The Victory Season Read online

  In Boston, a mariachi band played “South of the Border” to taunt the visiting Dodgers over the loss of Owen, tossing pesos into the crowd when they finished. Then the Braves broke a 3-all tie with runs in the sixth and seventh to beat Brooklyn 5–3. Of more interest was the Brooklyn starting outfield. Despite the presence of Reiser and Walker, Leo made a point by starting the three rookies, Hermanski, Whitman, and Furillo. The manager was serving notice that he would use any player on his roster at any time.

  Braves Field had looked good, as the stadium seats had been freshly painted before the game. Unfortunately, the weather was sharply cold in Beantown, and the paint hadn’t dried well in the chill. Thus thousands of fans went home with green paint on their clothes. The team ran an ad apologizing for the miscue, offering to reimburse cleaning bills. Claims poured in from all over the country, many from people who were clearly looking for a quick score and obviously hadn’t been in Boston on the sixteenth. The Braves paid all claims anyway, costing the team more than six grand. The day had a more lasting effect too. The positive reception to the rich green hue of the park would make an impression on the crosstown Sox, who would put the shade to use on the monstrous left field wall at Fenway Park the following spring.

  About the only city unmoved by the occasion of opening day was, of all places, St. Louis. A touch fewer than fourteen thousand turned out to see the Cards drop the kickoff game to Pittsburgh on a chilly afternoon. There was no ceremonial first pitch, and little sense of occasion. The home team put three runs up in the very first inning, two on a double by heralded rookie Dick Sisler. Sisler was notable mainly for his odd habit of pirouetting his bat counter-clockwise as the pitcher delivered, pausing briefly at the shoulder before starting his swing.

  Pirates manager Frankie Frisch, a longtime Cardinal who knew from cold spring days in St. Louis, had his clubhouse boys forage for tinder before the game and build a fire in an old wheelbarrow in the back of the dugout. The Pirates warmed themselves by the blaze throughout the long game (it lasted two hours and forty minutes, a marathon by the standards of the day), while the Cardinals shivered. Sure enough, “Everything the Cards did after the first inning turned as sour as a week-old crock of clabber,” noted J. E. Wray in the Post-Dispatch. Pittsburgh came back for a 6–3 win.

  Chapter 11

  Jackie’s Debut

  Warren “Lefty” Sandel was a tough guy, a pitcher from the old school who thought nothing of brushing back hitters—or putting one in their ear if the situation called for it. He once plunked three straight batters who were attempting to squeeze a run home from third base, even though it cost him the game. He did it just to make a point. So he was surprised to have his own catcher question his manhood. With a 2–1 count on the hitter, Sandel’s equally tough, tempestuous catcher, Dick Bouknight, trotted out to the mound and asked Sandel a rather direct question.

  “Are you going to throw at this nigger or not?”

  It was April 18, two days after the majors had opened their campaign. Now the minor leagues were beginning play, and there was a celebratory feel in the air on this Thursday afternoon in Jersey City, New Jersey. Mayor Frank Hague had closed the schools and declared a holiday for city employees—on the condition that they purchase tickets for the game that day between the Jersey City Giants and the Montreal Royals. Because of the edict, fifty-two thousand tickets were sold for the game at Roosevelt Stadium, a park that held about twenty-three thousand.

  They could have sold that many tickets for the Thursday afternoon game, even without the Mayoral Holy Bull, thanks to the starting second baseman for the Royals that day—Jackie Robinson.

  Roosevelt Stadium was named not for Teddy Roosevelt (whom Jackie was middle-named for), but for FDR. The art deco–style stadium was built as a Works Progress Administration project in the Droyer’s Point section of Jersey City, at the intersection of Danforth Avenue and Route 440. Pregame, the park was festive, with two bands playing, tumbling acrobats cavorting across the outfield, and a huge throng of writers and photographers on hand to capture the action.

  Clay Hopper wasn’t planning to start Robinson, not yet fully believing in his new infielder/experiment, but when he caught wind of the hype being whipped up around Robinson’s debut, he caved in. Hopper told Jackie he was starting that morning at the McAlpin Hotel, at 34th and Broadway in Manhattan, and Robinson crossed the Hudson anxiously awaiting his first day at integrating the game.

