The Victory Season Read online

  As for the Basic Player Contract, it was rewritten after the 1946 season. Under the old system, the club held complete command—“The player will accept such salary rate as the club may fix, or else will not play baseball otherwise than for the club.” Under the new contract, the teams could offer a new one-year contract at the previous season’s salary, after which the player would ostensibly be free. However, the owners interpreted the language as being a perpetuating rollover clause, essentially locking players to a club, much as things had been. Without a Robert Murphy or any other legal minds on hand to protest this reading of the clause, the players quietly acquiesced.

  Red Smith was angry that the gains were so puny. “The owners,” he thundered in the Herald Tribune, “sought to forestall trouble by tossing the help a bone. They decided in advance how little they could offer and get by with. Then they called in the hired men and made a pretense of asking them what they wanted.”

  Given just how tenuous the moguls’ position truly was, the fact that they had gotten away with their control intact at the relative cost of a few coins sprinkled into a park fountain was extraordinary. But the players walked away feeling they had won a large battle, if not the war. That wasn’t a conflict they were looking to fight, anyway. For these veterans who were simply happy to be back playing ball again, going to the mattresses over working conditions was like the failed Operation Market Garden of 1944—a bridge too far.

  Robert Murphy was outraged. “The player-management deal was cooked up to get rid of the guild,” he told the Harvard Crimson. “It’s the most barefaced attempt at a company union I have ever heard of. Eventually,” he continued, “the new generation of intelligent, non-subservient players will…recognize that their greatest weapon is the strike, and will not hesitate to employ it if they must.” He added sadly, “The players have been offered an apple, but could have had an orchard.”

  It would take Murphy’s evolutionary descendant, Marvin Miller, to get the players their orchard. Miller negotiated his first contract as head of the Major League Baseball Players Association in 1968. He got the minimum salary raised from $6,000 (to where it had been raised in 1948) to $10,000. In other words, the magnates’ canny maneuvering, led by MacPhail, to maintain control in ’46 had bought them two decades and change of relative status quo—salaries still low, and the Reserve Clause still in place. Then, in 1975, Miller took the owners to court, where an arbitrator named Peter Seitz at last struck down the Reserve Clause, opening the door for proper free agency.

  Chapter 30

  Here’s to You, Mrs. Robinson

  On July 25, 1946, a white farmer from Georgia named Loy Harrison paid $600 bail to get a black man named Roger Malcolm out of prison. Malcolm had been accused of stabbing a white neighbor of Harrison’s, and at first the farmer refused to help when entreated by two of his other part-time employees on the farm, Roger’s wife, Dorothy, and her brother, George Dorsey. But he changed his mind and went to the Walton County Jail, about halfway between Atlanta and Athens, to free Roger.

  Harrison drove Malcolm, Dorothy, and Dorsey and his wife, Mae, back toward the farm, but via an unusual route, one that took the white driver and his four black occupants over the Moore’s Ford Bridge. At the far end, a car blocked their path. A large group of white men, anywhere from a dozen to thirty, all armed, surrounded Harrison’s car and hauled the Malcolms and the Dorseys out. George Dorsey, a recently returned veteran, realized what was about to happen and resisted, but was swiftly overcome.

  The white mob shot the two black men and threw them in the Oconee River under the bridge. The two women were then shot in case they could identify any of the attackers.

  Dorothy Malcolm was several months pregnant. Her unborn child was cut out of her body.

  The FBI investigated briefly, found no one willing to talk about the killings, and dropped the case, which remains unsolved.

  It was the last recorded mass lynching in US history, and the ninth of 1946. Additionally, a score or more black men and women had been rescued from mob justice at the last moment. President Truman, aware that more than 75 percent of the nation’s black population still lived in the South, despite heavy wartime migration to the north and west, established a Committee on Civil Rights that recommended an end to housing segregation and federal punishment for lynchers.

