5
WHEN A FEW YEARS later, Marvin Miller, the labor negotiator, visited the various baseball camps during spring training for the first time to explain collective bargaining to the various players, he was quickly struck by the fact that the Cardinal camp was different from every other one he visited. The players were more relaxed, more mature, and better integrated, black with white. The friendships among the players seemed to transcend racial lines, and Miller was especially struck by the fact that not only were the players friendly with each other but their families were too. By the summer of 1964, the question of race hung heavily over the nation at large, as young blacks challenged existing segregation statutes in the South, and baseball too was going through its own period of dramatic racial change. It was now seventeen years since Jackie Robinson had broken in with the Dodgers, and had done it so brilliantly that he had not only helped lead Brooklyn to a pennant but had won the Rookie of the Year Award. That there was a great new talent pool of black athletes was hardly a secret among the white players themselves. The names of such great black players as Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, and Judy Johnson had been well known to the many big-league players who had often barnstormed with them after the regular season was over (and who often made more money barnstorming on the all-white major league all-star teams than their colleagues had made playing in the World Series): they knew that the Negro leagues were filled with players who could hit and pitch, and, above all, who had speed. In the years since Robinson’s historic arrival in the big leagues, certain teams had moved quickly to sign up the best black players. It was the equivalent of a bargain-basement sale at Tiffany’s—great players available at discount prices, even as the price of young, untried white players was going up very quickly.
The talent search was not joined with equal enthusiasm by the two major leagues. In 1954 the Supreme Court of the United States had ruled that white Southern school districts should move with all deliberate speed to integrate; in baseball the National League moved with speed, but the American League moved with deliberation instead of speed. Because the Dodgers soon had Robinson, Roy Campanella, and Don Newcombe in their lineup, there was a ripple effect in the National League. The Dodgers’ crosstown rivals, the Giants, had to move quickly in self-defense, and as both teams were adding speed and power, so other National League teams were forced to move as well. At first, they scouted the Negro league games, and then, as the younger players there were signed up, they began looking for ever younger players from the Deep South. Soon the Milwaukee Braves followed with Bill Bruton and Henry Aaron playing in the outfield, which led to the joke “What’s black and catches flies?” The answer was the Braves’ outfield. Hank Aaron did not think it very funny.
In the American League the tone was set by the New York Yankees. The Yankees were a dominating team, and their ownership in those critical years was, to be blunt, racist. They were winning and winning consistently without black players, about whom the ownership believed many of the existing stereotypes: that blacks were lazy and would not play well under pressure. George Weiss did not even want white rabble at his ball park, he told reporters. He wanted his fans to be from the white middle class, and he most emphatically did not want black fans who came to cheer black players. That, in his mind, would surely drive away his treasured white middle-class customers. In 1945, Weiss had stolen away one of Branch Rickey’s best scouts, the famed Tom Greenwade, a man who worked the Ozarks and the Southwest. It was Greenwade who signed Mantle for the Yankees, but it was less well known that he also had done the vital day-to-day scouting of Jackie Robinson when Rickey was making up his mind as to which black player would be the first to break the color line. Because of that, Greenwade knew as much or more about the available black talent as any white scout in the country, but Weiss was not interested. “Now, Tom,” he told Greenwade in their first meeting working together, “I don’t want you sneaking around down any back alleys and signing any niggers. We don’t want them.” That was that. Greenwade thought it bizarre. He was being tipped on such great young prospects as Ernie Banks, but was unable to move on them because of his marching orders. The Yankees, he later lamented to his son Bunch, lost an important decade by not going after black talent, and he told the story of Weiss setting limits on him with considerable bitterness and regarded it as the great regret of his career. Ironically, Mantle’s greatness increased the arrogance of the front office, for his exceptional speed and power convinced the Yankees that they did not need to change. He helped bring them an additional decade of dominance, and in so doing, he helped create the attitude among their executives that would lead to their eventual decline. As most of the other American League teams followed suit, the National League gradually began to pull away as superior, with better teams and more exciting younger players.
