Opening Day

by Jonathan Eig

  • • •

  It might have been Irvin, and it might have been Roy Campanella. Had Robinson been overlooked, or had he failed, or fallen to injury, or succumbed to his rage in Montreal while on trial there, Campanella might well have been next on Branch Rickey’s list. He would not have been a bad choice. Campanella first attracted the attention of professional black teams around his hometown of Philadelphia when he was a mere fourteen years old. He was a hefty, strong-armed, hard-hitting kid, the son of a white father and a black mother. At sixteen, and still hefty, he dropped out of school and turned pro. Campy, as everyone called him, was a sweetheart, and even as he began traveling with the Baltimore Elite Giants, sometimes catching four games a day, living on hot dogs and pop, learning to shoot craps, listening to the old men tell tales, the hardships of the road did not spoil his gentle personality.

  Competing with grown men never was a problem for the teenager. His talents were man-sized long before he’d reached his full height of five-feet-eight. Before he was eighteen he had played in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, and in so many small American towns that he never bothered trying to count or remember them. He played year round. Wherever there was a game and a team in need of a catcher, that’s where you’d find him, shin-guards on, ready to go. His parents didn’t mind. “They pay our boy good, real good,” his mother once said. “Would he be better off as a porter—a shipping clerk, or perhaps work in a fruit and vegetable store?”

  Before long, he was the second-best catcher in the Negro leagues, the best, by universal decree, being Josh Gibson. Gibson was six-feet-two, 230 pounds, all chest and arms, a baseball-hitting machine said to have belted more than eight hundred homers over the course of his career, and said to have hit them for greater distance than anyone alive, including Babe Ruth. No one had ever doubted Gibson was good enough for the big leagues. The interesting question is why so many big-league owners resisted the temptation to make Gibson the game’s first black player, particularly in the 1930s and early 1940s, when he was in his prime, or in the war years, when talent was in such short supply that the St. Louis Browns played the one-armed Pete Gray in left field. Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the old goat who ran the game, might have objected. But wasn’t there one owner willing to take on Landis and take a chance on a man of such stupendous talent? There was not. And while racism no doubt played a role in the outcome, Gibson did, too. The great black slugger was an emotional disaster, given to depression and fits of rage. He drank heavily and partook liberally of drugs. The black press did its best to present the image of Gibson as a star, ignoring his trips to mental hospitals, but there was a good reason why Wendell Smith and other writers never pushed for Gibson’s promotion. On the field, the man could handle anything. Off, he was a lost soul. On January 20, 1947, less than three months before Robinson’s first game with the Dodgers, Gibson died, apparently from a stroke. He was thirty-five.

  Campanella was no Gibson. He lived cleanly, loved his wife, and stayed far from trouble. His only madness was for the game. And he was young enough yet, at twenty-five, not to have been torn up by life on the road in the Negro leagues. Other men grew weary after a couple of months bumping from town to town, but Campy loved it all. On October 17, 1945, about six weeks after Rickey’s first meeting with Robinson, the catcher received his own summons to appear at 215 Montague Street in Brooklyn. The boss held forth for four hours. “Mr. Rickey certainly was a man with the words,” Campanella said of his visit. “I wasn’t sure I had understood everything he said.”

  A week later, Campanella discovered just how much he had failed to understand. He and several other black ballplayers were at the Woodside Hotel, one of Harlem’s popular gathering places, and the inspiration for Count Basie’s huge 1938 hit, “Jumpin’ at the Woodside,” when Campy ran into Jackie Robinson. The men had never met. All Campanella knew about Robinson was that he murdered inside pitches, a fact he had filed away for future use. Robinson invited Campanella to his room for a game of gin rummy, half a cent a point. Campy lit a cigar as Jackie dealt the first hand.

  “I hear you went over to see Mr. Rickey last week,” Robinson said.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Campanella answered, surprised, for he had told no one. “How did you know?”

  “I was over there myself. What happened with you?”

  “Nothing much,” said Campanella. “We talked, or rather Mr. Rickey did. Man, he’s the talkingest man I ever did see.”

  “Did you sign?” Robinson asked.