  The night after the events at Moore’s Ford Bridge, Jackie Robinson and the Montreal Royals opened a series in Baltimore. Orioles fans had yet to reconcile the idea of a Negro ballplayer on the field with their heroes, and staged a pitch invasion in the first inning, forcing the teams to the clubhouse and delaying the game while police cleared the field. When order was restored, Robinson, his ears ringing with unending abuse from the stands, reacted by collecting three hits, including a two-run homer, and stealing home in a 10–9 Royals victory.

  It was progress, more than could be achieved by a dozen presidential committees.

  Horse racing’s Triple Crown of 1946 was captured by Assault, the son of Bold Venture, who thundered from way back in the pack to overtake Natchez and win the Belmont Stakes, thrilling a huge crowd of New Yorkers who shivered through an unseasonably frigid June day. The pigeon-toed Robinson might have felt some kinship with Assault, the “Chocolate Champ with the deformed foot,” who had overcome hardship to become a champion. But he had no time or energy to follow America’s second-favorite sport. He did manage to watch boxing when he could, and enjoyed a mid-June reunion with former army acquaintance Joe Louis at the champ’s training camp in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, where Louis was readying for a rematch with Billy Conn. He posed for pictures wearing a single boxing glove, while the Brown Bomber held a baseball bat with languid grace; he appeared ready to bat cleanup for the Bronx Bombers at any moment.

  Otherwise, the constant travails of pioneer life were wearing Robby down.

  The local papers, the Montreal Star and the Montreal Gazette, were hardly anti-Robinson. But even as Jackie was taking the town by storm with his early success, they betrayed their true, if underlying, feelings by referring to Robinson as the “Coloured Comet,” or “Dark Poison,” or “Dark Danger,” or simply “dark boy.” By midsummer, though, racial themes were no longer en vogue—Jackie had simply eliminated them through superb play. Instead of “Negro” or “black,” he was referred to simply as “Robby.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be anything he can’t do,” wrote Dink Carroll in the Gazette, and indeed, the hot rumor was that Rickey would call Robinson up to the big club to help them hold off the Cardinals. Hopper, by now an unabashed fan, told Newsweek that Robinson was “a player who must go to the majors.” Royals GM Mel Jones was forced to reassure French Canada by telling the Sporting News, “He’s passed the test here and he shouldn’t have to go through that again in the big leagues this year.”

  Robinson continued to turn in extraordinary feats on the diamond, such as tagging and scoring from third on a pop-up behind second base, or keeping a rundown alive until nearly the entire opposing team was trying to tag him out. But overall, his sterling play began to fall off during the dog days of summer. Partially, he was hitting a rookie wall, unaccustomed as he was to playing such a long, and unremitting, schedule. He missed nearly three weeks in June with a calf injury. And the fact that the Royals played an extraordinary thirty-nine doubleheaders during the 1946 season surely didn’t help. But it was the pressure that was his worst enemy.

  “I haven’t heard anything worse than you hear in college football,” Robby insisted to Red Smith, but the truth was plain to see. “The stress continued to mount on Robinson,” reported the Sporting News. He had trouble sleeping. He pecked at food. Rachel was having a difficult pregnancy, not helped by the shortages that afflicted Canada almost as much as the United States. She would get fevers that spiked as high as 105 degrees, and sulfa that helped reduce her temperature was hard to come by. But she was there for every home game, and provided Jackie some much needed domestic tranquility in the flat on Rue de Gaspé.
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  “Rachel’s understanding love was a powerful antidote for the poison of being taunted by fans, sneered at by fellow players, and constantly mistreated because of my blackness,” Jackie wrote in his autobiography, I Never Had It Made.

  They met at UCLA, when Jackie was already an athletic star, and Rachel was just a freshman trying to find her way. The relatively few African-Americans on campus liked to hang out at Kerckhoff Hall, where the leader was a student named Ray Burkhart. Rachel met her future husband there, though she wasn’t immediately attracted to him. “He was already a big man on campus,” she remembers through the mists of time, “and when I saw him for the very first time, he was in a studied pose, with his hands on his hips. I thought he was arrogant because of it, and I hated arrogance.”

