The Victory Season Page 27

  The round park was a riot of color, with dozens of advertising boards competing for every inch of space on the outfield walls, interrupted only by a small hitters’ background, a cooling dose of black amid the bright primary colors. Ebbets Field’s outer hull was dominated by an art deco facade complete with gargoyles, semicircular windows, and medallions of baseballs encircling the diamond-shaped edifice. The famous rotunda featured a chandelier made of bats and balls. The ticket lines meshed with entrance queues, leading to a mishmash of humanity pushing toward a single goal—entrance to the world of the Dodgers.

  Upon entering the park, fans were greeted with a unique smell, a pungent combination of beer, piss, mustard, grass, body odor, and even a hint of freshly baked bread, courtesy of the Bond Bread Bakery a couple of blocks down.

  After the nose took its beating, the fans’ ears were assaulted. The “Sym-Phony Band,” a group of fans who sounded as if they had found their instruments on the way to the game and decided to jam, played mostly off-key tunes throughout the games. They serenaded the umps with “Three Blind Mice,” and strikeout victims heard “The Worms Crawl In, The Worms Crawl Out,” complete with crashing cymbals. Meanwhile, Tex Rickard, the public-address announcer, would intone malapropisms like “A little boy has been found lost,” but everyone knew what he meant.

  The fans themselves were mostly working class, and heavily representative of the borough’s Italian, Irish, and Jewish admixture. In the scrappy Dodgers they saw themselves; struggling mightily but in the main unsuccessfully against the entitled fat wallets in their lives (represented by the Yankees). This wasn’t the twee, artisan-food-crafting, stroller-pushing Brooklyn of today, but a waterfront city that still felt itself a separate entity from Manhattan. The Dodgers were part of the neighborhood fabric; if the players didn’t actually play stickball, stoop ball, crack the top, coco-levio, Johnny on the pony, or red light–green light with the local kids, they encountered such games on the way to the ballpark. On a given day, celebrity pals of Durocher like Danny Kaye, Groucho Marx, or Perry Como could be spotted in the crowd. But perhaps the fan who best defined the borough’s desperate strivings was a recently discharged army major who frequented Ebbets Field, “broadcasting” the games from the grandstand into his tape recorder, hoping to parlay his law degree into a career in sports, a Brownsville native who had changed his name from Cohen to Cosell.

  Under the scoreboard in right-center field, a sign advertised Abe Stark’s clothing store. Abe was a tailor who offered a free suit for anyone who hit the ad board on the fly. Atop the scoreboard, a Gillette ad invited customers to “Shave Electrically” (the fabled Schaefer Beer sign that doubled as an official scorer, the H or E lighting up according to the ruling on a play, wasn’t there until 1948). The scoreboard was the centerpiece of the thirty-eight-foot-high wall that abutted Bedford Avenue.

  Because of the bizarre street layout surrounding Ebbets Field (the park was built on the site of a festering garbage dump known as Pigtown, named in honor of the porcine inhabitants feasting on rotting fish and other aromatic cuisine), the wall was built at a crazy concave angle. It actually bent inward, so balls tended to carom at unpredictable angles, and Dodgers outfielders like Dixie and Furillo had to learn the baffling bounces. Ebbets was a paradise for hitters even before 1948, when the fences were moved in, but a nightmare for opposing players subject to catcalls from the fans, who were right on top of them. The center field fence had a gap at its bottom that allowed fans outside on the street to lie on their bellies and sneak a peek of the action, until a copper tapped his billy club on their feet, the signal to get up and move along.

  One block west, at the Left Field Bar & Grill, fans gathered before and after games to dissect Durocher’s (“Dee-ro-ture” in Brooklynese) gambits or pay off wagers or just hurl epithets at the Giants. An outlandish remark would earn the rejoinder, “What ya been smokin’, bud, mario-wanna?” Other fans convened for suds and chatter at Seaford’s Lobster House, or at the Subway Inn on Willoughby Street, or the lobby bar of the Hotel St. George.

