BOAT-ROCKER
AFTER THE last out of the 1946 Series, Musial did not have much time to celebrate. He rushed out to California, where Bob Feller had organized a barnstorming tour between white major-leaguers and the Satchel Paige all-stars from the Negro League. To Feller’s credit, he was paying everybody the same, $100 per game, and treating the players well, chartering two DC-3s to transport them around California.
The World Series ended on the afternoon of October 15 (that classic seventh game, injuries and pitching changes and all, took exactly two hours and seventeen minutes). The next day Musial was in Los Angeles, in front of 22,577 fans, going hitless in two at-bats. (It was not the first time Musial had faced Paige: he’d hammered a home run off him in a similar barnstorming game in Sportsman’s Park right after his meteoric 1941 season, on a day when blacks were allowed to sit anywhere for a rare breakdown in the normally segregated seating.)
After the 1946 season, the public got a glimpse of the inner Mother Jones in Stanley: making a speech at the Dapper Dan Dinner in Pittsburgh over the winter, Musial said he loved barnstorming for Feller because he made three times more money with Rapid Robert than he did in the World Series. Musial may have been exaggerating, but he managed to annoy some of the owners, who began pressuring Feller to cut down on the barnstorming. The idea of players making money from their baseball skills outside the season made the owners very nervous. They were operating on the assumption that they owned the players in perpetuity—and that included the off-season.
However, the players were getting restive, even Musial, who was not known as a radical in any form. He certainly knew about labor strife from growing up in Donora, one of the last steel towns to accept unions long after the 1892 Homestead Strike. His associations with businessmen in Pennsylvania and St. Louis had conditioned him to think of himself as an individual entrepreneur, but he also saw himself as part of the trade or profession of major-league ballplayer. And 1946 had been a landmark year in labor relations.
The end of the war had caused players to question their contracts with the owners. Returning service veterans were legally entitled to their old jobs, but players were still bound to their clubs by the so-called reserve clause, which had been approved in 1922 by the United States Supreme Court. The Court had declined to change the decision by lower courts that clubs operated as individual local businesses and that baseball was not an interstate business, despite being the national pastime. That non-ruling by the highest court was still in effect when the players came home from the service.
One of the great curiosities about baseball is that its players mostly came from the working class, like Musial, yet when they got to the major leagues they fell prey to something like the Stockholm syndrome, in which hostages identify with their captors. After having fought to save their country, however, some players began asking questions.
“I think a lot of these ballplayers, after they came back from the service … had to check the contracts they’d played with years ago, and all this came to a boiling point,” Musial said.
The players hired a Harvard-educated lawyer, Robert Francis Murphy, who proposed a players union—he called it the American Baseball Guild—that would demand a minimum salary of $6,500, arbitration of all salary disputes, and a player’s right to half the price in the event he was sold to another club.
Murphy’s efforts were blocked by the owners, who worked on the players’ fears and their patriotism. As Rickey told the writer Arthur Mann: “You couldn’t get enough ballplayers to agree on any one thing to pull a strike. It’s bogey-man stuff.”
Murphy did not make significant inroads with the Cardinals, but in Pittsburgh, one of the stronger union towns, players scheduled a vote about ratifying the guild. On June 7, 1946, the Pirates’ manager, Frankie Frisch, made out an alternative lineup with himself and coach Honus Wagner ready to be activated for a game against the Giants. In the clubhouse, Rip Sewell and Jimmy Brown, both from southern mill towns, urged teammates to take the field.
Ralph Kiner, later a Hall of Fame slugger and venerated broadcaster for the Mets, was a rookie on the Pirates. Kiner recalled Al Lopez, then finishing up his catching career, advising Kiner, “You don’t know enough about this, so don’t get wound up in this thing.”
The players voted 20–16 in favor of striking, but short of the two-thirds needed for it to pass. The game was on and the public was spared the spectacle of Frisch and Wagner back in action.