By 1964 the National League had virtually all the best young black players, and it was therefore a league with more speed and power; its best young players flashed their speed on the base paths with increasing aggressiveness. The American League tended to rely on sluggers who were slow of foot (Mantle and Maris were exceptions), and tended toward a more cautious game, its managers by and large waiting for the big inning. The difference between the leagues was dramatic. After the 1963 season, Sandy Koufax, who had dominated the league as well as the Yankees during the World Series, was the National League’s Most Valuable Player. The selection followed a decade in which nine of the previous ten winners were black, and in the one instance that a white player won—Dick Groat of the Pirates in 1960—it could as easily have been his teammate Roberto Clemente (who was enraged by Groat’s selection and was convinced that he had lost because he was Puerto Rican and therefore had encountered an additional layer of prejudice). The black winners were Roy Campanella of the Dodgers, winning the second of his three MVP awards, followed, in order, by Willie Mays, Campanella again, Don Newcombe, Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, then Banks again, then Frank Robinson and Maury Wills. Wills was emblematic of the change taking place. He was, first and foremost, a player who brought speed to the game, and he had languished in the Dodger organization for a long time. He came into his own when they moved from Ebbetts Field, a hitter’s park, to the vast spaces of the Los Angeles Coliseum, which emphasized the importance of baserunning. Soon other National League teams were looking for their version of Maury Wills. By contrast, in the American League, Elbe Howard, the first black Yankee player, who was brought up in 1955, became the league’s first black MVP in 1963. “Well, when they finally get me a nigger, I get the only one who can’t run,” joked Casey Stengel, his manager, whose attitudes on race were schizophrenic enough that he could at once use ethnic slurs and yet still appreciate Howard’s obvious talents.
If, by 1964, the Cardinals had become something of a model in terms of their racial composition and attitudes, it had not always been that way. In fact the Cardinals had come to this more slowly than most National League teams. They were one of the teams that had, for a brief time, considered striking against Jackie Robinson in his first season. Before the Dodgers and Giants moved west in 1958, and before big-league baseball went to Kansas City and Atlanta, St. Louis was not only the farthest west team in professional baseball, it was the most southern as well. St. Louis was for a time the most segregated city in the big leagues, the city that visiting black players liked to visit least. The Chase Hotel, where the ball clubs stayed, was one of the last to admit black players. The regional pull of the surrounding territory affected the Cardinal decision-making, and the team drew some of its players and many of its fans from the South and Southwest, so it was loath to violate their racial prejudices. KMOX, the radio station that beamed the Cardinal games, was a powerful signal throughout the South. It was the custom in the mid-fifties, in such places as Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, for young, white working-class men, their work week finished, to load up a car with beer on Friday afternoons and take off for St. Louis. Driving and drinking, if necessary through the night, they would arrive in time to
watch the Cardinals on Saturday and, if possible, in a Sunday doubleheader, before driving home all Sunday night. “In St. Louis they say that fans would never stand for Negroes on the Cardinals or Browns,” wrote the New York newspaperman Dan Daniel, after Larry Doby signed to become the first black player in the American League. “St. Louis, they insist, is too much a Southern city.”
Among the players who agreed with that judgment was Minnie Minoso, the black Cuban player. In 1946, Minoso, one of the most gifted players in the history of the game, was playing in the Negro leagues. He was asked to a Cardinal tryout and arrived there with Jose Santiago, a Puerto Rican pitcher on the New York Cubans. In Minoso’s eyes, he and Santiago were by far the best players at the tryout. Santiago struck out every batter he faced, while Minoso, playing in the infield, was told not to throw so hard to first, because the first baseman could not handle his throws. Nonetheless, Minoso could sense that the Cardinals were not interested in the two of them, that the tryout was a sham, and he left that day bitter and determined never again to attend a tryout for a white man’s team. If white people wanted to scout him, he decided, they could come watch him play at Negro league games; he would pay no more house calls.
When the Cardinals finally did sign their first black player, they went about it ineptly. Gussie Busch was stunned to find that the team he had just purchased was all white. Since Budweiser, its executives believed, sold more beer to black people than any other beer company in the country, Busch was nervous for economic reasons about owning a lily-white team. He could easily visualize a black boycott of his beer, and, to his credit, he also thought it was simply morally wrong to exclude blacks. That first year he visited the team in spring training, he asked his manager and coaches, “Where are our black players?” There was a long silence and one of the coaches finally said, “We don’t have any.” Busch said, “How can it be the great American game if blacks can’t play?” The silence hung heavily over everyone. “Hell,” he added, in words that clearly represented the end of an era, “we sell beer to everyone.”
Very quickly, as part of the new regime, two black players were signed, at the far-from-bargain-basement price of $100,000 each: Tom Alston, a minor-league first baseman who had played in San Diego and hit well there, and Memo Luna, a dark-skinned pitcher who was believed by the Cardinal ownership to be Cuban but was born in Mexico. Luna celebrated his good fortune at being signed by the Cardinals by pitching in both ends of a doubleheader and arrived in St. Louis with what was essentially a dead arm. He pitched less than one inning for the Cards in his career, gave up two walks and two hits, and retired from major-league baseball with an earned run average of 27.00. Busch did not regard this acquisition as a good start in improved race relations.
