The Victory Season Page 10
He made the announcement to American reporters by presaging LeBron James’s Decision. “The Giants have treated me shabbily,” he said. “I have decided to take my gifted talents to Mexico.”
Several players, many with Latino roots, followed Gardella’s path, including fellow Giant Napoleon Reyes (whom Pasquel may have signed merely for his first name), Bob Estalella of the A’s, Chisox pitcher Alejandro Carrasquel, and Brooklyn’s Luis Olmo, aka the “Puerto Rican Perfecto,” who hit .313 in 1945. But the Liga had yet to make a significant splash, despite much boasting from the Pasquels. The guys they attracted were mostly wartime-ball roster filler, expendable with the return of the varsity.
The first big fish to sign on with Pasquel was Brooklyn catcher Mickey Owen. He was best known for letting that fabled third strike get past him in the ninth inning of Game Four of the 1941 World Series, which led to a Yankees rally and eventual championship. Owen had made four straight All-Star teams, was a solid, dependable starter on a popular team, and when he turned his back on Rickey to sign with Pasquel, it got plenty of attention. Owen got $15,000 a year for five years, plus a $12,500 signing bonus. “He even offered to bring my mother down,” Owen told reporters. Pasquel sealed the deal by winning over Mrs. Owen, flashing a sizable diamond ring at her while promising, “This is for you at the end of the season.” Mickey was made player-manager of Vera Cruz, where Gardella would be his right fielder.
Owen’s signature on the dotted line opened eyes across baseball, boosting the players while worrying ownership, who hadn’t taken Pasquel seriously. “Offers are coming in every day and unless the owners realize what’s coming up next year they may wake up without ball clubs,” said Owen’s now former teammate Augie Galan.
Horace Stoneham, the owner of the New York Giants, sure felt that way after three more of his squad took the bait. Second baseman George Hausmann was leaned on by his wife, who was struggling to find a place to live in New York City. When she heard that they would live for free in a spacious abode in Mexico, she practically signed the contract herself. Two of Hausmann’s teammates came too. Rookie Roy Zimmerman wouldn’t be heard from again. Pitcher Sal Maglie would. Two more hurlers, Ace Adams and Harry Feldman, followed a couple of days later.
Stunned, Giants player-manager Mel Ott called a team meeting to assure the remainder of his team that he, at least, would be staying at the Polo Grounds. The gathering had a timely soundtrack. A slightly deaf pitcher named Bill Voiselle was in the bathroom, having missed the call to take a knee. As Mel was talking about the defections, Voiselle was shaving and singing “South of the Border” to himself. A teammate had to be dispatched to the john to tell Voiselle to knock it off.
Then the Pasquels landed a true star. Vern Stephens had led the AL in homers in 1945 and RBIs in 1944 while playing a strong shortstop for the St. Louis Browns. But the Brownies refused to give him a raise, and when Jorge whispered in his ear about big, guaranteed money, Stephens listened. He asked for a five-year, $175,000 deal, and wonder of wonders, Jorge said yes straightaway. The departure of the sport’s hardest hitting shortstop astonished everyone in the game.
But Stephens didn’t stick around. He was good at baseball, but not so much at life—he was socially inept and not particularly curious about anything outside of hitting the hanging curveball. Bob Janis said Stephens was “afraid of his own shadow” and couldn’t hack Mexico’s hustle and bustle. He was thrown the first time he showered, when he discovered the hard way that the C on the faucets stood for caliente, not “cold.” So Vern jumped back to the Browns after a couple of weeks.
His father had come to stay with him in Monterrey, and now Stephens’s père drove him to Laredo, where Vern put on daddy’s overcoat and hat, pulled the brim down low, and skulked across the International Bridge. “I was afraid they might do something to stop me,” he told reporters back in los Estados Unidos, “so I just hustled out of Monterrey and got moving.” The Browns gave him $4,500 more for ’46 to smooth things over.