  Campanella said he didn’t, because he didn’t want to take a pay cut to play for the Brown Dodgers, a team that didn’t even exist.

  Robinson got so excited that he revealed a secret of his own. He told Campanella that he’d signed a contract to play for Brooklyn’s top minor-league team and he was going to Montreal the next day for the official announcement.

  Campanella sat dumbstruck, realizing suddenly his terrible mistake. His cigar gone cold, Campy continued sucking and pulling at it, replaying in his mind Rickey’s monologue. It occurred to him only then that Rickey had never mentioned the Brown Dodgers. Had the Dodger boss been offering him the same thing he’d offered Robinson: a shot at the big leagues? Had he blown his chance?

  A few months later, in March 1946, Campanella heard again from Rickey, and this time the boss made his intentions clear, offering a contract to play in the Dodgers’ minor-league system. Campanella signed.

  • • •

  After adding Campanella and pitcher Don Newcombe, Rickey continued shopping. He liked Monte Irvin and Larry Doby, both of the Newark Eagles. He liked Sammy Gee, an infielder, who was fresh out of high school in Detroit. He liked Dan Bankhead, a hard-throwing pitcher for the Memphis Red Sox. The issue now for Brooklyn’s boss was whether to buy every good black player available or let some of the other teams in on the action. Did he want to field a team with three or four black players while the rest of the league remained entirely white, or let Robinson fly solo for a little while longer and see if integration would catch on elsewhere? As usual, the great pragmatist wanted to have it both ways. So, with Campanella and Newcombe already on board, he waited.

  But not for long.

  Bill Veeck (rhymes with “wreck,” as he famously titled his autobiography) took over the Cleveland Indians in 1946, shortly after Rickey had signed Robinson to play for the Royals. Instantly, Veeck had a lot of ideas for how to rejuvenate the Cleveland franchise. It was Veeck, as an employee of the Cubs in 1937, who thought of planting ivy on the outfield wall at Wrigley Field. It was Veeck a few years later, at the age of twenty-seven, who bought a bankrupt minor-league team in Milwaukee and turned it into a sensation by offering fans fireworks shows, free beer, and morning games for swing-shift workers. He made a trip to the ballpark more like a trip to the circus, ensuring that fans would be entertained whether the home team won or lost. Once he proved his point, Veeck sold the team for a nice profit and moved on, his thoughts turning to more ambitious schemes.

  In 1943, he supposedly organized backers in a plan to buy the down-in-the-dumps Philadelphia Phillies, who over the past decade had never finished better than seventh place. Veeck’s transformation plan for the Phils included a secret weapon: Negro-leaguers. He wasn’t sure how many of them he would need, and he was not planning to establish a quota system, but he was certain that he wanted to integrate the team. “With Satchel Paige, Roy Campanella, Luke Easter, Monte Irvin, and countless others in action and available,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I had not the slightest doubt that in 1944, a war year, the Phils would have leaped from seventh place to the pennant.”

  For Veeck, it would have been a typical move—rushed, radical, and revolutionary. He was as much a social scientist as Rickey, even if their methods were entirely different. While Rickey proceeded cautiously, Veeck didn’t care if he blew up the laboratory. He smoked and drank and thought neckties had too much in common with nooses. He had a hole drilled in the bottom of his wooden leg so he could use it as an
ashtray. He had little or nothing in common with the wealthy men who owned other big-league teams, and he loved tweaking them every chance he got. Turning to Negro-leaguers to restock the Phillies seemed like just the sort of thing he would do, although no one has ever been able to confirm Veeck’s version of events. He claimed that he visited Commissioner Landis at his office in Chicago to tell him about his plans. “Judge Landis wasn’t exactly shocked but he wasn’t exactly overjoyed either,” Veeck wrote. “His first reaction, in fact, was that I was kidding him.”

  Still, Veeck said he left the commissioner’s office confident that the deal was done. By the time he got back to Philadelphia the next day, Landis had pulled the rug from under Veeck’s ashtray and foot. The National League had taken control of the Phillies. Soon after that, the league sold the team to a lumber dealer for half of what Veeck had supposedly offered.

