The Victory Season Page 17
The entire labor movement was tarnished. “Labor is like a kid who gets too much money from their parents,” thought one Des Moines dentist. A housewife in New Orleans was blunt—“My husband’s a union man, but he’s wrong.” Veterans were particularly put out. “It looks like what we went through in the war was hardly worthwhile,” one told a New York reporter. Another, overhearing, went further—“If we had Hitler here, there would be no strike.” It seemed to many as though the blossoming Communist threat abroad had found a beachhead right here in the Great 48.
Baseball was affected right along with everything else. Half a dozen teams were stuck for hours before arranging to get to the next city. The Cleveland Indians were due into St. Louis to play the Browns after beating the Red Sox in ten innings on the twenty-third. They chartered a flight, but the plane was appropriated by the government for higher priorities, so they climbed on a bus early on the morning of the twenty-fourth. The team was still hours from Missouri at game time. The contest was officially declared a rainout, even though the sun shone over St. Louis.
Catcher Joe Garagiola had just been called up to the Cardinals, and the hometown hero hoped to join the team in Cincinnati but was stranded, unable to get to the show. Teams across the majors, like the Tigers, Cubs, and Pirates, hired fleets of cars to haul them to the next stop on their schedules. Umpires were told to stay where they were and officiate whatever games took place in that city.
Meanwhile, the Cardinals’ charter raced toward Cincinnati. Ten players, including Pollet, Beazley, and Dickson, were deemed nonessential and were left off the plane. They found a bus and completed a twenty-seven-hour slog, thus missing the game of the twenty-fourth. They had it easy. The rest of the club flew in a DC-3, many of them in a plane for the first time. It was a typical flight for 1946—fifty miles short of their destination, the air turned violent, and thunderheads forced the plane down well short of Cincinnati about two hours before game time.
A group of ancient taxicabs was on hand at the airstrip, and the junkers raced for Crosley Field. Most made it without incident, but the cab carrying Musial and a few others, including Slaughter and Moore, had a faulty hood latch. The hood kept popping open, blocking the cabbie’s view of the road. With an accident that would deprive the National League of its best player growing more and more likely, Musial told the cabbie that he should sit on the hood to hold it in place. Musial took the wheel, driving while sticking his head out of the window to see past his new hood ornament. The other guys stared at their shoes or gripped the door handles in terror as Stash sped into town and up to the ballpark. “I was laughing, but the guys were a little white,” said Musial later. Somehow, they all arrived in one piece, and on time. Unsurprisingly, they were no match for Ewell Blackwell. The Reds won 5–1. The cabbie probably looked for a safer job.
Lanier, Klein, and Martin had a different madcap journey. They were headed for St. Louis to pack rather than Cincinnati to play, but the rail strike didn’t discern. They found a bus to Baltimore, and were so worried about their big bonuses being stolen that they stored the cash bundles inside a big radio they had bought for the purpose of clandestine travel. They managed to get on board a plane to Chicago from Baltimore, but all the outgoing flights to St. Louis were booked solid. So they covered the three hundred miles by taxi, with Pasquel picking up the $400 tab.
A friend of Klein had somehow found a new car for his buddy, a Chrysler Windsor, even though automobiles were tough to buy. He had likely gone through the black market, which had sprung to life across the country in an instant as the OPA struggled to enforce price ceilings in the same way liquor agents had struggled to keep people from imbibing during Prohibition. “The black market cut through every stratum of American life” reported Life. In one celebrated case, a girl in Oakland bought a stick of penny candy and was forced to buy a $5 candy bar as well. Sugar that usually cost $.08 went for $1 a pound. The estimates of goods being resold at jacked-up prices on the black market were staggering—75 percent of automobiles, 70 percent of lumber, 75 percent of grain, 85 percent of bananas. Clothing, meat, liquor—if it could be sold, it was sold at a markup, accompanied by a muttered “you looking to buy something?”