Pasquel issued a formal complaint with the State Department, but otherwise forgot about Stephens and began to hunt big game in earnest. He breakfasted with Feller, lunched with Williams, and supped with Hal Newhouser. His offer to the Splinter was so grand that Ted asked, “Are you going to give me four strikes, too?” Williams, whose mother and grandmother were Mexican, wasn’t impressed by the gauche Pasquel. “[He] had diamonds in his tie and diamonds on his watches and diamonds on his wrist,” Ted remembered. “Every time he talked, he kind of splattered you a little bit. I got a commitment from him, but never really gave him a tumble.” Others did—Pasquel nearly made Hank Greenberg choke on his steak when he offered the Detroit slugger $360,000. The big stars were surely tempted, but remained coy—for now. They preferred to use Pasquel’s bottomless checkbook to try to drive up their own rates to stay in America.
Pasquel also sent Bob Janis to Daytona to go after Robinson, but the muscleman didn’t have much of a chance for a sales pitch—Janis was in the clubhouse headed toward Jackie when Rickey and Durocher appeared. Leo had a bat in his hand, and tapped it against his palm, readying for combat. “Stop stealing our players!” Rickey yelled, and Janis beat it.
But Pasquel wasn’t intimidated. When he “accidentally” crossed paths with Reiser and offered him $100,000 for three years on the spot, Pistol Pete was tantalized. “If I thought this offer was free of all US taxes,” Reiser said, “I would take it in a minute. It would take ten years or more at a good salary here to earn that much.”
The Mexicans were exploiting a yawning gap between baseball’s popularity and the financial renumeration for its players, one that had always existed but was particularly stark with the war won and the palpable thirst for their services on display nationwide, even before the season started officially. “We treat players right here, not like slaves,” Pasquel said, for the first time framing his raids as a labor issue, rather than merely a vanity play. “U.S. players are bought and sold like so much cattle and have no control over the decision.”
The pivotal recruiting pitch was put to Yankees shortstop Phil Rizzuto. The Scooter had served on a navy supply ship in the Pacific during the war, shuttling between New Guinea and Manus, and had spent nearly a year in the Philippines. When he returned to the Yankees, he wasn’t the player he had been before the war, and he scuffled during the Yankees’ wide-ranging spring training. He was also suffering from island-borne malaria, an ague that would plague him intermittently during the season.
Sensing an opening, the Pasquels wined and dined Rizzuto at the Waldorf-Astoria, along with teammate Snuffy Stirnweiss. “We met them upstairs in their suite,” recalled Rizzuto. “They were packing guns, which scared me. They promised us Cadillacs, if we’d go with them. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so receptive to them if I were hitting better. But I had just gotten back from two years in the service and I was having a tough time adjusting to curve balls and getting base hits. I wasn’t sure of my ability anymore. I was thinking this might be the most money I’ll ever make in baseball, but after we left, Cora [Phil’s wife] said to me, ‘No way we are doing this.’”
MacPhail took the Mexican threat and what it represented to the Reserve Clause and the treasured status quo more seriously than many of his fellow owners. After all, the raids were the sort of thing he would do, were MacPhail running an upstart organization and not the totemic franchise in all of sports.
So when Mac had caught wind of the Pasquels’ interest in Rizzuto, he’d bugged their hotel room. This was a little different terrain than promoting night baseball, but it was right up the alley of the shadow warrior who almost stole the Kaiser out of house arrest. He had his dark arts, and he used them to full effect. The next day, he called Rizzuto and Stirnweiss into his office, played them the recording of their meeting with the Pasquels, and suspended them for two days, suggesting strongly they break off all contact with the Mexicans. The ploy ended the Pasquels interest in luring Yankees players.
MacPhail had ensured h
is team wouldn’t be hurt. Now he went to work on the rest of the majors. He paid a visit to Commissioner Chandler, who MacPhail himself had championed the year before when few had thought of him as a worthy replacement for Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Mac had pushed the Kentucky senator into the job. Now MacPhail, doing his best Scotch-Irish version of Don Corleone, reminded Chandler of how he got to that particular post. Mac then noted that big money from the Pasquels was a strong inducement to jump, and that an even stronger reason not to go was needed to protect the integrity of the game.
On April 16 in Chicago, Chandler announced the reason. He banned jumpers from the majors for five years.
This was big news, but it got a little lost in the noise generated elsewhere. For Chandler had made his sweeping pronunciation on opening day, 1946.
