The Victory Season Page 40

  Missouri was a hotbed for secessionist firebrands and bushwhacking thugs during the Civil War, and the descendants of pro-slavery fighters made up a sizable portion of the Cardinals’ fan base. Their attitude toward blacks hadn’t mellowed much. So while Robinson and Don Newcombe and Roy Campanella were sparking the Dodgers, and Willie Mays and Monte Irvin were starring for the Giants, and Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente, and Frank Robinson were becoming Hall of Famers, the Cardinals remained pale. They didn’t integrate until 1954, and it wasn’t until the team underwent a complete turnabout and embraced black stars like Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, and Curt Flood in the 1960s that the franchise returned to its assumed place in baseball’s penthouse.

  The perceived, fair or otherwise, intolerance toward black players on the part of St. Louis fans raises an interesting counter-factual—what if Branch Rickey had remained in charge of the Cardinals and not gone to Brooklyn? Does he integrate the game along the banks of the Mississippi? Does someone else do it in Brooklyn? Does it even happen until the next generation, when civil rights took on a moral imperative? Fortunately, destiny brought circumstance and personality together at the right time and, perhaps more important, in the right place.

  Jackie Robinson had seemingly passed every test required for entrance into the major leagues. He had dominated at Montreal on a championship team. He had withstood all manner of taunts, slights, and enemy actions on the field and off. He had grown as a person in the cauldron of being the first black man in pro ball.

  But that wasn’t enough. With the handwriting on the wall, in early January 1947, baseball’s owners called another secret meeting in New York. There was but one item on the agenda—Jackie Robinson, and whether he should be allowed to play in Brooklyn during the upcoming season.

  There wasn’t much debate. Branch Rickey stood up at the meeting’s outset and said flat out that he intended to promote Robinson to the majors. He was met with stony silence. Then the other standpatters, from MacPhail, Yawkey, and Breadon to owners of lesser stature, like Bob Carpenter of the Phillies, Powel Crosley of the Reds, and Walter Briggs of the Tigers, all stood and announced their opposition. Horace Stoneham, the owner of the Giants, said that fans would burn down the Polo Grounds the first time Robinson came to play. Undeterred, Rickey called for a secret ballot. The vote was 15–1 against, with Rickey the lone yea. Even Bill Veeck, who would integrate the American League by signing Larry Doby a couple of months into the 1947 season, voted no.

  The vote was an unfortunate way for MacPhail to begin his final year in baseball (Sam Breadon, too). His position of respect in 1946 was undone by cascading other embarrassments, most of them brought about by drink. The Yankees won the 1947 pennant and World Series, but MacPhail destroyed both celebration parties by attacking others in an alcoholic rage, including fellow owner Dan Topping. The day after this catastrophe, MacPhail sold his stake in the team to Topping and stepped away from the game he had done so much to transform and, in his shortsighted way, try to protect.

  His outrageous conduct overshadowed his achievements in the short and medium term. MacPhail should have been a first-ballot Hall of Famer for his impact on the sport, but instead it would be a quarter-century after his eligibility before his name was called at last in 1978. Sadly, Mac had passed three years earlier. But this man of firsts achieved another when his (now late) son, Lee, who had followed in Dad’s footsteps and become a baseball executive, was enshrined in 1998. Larry and Lee are the Hall’s lone father-son combo.

  While the owners congratulated themselves on seemingly deterring the threat to their restricted club, Rickey outflanked them. He traveled to Kentucky to call upon a sympathetic ear—Commissioner Chandler. Ironically, Chandler had only gotten baseball’s top job at the insistence of Larry MacPhail. Installing Chandler, whom MacPhail figured he could control with ease (and usually did, as proven during the Mexican League crisis and the Durocher flap), was one of MacPhail’s first moves after returning to baseball after the war ended.

  But now the Commish defied his benefactor. Chandler was happy to let Jackie become a Dodger, telling Rickey, “I’m going to meet my maker someday, and if He asks me why I didn’t let this boy play and I have to say it’s because he’s black, that might not be a satisfactory answer.”

