks of an era when management dealt all the cards in salary negotiations, and a player’s recourse was to retire.
If there was a comparable price-per-inning club for pitchers, it was $150, and Raschi constantly struggled with Weiss for the right to be a member of it.
Weiss, almost completely devoid of charm, was ruthless and cold-blooded in contract negotiations; he had a God-given knack at contract time, one Yankee said, to turn what was a positive, healthy relationship into a cold, bitter one. He did not mind that at all. It did not occur to him that it was important for ballplayers to like him: That was not part of his job. He firmly believed that a well-paid ballplayer was a lazy one and that a hungry player, even one who resented management, was a winning one.
That attitude had helped create an important part of the ethos on those Yankee teams. The players, badly underpaid, needing their World Series checks, became the enforcers on the team. That gave Weiss the philosophical basis to be penurious, but he had a more basic one as well: The lower the sum of all the players’ salaries, the greater the additional bonus he received from the owners.
The owners gave Weiss a budget, say, of $1 million a year. Weiss worked to keep the salaries down, say, to a total of $600,000 a year. Of that remaining $400,000, Weiss, by agreement, took 10 percent.
He had no illusion that sports was fun. Baseball, to him, was a business, and he never lost sight of this. Typically, at the team party celebrating the Yankees’ four-game sweep of the Phillies in the ’50 Series, a joyous occasion, he dampened the occasion for almost everyone by making a speech.
He reminded the players that because the Series had lasted only four games, the owners had not made as much money as they should have and therefore salaries would have to be held down in the coming year.
Weiss was so cold in his professional dealings that for a time Jimmy Cannon, the talented New York Post sportswriter, wrote columns referring to him as Lonesome George. One day, Weiss went to Toots Shor’s restaurant, threw down a couple of columns, complained about Cannon and then said, “But what the hell, Toots, who reads that guy anyway?”
“You do, George,” Shor answered.
Vic Raschi became one of the great stars of the Yankee teams that won five pennants and five World Series in a row from 1949 through 1953. In those five years, he won 92 and lost only 40. He was, his teammates thought, possibly the fiercest competitor on the team. He was like a bulldog, tenacious, almost violent about losing a game, particularly after he had been given a lead.
Once during a game with the Red Sox in which Raschi had the lead, he seemed in the seventh inning to be struggling. With Walt Dropo up, Casey Stengel sent Jim Turner, the pitching coach, out to talk to Raschi. Turner ambled out and spoke a few words. The resentment in Raschi’s face was visible from the dugout and Turner quickly returned to the bench.
“What did you say?” asked Stengel. “I asked him how he was going to pitch to Dropo,” answered Turner. “And what did he answer?” Stengel asked. “Hard,” said Turner.
In those five years, Raschi started 160 games and completed 73. He did this despite terrible physical pain. He hurt his knee in 1950 when Luke Easter of the Indians lined a ball off his leg. But he did not have an operation for two years because he was afraid it might cost him part of a season. That meant he played in almost unbearable pain and could barely run and hardly field his position.
His teammates were duly careful around him on the days he pitched. He snapped if they even offered him pleasantries. If they did not pick up on that signal, he would tell them to get away from him.
He did not want photographers to take his picture on a game day: They still used flash attachments, and Raschi hated the fact that for five or six minutes after each pop he could not see properly. He tried to warn them off, but if they did not listen to him, he would spray their shoes with tobacco juice.
Because Raschi gav
e everything of himself as a player, he expected nothing less than complete respect for his accomplishments.
Weiss seemed to want him to be a strong, forceful man as a pitcher—and a passive man as a negotiator. When Raschi went to negotiate with Weiss, it was as if he was a different pitcher, one who had won 10 games for a seventh-place team. Weiss came armed, not with the latest success of the Yankees and Raschi’s integral part in that success but rather with what he had not accomplished—games he had not finished, games against lesser teams he had lost.
It was as if Weiss was trying to withhold not merely Raschi’s money but his dignity as well. Weiss had the real leverage, and that made their struggles all the more unfair. Weiss never looked him in the eye but, instead, he looked down on the floor or out the window or off to the side, and he would say after an exceptionally successful season, “Prove to me why you deserve a raise.”