Chapter 10
Opening Day
Tuesday, April 16, was sunny and cool in Washington DC. The morning papers were full of baseball talk, and an advertising campaign that trumpeted “THE STARS ARE BACK!” appeared in them all; indeed, the owners had paid to place similar ads in dozens of publications across America.
Yep, “real baseball” was back, and John Q. Public would have to pay for the privilege of watching the frolic on peacetime diamonds. Only five teams, notably including the defending champion Tigers and the NL pennant-holding Cubs, had kept ticket prices static. The rest had upped their rates from 50 to 100 percent, typically to between $2.00 and $2.50 for reserved-box seats, $1.25 for general admission, and about $.60–$.75 for the bleachers.
Ordinarily, already put-upon Americans might have responded to this indignity with some outrage. But such was the overwhelming hunger to see baseball at its highest level once again, and the joy that the game was back in all its glory, that stands were packed across the league. The eight inaugural games played that Tuesday drew 236,730 fans, the second-highest total in the sport’s history to that point. All told, close to half a million fans attended the sixteen openers.
A crowd of 30,272 turned out to Griffith Stadium in the nation’s capital to see the Senators host the Red Sox, including someone of particular importance—President Truman. Roosevelt in 1942 had discontinued the tradition of the president opening the season by throwing out the first pitch. He had more important matters to worry about that April, as the Japanese cut the Burma Road, invaded New Guinea and Sri Lanka, and captured Bataan in the Philippines, forcing some seventy-eight thousand prisoners to march south. Thousands died along what came to be called the “Bataan Death March.”
Now, four years later, Truman received a large ovation as he strode through the stands to his box and prepared to throw out the ceremonial pitch. He was the first president to walk to his seat—all previous chief executives had been driven to their boxes. The First Lady, Bess, and Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff, flanked the president in his box, which was crammed with an entourage of thirty-two people, including General Dwight D. Eisenhower. A natural lefty who had learned to write and perform other tasks with his right hand as a youngster, Truman promised to throw out this pitch southpaw, to honor “the game’s great lefthanded hurlers.”
But when the time came, he mistakenly began to throw it out with his right hand. Reminded of his presidential promise, “he switched the ball to the publicized duke, limbered it up with two short waves of the soupbone, drew it back behind his ear, and fired an overhand delivery about 50 feet into the cluster of players of both sides deploying for the throw,” according to the New York Herald Tribune. A Sox reserve named Andy Gilbert caught the ball after it had caromed off a couple of Sens, and he had Truman autograph it.
The game was a command performance for the longtime baseball fan in the Oval Office. Hardly one to put on airs, the “accidental President” remained a Missouri good ol’ boy even while living on Pennsylvania Avenue. Truman spent his downtime playing endless hands of stud poker with his “Show Me State” cronies, and returned often to his home turf, where he made a point of spitting in the Mississippi (a long-held tradition thought to bring luck).
To Truman, the return of the prodigal hardball stars was in keeping with the finest tradition of warrior-citizenship. His hero was Cincinnatus, the Roman general who returned to his farm when war ended, his nation served. True, Joe D. and his ilk hadn’t seen much combat, much less battled it out with the Volscians. But regardless of actual dangers faced, Truman revered the likes of Williams, who had sacrificed three years of his career for his country. That was in the finest tradition of the republican ideals Truman treasured. It was in stark contrast to what he was starting to see day in and out. It was completely beyond his understanding how the United States could go so quickly from wartime sharing and belief in the common good to the breathtaking selfishness on display in postwar America. He was fit to be tied by the political obstruction he faced in Washington; as Life wrote about his pitch at Griffith that day, “It’s the first time in months he’s found anybody to play ball with him.”
Williams came to bat in a scoreless game in the third inning. He’d been saddled by a sore throat for the previous few days, but announced in batting practice that he was at full health by catapulting several balls over the right field wall. Now Williams unloaded on a knuckleball from Roger Wolff to dead center, a home run that landed some 440 feet from the plate. It was among the longest shots in Griffith Stadium history, and even the home folks rose to give Williams a loud ovation in response to the sheer magnificence of the clout. Boston went on to win 6–3, backing up Truman’s prediction of a Sox victory.