  But when they started talking, she discovered she had totally misjudged him. “I fell in love right away with his humility,” she recalls. This being Los Angeles, the automobile played a part in their burgeoning relationship. “I found out where he parked his car,” she recalls with a laugh, “and parked as close as I could every day.” She was driving a beater she shared with her brother, one that barely made it to campus and back. Soon enough he was driving her around. They were together until Jackie’s death in 1972. It was one of the great American love stories of the twentieth century.

  “I always felt that I was meant to stand beside this great man, not behind him,” she says today. “And he wanted me there. I supported him, I listened to him, I watched him compete. I worried about him, especially when all those beanballs were thrown his way.” But there was never any judgment, any recrimination. If this was her husband’s destiny, Rachel would be right there too.

  But even with the extraordinary spousal support, Jackie’s play continued to suffer. His errorless streak ended at fifty-seven games with a pair of flubs. He started to slump at the plate. Jittery, exhausted, and frustrated, Robinson finally paid a secret visit to a Montreal physician, who told Robby he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The doc wanted Robinson to sit and rest for a while, maybe a full month.

  It wouldn’t have been an unreasonable request, given what he had endured to that point, and the fact that Montreal had long since clinched the top spot in the standings. But Robby could not not play. He was leading the league in batting average, for one thing, and worried that fans would interpret his sitting out as a sign that he was merely trying to protect his numbers. And of course, he didn’t want to give the bastards the satisfaction. Most powerful was his competitive nature. Robinson reframed his exhaustion as an athletic challenge. He took off exactly one day, taking the opportunity to go on a picnic with Rachel. Then he returned to the lineup.

  Two weeks before the season ended, Jackie was back in Baltimore, the scene of so much racial animus. Early in the day, the Sporting News reported that several Montreal scribes rated Robinson as the best Royals second-sacker of all time. He celebrated by stealing home in another win over the Orioles, and this time, his dash and daring was rewarded with a standing ovation from the crowd, their hate at last broken by admiration.

  “After that, I started to relax,” he later wrote. If he could turn Baltimore’s crowd to his side, anything was possible. He just might make it through this trying season. He captured the batting title, and prepared for the playoffs.

  On the final day of the International League’s regular season, the US Armed Forces Commander in Europe, General Joseph T. McNarney, was quoted as saying Negro leadership qualities were “below the standards required for the efficient performance of certain types of combat duties.”

  Clearly, there were still some hearts and minds to capture.

  Chapter 31

  The Autumn of Their Discontent

  Boston cruised through August, going 21–11 during the dog days, and maintained a double-digit lead in games. On September 5, the Sox won their eighth straight, a 1–0 shutout from Jim Bagby. Bagby had a harelip, and was difficult to understand when he spoke, so he made up for it by cursing every third word or so. He once reamed out Ted Williams for not hustling after a ball hit down the line. “For Christ sake, go after that fucking ball,” he bellowed.

  “I’ll tell you what, Bagby,” Williams yelled back. “When you pitch, I won’t play.”

  “Is that a promise?” Bagby replied. “If you don’t play, I might win a fucking ballgame.” Everyone within earshot understood every word.

  Boston led the league by an astounding 16½ games after Bagby’s gem, and were one win away from taking the pennant. The team cleaned out DC-area liquor stores of their champagne stock in preparation for the clinching celebration during a series with the Senators. But then they slumped and lost six straight games, leaving the bubbly flat and the team surly.

  Perhaps they were worried about events overseas. The phrase “Cold War” wouldn’t be commonly used until the following spring, but the tense standoff with the Communists began in earnest in the fall of ’46. Two unarmed American cargo planes were shot down over Yugoslavia, with five killed and seven more taken prisoner, initiating an uneasy showdown with Marshal Tito. The Soviets left troops in Iran far beyond their promised pullout date, precipitating a crisis. A drunk Russian soldier in the American sector of Berlin nearly caused an international incident when he stood in the street and refused to let a streetcar pass. US soldiers shot him in the foot when he fled. Truman had been forced to fire his commerce secretary, Henry Wallace, after Wallace wrote a letter advising unilateral disarmament and appeasement of the Russians. On Wallace’s way out of the White House, Truman called him a “rat bastard.”

