Opening Day

by Jonathan Eig

  As the game approached the three-hour mark and shadows covered the field, Doug Wilder and the barbershop quartet from Virginia remained firmly planted in their seats along the first-base line. Wilder was pleased to see so many black men and women around them, their voices rising in joyful noise—“Hit da ball, Jackie boy! Hit da ball!”—every time Robinson stepped to the plate. He was equally pleased to see that the white men and women seemed unbothered by their black neighbors. The Virginians’ seats were so good they could hear the ballplayers cursing and see the hard lines of exertion drawn on their faces when they ran. Doug hoped to watch the Cardinals complete their comeback. The men from the barbershop didn’t care who won so long as Robinson did something special. No one suggested leaving early to get started on the drive home.

  In the top of the eleventh, with one out and Musial on first, up stepped Enos Slaughter. A native of North Carolina, Slaughter was one of the toughest men in baseball, and in this year of ups and downs for the Cardinals, he’d been one of their few reliable hitters. Slaughter played the way Stanky did—running hard on every play, chasing after every fly ball until it touched down, no matter how far out of reach it appeared to be. He’d become famous in the 1946 World Series when, after badly injuring his elbow in the fifth game, he stayed in the lineup for games six and seven. In the final game of the Series with the score tied, he led off the eighth inning with a single, broke for second on the next pitch, and kept running until he scored on a hit by Harry Walker. The play, which wound up winning the Series for the Cards, became known as the Mad Dash, and cemented Slaughter’s reputation as one of the game’s all-time greatest hustlers.

  Now, with the chance to be a hero again, Slaughter took a big swing on a low fastball, hitting it sharply to first base. Routine play. Robinson fielded it, turned to second to see if he had a chance to throw out Musial, and thought better of it. He squeezed the ball and hustled toward first to get the sure out. Stepping on the bag, Robinson turned back toward the infield to make sure Musial had no intention of trying for third. But just as he turned, he felt a searing pain shoot through the back of his right foot, just above the heel. Slaughter, coming down the line hard and fast, had gashed him with his spikes. Robinson hopped in the air, grabbed the back of his ankle, and hopped some more before calling timeout. Slaughter put his head down and ran to the dugout.

  The Medwick spiking a couple of days earlier had raised no ire, but to many in the press box and in the crowd of twenty-six thousand, it seemed plain that Slaughter had spiked Robinson intentionally. That’s how Doug Wilder saw it. “I was shocked,” he recalled, “because Slaughter was one of my heroes. . . . My heart sank.” And that’s how Robinson saw it, too. “What else could it have been?” Robinson asked immediately after the game, adding some foul language the newspapers couldn’t repeat to say what he thought of the Cardinal slugger. “I had my right foot on the inside of the bag after taking his ground ball. He had plenty of room.”

  Doc Wender treated the lower part of Robinson’s calf for slight contusions. “Jackie was lucky he wasn’t maimed,” the trainer said. “I can’t understand how one ball player can deliberately do that to another one. He might have severed Robinson’s Achilles’ tendon and finished his baseball career.” Harold Parrott, the team secretary, walked into the Cardinal clubhouse after the game to tell the visitors what he thought of Slaughter’s conduct. Some of the men in the press box felt that Slaughter had stepped purposely on Robinson’s foot. The only real question was whether he’d done it out of racial bias or pure competitive passion. Some suggested that Slaughter knew the Dodgers had no backup at first base and that his team’s pennant chances would be helped by getting Robinson out of the lineup.

  Robinson stayed in the game after the spiking. In the top of the twelfth, Kurowski slammed Hugh Casey’s first pitch into the left-field stands for a homer, putting the Cards ahead by a run. Robinson led off the bottom of the inning with a sharp single to center and went to second on a sacrifice by Reiser. As he danced off second, hopping around now not so much in pain as in anticipation, Robinson must have been eager to exact his revenge. He may have been a bit too eager, in fact. George Munger spun from the pitcher’s rubber and threw quickly to Marty Marion, who snuck in from behind and slapped the tag on Robinson for the second out of the inning. One play later, the game was over. Robinson was not quite the goat, but his blunder was a significant one.