Martin ventured south separately, but Lanier and Klein drove together in the Windsor. As they packed up, they talked with reporters. “We realize that we have no more than five years of ball left and for the sake of our families we figured we could not turn down the proposition,” Lanier said. John Lardner wrote in Newsweek that he didn’t understand “why the whole St. Louis team hasn’t jumped to Mexico before now.” Others in the press thought differently. “Has the USA reached the point where it can’t match Mexican money?” asked Grantland Rice. “Has it become that cheap?” Writing from Cincinnati, the dean of St. Louis sportswriters, Bob Broeg, thought, “It wouldn’t be surprising if Crosley Field just up and moved across the Rio Grande.”
The defections stunned the Cards, who were tied for first when Lanier and the others signed on Pasquel’s dotted line. “I felt like our pennant chances had been shot out from under us,” Dyer moaned a short time later, and the team went into a tailspin, losing seven of the next eleven to close May. Breadon was nonplussed, pointing out that a pitcher named George “Red” Munger, a solid starter who still hadn’t been discharged from the service, would soon be back to fill Lanier’s spot. Munger, however, wasn’t due back until August.
Howie Pollet, Dyer’s favorite among the Cards, stepped up and volunteered to shoulder a heavier burden in Lanier’s absence. “Give me a day’s rest after I start a game,” he told his manager, “and I can relieve if you need me. Then another day of rest and I can start again.” Dyer said later, “Howie wasn’t a robust fellow, but his heart was stout and I’ll never forget it.” Murry Dickson, who until that point was solely used out of the bullpen, also gained a prominent role in the rotation as the Cards tried to make up for the loss of their ace. Johnny Beazley took on more of a starter’s role as well. Freddy Schmidt, however, remained glued to his seat in the bullpen.
Lanier and Klein became Vera Cruz Blues, joining Mickey Owen and Danny Gardella, and learned what the league was all about on their third day in Mexico. Vera Cruz led by two in the ninth inning, but the bases were loaded with nobody out. Pasquel, watching from his front-row box seat, pushed aside the silver platter of food he was wolfing down, called time out, and walked to the dugout. He ordered Owen to put in his new star pitcher. Owen shrugged in Lanier’s direction, as if to say, “It’s his money.” Lanier, who hadn’t pitched in over a week, struck out the side on nine pitches. Pasquel ran out to hug Lanier, yelling, “Max, I won this game, didn’t I?!”
That was the high point of Lanier’s time down south. He quickly became a clearinghouse for all the problems faced by Yanquis playing in Mexico. The water made him sick, the food made it worse. He mostly lived on canned tuna and peaches. His home had no air-conditioning, only overhead fans with slow blades that merely pushed the oppressive heat around the room. Lanier couldn’t sleep and soon was so exhausted he could barely speak.
When he left for road trips, things got worse. Travel in the Mexican League was by bus or occasionally two-motor prop plane. Bus rides from city to city were terrifying affairs, as road rules were ignored and the loudest horn had the right of way. Air travel wasn’t much better. Once, on a road trip to Tampico, the Vera Cruz plane landed in a cow pasture to pick up a passenger. Lanier would later vividly remember seeing the trees bending from the pressure of the plane upon takeoff.
Regardless of Lanier’s travails, Pasquel’s success with the St. Louis Three led him to go hard after other Cardinals, including Slaughter, Kurowski, and especially Musial. Jorge had Owen call Stan relentlessly, pitching him on the merits of La Liga. Then he sent Alfredo to St. Louis to meet with Musial at the Fairgrounds Hotel on June 6. Musial almost choked on the fat cigar he was puffing on when Alfredo spread five $10,000 cashier’s checks on the bed and told Stan it was a bonus on top of the $125,000 they would
pay him over five years. He later understated the obvious when he said, “All that money makes a fellow think before saying no.”
“Musial to say adios” rumors swept St. Louis, leading to the city almost losing its collective shit after an innocent mix-up. Musial happened to be moving on the afternoon of June 6 to a bungalow in the southwestern part of town. A reporter called his soon-to-be-former home and Stan’s son Dickie picked up. When asked what they were doing, the boy answered “packing.” Naturally, the press jumped to the conclusion that they were leaving town for Mexico.
Musial put that story to rest but was still torn about whether to take Pasquel’s riches. It was Eddie Dyer who sized up the situation and cut to the heart of Musial’s true feelings. “Stan, you’ve got two children,” Dyer said. “Do you want them to hear someone say, ‘There are the kids of a guy who broke his contract?’”