Raschi, more than almost anyone else on those teams, stood his ground. After all, he was a winning, starting dependable pitcher for a great team, and starting pitchers were always hard to come by. His only alternative would be a decision to retire, and in this case it was a real possibility. He was just proud enough to do that.
At the end of the negotiations, when Weiss magnanimously agreed to grant a $5,000 raise as a reward for a 19- or 20-game season, he would close the meeting by turning to Raschi and saying his last words of the afternoon: “Don’t have a losing season.” Those words would hang in the air for weeks and months for what they were: a threat.
Weiss seemed to Raschi and his teammates like a man with a very long memory for slights, and Raschi had a feeling that the moment he showed any sign of slipping as a player, Weiss would turn the screws on him, and he would be gone. The top salary he made after all those great seasons and those five pennants was $40,000, and it had been a war to get even that much.
In 1953, still bothered by injuries, he slipped slightly, winning 13 and losing 6 and starting only 26 games instead of his usual 33 or 34. Raschi, who was 34, had a sense that the end was near.
When he received his contract from Weiss, it called for a 25 percent pay cut. He sent it back, unsigned, with a note to Weiss, saying he had made a cripple of himself in the Yankees’ cause. That winter, the Yankees sold him to the Cardinals. They did not notify him personally, and he learned of the deal only though newsmen. One called Raschi at his home. Raschi, proud to the end, said in what was a virtual epitaph for baseball management of that entire era, “Mr. George Weiss has a very short memory.”
MY DINNER WITH THEODORE
From Ted Williams: A Portrait in Words and Pictures, 1990
My appointment with Mr. Theodore Williams of the Islamorada, Fla., Williams family had been agreed on well in advance, though we had not yet talked to each other. That is normal in matters of this gravity, and our earlier arrangements had been conducted through intermediaries.
My representative had been Mr. Robert M. Knight of Bloomington, Ind., who, in addition to being my occasional appointments secretary, is coach to the Indiana University basketball team. Mr. Knight, on occasion, has had troubles with members of the press himself, and was almost as celebrated as Mr. Williams in this regard.
It had taken no small amount of time to win over Mr. Knight’s good opinion, for somewhat early in our relationship I had failed him on a serious literary point. Mr. Knight, unbeknown to many, is a literary man and I would not be amiss if I referred to him as a kind of literary executor for Mr. Williams. On that earlier occasion, he had quizzed me on my qualifications to write about Mr. Williams.
I had done reasonably well until the final question. Mr. Knight had asked me to quote the best-known sentence of John Updike’s famous New Yorker piece on Mr. Williams. I had not known, and Mr. Knight had, with no small measure of disdain, pointed out that it said, “Gods do not answer letters.”
Still, I had gradually managed to win my way back into Mr. Knight’s good favor, and the fact that someone such as Mr. Knight recommended me as a worthy reporter-historian to Mr. Williams had weighed heavily in my favor.
Mr. Williams was reported to have said that if Mr. Knight gave his goddamn approval, why that was goddamn good enough for Mr. Williams.
I arrived well in advance at the motel where Mr. Williams would call on me, and I was told he would come by at eight the next morning to summon me to our meeting. The motel itself was not exactly memorable. Simpler America, vintage 1950s southern Florida, I would say, if architecture were my specialty, which it is not. But I do remember that the cost of it for the night was roughly what the cost of orange juice is at a hotel in the city in which I live, New York.
At exactly 8 o’clock in the morning there was an extremely loud knock on my door. I answered it, and there was Mr. Williams, and he looked me over critically and then announced, “You look just like your goddamn pictures.” So, I might add, does Mr. Williams. He has reached his 70s, admirably tanned and handsome and boyish. He seems not to have aged, though he no longer, as he did in his playing days, looks undernourished.