  The eccentricities of Brooklyn baseball were a major advantage for the Dodgers in 1946. They went 56–22 at home but were only two games over .500 away from their bandbox and adoring Dodgers Nation. Only one team would be able to go into the Ebbets Field cauldron and win more than they lost, and it just happened to be the red-clad squad that was locked in a pennant battle with the Bums.

  Durocher had been operating at red-line speed for months, pushing, prodding, cajoling, bullying. “Leo will run a club just as he runs a game of poker,” wrote Dan Daniel in describing the Durocher Method. “He will deadpan, he will exuberate, he will twit you, he will fool you.” The two sides of Durocher’s style were on display in mid-August. During a game against Philadelphia, Leo engaged in an epic rhubarb with umpire George Magerkurth, the man who admitted to Reiser he had botched a call on an attempted steal of home. Magerkurth ejected Leo and nearly tossed the entire Brooklyn dugout when they rallied to their manager’s side. The Dodgers were swept by Philly in a doubleheader. The next day, Durocher responded with a maneuvering tour de force, using eighteen players to eke out a 3–2 win over the Giants. “It was like the bill in small-time vaudeville,” Durocher would say of his oft-changing lineup.

  One day later, August 14, Rickey revivified an old idea for squeezing nickels from fans. For a scheduled doubleheader with the Giants, the team split the games into a day-night format, with separate admissions for the two games. It was decidedly out of fashion in 1946, though in the teens several teams had tried to do it, only to find it quite unpopular with fans. Brooklynites grumbled, but more than fifty-seven thousand paid to get in over the two games, and the Dodgers rewarded the faithful with a sweep. “People will pay to see anything these days,” a Philly cabdriver told Bob Broeg. “Crowds would come out just to watch them play marbles.”

  That truth was at the heart of Robert Murphy’s efforts to unionize, but a few days later, the Pirates voted to drive the final stake in the American Baseball Guild by voting against Murphy’s offer to represent the players wholesale in salary negotiations. Then they whipped Brooklyn, 10–0.

  It was a fair representation of the players’ mind-set. They wanted a better balance in their relationship with management. But they were willing to settle for pennies on the dollar, then go out and play their kid’s game with an untroubled mind, not caring how close they were to truly collapsing the ramparts that held the owner’s castle together.

  Chapter 29

  Fighting Retreat

  Larry MacPhail was a man of contradictions, simultaneously a pioneer and a reactionary, a progressive and a conservative. He went to great lengths to push night baseball on the sport, then turned around and urged his fellow moguls not to schedule too many evening games. He brought cartoonish volume and cheesy attendance boosters to the dignified Yankees, while at the same time cementing the franchise’s reputation for a bloodless corporate personality. Alcohol played a large role in his capriciousness, but the Yankees owner naturally tended toward the bipolar, even before hoisting his first highball.

  So it was with the delicate subject of the color line. Had MacPhail still been in charge of the Dodgers, rather than the Yankees, he might well have been the one to sign a Negro. It was just the sort of controversial, landscape-altering move he favored. But when his biggest rival, Branch Rickey, did it instead, that soured Mac on the entire idea. Besides, the most important thing to him in 1946 was the program to woo great numbers of well-off fans to Yankee Stadium. Putting a black man in pinstripes would turn off a sizable number of those paying (and paying) customers. And all those black fans who would certainly come out in support of one of their own wouldn’t be great for business, either. He had reached out to the swells for advertising and other means of corporate support, and when his new pals complained about the whirlwinds buffeting their businesses throughout 1946, MacPhail was swift to reassure them that, at Yankee Stadium if nowhere else, time stood still and all was as it
had been. Had there been a few Negro business executives to woo, Mac’s manner may have been totally different.