  It took him five full minutes to work his way through the crowd outside to the clubhouse. Many black fans had turned out, of course, but there was a healthy mix of races and creeds, what Smith called, “A seething mass of humanity, representing all segments of the crazy-quilt we call America,” in the Courier. “Wendell Willkie’s ‘One World’ was right here on the banks of the Passaic River.” Another writer, Baz O’Meara from the Montreal Star, called it “another Emancipation Day—a day Abraham Lincoln would like.”

  As the national anthem wafted across the field, Robby and John Wright stood ramrod straight, blue caps in hand, their faces blank. Smith put himself in their shoes:

  No one knew what they were thinking right then, but I have travelled more than two thousand miles with the courageous pioneers during the past nine weeks…and I feel like I know them probably better than any newspaperman in the biz…I know that their hearts throbbed heavily and thumped a steady tempo.

  Indeed, Robby himself alliteratively described the “lump in his throat and my heart beating rapidly, my stomach feeling as if it were full of feverish fireflies with claws on their feet.”

  Mayor Hague threw out the first pitch, and the game was on. Robinson batted second in the lineup, and came up in the first with one out. A huge roar greeted him. “Although I was wearing the colors of the enemy,” recalled Robinson in his autobiography, I Never Had It Made, “the Jersey City fans gave me a fine ovation. And my teammates were shouting, ‘Come on, Jackie, start it off. This guy can’t pitch. Get a-hold of one!’”

  The “Little Giants” were less welcoming. Sandel, the starting pitcher for Jersey City on this historic occasion, recalled to writer Rick Van Blair in the early 1990s that “Before Jackie came up some of the guys in the dugout were making all kinds of remarks like, ‘Whoever don’t get a hit tonight has to room with a nigger on the road.’” Sandel had grown up in California and knew Robinson some from Jackie’s days on the West Coast. “I didn’t have anything against him,” Sandel said. “If he was better than me, more power to him.” Thus, when Bouknight came out to demand that Sandel plunk Robinson, the pitcher refused. Bouknight, not liking that answer, went back to his squat, and when the next pitch came in outside, he returned it to Sandel—an inch or two from Robby’s right ear.

  Robinson took the count full and bounced out to short, a grounder considered unremarkable by most onlookers, but one Smith called a “sizzler to shortstop”; he wrote that Robby was “thrown out by an eyelash at first base.”

  Rachel Robinson was busy roaming the breezeway behind the stands, too nervous to sit still. “I didn’t engage with the other players’ wives at all,” she remembered. “I was distant; I was paying too much attention to the field to be polite.” Out at second base, Robinson couldn’t bear to look at the crowd, “for fear I would see only Negroes applauding.” The import of the moment threatened to paralyze the twenty-seven-year-old. “We all sensed that history was in the making,” wrote Robinson, “that the long ban on Negros was about to come crashing down, setting up reverberations that would echo across a continent and perhaps around the world. I believe everyone in Roosevelt Stadium that day realized he was witnessing a significant collapse in the ancient wall of prejudice.”

  The Royals led 2–0 in the third when Robby came up to bat again. The flags on the foul poles fluttered lazily in the slight breeze. Two men were on base, so Sandel assumed Robinson would bunt. Indeed, Sandel said years later that he had stolen the bunt sign from the Royals dugout, so he let up a little on his fastball to get into a defensive posture
a touch faster.

  Unfortunately, Robinson had either missed the sign or ignored it, for he “swung with everything I had” at the chest-high pitch and was rewarded with a “crack like a rifle shot in my ears.” The ball disappeared behind the left field fence, a shot estimated at 335 feet. The crowd at Roosevelt Stadium let loose with a bellow that scattered nervous wildlife across North Jersey.

  It was an amazing moment, a theatrical blend of the historic and the sensational. Robinson rounded the bases, trying vainly to keep a broad smile off his face. The many black fans in attendance shouted, danced, and threw programs in the air. George “Shotgun” Shuba, the Royals left fielder, was on deck, and he “danced a mild jig,” according to the Afro-American. He waited at home for Jackie. “You could see it in his face, how happy he was,” Shuba recalled to the New York Times fifty years later. “You could see he was just overwhelmed with joy.”