  Doug Wilder should have been happy. His trip from Richmond to Brooklyn had been everything he’d dreamed. His team had won a thrilling game. Yet something—he couldn’t say just what—troubled him as he squeezed into the backseat of the car for the ride home.

  “It took me the better part of the season for what really took place to visit with me,” he recently recalled. “You know, you saw something here that was unusual. First of all you saw the acceptance of Robinson by the Brooklyn fans. Everybody there was terribly upset with the spiking. You saw the determination of Slaughter to spike him. He really went out of his way to do it, you could see. It just left me deflated for two reasons. One, to see this done to Robinson, and also to see it done by my team. I never got over that. Just amazing. I recognized later what he was going through. . . . I started thinking, taunts are one thing, epithets are another, but physical harm, intentional. . . . That, possibly, was Robinson’s greatest moment, in showing how he would rise over and over to be the person he was. It wasn’t an athletic thing, it was a human thing. ‘I will show you I can rise over and above.’ It’s not a matter of forgiving you for doing it. It’s a matter of saying, ‘No matter, not withstanding what you did, it doesn’t prevent me from being the man I am.’

  “It was a tremendous lesson.”

  • • •

  After splitting the four-game series with the Cards, the Dodgers went on a nice run, taking three in a row from the Reds, two of three from the Pirates, one of two from the Cubs, and then three in a row from the Giants. The end of their passage was in sight.

  Way back in April, few of baseball’s cognoscenti had given them a chance. Even as the season unfurled, skeptics remained. The Dodgers didn’t hit as well as the Cardinals or pitch as well as the Giants. In fact, the 1947 Dodgers in most departments appeared to be worse than the 1946 team that had settled for second place. Spider Jorgensen was an improvement over the platoon that had manned third base in 1946, but Jorgensen’s batting average, on-base percentage, slugging average, and fielding percentage were all almost identical to the league averages. He was hardly the difference between second place and first. And the team’s core players—Reese, Reiser, Walker, and Stanky—played no better in ’47 than they had in ’46. In fact, their numbers on the whole slipped slightly. The team’s pitchers were worse in ’47, too, allowing about one hundred more runs than they had the year prior. How did they do it?

  Jackie Robinson would finish his rookie year with a .297 batting average, twelve home runs, and forty-eight runs batted in. His .427 slugging percentage (total bases divided by at-bats) ranked third among the team’s regulars. His 125 runs scored were second-best in the National League—and far and away best among the Dodgers. His twenty-nine stolen bases and twenty-eight sacrifice bunts were tops in the league. Fourteen times he had bunted for hits, and, though no records were kept on bunted hits, that, too, was almost certainly a league-leading quantity. Only four times, reported The Sporting News, had he bunted and failed to either advance a runner or reach base safely. Robinson led the Dodgers in games played (151), at-bats (590), hits (175), total bases (252), doubles (tied with Walker at thirty-one), and home runs (tied with Reese at twelve). He was also hit by pitches nine times, which was more than anyone on the team. In recent years, the statistician Bill James has developed a useful statistic called Runs Created to measure how much a player contributed to his team’s offense. The formula is:

  (Hits + Walks) × (Total Bases) / (Plate Appearances)

  Robinson and Walker tied for the team’s lead with ninety-four runs created. Ed Stevens and How
ie Schultz, who had shared the first-base job in 1946, created only sixty-six runs combined that year. Thus Robinson gave the Dodgers at least twenty-eight more runs than they’d had the year before from the first-base position. The true number of runs Robinson delivered was certainly higher, but it would require a statistical formula of much greater sophistication to account for the sacrifice bunts, the stolen bases, and the general frazzling of pitchers’ nerves that occurred whenever Robinson stepped on the diamond. But one sure measure of Robinson’s impact can be seen in the performance of his teammate Pete Reiser, who usually batted behind Robinson in the Dodger lineup. As Robinson made pitchers edgy, Reiser stood at the plate ready to take advantage. Before 1947, he drew walks in only about 9 percent of all his trips to the plate. But in 1947, he increased that number to almost 15 percent. In 1946, he had hit only .277, with a .361 on-base average. In 1947, getting more fastballs thanks to Robinson, he hit .309, with a career-best .415 on-base average, despite complaints of suffering vertigo on and off after his collision with the outfield wall.