  The triple-pronged assault on the closed shop the owners were running, personified by Robinson, Pasquel, and Murphy, battered the psyches of the moguls. When their grumbling turned to panic, MacPhail acted. Quietly, through the spring and early summer, he met several times with Breadon, Yawkey, Cubs owner Phil Wrigley, and the presidents of the two leagues, Ford Frick (NL) and William Harridge (AL). The “Steering Committee,” as the cabal was called, then met officially in Boston on July 9 and 10, and then again a week later on the seventeenth and eighteenth, and three more times in early August.

  The upshot of the meetings was that MacPhail, who among his other talents was a world-class assembler of facts and figures that he could marshal on behalf of whatever argument he was in at the moment, would put together a secret report on what the moguls were faced with, and make recommendations for courses of action.

  The MacPhail Committee Report was exceptionally frank in its pessimistic outlook, a “damning document” in the words of historian Jules Tygiel. It condemned baseball’s organizational structure: “Professional baseball has not attempted survey or analysis of its administration set-up for 35 years…without any material revision to meet changing conditions.” It ridiculed the bickering that was pandemic among the owners when it came to making major decisions (“an acute situation representing almost total confusion”). It warned that unionization efforts would succeed if the next attempt began with minor leaguers, and not major leaguers who had more to lose.

  The report conceded that the Reserve Clause was illegal bunk (“In the well-considered opinion of counsel for both major leagues, the present Reserve Clause could not be enforced in an equity court in a suit for specific performance, nor as the basis for a restraining order to prevent a player from playing elsewhere, or to prevent outsiders from inducing a player to breach his contract”), and that only intimidation and scare tactics could be used to dissuade players from jumping to Mexico or any other breakaway league. It acknowledged that baseball had been extremely fortunate that Jorge Pasquel’s Liga was just broken down enough to not be a desirable destination for renegade players.

  And the MacPhail Report recommended defending the color line at all cost, breaking out several spurious arguments for doing so. The race issue was being promulgated by publicity hounds who had no knowledge of baseball but were seeking to make political hay. Signing a handful of blacks was an empty gesture, as most Negro Leaguers were ill-equipped for the majors. Lack of minor league experience crippled Negro League players. Negro League contracts must be honored. And so on.

  The section of the report on race closed with a warning shot across Branch Rickey’s bow. “There are many factors in this problem and many difficulties which will have to be solved before any generally satisfactory solution can be worked out. The individual action of any one Club [read: Brooklyn] may exert tremendous pressures upon the whole structure of Professional Baseball, and could conceivably result in lessening the value of several major league franchises.”

  The real reason the owners wanted to keep baseball white wasn’t racial but financial. They wanted to keep the rent money paid by Negro League teams flowing, and the white fans coming to the parks. No one save Rickey seemed to be able to conceptualize white fans wanting to pay to see electrifying players like Robinson in action, or the idea that black fans would make up for any whites who boycotted the park.

  Given how inflammatory the report was, the Steering Committee and its successors took great pains to keep its contents secret, asking the recipients to destroy their copies. The very existence of the report did not become public knowledge for five years, until a congressional committee accidentally uncovered a copy in 1951. The Sporting News ran excerpts that October, but as MacPhail was out of baseball and Robinson in, the revelation wasn’t as explosive as it might have been.

  Baseball put out the official report from the Steering Committee on August 27 at a full owner’s meeting in New York, but it was a heavily redacted version of Mac’s issuance, containing little about the color line and other controversial issues. This version had MacPhail proposing to adopt Negro League teams whole into the majors, “if and when they put their house in order,” a meaningless bit of rhetoric aimed merely at heading integration off at the pass.

  One matter not redacted from MacPhail’s secret report was his slamming of baseball’s outmoded organizational structure. Mac had threatened and cajoled his stubborn brethren into accepting a new executive council, made up of the commissioner, the league presidents, and a rotating duo of owners, who would rule on all manner of rules, regulations, and issues that would crop up.