  Hopper slapped Jackie on the back as he rounded third, and Shuba shook his hand as Robby touched home to make the score 5–0 Montreal. The following April, Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese would famously shake Robinson’s hand and put his arm around the besieged newcomer as he ended segregation in the major leagues. This moment is much less remembered, but it confirmed what Robinson had suspected all along—that winning and performance would far outweigh race on the athletic field, and he would be welcomed once he showed he belonged. “I didn’t think anything of it,” Shuba said. “A teammate had homered, and I shook his hand.”

  The whole team congratulated him in the dugout. “Deep southern voices from the bench shouted, ‘Yo sho hit ’at one, Robbie, nice goin’ kid!’” Smith later wrote. But up in the press box, Smith was too overcome by the moment to reflect on the culmination of his tireless efforts to promote the idea of the breaking of the color line. He could only look over to fellow Negro sportswriter and Robinson supporter Joe Bostic and smile broadly.

  According to Sandel, however, Hopper was upset that Robinson had ignored the bunt sign, and he roasted his rookie between innings.

  Phil Oates was in to relieve Sandel the next time Robby hit, in the fifth inning. He had played longball, and now Jackie showed the fans some of the flair the Negro Leagues were known for, what its practitioners called “tricky baseball.” He bunted for a hit, stole second, and went to third on a groundout. What followed would become familiar to baseball fans lucky enough to see Robinson play. He teased Oates, dashing down the line and throwing on the brakes, shoulder-faking, and generally inciting the crowd to holler and Oates to come undone. Oates stopped in mid-windup to throw over to third, a clear balk, and Robinson trotted home with a run he had created by “running the bases like a wild colt from the Western plain,” in Smith’s phraseology.

  Jackie was rolling. In the seventh, he singled, stole second, and scored on a triple. In the eighth, he bunted his way aboard yet again, scampered around to third on an infield single, and then flummoxed yet another pitcher, this time Hub Andrews, drawing another balk and scoring for the fourth time. That made the score 14–1, which would be the final blowout result.

  Other than an error in the fifth that allowed Jersey’s lone run to score, Jackie had been magnificent under immense pressure. Robby had gone 4–5 with 3 RBIs, 2 steals, and the 4 runs scored, and had made an indelible impression on everyone in the park. “He did everything but help the ushers seat the crowd,” Bostic wrote in the Amsterdam News. Dink Carroll in the Montreal Gazette wrote, “He has the same sense for the dramatic as Babe Ruth, Red Grange, Jack Dempsey, Bobby Jones and others of that stamp. The bigger the occasion, the more they rose to it.” “Jim Crow Dies at Second” was the headline in another paper.

  The only ones not in Robby’s thrall were the Little Giants, especially Sandel. He was incensed that Robinson had bunted for a hit with the game out of hand. “To me that was just fattening up his average because in that situation you have to hit away,” he said. True to his nature, and the unwritten codes of baseball, the next time Sandel faced Robinson, he knocked him down with a fastball, and said “that was for bunting that last time.”

  But no one else was complaining, least of all the overflow crowd. Jackie later wrote, “I knew what it was that day to hear the ear-shattering roar of the crowd and know it was for me.” At game’s end, the throng rushed onto the field. Fans surrounded Robinson. Smith again captured the scene as Jackie tried to get off the field:

  “Perspiration rolling off his bronze brow, idolizing kids swirling all around him, autograph hounds tugging at him…and big cops riding prancing steeds trying unsuccessfully to disperse the mob that cornered the hero of the day.”

  Red Durrett, a Royals teammate whose two homers on the day had been completely overshadowed, performed more heroics by wading into the mob and pulling Jackie to the safety of the clubhouse. There, however, Robinson encountered more bedlam. Flashbulbs exploded, reporters shouted questions, half-dressed teammates approached to slap his back or clap his shoulder. “Don’t think I didn’t like it,” Robby told Lloyd McGowan of the Montreal Star. Someone thought to call Rickey, who was at his desk on Montague Street (the Dodgers were having their home opener that afternoon). “He’s a wonderful boy,” he said when informed of the remarkable events of the afternoon.