That got Stan where he lived, and he told the Pasquels thanks but no thanks. Later, he intimated to the Sporting News that patriotism had outflanked avarice:
My dad came over from Poland. He worked in a steel mill in Donora, PA. He worked hard. But he never kicked. This was his dream, the good old U.S.A.…I want our little family to be together right here in America.
A shaken Breadon called Stan to his office and magnanimously awarded his superstar a $5,000 raise, bumping him to $19,000. It was still the best bargain in the game. The news didn’t filter down to Mexico. Even as Musial was signing to stay in St. Louis, the public address announcer at the Verz Cruz–Puebla game told fans that Musial was en route and would play the next day against Lanier’s Vera Cruz team.
Life noted that “Owners should have been happy, but they went around with harried, haunted looks, worrying which might be the next of their players to tear up his contract and jump to the fabulous Mexican League.” But Musial’s refusal to jump defanged the Mexican threat. His decision was closely watched by all of baseball. Had Stash crossed the border, many more were sure to follow. Instead, the players were mollified. If Musial was staying put, laughably underpaid as he was, then things down south must be not all they were cracked up to be.
Indeed, La Liga was quickly losing its “fabulous” sheen.
Chapter 19
Finito
A familiar, if flushed and heavily sweating, round face appeared in Jorge Pasquel’s box during a Vera Cruz–Tampico game at Delta Park in May. It was “El Sultan del Bat”—Babe Ruth, in the flesh. “Qué tal, amigos,” the Babe mumbled to well-wishers. He had only two years to live, and the oppressive heat and smog was playing havoc with the Babe’s constitution. But he was down south to send a message to the owners that were essentially blackballing him from the game. Since retiring from clubbing tape-measure home runs, Ruth wanted nothing more than to manage a big league team, but he was frozen out, partially because he was unsuited for the job, partially because the owners resented his outrageous salaries and bigger-than-the-game behavior while he had been playing.
So Ruth was reduced to flying to Mexico City and fanning rumors that Pasquel was set to make him commissioner. “I think the Pasquels are doing a fine thing for baseball and for their country,” Ruth told the press horde. “Baseball is a game that should be played all over the world.”
The owners were embarrassed, mainly because of the timing of Ruth’s statement. MacPhail had led a lawsuit seeking to permanently stop the raids, and the owners’ chest-thumping was overshadowed by the Babe’s trip. MacPhail and his cohorts in the owner’s boxes across baseball thought the law would be on their side, but in truth, it was a day in court the Mexicans looked forward to. “Monopoly is our defense,” said Jerome Hess, the attorney for the Mexican League, “and it will be tried right down to the end, until every scintilla of evidence has been introduced.”
Among Mexicans, baseball and the Mexican League had never been more popular. As the New York Times reported, the streets were full of talk of the game, while most reveled in the idea of “Saint Jorge” slaying the “dragon” of Norteamericano béisbol. It was seen as a small piece of revenge for the Mexican War of exactly a century before, a conflict that cost Mexico half of its territory to President James Polk’s Manifest Destiny. As pitcher Tom Gorman, who leapt from the Braves to Mexican League ball in the spring of ’46, said, “The Mexicans love to see a mere human dispatch a tremendous bull.”
Back in America, those with a vested interest in the game did all they could to ruin the reputation of the man who threatened their livelihood. Stories abounded of Pasquel pulling handguns on reporters, or ignoring owed payments, or threatening players with violence after on-field mistakes. “He is viewed as a sinister, swarthy, and unscrupulous man of limitless means whose widespread agents operate on a Fu Manchu–like scale,” reported Time, and that alien, vaguely Communist aura was exactly how the owners painted Pasquel to the public.
They had help from several coconspirators. American sporting-goods manufacturers, heretofore the sole suppliers of the Liga, refused to sell equipment to the Mexicans, under threat from the owners. The result was a shortage of bats, balls, and bases that forced the Mexican League to postpone its opening day by a week. Then a sympathetic congressman let slip that back in 1941, Pasquel had been blacklisted by the US government for illegally trading with Germany. Meanwhile, a judge in New York called the luring of players “malicious acts” and set a temporary injunction against the Pasquels approaching any of the Yankees. Pasquel responded by sending Commissioner Chandler a contract offering Happy $50,000 to come down and serve as commish in Mexico.