  Ensuring that the overdue changes wouldn’t be too painful, and indeed would be implemented in such a manner that would leave the Lords of Baseball still firmly in charge, was Larry MacPhail’s job. No one formally gave it to him, but he naturally took charge, and the other moguls let him run. It helps to remember that the owners of the era weren’t exactly the “Malefactors of Great Wealth” whom Teddy Roosevelt battled. They were rich men, sure, but they had earned it the hard way, and kept it despite the best efforts of the Depression. Ownership of a ball club wasn’t the license to print money it is today. There were no huge television contracts, no $9 beers, no stadia publicly funded on the backs of taxpayers. Most teams operated on small margins, with an outsized reliance on gate receipts, and they weren’t happy with the idea of a shift to any type of “free agency,” where players would force bidding wars for their services. As Fortune put it, “It is the express attitude of many owners…that the average big league ballplayer ought to be happy he’s not back in Hoskins Corners driving a truck. (By the same logic Dorothy Lamour at option time should be grateful only that she is not running that elevator in Chicago.)” MacPhail foresaw the possibility of the Reserve Clause’s demise and was eager to forestall it.

  He pressed upon his fellow owners a radical idea. The players would be invited to a meeting, attended by representatives of each team, during which they would be granted a few inroads, some spoils that would get them off the owners’ backs for a while. That, Mac reasoned, would give the players the illusion of controlling their destiny, and since they had already decided not to unionize (yet), the owners would look as though they were being magnanimous, while taking solace in the fact that the players were unlikely to demand anything truly groundbreaking.

  Heck, Mac would even host the unprecedented meeting at Yankee Stadium. The owners set the discussions for a period starting in late July and extending through August, as the players’ schedules permitted. They then hedged their bets by inviting only six player reps—three from each league (although each team had elected one or two).

  Mac wasn’t short for Machiavelli, but his plan had the devious brilliance of the prince. It isn’t known if he suspected that the player reps tabbed to attend the meetings would be older, higher-salaried players, and thus ones with little to gain by fighting for the future, but that was the result. Dixie Walker represented Brooklyn, Billy Herman the Cubs, Joe Kuhel the White Sox, Mel Harder was there for Cleveland, and coming upstairs from the Yankees clubhouse was Johnny Murphy. All were well over thirty. Twenty-nine-year-old Marty Marion, who was already active in trying to attain some new privileges for the rank and file, was the babe at the negotiating table.

  “The invitation to participate is pap for noisy brats,” thought Red Smith, and while most of the press lauded the owners for their largesse and forward-thinking, a handful saw through the charade. John Lardner in Newsweek wrote, “It is one of those old-fashioned baseball coincidences that the owners did not get around to contemplating player’s rights until the players began to hold clubhouse and hotel meetings in regards to same. The player has been a legal slave for better than a half century. In the middle of 1946, already, the magnates leap into battle in his behalf.” He went on to liken the owners’ promise of new benefits for the players to jailer
s promising an expansion of jail cells.

  Perhaps, but to the players, this was significant progress, an opportunity to formally advance their platform while they, for once, held a card or two (even if they didn’t realize they had aces full of kings). As Freddy Schmidt put it, “Because of the Mexicans the owners were scared. They had to give us something—not much, but something.” The reps presented a dozen demands, including a pension plan, a minimum salary, severance pay, and spring training funds—essential planks of the American Baseball Guild, as it happened. Most notable, however, was what wasn’t brought up—an abolition of the Reserve Clause. “It is interesting to us that the players recognize the absolute necessity of the Reserve Clause as the foundation of our system,” MacPhail warbled to the press. Marion would later acknowledge that the players had been intimidated by years of witnessing “problem” players get discarded like old newspapers. MacPhail swiftly drew up an “agreement in principle.” Commissioner Chandler, trying hard not to guffaw, called the demands “comparatively modest.”

  The owners granted a new minimum salary of $5,000, capped pay cuts at 25 percent, instituted medical benefits, ensured injured players they would be paid in full, began a league-wide pension fund, and agreed to pay $25 per week per player during spring training for expenses down south, the aforementioned “Murphy Money.” The owners had been pushing for an expansion of the season to 168 games, but they agreed to table that idea for the foreseeable future.