  The sun was disappearing behind the park as the Robinsons left. Her face red from the slanting rays of twilight, Rachel turned to her husband and said, “You’ve had quite a day, little man.”

  “Yes, God has been good to us today,” Jackie replied.

  Chapter 12

  Trial by Fury

  St. Louis righted its ship in Game Two of the season, a 6–0 shutout behind Max Lanier. The strongly built lefty was, like President Truman, adept with both hands. In Lanier’s case, he pitched from the port side because he had broken his right arm twice as a youngster. Max was dominant during the war years, winning seventeen games in 1944, before finally getting called up in May of ’45. He pitched for the team at Fort Bragg and happily saw the war end almost as soon as he got through basic training. Lanier still had plenty of time to serve, but was granted an unexpected, and controversial, discharge in October. The War Department was forced to investigate and cleared the pitcher for baseball duty.

  Lanier held out for a time in the spring, battling for extra money from the notoriously miserly Sam Breadon. He got only a $500 bump from his 1944 rate, and a grudge began to build. Lanier was a rowdy-looking man from North Carolina, fast with a joke and a first-rate singer, but the disagreement over salary robbed him of some life. He was thirty and beginning to think about life after baseball for the first time.

  On the mound, however, it was hard to see his distraction. Lanier baffled hitters by delivering from various angles, including sidearm, and using a wide repertoire of pitches. He used a very high leg kick and never pitched from the stretch, regardless of runners on base. He started the season 6–0, with two shutouts and a microscopic ERA.

  In particular, Lanier could be relied on to best the Dodgers, winning eleven straight against the Bums at one point. That was important, because Durocher’s team was looking far more formidable than predicted. After losing the opener in Boston, Brooklyn won eight in a row.

  The strong play started on April 18, when 29,825 turned out for the first home game of the season at Ebbets Field, against Brooklyn’s hated Harlem rivals, the Giants. As a male quartet sang under the stands and a lone trumpeter played a “brassy paeon of joy,” fans swarmed Flatbush. Cops asked loiterers in the area if they had tickets—if not, they were turned in the opposite direction, away from the park. New York City Mayor William O’Dwyer, who loved the Dodgers almost as much as he loved the ponies, tossed out the first ball, “a weak blooper that plopped almost unnoticed on the grass.” The Dodgers thence unloaded on Mel Ott’s Giants, winning 8–1, even as Brooklyn’s triple-A team was hammering New York’s behind Robinson’s heroics at exactly the same moment. Pete Reiser, the superstar returned from war, was in an unusual spot—third base, a position he hadn’t played since he was
a rookie in 1940. Durocher was determined to give the kids (Whitman, Hermanski, and Furillo) a shot in the outfield.

  The game on April 23 had the Brooklyn faithful believing that this might be a special season along the Gowanus. The euphoniously named Ed Head no-hit the Braves 5–0 that afternoon. Head was a righty from northern Louisiana. He began life as a lefty, but one day when he was fifteen, Head was riding in a bus with his sweetheart. As kids that age are wont to do, he had his arm draped over her shoulders. She was in the window seat and thus had a good view of the bus that came up and plowed headlong into the one they were riding in.

  She died instantly, but Head survived, his arm crushed. Amputation was recommended. But Head pleaded with the surgeon to telephone Ed’s uncle, Dr. L. E. Larche. Larche had the only fluoroscope in all of the area, and an examination showed the arm could be saved. After many hours of surgery, Head kept his left arm. Unfortunately, he could no longer pitch with it. So he learned to pitch right-handed, and amazingly adapted well enough to get to the bigs.

  Head hadn’t pitched in two seasons, and his good wing was still sore from absorbing a recoil from an anti-tank gun at Camp Hood, Texas. And his mind was almost certainly elsewhere—his wife had given birth to a baby boy, Rickey, the day before. Maybe the distraction helped, for Head made short work of the Braves. “I knew I was going to do it all the time,” boasted the proud papa. At the final out, fans deluged the field in celebration.