  But Chandler worried about MacPhail’s reaction and feared that he would be overstepping his bounds if he unilaterally allowed Robinson to play. So he informed Rickey that there was no bylaw or language specifically preventing a black man from playing. As with the Reserve Clause, it was not something that would ever stand up to a legal challenge. Therefore, should Robinson’s contract pass through his office, there would be no reason for Chandler to deny it. Robinson would be granted access in a backhanded manner. The owners could raise a stink, but Chandler was willing to risk that they were too craven to declare their racist stance publicly, given the legal and PR ramifications that could come of denying Robinson’s entry into the game. On that note, he was correct.

  So it came to pass that Jackie Robinson officially broke Major League Baseball’s color line on April 13, 1947. He became Brooklyn’s first baseman, despite all that work on improving his pivot on the double-play ball the spring before. Ed Stevens was collateral damage, sent to Montreal with the promise of a recall by Rickey, who told Stevens he was trying to deal second-sacker Eddie Stanky and would then move Robby to his more natural position. Stevens had a trying year with the Royals, taunted across the International League for “letting a nigger take his job.” After the season, it was Stevens, not Stanky, who was dealt.

  Stevens may have been wronged, but it was baseball fans who should have felt more aggrieved. By Robinson’s second week on the diamond, it was readily apparent that baseball was much better for having black players involved. Those who had heard the legends of Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, and Oscar Charleston could only wonder at how much richer the majors would have been for their presence. In that context, the war and its accidental advancement of civil rights proved a boon to the game. Not so the Negro Leagues, ironically, which fell by the wayside after the color line was broken, their raison d’étre now gone with Robinson, and soon Larry Doby, Monte Irvin, Satchel Paige, and many others moving over to “white folks’ ball.”

  Robinson starred for the Dodgers for several seasons, winning the MVP in 1949 and the World Series (at long last) with Brooklyn in 1955. But his career and potential for managing afterward was cut off by the onset of diabetes. He quit the game after the ’56 season, with an executive position at Chock full o’Nuts coffee in his hip pocket. He suffered in retirement, the insulin injections doing little to slow the ravaging of his once-perfect physique. He was elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot in 1962, a temporary salve to an all-too-brief post-baseball life that was marked by a (later repudiated) turn to backing the Republican Party and anger over the sport’s sloth at hiring black managers and executives. He passed in 1972, at which point he was nearly blind from the diabetes. He was a mere fifty-three years old, the same age Babe Ruth was when he too died far too soon.

  Thousands of mourners attended the funeral service at Riverside Church in New York. Reverend Jesse Jackson gave the eulogy. But for all the words spilled over Robinson, his impact, his courage, and his legacy, it was a respectful nod from Leo Durocher that best captured his on-field persona, and was how Jackie insisted he be judged. “You want a guy that comes to play,” quoth the Lip to Roger Kahn in his classic The Boys of Summer. “This guy didn’t just come to play. He come to beat you. He come to stuff the goddamn bat right up your ass.”

  His widow, Rachel, has lived on, sustaining the Jackie Robinson Foundation in New York with her extraordinary energy and intelligence, even at age ninety. She puts in three days a week at the Foundation. “Work has always been essential for me,” she said one afternoon in her office, which is lined with photos of her husband. She lost Jackie, along with her mother and her son, Jackie Jr., in a short period between 1971 and 1973. The grief was overwhelming, b
ut the Foundation has allowed her to concentrate on “something alive, so I could move forward, not look back. Gradually it became less painful.” The Foundation provides full four-year scholarships for disadvantaged students of color, some 1,400 as of 2012.

  Rachel continues to work on another project—raising money for a Jackie Robinson Museum, ostensibly to be built adjacent to the Foundation’s offices in Tribeca. But she is some $20 million short of the funding needed for construction. Perhaps this can be spun as a positive—that Robinson’s pioneering efforts have been so well documented and recognized in recent years, including the permanent retiring of his number 42 across the entire sport, that a museum is somewhat redundant at this stage. But surely one is worthwhile, if only to ensure that future generations are kept aware of what Jackie Robinson meant to baseball and the country.