  In 1946, with Landis dead, Veeck put together another deal, this time to buy the Cleveland Indians. By then, Robinson had already been signed to play for the Dodgers’ minor-league team in Montreal, and Veeck knew he wanted to be a part of the game’s integration. So he moved quickly to hire a black public relations executive—Lena Horne’s former husband, Louis Jones—and told him to start preparing Cleveland’s black community for integrated baseball. “I moved slowly and carefully, perhaps even timidly,” wrote Veeck. “It is usually overlooked, but if Jackie Robinson was the ideal man to break the color barrier, Brooklyn was also the ideal place. I wasn’t that sure about Cleveland.”

  Veeck wanted someone like Robinson. He settled on Larry Doby, the hard-hitting second baseman for the Newark Eagles. Doby had attended college. He didn’t smoke, swear, or drink. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Doby had been hitting the hide off the baseball wherever he went. Midway through the 1947 season, after forty-two games with the Newark Eagles, Doby was batting .458 with fourteen home runs and thirty-five runs batted in. And he was only twenty-three years old.

  The Indians were in fifth place in the American League, and going nowhere. Veeck was not inclined to wait. On July 1, he phoned Effa and Abe Manley, owners of the Eagles, and offered to pay ten thousand dollars for Doby, with another five-thousand-dollar payment to be made later if he stuck with the team. Effa Manley, who ran the team, had mixed feelings about the integration of the majors. She recognized that it was good for the black ballplayers and probably good for the country, even if it might prove disastrous for her championship team and the business of black baseball.

  Veeck had not done as much preparation as Rickey. He had not let Doby spend a year in the minor leagues to acclimate. He had not given his first black ballplayer the benefit of a spring training camp to get to know his teammates and to get accustomed to big-league pitching. What’s more, Doby, as a second baseman who could also play short, didn’t fit into the Indians’ lineup, where Joe Gordon was a star at second and Lou Boudreau, the team’s player/manager, was planted firmly at short. Doby, like Robinson, would have to learn to play first base in order to see much action.

  It was mid-June when Doby heard the Indians were coming after him. One of Veeck’s men approached him and said arrangements would probably be completed within two or three weeks. Doby thought it was a joke. On July 3, when the deal was announced, Veeck told The New York Times, “I wanted to get the best of the available Negro boys while the grabbing was good. Why wait? Within ten years Negro players will be in regular service with big league teams. . . . The entrance of Negroes into the majors is not only inevitable—it is here.” To another reporter, Veeck said, “I am operating under the belief that the war advanced us in regard to racial tolerance. I probably will catch hell for a while, but it is my hope it will work out.”

  Doby was a quiet man, strong and handsome. Born in South Carolina, at the age of fourteen he had moved to New Jersey, where he began attracting attention for his athletic talents. Now, less than a decade later, he told a reporter he didn’t know whether he was “more surprised than excited, or more excited than surprised” at the opportunity presented him.

  He played one more game with the Eagles, homering in his final at-bat on July 4. The next day, he was in a taxi with Veeck, on his way to Comiskey Park in Chicago, where he would join the Indians for a game against the White Sox. Doby wore a suit with a white shirt buttoned to the collar and no tie. He stuffed a white hankie in his jacket pocket. Veeck wore a white shirt, wide open at the neck, sleeves rolled all the way up to show off his biceps. Doby and Veeck held a press conference to answer questions for reporters and mug for photographers while Boudreau met with his players, warning them not to make any trouble for the new man. After the press conference, Doby walked into the clubhouse and put on an Indians uniform, CLEVELAND printed across the chest, a grotesque caricature of a Native American on the left sleeve, number 14 on the back.

  With Boudreau at his side, the newest Indian walked around the clubhouse and said hello to his teammates. The team’s two first basemen, Eddie Robinson and Les Fleming, reportedly avoided shaking hands. Otherwise, there were no problems.