After the game, Brown was roughed up by two men as he walked outside Forbes Field. Was he pushed around because of his anti-strike posture in the clubhouse? “Oh, positively,” said William O. DeWitt, the owner of the St. Louis Browns.
Although the guild faded, Murphy did make some progress. In August, the owners gave bonuses to players making under $5,000, guaranteed major-league salaries to players sent down to the minors, and agreed to pay $35–50 per week for meal money the next spring training. To this day, spring meal payments are known as “Murphy money.”
“If it hadn’t been for the guild, if it hadn’t been for the Mexican League, we would probably never got anything,” Marty Marion said.
The players were not through. Each league nominated three representatives to meet during the 1946 World Series.
“Marty was kinda our leader,” Musial said, referring to business matters. “He was always talking about trying to improve the conditions for the ballplayers, you know, and trying to set up a pension plan.”
Meeting in a hotel in Boston, the representatives proposed setting up a pension plan with a portion of the radio receipts from the World Series, there being no income from television at that time.
Five marginal Red Sox players did not want to give up their shares of the radio rights, approximately $300 each. They feared that when the rosters were returned to twenty-five in 1947 they would be out of the major leagues without enough tenure for a pension.
Marion recalled: “I had to go into their clubhouse and convince the Red Sox that, you know, after all, boys, here we’re only giving but a hundred thousand dollars, and we’re starting a pension plan here. And some of you guys won’t be around, you know, very long and you better take this when you can get it.”
One of the leaders of the pension plan was Doc Weaver, the Cardinals’ trainer better known for his cheerleading and mandolin playing (as well as inventing devices like a nasal filter to keep out the coal smoke on the long train rides). Doc also had a head for figures.
“I think our main idea at the beginning was a pension plan,” Musial said, alluding anonymously to players they all knew who were said to be destitute.
On October 13, as the Series returned to St. Louis, the National League president, Ford C. Frick, announced that the Cardinal and Red Sox players had agreed to put $175,000 from radio rights into escrow to set up a pension fund that would be worth $4 million at first. The owners would also come up with a $5,000 minimum wage but did not budge on the reserve clause.
“We wanted some representation, but in those days, I don’t think we wanted to be organized as such,” Musial said in 1990. He called the pension plan “a great thing for baseball and baseball players. But it wasn’t easy.”
Musial would serve as a player representative in the future and supported the Players Association when it was founded. But in salary negotiations, players were still the property of their clubs.
After that 1946 season, Musial soon had another reason to doubt the saintly kindness of owners. He had batted .365 and won the Most Valuable Player award in 1946—while moving from the outfield to first base—and figured he might be due some real money in 1947. Instead, Breadon offered him a contract for $21,000. Musial pointed out this was a raise of only $2,500 from what he had been paid in 1946.
No, no, Breadon explained, it was a raise of $7,500. That other $5,000 that Musial had been given late in the season had been a gift between pals. Weren’t they pals?
“Mr. Breadon, I don’t care what you call it,” Musial said, “but I k
now two things—I had to sign a new contract and I had to pay income tax on the money.”
With the intercession of Eddie Dyer, Musial eventually signed for $31,000 for 1947. The reserve clause was still operative. And by then the Pasquels had stopped coming around with satchels of money.
23
STANLEY THE SCOUT
STAN THE Man was telling this story about himself. He was back in Brooklyn in April 1997 for a conference at Long Island University, observing the fiftieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s debut.
The Dodgers had long since moved west, but Musial was an enthusiastic member of the Brooklyn Dodgers Baseball Hall of Fame, still revered by aging Brooklynites. They remembered that by the time the Dodgers moved to California after the 1957 season, Musial had played 163 games (over a full year’s worth by today’s standards) in 15 seasons at Ebbets Field and batted .359 with 222 hits, 48 doubles, 13 triples, and 38 homers while driving in 127 runs and scoring 141 runs—all with a smile on his face.
“I’d be less than honest if I didn’t admit liking it,” Musial once said. “And liking Brooklyn, Ebbets Field, Flatbush fans and, especially, Dodger pitching.”