  A lot changed between 1946 and 1947. The Dodgers got a new manager, a new third baseman, and some new part-time outfielders. They lost a couple of pitchers and added a couple. Such variables make it impossible to measure the impact of a single player. But Dixie Walker, who had his biases, to be sure, offered this assessment: “No other player on this club with the possible exception of Bruce Edwards has done more to put the Dodgers up in the race than Robinson has. He is everything Branch Rickey said he was when he came up from Montreal.”

  • • •

  As Branch Rickey began fine-tuning his roster for the World Series, pitching remained the priority. Late in August, he made an intriguing move, paying fifteen thousand dollars to the Memphis Red Sox of the Negro American League for Dan Bankhead. The lanky right-hander could do it all, the newspapers reported. He threw a scorching fastball, hit the ball hard and often, and ran with fantastic speed. Though he had been preaching for several years now that black ballplayers needed time in the minors to get acclimated, Rickey suddenly changed his mind and sent Bankhead directly to the Dodgers, making him the majors’ first black pitcher.

  In America, few achievements confer more glory than reaching the big leagues. Survey a hundred high-reaching men and it’s a good bet that ninety or so will tell you they dreamed of being big-leaguers before they ever gave a thought to being senators, college presidents, or brain surgeons. In the Bankhead family of Empire, Alabama, no one was imaginative enough to dream of making the majors, but it was practically a given that the males in the family would play professionally in the Negro leagues when they weren’t mining coal. When Dan joined the Dodgers, his brothers Sam, Garnett, and Fred were all firmly planted in the Negro leagues, and brother Joe was preparing to start his career. Sammy Bankhead was the most talented of the brood, and had he been born a couple of years earlier (he was thirty-one in 1947), he might have been the brother chosen first. Sam could field any position on the diamond. He had a great arm, good speed, and decent power. Playing mostly as a shortstop, he developed a reputation as a leader who made everyone on the diamond play more sharply. He would have been a valuable asset to any number of big-league teams, even if only as a utility player, but he missed out, just barely. Some say Sammy Bankhead became the inspiration for Troy Maxson, the tragic hero of Fences, August Wilson’s devastating play about a former Negro-league player. Like Maxson, Sammy Bankhead retired from baseball to become a garbage collector. He would look back on his career with both pride and a pulsing feeling of resentment at the fame and fortune he’d been denied. If Robinson represented the ultimate manifestation of the American baseball dream and Sammy Bankhead its dark underbelly, brother Dan fell somewhere in between. He was the second-most-talented athlete in his family, the fifth black man chosen to play in the majors, and, at that moment, the lowest-rated member of the Brooklyn Dodger pitching staff. But at least he had been given a chance.

  “Call me if I can help you about anything,” Robinson told his new teammate—and his new roommate for road trips—on the day they met at Branch Rickey’s office.

  “I guess I’ll be calling you tonight,” Bankhead replied.

  Some writers had warned that violence might erupt if a black pitcher threw too far inside and hit a white batter. Given Bankhead’s great fastball and his occasional control problems, it was far from a hypothetical matter. But the next day, when Bankhead plunked Wally Westlake of the Pirates, Westlake didn’t say a word. “It was as though he had been hit by Joe Gluttz,” wrote Dick Young. “No precipitous incident. No fuss. No nothing.” Unfortunately for Bankhead, “no nothing” also described the quality of his pitching that afternoon and for much of the remainder of the season. The righty surrendered ten hits in three and a third innings as the Dodgers suffered a blowout loss. It was one of the most brutal debuts anyone had seen in a long time. Only one thing made the afternoon less than a total disaster. In the second inning, facing Fritz Ostermueller, Bankhead belted a two-run homer to left, making him only the twenty-first player in the history of the game to homer on his first trip to the plate as a big-leaguer.