  Before the game, Doby stepped onto the rain-slicked field and threw a ball back and forth with Boudreau. When the action began, he took a seat at the end of the bench, the spot customarily reserved for rookies, and watched the White Sox jump to a 5–1 lead. In the seventh inning, with runners on first and third, Boudreau ordered Doby to grab a bat and pinch hit. Because of the rain earlier in the day, batting practice had been canceled. Doby hadn’t even had a chance to check out the available equipment, much less take a few swings. As he took his cut at the first pitch from Earl Harrist, Doby seemed intent on entering the big leagues the same way he had left the Negro leagues twenty-four hours prior: with a home run. He swung like Babe Ruth, straight from the heels, and missed it by a mile. On the next pitch, he scorched a long foul ball. He let the next two go for balls, then swung at a pitch outside and fanned. The Chicago crowd applauded politely.

  Doby returned to the bench. As yet, Veeck and Boudreau hadn’t discussed what to do with their new player. Would he be a starter or strictly a pinch hitter? Would he play first base, second, short, or outfield? No one seemed to know. As the end of the game neared, two black men in jackets and ties joined Doby in the dugout. Their presence attracted the attention of the home-plate umpire, Bill Summers, who called timeout and asked Boudreau to explain. Boudreau said the men were Chicago police officers, sent to protect Doby. The ump let the cops stay.

  After the game, when his teammates went to the Del Prado Hotel, Doby was escorted to the DuSable Hotel.

  In his Courier column the following week, Robinson offered advice for Doby, whom he referred to as a “grand guy and a very good ballplayer.” Robinson warned that Doby would find tougher competition in the majors. In the Negro leagues, he noted, a hitter would feast from time to time on substandard pitching. Not so in the majors. “I hope Doby won’t try so hard that he’ll tighten up and lose some of his effectiveness at the plate,” Robinson wrote. “I guess it’s the tension that does that.” He went on to thank the owners of Negro-league teams for giving up their best players to the majors. “The signing of Doby by Cleveland is a good thing for everybody,” he wrote. “It’s good for all baseball; it’s good for Negro baseball and it’s even good for me. I’m glad to know another Negro player is in the majors. I’m no longer in there by myself. I no longer have the feeling that if I don’t make good it will kill the chances of other Negro players. Larry is up here with me in the big leagues now. We’ll both do all we can to make it easier for someone else. We’ll try to act and play in such a way that the other owners will sign Negro players and be glad to have them.”

  In his column two weeks later, Robinson made a pitch for Sam Jethroe, center-fielder for the all-black Cleveland Buckeyes, who had joined him in Boston for a big-league audition a few years earlier. “I think he would make good if given the opportunity,” Robinson said. Rumors, meanwhile, were flying: The Yankees were preparing to take Dan Bankhead, the Indians were after Jethroe
, the Pirates were close to signing Irvin . . . and on it went.

  The notion that black ballplayers might suddenly descend on teams through the majors, as exciting to Robinson as it was to many of the younger men in the Negro leagues, proved too much for some to take. Pete Norton of the Tampa Tribune warned that big-league baseball might be in for trouble come spring training if a lot of teams traveled across the Mason-Dixon Line with black players in tow. “Custom in the South . . .” he wrote, “has always banned mixed sports contests. This action has been taken to avoid unpleasant incidents, and has been found, over a period of 82 years, to be the sensible way to eliminate any possible trouble.”

  In The Sporting News that same week, an editorial writer quoted an unnamed ballplayer, reportedly an all-star, saying he had no objection to playing alongside a Negro: “I know we are going to have Negroes on all clubs, with the possible exception of the Senators, Cardinals and Browns. I feel that if the majors fight this movement, they will be placed in a very uncomfortable position. However, the Negroes have their own league. Is it going to open up to white players? Another thing. The Negroes holler ‘discrimination.’ Well, Robinson moves right into the National League after one year in the AAA minors, and Doby gets a job in the American League without previous schooling in white baseball. I fought my way through the minors for five years. I rode buses all night for three of those five years, so that I could get a chance in the majors. If we are to have Negroes in the majors, let them go through the long preparation the white player is forced to undergo. Let us not discriminate against the white player because he is white.”

  • • •

  Two weeks after Doby joined the Indians, the St. Louis Browns joined the action, signing the black players Willard Brown and Henry Thompson. They also purchased a thirty-day option on Negro-leaguer Lorenzo Davis. Suddenly, black ballplayers were popping up everywhere.