Mr. Williams took me to his house and granted me that agreed-upon interview. The interview with Mr. Williams, who is enthusiastic about whatever he undertakes, was exceptional. Not only did he answer my questions with great candor, but he also managed to give me several demonstrations of correct batting procedures.
He emphasized that I should goddamn well swing slightly up since the mound was higher than the plate. Referring to his close friend Mr. Robert Doerr, of the Junction City, Ore., Doerrs, with whom he has been negotiating on this point for 50 years, he said, “I still can’t get that goddamn Bobby Doerr to understand it.”
His advice was helpful, particularly since I, like him, bat left-handed, and for a moment I wondered whether with coaching like this, I might make a belated attempt at a career as a designated hitter. I was a mere 54 at the time.
I found Mr. Williams on the whole to be joyous and warmhearted. He had opinions on almost everything, and it was clear that he had loved playing professional baseball and had stayed in touch with a large number of his teammates, which is unusual for a professional player, 30 or 40 years after his career is over.
Mr. Williams also sought to advise me about political developments in Salvador and Nicaragua. There seemed to be a considerable difference in our opinions on how best to bring a measure of happiness to those two countries, but Mr. Williams did not hold against me my lack of enthusiasm for greater military involvement.
Late in our meeting, Mr. Williams found out that I was a fisherman. It was not information I had volunteered readily since I was afraid that if he found me inadequately skilled with a fly rod, his judgment of me as a writer and interviewer would decline accordingly and he might even report back unfavorably to Mr. Knight.
The interview took up most of the day, and that night Mr. Williams and his lady friend Lou took me to dinner. It was a wonderful dinner, and Mr. Williams paid for us. We had been together 12 hours and he was everything I had always hoped he would be. I considered it to be one of the happiest days in my life.
HISTORY’S MAN
From Jackie Robinson: Between the Baselines, 1995
He was history’s man. Nothing less. Though he came to the nation disguised as a mere baseball player, he was, arguably, the single most important American of that first post-war decade. It was not just that he was the first black to play our one showcased national sport, nor that he did it with so dazzling a combination of fire and ice, that he was in truth the black Cobb. What made him so important was the particular moment when he arrived and the fact that he stood at the exact intersection of two powerful and completely contradictory American impulses, one the impulse of darkness and prejudice, the other the impulse of idealism and optimism, the belief in the possibility of true advancement for all Americans in this democratic and meritocratic society.
It is easy now, a half century after Jackie Robinson first played for the Dodgers, when we live in an age of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, and
Jerry Rice and Emmitt Smith and Frank Thomas and Bobby Bonds and countless other brilliant black athletes to forget the ethos which existed in America of the 1940s, just before Robinson broke in with the Dodgers. There was a special cruelty to it: for this society not only blocked black athletes from competing on a level playing field, and it did not merely prevent them from gaining their rightful and just rewards from their God-given athletic talents. We as a country were worse than that: we discriminated against blacks, prevented them from playing, and having done that, we denigrated them and said that the reason that they could not play in our great arenas with our best whites athletes, was because they were not good enough.
We defined elemental fairness. We denied them entry to our greatest and most revered arenas, and having done that, we said that the fault was theirs, that they, the they being Negroes (though that was not the word which was used, of course), did not deserve to play with our great whites because they were not good enough. They were, we said, too lazy. We also said of them that they were gutless, and would not in critical situations show the requisite grittiness and toughness demanded of big league ball players. And having said both those things, and having denied almost all blacks in the country any kind of parity of education in those years, we also said that they were not smart enough to play our big-time sports. The only thing they could do—this was self-evident from track meets—was run fast. The issue of courage was particularly pernicious: even if they seemed to have enough natural talent, we said, they would fold under the pressure of big games. Having said this, and it was, I assure you, passed on as a kind of folk gospel at the bar of a thousand saloons, and on the sandlots of a thousand small towns and cities, we denied them any chance to give the lie to words so uniquely ugly, and indeed un-American. Their athletic bell curve was, so to speak, not as good as ours. This, by the way, was not just said in the South, where the reasons for blocking any progress by black people was obvious; rather it was said all over the country. That was one part of the ethos of the time.
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