The Victory Season Read online

  They played only three times a week, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, further disrupting the jumpers, who were used to far more regular action. The season lasted ninety-eight games. The players’ average salary was about $200 per month—and that was including the Americans. There was no seventh-inning stretch, no pregame meeting to go over strategy, and hardly any “inside baseball”—hit-and-run plays and sacrifice bunts were rare. The outfielders didn’t call one another off fly balls, and they didn’t shift depending on what side of the plate the batter hit from. Pitching changes were rare and occasionally dangerous. An aptly named hurler known as Loco Torres once refused to be pulled from the game, until his manager prodded him off the mound by walloping him in the backside with a fungo bat.

  In an ironic turn of events, the Americans who jumped were playing integrated baseball a year earlier than anyone outside the International League. Players from all over Latin America, including dark-skinned Cubans and Dominicans, and African-American players as well, all tumbled together and mixed with the whites from the majors. J. G. Taylor Spink, the publisher of the Sporting News, had pooh-poohed the Mexican threat on those grounds. “They can’t get many of our players to join those mixed nationalities that make up the clubs down there,” and some indeed stayed away because of that factor.

  The Yanks who ventured south were in the main farm boys who, in a strange twist, wound up deeply envious of the more sophisticated black players. They spoke little Spanish, whereas the Negroes were mostly bilingual, at least conversationally so, thanks to years of playing ball in Latin America. It was a talent that set them up with the local ladies. The whites from the States were shut out of postgame “action,” a not-insignificant fact in a world defined by locker room ethics.

  The black players were also far more tolerant of the hardships of baseball outside of the majors. They were used to an itinerant hardball life, one that came with all manner of difficulties. They adapted—the major leaguers were hard-pressed to do likewise.

  Max Lanier found out the hard way that the Negro Leaguers were tough outs. Lanier’s first game after his exceptional relief appearance came against Monterrey, a team led by several Negro stars, mainly Ray Dandridge, a future Hall of Famer. Dandridge powered a home run (jonron) off Lanier. Afterward, Lanier asked Dandridge where he had come from. “We come from the same place you did, the U.S.A.,” Dandridge replied.

  “I never heard of any of you guys before,” Lanier said.

  “Well, we’ve been here,” said Dandridge.

  Mexico had always been a sanctuary for Negroes looking to play, such a well-known stop that boxer Joe Louis, when asked his plans after he pummeled Billy Conn in June, said, “I dunno—maybe go down to that Mexican League. They say I hit pretty good.” But star players like Dandridge and Martín Dihigo resented the fact that the major leaguers were getting so much money and attention, even as the blacks and Latinos outperformed them on the field.

  The specter of the Mexican presidential election hung over the season, and the major leaguers began to suspect that their recruitment was more about politics than pitching and hitting. Pasquel was close with candidate Miguel Alemán, of the Pardito Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), and he gave plenty of credit internally for the ballplayers jumping to Alemán, which helped him at the polls. The PRI controlled Mexican politics, and Alemán was the odds-on favorite to win, with or without Pasquel, but the good PR didn’t hurt. Of course, that didn’t mean Alemán and Pasquel left anything to chance. Lanier remembered a clubhouse boy telling him that “the election was yesterday, and I voted seven times!”

  After the election, Pasquel attempted to cut salaries, including Lanier’s. The resulting squawk changed Pasquel’s mind, for a while at least, but Lanier, already put off by the food and Mexico City’s pollution, was ready to jump back to the States.

  He didn’t do it, but his catcher, Mickey Owen, did. Owen had a pretty sweet deal. He was getting $120 per month for food, had a maid to clean his furnished apartment, and had a car and driver. He bought a sterling-silver set with his $12,500 bonus. He was exempt from US taxation, and Pasquel paid his Mexican duties.

  But Owen was miles out of his element, and that outweighed his financial portfolio. He was a child of the Ozarks and hadn’t counted on playing with blacks—or worse, being managed by one, Ramón Bragaña, who replaced Owen as the player-manager of Vera Cruz when Owen’s limitations with the language proved him unfit to run the club. He was also handled rather easily in a fistfight with Afro-Cuban star Claro Duany. Then came a real insult—he was asked to play first base so a Negro League vet could catch.