After the game, the housing shortage that gripped the nation was brought home when reporters learned that ten of the Senators players, unable to find a dwelling, had been living for over a week in the team clubhouse. The Sens weren’t alone. The Chicago White Sox offered a season pass to anyone providing a lead that resulted in housing for twenty team members who had nowhere to live as of opening day. The homelessness partly explained the feeble effort the Chisox put forth, managing just three hits off Cleveland’s fireballer, Feller, in a 1–0 loss. Rapid Robert had a little something to do with it as well.
The demobilization had unleashed so many former soldiers on the country that the most basic of human needs, shelter, was an issue for millions. Real-estate salespeople exacerbated the shortage by jacking up prices and putting unreasonable demands on many properties, such as “No Children Allowed.” Young couples with families were forced to crowd in with in-laws. Mauldin, the Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist, was spot-on and savage with his drawings lampooning the situation. One portrayed a statue of a soldier sleeping on a park bench, with the phrase Semper Sans Cot (“Always Without Cot”) stenciled upon it; the cartoon was entitled “The Unknown Soldier, 1946.”
Another pictured a former GI on a park bench telling the police officer rousting him, “You shoulda seen where I spent my nights last winter!” A third had a couple of veterans being accosted in a hallway by a shotgun-toting landlord. “If ya want character references,” one says, “write to Signor Pasticelli, Venafro, Italy. We occupied his barn for seven weeks.”
The satire was rooted in unfortunate reality. The housing shortage was so severe people slept all night at Turkish bathhouses. In Corpus Christi, Texas, the entire town turned out for a barn raising of sorts, a project that built an entire home for a veteran in a single day. The city of Greenwich, Connecticut, leased mansions that had been sitting empty to vets for $1 a year. The head of the government-housing department, Wilson Wyatt, authorized 250,000 military Quonset huts to be converted for private use. Meanwhile, he encouraged factories to turn out prefab homes, mobile units that could be laid down and built around. Early examples drew huge crowds in department stores, and orders were backlogged for months. In New York, a man named Henry Levitt took notice of the crying need for housing and developed plans for entire cities of prefab homes, to be known as Levittowns, that soon would dot the suburban landscape.
In the meantime, house hunters used all manner of chicanery to find a plac
e to dwell. Some would approach the superintendent of an apartment complex and bet him $200 that there were no vacant units, hoping to lose the bet/bribe. Others gifted the women who took housing ads for the Times with nylons, perfume, or straight cash, anything to get a leg up on the new listings. “The girls, being of strong moral fiber, always turn these offers down firmly,” the paper reported.
One corporate manager had an underling transferred west—then took his apartment. An investigator for the New York district attorney’s office arrested a tenant—and moved into his vacated apartment. Chicago reported a shortage of NO VACANCY signs, though FOR RENT signs were going at half price.
The most common solution for the unsheltered was to trade something of value for an apartment: a Leica, a pet, a job. Automobiles were the most common trade bait. One fall issue of the Times had no fewer than forty-eight offers of cars-for-apartment trades in the classified section.
In one reported case, a woman was told that her Plymouth would land her a home in New Jersey, but for a place in New York City, she needed a Cadillac.
Williams wasn’t the only star to get off to a good start. In Philadelphia, Joe DiMaggio also celebrated his return to action with a home run as the Yankees shut out the A’s 5–0 behind Spud Chandler. The “New DiMaggio” celebrated with his teammates in the dugout with a demonstrative flair that had the press asking themselves, Who is this guy?
Up in New York, UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie, a Norwegian, attended his first-ever game, the opener at the Polo Grounds. Actress Dorothy Lamour was there too, “wearing a large white hat to avoid attention,” in the words of John Lardner. They got to see another superstar, Ott of the Giants, go yard in an 8–4 win for New York over the Phillies. It was the 511th homer of Ott’s storied career—and his last. In the next game, the thirty-seven-year-old Ott dove for a liner and injured his knee, essentially ending his career. Fortunately, he was the player-manager of the Giants, so he had a reason to come to the park every day. Not so for the pinup star from Hollywood—Lamour reportedly left after the first inning, an act, in Lardner’s mind, “contrary to protocol, which called for the Phillies starter to leave the game first.” Said starter, Oscar Judd, lasted into the second inning before he was driven from the mound, trailing 6–0.