  The Russians didn’t have the bomb—yet—but the just-dawned Atomic Age clouded minds and jangled nerves across the country. Those inclined to forget were jolted back to reality by John Hersey’s monumental report on the destruction of Hiroshima in the pages of The New Yorker, published on August 31. So one nuclear weapons control exponent tried to enlist the barbers of Pennsylvania to talk atoms instead of baseball. “You must admit, barbers reach a good cross-section of people,” said Lillian Watford to Life. “You know how they are always talking in their shops about baseball and so on. They might profitably be talking about the implications of atomic energy instead.”

  Across the globe, conflict raged, and the likelihood that the United States would be drawn back into war someplace seemed to grow each day. Hindus and Muslims butchered one another in India. The Chinese civil war grew more heated, while famine swept the land (“Starving Chinese Eat Bark” was a typical report from the Middle Kingdom). Partisan bands raged across the Balkan countries, continuing a centuries-old ethnic war that had been given temporary legitimacy by World War II. The British vainly attempted to fend off freedom fighters/terrorists in Palestine, as the group known as Irgun, led by future Israel prime minister Menachem Begin, bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing ninety-one people.

  The Washington Post ran a cartoon that captured the mood that September. Entitled “The Beautiful Post-War World,” the image showed figures representing the United States and Russia, Labor and Management, Muslims and Hindus, and Truman and Congress, all with arms folded and backs turned to one another.

  The postwar world had been beautiful for the Red Sox until now, but the losing continued from DC up to Philly. Boston lost a pair of games in the Liberty City. The winning pitcher of the second game for the A’s was a Canadian right-hander named Phil Marchildon. He was Connie Mack’s best pitcher before the war, and was slowly regaining that status after it.

  He was fortunate to be playing at all.

  After winning seventeen games for a Philly squad that won only fifty-five games all season in 1942, Marchildon joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, posing with another star athlete, Boston Bruins stalwart Roy Conacher, during the induction ceremony. Marchildon was offered a chance for easy duty as a fitness instructor in the Toronto area, where he was from, but he passed. “I figured I might as well go in all the way,” he remembered in his memoir, Ace.

  Marchildon was
made a tail gunner and flew in the rear of a Halifax bomber, the multiuse, heavy-duty British plane overshadowed by its contemporary, the Lancaster. His war boiled down to counting missions—reach thirty, and he’d rotate back home, out of danger.

  In the back of the Halifax, Marchildon was tucked into a crawlspace seventy feet from the cockpit. Even though Marchildon was an unimposing 5'10", 170 pounds, there was barely room for his parachute. Inside his snug bubble, he kept watchful eye for the telltale glint of silver that presaged a German fighter, or for the evil black puffs of flak that burst without warning around his turret. “On every mission I was tense as I scanned the skies looking for fighters who would attack at a moment’s notice,” he remembered years later. “There was no time to relax once you were over enemy territory.” After D-day, as his mission count climbed toward and then past twenty, the close calls mounted. Once, over Caen, France, shrapnel from antiaircraft bursts riddled his plane, scarcely missing an engine. The crew coaxed the damaged bomber back across the Channel.

  Occasionally, some light moments broke the tension. One day an English friend brought Marchildon in as a ringer in a game of “American rounders” against some Yanks from a nearby base. The flyboys were swaggering about, confident in their ability to handle some Brits in their National Pastime. Then Marchildon took the mound, and one by one, the Americans went from waving to their English girlfriends to waving meekly at Marchildon’s fastballs and curves. “Jeez, are they all this good?” one muttered. Finally, they were let in on the joke and deluged Marchildon with autograph requests.

  By mid-August 1944, Marchildon and his crew of seven had reached twenty-five missions. In his memoir, Marchildon compared the vibe around the base to a team whose pitcher is throwing a no-hitter. No one spoke of the few remaining missions, for fear of jinxing them.