  Worst was the paranoia that set in—Owen complained to writers that “they” were following him, opening his mail, hiring detectives to watch his every move. He claimed that every evening at midnight, an agent of Pasquel’s would pound on his door and make him sign a piece of paper signifying that he was home and in bed. Finally Owen went to Pasquel to complain about his intolerable situation, and Pasquel pulled out a pistol and pushed it across his desk to Owen. “Shoot me if you think you’ve been lied to or misled! Shoot me!!” A reporter from Life was in the room; he stormed out to vomit from the tension.

  He was hitting .243 and getting booed by impatient fans. In Owen’s mind, the day was rapidly approaching when one of those gun-toting partisans would open fire at him after a groundout—heck, it could be Pasquel himself doing the shooting. He was done with this mierde. So Owen hailed a cab and paid $250 for a lift over the border to Brownsville, Texas. His wife hadn’t even had time to pack most of her clothes. When he talked ill of his experience to American reporters, a Mexican paper warned, “It would be wiser for Mr. Owen not to get too close to the international border after his remarks.”

  Owen imagined he would be exempt from Chandler’s ban, and Rickey certainly was willing to bring him back for the pennant race. “The Mahatma of Montague St.…who seemed to think it was quite alright to take Jackie Robinson away from the Kansas City Monarchs, is waiting on the Dodgers doorstep with outstretched arms,” wrote the Los Angeles Times. Brooklyn’s argument was that Owen had never signed a contract for 1946 and thus hadn’t really “jumped.” The contrary argument from St. Louis was made in a loud voice. The Cards had turned down repeated offers from Rickey for one of their young backstops and didn’t want to see a major positional advantage over their heated rivals overturned on a technicality. Chandler held firm, and Owen was out of luck. “When Owen makes an error, it is a beaut,” snickered Time.

  Other Americans were proving equally sour on the Mexican experience. Only Nap Reyes hit anywhere near what was expected from him, and the pitchers weren’t acclimating to the small ballparks and thin air. Their attitudes went south as well. Former Dodger Luis Olmo dozed off in the outfield in the fourteenth inning of an interminable game. As he snored, a hit came his way. Awoken by the roaring crowd, and thinking the winning run had scored, Olmo turned and fired the ball over the fence in disgust. Only then did the runner, who was held at third base, trot home to win the game.

  Time summed up the situation—“The Mexican gold rush is no El Dorado.”

  While the Americans were having buyer’s remorse, the Lords of the Game outflanked Pasquel. Breadon, with tacit approval from MacPhail, who was emerging as an ironic leader of the baseball establishment, made a surprise visit to Mexico in late June. He took in a game with Jorge, fended off rumors he was selling the Cardinals to the Pasquels, and watched his former hurler Freddie Martin lose a poorly pitched game.

  Afterward he talked up the Pasquels. “They are real people,” he beamed, “who will keep any promises they make.” Most presumed that meant Breadon had secured a deal ensuring the Pasquels would stop raiding the Cardinals; others broadened it out to include the entirety of the majors. That viewpoint took on further currency when Chandler, who had made a great show of fining Breadon $5,000 for his “unauthorized” trip, quietly rescinded it. Whatever the truth, the raids stopped. The owners heaved a sigh of relief, thoug
h the raids had exposed many of them as outlandishly cheap. The Depression was over, and the nation’s tolerance for cries of poverty from the moguls was wavering.

  The demise of the Mexican League and Pasquel’s dream was nigh. Pasquel’s money had been a crucial factor in the jet-propelled rise of the enterprise, but the appearance of stability was almost as critical. Owen’s defection and Breadon’s side deal had made Pasquel look like a petty tyrant of a banana republic. He hadn’t helped matters with stunts like managing teams himself on a whim, or becoming official scorer to make decisions that allowed him to welsh on performance bonuses. He remained as majordomo of Mexican baseball until 1951, when an irate fan beaned him on the head with a stone thrown from the stands. Enraged, Pasquel sold his stake in the Liga and turned to safer pursuits, notably big-game hunting in Africa. He was killed in 1955 when his private plane crashed in the Mexican mountains.