  The Red Sox would suffer even more than St. Louis at the hand of racial intolerance. Infamously the last team to integrate, in 1959, the Bosox spent decades tilting at the AL windmill zealously defended by the Yankees. In the immediate aftermath of the loss to the Cardinals, there was disappointment (fans and press alike referred to the team as the “Red Flops” all winter) and shock. After all, for the first time ever, Boston had lost in the Series. Grantland Rice summed up the feeling around baseball—“Boston’s World Series fortress, unconquered for 43 years, has fallen at last.” It made Pesky’s stammer and Williams’s flameout that much harder to understand, and Slaughter’s dash that much more of an event.

  But then the Sox found new and ever more excruciating ways to lose big games and big series, and Pesky’s “blunder” took on greater and greater import as the seasons passed without a championship. Fifty-eight more empty years would go by until the Sox finally lifted the World Series trophy, an unfathomable spell for the Olde Towne Team. Certainly, one can’t overlook the historic failure of the team to sign black players, even after the Sox color line was at last broken, as a component of the franchise’s historical heartache.

  A couple of days after the Series, in his ghostwritten column, Ted Williams “joked” about the defeat. “I knew it would be a whale of a game…but I didn’t think we’d be the ones wailing.” At another point he drolly observed his newfound fear of cats (or, more accurately, Cat Brecheens). “I’m glad it’s all over. Now I can go hunting and fishing. But there’s one thing I’ll steer clear of. It will be wildcats in the fields and catfish in the streams. Brother, keep those cats away from my path and away from my peepers.”

  The column’s wordplay, courtesy of Hy Hurwitz, glossed over the devastation the Splinter felt over the loss and his role as goat. Had Williams known then that this was to be his lone chance at October glory, he might have been a candidate for electroshock therapy, a common treatment for depressives in the 1940s. As it was, decades later, when asked if he had any regrets from his career, he mentioned not the years he missed to war but the 1946 World Series.

  Williams’s defenders pointed out that his injured elbow had robbed the Kid of his beautiful stroke. “You can’t pin the horns on somebody who is physically unable to do something, and Ted just wasn’t able to physically hit the ball consistently,” wrote Whitney Martin of the Associated Press. Others, most notably Colonel Egan in the Boston Record, were less charitable. Egan never forgave Ted for his ’46 flop, and referred to him as “the inventor of the automatic choke” every time Williams came up short thereafter.

  Not even Egan could deny the full greatness of Ted’s career, however. Williams was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1966. Still, as if to remind him of his contretemps with the press over his career, twenty voters decided Ted wasn’t worthy of immortality, at least on the first ballot.

  While Williams’s failure in the ’46 Series was the standout flop, Musial had hardly been better. The Man did outhit the Kid .222 to .200, drove in four runs to Ted’s one, and could at least point out that five of his six hits went for extra bases. And he had the good sense to flee town immediately, going off on the barnstorming tour organized by Bob Feller the day after Game Seven. One of his opponents on the tour was Jackie Robinson. Musial had a similar opinion to Feller’s—that the first Negro in baseball wouldn’t accomplish much in the major leagues. “He didn’t impress me too much when I saw him in ’46,” Musial told interviewer William Marshall in 1978. “He wasn’t graceful…and he had a short choppy swing [and] it didn’t look like he had a good arm. I figured the guy wouldn’t do well in the big leagues,” Musial finished with a laugh.

  Musial, like many great players before and since, struggled on the Series stage. In four appearances in the Classic, 1942–44 and ’46, Musial hit .256 with a single homer and just 8 RBIs. But much of that lack of production was obscured by the war and the fact that the Cards won three of those four World Series. Had Boston been victorious, Musial’s legacy might well be different. Instead, he is regarded as the greatest, and most beloved, player in Redbirds history. Three years after Williams was elected to Cooperstown, Stan the Man followed him into the Hall of Fame, both entering in their first year of eligibility.