On March 21, opening day in the Liga, Vera Cruz dumped Mexico City 12–5 in front of thirty-three thousand at Delta Park. Outgoing Mexican President Manuel Avila Camacho threw out the first pitch. Gardella homered and doubled in the game but, true to his scouting report, also dropped a couple of fly balls. Pasquel ordered him to get his eyes checked. The first two dozen games on the schedule drew about seven hundred thousand fans, proving that folks in Mexico were every bit as eager to turn the page on the war as their neighbors to the north. Pasquel also had sold the 1946 radio rights for a cool $20,000—in 1942, Pasquel had paid for the broadcasts from his own pocket.
But there were warning signs that the good times were coming to an end. The Americans were having trouble adjusting to the mores of béisbol Mexicano. The lawless culture took them aback. Virtually everyone, or so it seemed, carried a weapon, brandishing it at the drop of a sombrero. “If some of those Mexican henchmen didn’t think you were hustling to their satisfaction,” said Mickey Owen, “they’d sidle up to you and stick a gun in your ribs.…It just scared the hell out of me.” Fireworks and hissing skyrockets would be set off after good plays. “They’re worse than Brooklyn,” Owen exclaimed after being startled once too often.
The Sierra Madre chain provided an unforeseen problem for the jumpers. The altitude in Mexico City and the surrounding cities left players gasping for breath, while pitchers found that their curveballs lacked snap in the thin air. The Times reported on a player who hit a triple, then held up the game for five minutes while he attempted to catch his breath. The locally made bats were constructed of poor lumber and cracked unless hit perfectly sweet. The players called them “drugstore bats.” Mosquitos were a constant nuisance, especially in hotel rooms that didn’t provide screens. A sleepless night was a strong possibility if the bugs weren’t kept at bay.
Tampico had a large, mostly modern park that seated thirty thousand fans, and Pasquel was said to be planning a $2 million stadium for downtown Mexico City. But most of the parks in the league were substandard. They didn’t have showers or clubhouses, for one thing, necessitating players to change at their hotels, which often didn’t have running water, especially outside of Mexico City. The dugouts were small and airless in the fearsome heat, and players mostly sprawled on the ground outside. In Vera Cruz, the dugout was sunk so far into the crowd the players had to lean way out to see the game, as if they were in a pillbox.
The infields were often grassless, rock
-filled tracts, and outfields were seldom mown uniformly. In Pueblo, the groundskeeper had a secret weapon to control the grass—goats were let loose to eat the extra growth before games. Even Tampico’s decent park had a railroad track that ran smack through center field. Right in the middle of a game, a whistle would blow, the gates would open, and the action would stop while a freight train ran across the field. Outfielders had to look down while tracking flies to ensure they didn’t trip over the tracks.
Travel was mostly by overcrowded bus, filled to double capacity, ones where “people got on, but nobody got off.” Max Lanier wasn’t the only American scarred by road trips. Two decades later, Sal Maglie still shuddered when he remembered the trips over the mountains to and from Puebla, his team. “The buses were driven by madmen,” he told Sports Illustrated. “They used to push those old wrecks as hard as they could on the narrow, winding roads in the mountains.” Maglie started flying at his own expense to avoid the bus, but the local airplanes weren’t much safer. Landing strips in a few towns were simply open pastures. “It was unnerving,” Owen said years later. “Coming in for a landing we’d look out and see eight or ten of those big black Mexican vultures waiting for us. That’s one of the things I remember best about Mexico—those vultures.”
Nearly everyone smoked, and the haze obscured fly balls. Worse, fires started from wayward cigarillos were a constant hazard. Vendors sold seat cushions, enchiladas, and lottery tickets. Gambling was pervasive, with pesos changing hands after almost every pitch. Police with tear-gas guns lined the aisles, ostensibly to control the gambling, but they barely slowed the action. The best seats up front cost about $2—most paid far less. The fans, almost all of whom were male, yelled “ciego!”—“blind man”—at the umpires.