  “It was just one of those days,” he said after the game. If nothing else, he had already mastered the big-league cliché.

  • • •

  Before issuing World Series tickets, the Dodgers had to make one more trip to St. Louis. Only a Cardinal sweep of the three-game series would delay an order to the print shop, and even then the delay would likely be temporary. Back in Brooklyn, fans were so excited about this chance to finish off the Cards that hundreds gathered at Ebbets Field to stare out at an empty ball field and listen to Red Barber and his partner, Connie Desmond, broadcast the action over the public address system. It was as if they’d all come out to worship.

  In the first game in St. Louis, played on the evening of September 11, Robinson was stepped on yet again. This time Joe Garagiola wielded the spikes. In the bottom of the second inning, with a man on first, the Cardinal catcher swung at the first pitch, a fastball up and away, producing a routine ground ball to short. Garagiola ran hard to first, trying to stay out of the double play, and caught a piece of Robinson’s foot on the bag. The press made no mention of whether Robinson’s foot was in the middle of the base or safely by its side. Neither did the reporters speculate this time whether there was intent to harm, an odd omission given the recent dustup over Slaughter. Robinson’s shoe was torn, but he suffered no injury.

  The next inning, Robinson came to the plate with two outs and two men on, the Cardinals leading 2–0. Before the first pitch, he turned and said something to the catcher about their contact the inning prior. Garagiola was a tough kid from an Italian section of St. Louis known as Dago Hill, twenty-one years old, still trying to prove he could make it in the big leagues, and he liked to run his mouth. Robinson made him nervous. Whenever the Dodgers’ speedster got on base, Garagiola called fastball after fastball, looking for easy pitches to handle, never mind that his pitchers were more likely to get knocked around. “He made all catchers nervous,” Garagiola said of Robinson in an interview decades later. “A lot of games I wished I could have bought a ticket instead of being where I was.”

  This was one of those games. Garagiola may have made a crack about Robinson’s color. Robinson said he did, Garagiola said he didn’t. Whatever was said, both men became incensed. Garagiola rose from his crouch to more effectively tell Robinson how he felt. Robinson stepped in Garagiola’s direction in order to offer a rebuttal. Quickly, the umpire, Beans Reardon, stepped between them. While Reardon and Garagiola went at it, Robinson stepped back and clapped his hands. He appeared to laugh. That only made Garagiola angrier. For a moment, it looked like the men might fight. Clyde Sukeforth, the Brooklyn coach, rushed from the dugout to pull Robinson away. Finally, everyone cooled off and the game resumed. Robinson swung at a belt-high fastball and popped out to Garagiola to end the inning.

  The fracas with the Cardinal catcher had two effects. In the short-t
erm, it made an angry man of Robinson—never a good thing for Dodger opponents. In his next trip to the plate, Robinson said nothing to the catcher. He stepped into the box, worked the count full, and then swung at another belt-high fastball. This time he banged it deep into the left-field seats to tie the score. As Robinson crossed the plate, Eddie Stanky, who did not believe in showing up opponents by celebrating on the field, allowed himself a rare display of emotion. He grabbed Robinson’s hand and gave it a vigorous shake, then let go and slapped his teammate’s back.

  At that very moment, back in New York, forty-five hundred fans were watching a Negro-league doubleheader at the Polo Grounds, New York Cubans versus Newark Eagles. Suddenly, at a moment of no import in the game, the crowd began to buzz, and then roar. Men stood and danced in the aisles. “I bet Robinson just a hit a home run,” someone in the press box said. A minute later, news of Robinson’s blast came across the wire service ticker. Robinson’s fans at the Polo Grounds had heard it first on their portable radios.