  But if the owners thought they were done with challenges to their economic foundation, they were sadly mistaken.

  Chapter 20

  Strike Out

  June 7 was a warm evening in Pittsburgh, and a single question was on the minds of the shirt-sleeved fans, 16,884 in all, in the stands of Forbes Field—would they see their Pirates take the field to play the Giants that night? Perhaps a few in the crowd recognized the potential historic import of the evening—history that would ironically be made only if their Pirates chose not to play.

  With game time just minutes away, the answer was very much in doubt. The home clubhouse was locked tight. Reporters stood on ladders and piled trunks to steal a glimpse inside through the single square window. In the hallway that led to the field, a slightly built man in his mid-thirties paced back and forth, awaiting the result of a momentous vote taking place in the locker room.

  His name was Robert Murphy, and he was the other half of the tag-team combination that was terrifying MacPhail and the other owners that summer.

  Murphy was a lawyer from Boston, in the employ of the National Labor Relations Board, ironically as a management expert. He loved baseball and, in the course of regularly attending Braves and Sox games, got to know a few players. He heard them complaining about salary issues with ownership, and would always tell them, half in jest, “Form a union.”

  But the more Murphy thought about it, the more it made sense. He vividly recalled an incident from back in 1933, when Jimmie Foxx, the slugging “Double-X” who had just won consecutive MVP Awards, was “offered” a salary cut by Connie Mack, from $18,000 to $12,000, and Foxx had little recourse. That had struck Murphy as insane at the time, and now, with a law degree from Harvard and several years’ experience in labor relations in hand, it seemed even crazier. “I could talk for three days on some of the injustices done to ball players by the club owners,” he said. Murphy saw that stage and screen entertainers were unionized. Why were ballplayers any different?

  The first tilt toward player solidarity had come way back in 1885, when John Montgomery Ward, who was a lawyer as well as a New York Giant, attempted to organize his brethren, to little lasting effect. Then, a “Player’s Fraternity” formed in 1912, in the wake of Ty Cobb’s suspension for beating up a fan. Not the most sympathetic of causes, perhaps, but a large majority of the players signed up, in part because the leader, a lawyer named Dave Fultz, studiously avoided the use of the word “union.” Fultz once called for a strike (a settlement was reached the day before) and applied to the American Federation of Labor for inclusion. AFL boss Sam Gompers turned the players down, however, and World War I, with its “work or fight” ultimatums, killed off the Fraternity.

  Now, in the wake of an even bigger war, Murphy was spoiling to try again. He wasn’t a baseball man—the only athletic endeavor he took part in was running some track while at Harvard—and that made him suspect in some people’s eyes within the game. But what he had to say outweighed their cynicism.

  His stated goal was “a square deal for players, the men who make possible big dividends and high salaries for stockholders and club execs.” He then sat in Boston as the fourteen other major league teams came to town, and spoke to the visiting players in his soft New England accent about the absurd conditions they were agreeing to without representation. Before the war, his words may have fallen on less-willing ears, especially during the Depression, when the prevailing opinion among baseball’s rank and file was that they were lucky to have a job at all, much less one so fun. But now, with the stands bursting and the excitement for the game palpable, the players were more receptive to his message. Everyone, it seemed, was making more money from the game—except them.

  As he put it early in the season, “We lost 15 or 20 players to the Mexican League already, and we may lose even more. If they had been satisfied [in the US], they naturally would have remained. It’s our aim to improve salaries, player conditions, and contracts so that players will be satisfied.” Murphy’s hardest task was selling the players on dues of fifty cents a week.

  Murphy proposed an American Baseball Guild, with him as director. The Guild’s platform would contain six main negotiating points:

  Half of the purchase price of any player sale would go to the player (at present, the sold player got zilch).

  The players should have the right to an arbitrator to settle salary disputes.

  That there would be no maximum salary.