  The two greats will always be linked by the 1946 Series. In the great sweep of history, Williams is unilaterally remembered as the greater player, and he was certainly the better hitter—although not by as much as one would assume. Stan, on the other hand, was the better fielder (at two positions), better base runner, better hustler, better teammate, and better person. That was the contemporary judgment as well—that Williams, for all his artistic brilliance at the plate, was touched out by Musial due to the Cardinal’s all-around qualities.

  But history hasn’t been quite as kind to Musial as it has to Williams. As the value of all those bases on balls began to be better understood in the 1980s and ’90s, Williams’s de facto stock soared. Meanwhile, Ted’s gruff exterior and inability to domesticate was transmogrified into a necessary adjunct of being baseball’s Marlboro Man, his loner instincts and no-nonsense mien a throwback to the frontier persona America has long idolized, if not identified with. Williams’s failure to tip his cap to applauding fans too became a symbol of his fealty to a little-known code understood only by ubermenschen, especially after John Updike immortalized Ted’s homer in the final at bat of his final game in 1960, and his subsequent ignoring of an adulatory Fenway crowd. “Gods,” Updike wrote in his classic piece in The New Yorker, “do not answer letters.”

  In his final at bat, on September 29, 1963, at Sportsman’s Park, Musial singled in a run against Cincinnati, rapping a knock past a lunging rookie second baseman for the Reds named Pete Rose. Unfortunately for Musial’s legacy among the sporting intelligentsia, John Updike was elsewhere.

  But it was the latter-day deification of the soldiers who fought and won World War II that gave Williams his final propulsion past Musial, even though neither man actually saw combat in the conflict. Ted’s service in Korea, replete with actual missions and heroic photos of the superstar in the cockpit of his fighter jet, became conflated with his necessary and exemplary, if less heroic, work during World War II. Regardless, having reached the top of the pyramid in not one but two of the manliest pursuits possible (three if you count his excellence with the rod and tied fly), Williams cemented his status as an American hero. Musial? Well, he was a great ballplayer, sure, and a helluva nice guy, but what did he do during the war? Run a water taxi at Pearl Harbor? Williams was Chuck Yeager; by contrast, Musial merely Chuck Taylor.

  Both sluggers would meet with sad declines. Williams died in 2002, after which his soulless corpse became the subject of a tug-of-war between his son John Henry, who wanted his body frozen cryogenically until science could kick-start him back to life, and his daughter Bobby-Jo Ferrell, who wanted the body cremated. John Henry, who himself died of leukemia in 2004, won, and Ted’s body was stored at a facility in Scottsdale, Arizona, where, according to a tell-all book by a former employee, his decapitated head was swatted around in a grotesque bit of batting practice by technicians at the frigid plant.

  Musial passed awa
y on January 19, 2013. He had been spared ghoulish indignities, but toward the end of his life he suffered his own living nightmare. After decades of goodwill ambassadorship, the Man began to slip into dementia and advanced Alzheimer’s disease in the late 2000s. He had moments of cognition, and was able to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in early 2011, but for the most part he was unaware of his surroundings and, sadly, his own standing within the game and the franchise with which he is so closely identified.

  With the expected Fall Classic storyline of the Man vs. the Kid, a slugging showdown between the Most Valuable Players of 1946 not panning out (these things tend to happen in sports), the small difference between the teams over seven games was chalked up to the brilliant pitching of Brecheen and his cohorts, along with the fact that Joe Cronin’s managerial acumen had been lacking. The Series had been an “Instant Classic” in today’s vernacular, with Slaughter’s Mad Dash immediately taking its place in the rarefied air of great World Series moments.

  The ’46 Series became a defining moment in baseball history in another way. The tight competition and breathless ending captured the imagination of a new postwar generation of fans, who would mark the Series as the seminal moment in their baseball fandom. The great Mickey Mantle remembered in his memoir, All My Octobers, that the ’46 Series, and the heroics of fellow Oklahoman Harry Brecheen, sparked his love for the game. A future Mantle teammate on the Yankees, Ralph Terry, also from Oklahoma, recalled, “We used to listen to the Cardinal games on radio when I was a kid, and the 1946 World Series when the Cardinals beat the Red Sox got me hooked on baseball.”