On a more serious note, some fans and reporters at the conference questioned Country Slaughter and Bob Feller about their attitudes toward Robinson. Marty Adler, the assistant principal at Jackie Robinson Intermediate School and the leader of the Dodgers Hall of Fame, had to defuse some of the crankier questions.
But Musial charmed the crowd as he recalled seeing Robinson for the first time in the fall of 1946 during the Feller barnstorming tour.
“He was coming up the next year and I was anxious to see just how he fielded,” Musial said. “I watched him take infield practice. He wasn’t graceful on the infield.
“He had these short arms and short choppy swing, so when I got back to St. Louis, I was talking to the ballplayers and I said, ‘I think Robinson might have a hard time in major-league baseball because he has that short choppy swing and all that.’ ”
The fans waited for Musial’s punch line.
“So you know I wouldn’t have made a good scout at all,” Musial added with the familiar Musial giggle, to laughter and applause.
Half a century later, Brooklyn still loved Stan the Man.
24
THE STRIKE THAT NEVER HAPPENED
MUSIAL HAD doubts about Jackie Robinson’s ability—at first glance—but he never wavered about Robinson’s right to play.
Some of his teammates, not all of them southerners, will forever be branded as having talked about striking rather than play against the first African American major-leaguer of the century. There is not the slightest suggestion that Musial opposed Robinson, yet he rarely addressed the events of 1947, referring to them only obliquely.
Over the decades, he observed the baseball version of omertà, the Italian concept of “keep it in the family.” He declined to reveal what he saw and heard in the clubhouse, hotel lobbies, or team trains. But the evidence is that he saw and heard something, and that his pragmatism negated some of the red-hots in the clubhouse.
Having grown up in anti-union Donora, Musial had heard stories about what happens to troublemakers of one kind or another. He had seen his share of disagreements in his family’s crowded house, and he grew up with a tropism toward the safe and the secure. He had not turned down the Pasquels’ money; why destabilize his profession so soon afterward? In the matter of Jack Roosevelt Robinson, Stanley kept his head down, which, it could be argued, was itself a stand.
His first exposure to Robinson came in California right after the 1946 Series. One of the Paige all-stars was Robinson, a former four-sport athlete from the University of California at Los Angeles, who had just completed a highly successful year in Montreal, the top farm team of the Dodgers. Everybody knew that Rickey and Durocher expected him to play for the Dodgers in 1947.
All the attention to Robinson may have touched off the competitor, or the inner crank, in Feller. On October 21 in Sacramento, Rapid Robert was dressing fast after a game so he could take a personal excursion across the country for a lavish speaker’s fee.
When asked by a reporter from the Sporting News if he had seen any Negro players who could make the majors, Feller blurted: “I haven’t seen one—not one.” He would hear about that remark until his death in 2010.
Feller’s comment only added to the excitement of the next three games against a black team with Robinson on it. On October 23, a small crowd in San Francisco saw Feller pitch a two-hitter and beat Robinson’s team, 6–0. The next day in San Diego, Feller’s team won, 4–2, as Musial singled to start a winning rally in the eighth. And the third day, Feller’s team won despite a late rally by Robinson’s team.
“He didn’t impress me too much when I saw him at the end of ’46, in the fall,” Musial said years later. “I figured this guy wouldn’t … do well in the big leagues, and I can’t recall if he got any hits against us out there or not.”
This was classic Musial, not remembering much, not making waves. Having just hit .365, he did not have to fret about black players taking his job, as some white players feared. He was clearly the premier player of his league, and the Cardinals intended to ride him for a decade or more. He and his fellow Cardinals could not have fully imagined the changes that Branch Rickey was about to produce in Brooklyn.
Rickey has been depicted as everything from a sainted social visionary to a crass businessman, or all of the above. While he was running the Cardinals, they were as white as every other team, and Rickey did not protest or predict change down the road. However, late in the war, as President Truman pressed for more integration in the military and civilian life, Rickey found a way to take a positive public step while building the Dodgers at the same time.