  That the minimum salary would be $7,500 a year.

  Bonuses and insurance should be a standard part of every contract.

  Contracts must not be one-sided.

  It was that last vague-sounding point that struck the most fear in the heart of any management type who heard about it. Without saying so outright, it challenged the Reserve Clause, which was the very model of a one-sided contract. Even though Murphy went out of his way to say that he wasn’t after abolishment of the Clause (“the wealthier clubs would corner the player market” is what he told the Cardinals when he met with them in May), everyone knew that would be the inevitable result, if not immediately, then in the very near future. After all, as he told the Redbirds in their meeting, “the validity of baseball contracts makes me laugh. An owner can do as he wants with a player on a ten-day notice.” The player, meanwhile, was bound to the club forever.

  While many in the press made jokes about a “Second Basemen’s Local 307” and overtime pay for extra-inning games, Murphy would have seen that the winds were at his back. In the spring, a navy vet named Al Niemiec returned home and went back to his old job, that of infielder with the Seattle Rainiers of the Pacific Coast League. He was cut after a handful of games, and sued to get his gig back under the GI Bill, which guaranteed veterans they would be able to return to their old positions. Judge Lloyd Black agreed.

  “Baseball is no different than a store or a machine shop,” he wrote. “The law is simple. A veteran rates his old job back.…Since it is argued correctly that baseball is the great American game, certainly it ought to bear its share in meeting obligations to servicemen.” Then, using language that had to set Murphy’s hair on fire, Black wrote that the Reserve Clause was patently illegal, and “reminiscent of chattels.”

  Murphy, a bachelor, made the Guild his consuming passion that spring. He claimed that he had signed up members on at least eleven of the sixteen teams, and that he was ready to work on the minor leagues and the six thousand or so players down on the farm next. He certainly got the attention of the Lords of the Game. Already buffeted by Pasquel’s raids, the last thing they needed was a shit-stirrer fomenting labor trouble in their clubhouses. “The owners were no longer laughing; they were panicky,” wrote Newsweek. Clark Griffith, the tightwad owner of the Senators, screamed about the ridiculousness of Murphy’s demands. “Collective bargaining in baseball would be utterly impractical,” he said. “There is no production line in this game. It’s a matter of individual ability.”

  Some in management were more sympathetic than others, or at least more pragmatic. After Murphy had held secret talks with the Boston Braves about holdi
ng a strike vote, team president Lou Perini somehow got wind of Murphy’s intent and flew to Chicago, where the Braves were playing the Cubs, to talk it over with his players. As a result, he agreed to stop scheduling doubleheaders after night games, increase the minimum salary to $6,000, and begin payments during spring training.

  If the moguls were hoping that the press, whom they fed and liquored and (mostly) transported and sheltered on road trips, would be sympathetic toward their side, they were surprised. Most in the press saw the situation as absurdly tilted toward management, and wrote as much. Dave Egan, “the Colonel,” nominated Murphy for instant enshrinement in the Hall of Fame. Even Westbrook Pegler, the staunch right-winger (but a former baseball writer), took a line that sounded decidedly leftist. “The owners will have some of themselves to blame,” he wrote. “Not all, but enough of them, have been harsh and arrogant, mean in money matters and completely ruthless in imposing on the youth of great players.”

  By summer, Murphy was feeling cocky enough to call for a team to strike. He decided on Pittsburgh as his test case. The Pirates played in a strong union town with a heavy industrial base. Among others on the team were ETO World Series vets Ken Heintzelman and Maurice Van Robays, both emphatically pro union, their wartime experience giving them perspective on the shackles they served under at home. Then there was backup catcher Bill Salkeld. He had hit .315 in 1945, but received a mere $500 raise, to $6,000. Unable to find a place for himself and his family to live, due to the nationwide housing shortage, he had to put them up in a hotel, which broke him financially. Finally, he was forced to put his wife and kids on a train to California so they could live with his in-laws, going hat in hand to his teammates to borrow the $500 required for the tickets. The trial turned him into a hard-core proponent of Murphy’s guild and anything that would help ballplayers on the margins cope.