Once he signed Robinson to a minor-league contract, Rickey began telling the story about his Ohio Wesleyan baseball team going to South Bend, Indiana, to play Notre Dame many years earlier, and how the hotel manager refused to rent a room to a black player, Charles Thomas. As Rickey told it, he prevailed on the manager to allow Thomas to room with him, and Thomas began clawing at his hands, wishing he could scratch away the color.
For those who wondered if Rickey was indulging in a bit of self-serving apocrypha, Thomas, who had become a dentist in Albuquerque, backed up Rickey’s hotel-room story in 1947. He told writer Mark Harris about visiting Rickey at Sportsman’s Park in the mid-thirties and how Rickey considerately entertained him in his office rather than force him to sit in the segregated section of the outfield stands.
Robinson proved himself in 1946 in Montreal, a place Rickey had chosen because it was a Francophone city in Canada, with a more worldly racial attitude than most or all American cities had. The new man had helpful teammates at Montreal, including Al Campanis, a Greek-Italian immigrant who helped Robinson make the shift from shortstop to second base, and George Shuba, of Slavic ancestry, out of Youngstown, Ohio, who waited at home plate after Robinson’s first homer for Montreal—“the first interracial handshake in baseball history,” Shuba would call it years later. But these details were pretty much off the radar in the majors, back in the States.
“You know, he wasn’t with the Dodgers at the time of the spring training; they probably didn’t think he was coming up as quick as he did,” Musial said. “And I think the general feeling at that time was, the atmosphere was not quite ready for a colored—well, we used to call ’em colored—ballplayers.”
William Marshall, the very able interviewer for the University of Kentucky oral history series, pointed out that Robinson might have been discounted by major leaguers simply because they had never seen a black player in the majors.
“Well, that was probably true, I guess,” Musial said.
In spring training of 1947, Rickey took the Dodgers and their Montreal team to Cuba, essentially because Cubans were used to blacks and whites playing ball together.
Some of the Dodgers, not all of them southerners, did not want to play with a black
man, either because of their own strong racial convictions or out of fear how integration would be taken back home. One of the Dodgers who opposed Robinson at first was Dixie Walker, the Alabaman who was highly popular in Brooklyn.
One night while the Dodgers were on a road trip to Panama, a few players held a meeting and perhaps even wrote up a petition for a strike if Robinson was brought up to the big club.
“I wasn’t in that meeting,” said Ralph Branca, the Dodgers’ ace pitcher, who had grown up in an integrated New York suburb. “They never offered it to me because they knew I wouldn’t sign.”
Hearing of the meeting, an angry Leo Durocher burst in on the players, vowing to bust them if they acted against Robinson. Witnesses said the dapper Leo was wearing silk pajamas and a silk robe.
“I’ll play an elephant if he can do the job, and to make room for him I’ll send my own brother home,” Durocher later quoted himself as saying, his language undoubtedly modified.
Leo, who personified burning ambition, warned the knuckleheads that some Negro players had more desire than they did, and maybe more talent, too.
“They’re going to come, boys, and … unless you fellows look out and wake up, they’re going to run you right out of the ballpark,” Durocher said.
And speaking of Robinson, Durocher added: “He’s going to win pennants for us. He’s going to put money in your pockets and money in mine.”
Some Dodgers may have been prejudiced, but most were not stupid. They could see Robinson was an athlete and a competitor—choppy swing, musclebound throw, bad fundamentals at first base, and all. And if the new man was going to put money in the Dodgers’ pockets, that meant he was going to take money out of other players’ pockets.
Fairly or unfairly, the Cardinals of 1947 have been characterized as the team that plotted to strike rather than compete with Jackie Robinson. The Cardinals were essentially, to use a modern concept, a red-state team—Terry Moore from Alabama, Enos Slaughter from North Carolina, Marty Marion from South Carolina, and Harry Walker from Alabama.
Stan Musial Page 16