Tom Alston, by contrast, made a very good first impression on people in the Cardinal organization. At an early meeting, one of Busch’s public-relations men, Al Fleishman, warned Alston of all the terrible things that were going to be said and done to him. Alston put his hand on Fleishman’s knee and said, very gently, “I know I’m a Negro, and I know that there are going to be some people who hate me for nothing more than that. But that’s not my problem, that’s their problem.” Then he visited a nearby teachers college, where he told young black students that times were changing and that people were going to be judged not by their color but by their ability. He said that a new day was coming, that doors once closed were going to open, and he ended movingly: “When it does, be ye ready.” Alston, however, was not the answer to Busch’s prayers. He was a first baseman with good feet and good hands but a weak bat. In 1954 he came up 244 times and hit .246, with only 4 home runs. Those were not good numbers for a first baseman, and the pressure on him, some teammates thought, exceeded what he could handle. Alston stayed around long enough to accumulate 27 more at bats over the next three years.
Later that same year the Cardinals brought up a young black pitcher named Brooks Lawrence, who pitched exceptionally well; he had a record of 15-6 in 1954 and showed considerable promise for the future, but with Frank Lane as general manager, Lawrence was quickly traded away to Cincinnati. Clearly, putting talented young black players on the field was going to be harder than anyone expected, and was going to require far greater patience than the Cardinals had yet to display, as indeed putting together a first-rate team of any color was going to require greater patience than Busch had first expected. Yet, more than most teams, the Cardinal players came to deal with race with a degree of maturity and honesty rarely seen in baseball at that time. In 1961, a good fourteen years after Jackie Robinson’s professional debut, Bill White, the Cardinal black first baseman, challenged the concept of an annual whites-only players breakfast in St. Petersburg. Local businessmen there traditionally honored the visiting Yankee and Cardinal players, but, according to local custom, invited only the white players. White leaked to a reporter the anger of the black players about the breakfast, and, even more important, their resentment over segregating white and black players in separate living facilities—the whites staying at the best local hotels, the blacks forced to stay as boarders with black families in the black section of town. The policy for the breakfast meeting was quickly reversed (when White found out how early he had to show up, he asked his white teammate Alex Grammas if Grammas would like to go in his place). The housing problem was stickier because of Florida law. Finally, a wealthy friend of Gussie Busch bought a motel, the Skyway, and the Cardinals leased it for six weeks and rented some rooms in an adjoining one, the Outrigger, so that the entire team and their families could stay together. A major highway ran right by the motel, and there, in an otherwise segregated Florida, locals and tourists alike could see the rarest of sights: white and black children swimming in the motel pool together, and white and black players, with their wives, at desegregated cookouts. That helped bring the team together. Even Stan Musial, who had both the right, as a senior star, and the money to rent a house for his family during spring training—something he had looked forward to in the past—stayed at the motel and was a part of the team. That made a great difference, for Musial was not only one of the two or three greatest players of his era, he was one of the most beloved as well: he seemed to live in a world without malice or meanness, where there was no prejudice, and where everyone was judged on talent alone. He had always been a generous teammate, and he was always willing to help teammates and opponents alike with batting tips—although he was so spectacular a hitter himself, with such great wrist and bat control and so great an eye, that his tips were not always helpful. Once the young Curt Flood asked him how to wait on the curveball. At the time Flood was having trouble learning how to adjust his own swing to wait that final millimeter of a second in order to time it properly. Musial duly considered Flood’s request and then replied, “Well, you wait for a strike. Then you knock the shit out of it.” (I might as well, Flood thought, have asked a nightingale how to trill.)
Another Cardinal player who set the tone was Ken Boyer, the third baseman and the captain of the team. By dint of his sheer professionalism and the nature of his personality, he was a role model to many of the younger white players. Boyer was from the Ozarks, which did not make him exactly a Southerner, but still a player from a region not necessarily known for its hospitality to blacks. But Boyer stayed at the motel too.
The Cardinals not only dealt with the white-black issue better than most teams, they did it, Tim McCarver noted years later, before the team had won a pennant, whereas most teams tended to come together on the question of race only after winning. The mutual respect Cardinal players had for each other cut across racial lines. The team bridge game was an important daily ritual, pitting Bill White and Ken Boyer against Bob Gibson and Dick Groat. While it was a game, it was more than a game, because if these men, the four leaders on the team, had to play together on the baseball field by law, what they did in the clubhouse was their own choice. That did not mean that they agreed on everything: White and Gibson liked and admired Boyer, and sensed that
he had the capacity to grow on the issue of race, but they were aware that the changes in attitude that some younger men, such as Tim McCarver, were then undergoing might well be beyond Boyer’s reach. Boyer was for integration in general, but he was made very uneasy by other aspects of more profound social change. Racial intermarriage, especially, seemed to bother him. But at least they could argue about it and find some mutual measure of respect, and once when Boyer was at a bar, some man made a remark about Gibson. “The trouble with that goddam Gibson is he’s a racist,” the stranger had said. Boyer gave him a long cold look. “You don’t even know the man,” he said with contempt. (In the early sixties, Cassius Clay, not yet Muhammad Ali, became pals with some of the Cardinal players who were staying at the same segregated motel, and Clay convinced Curt Flood and Gibson to come to an early Black Muslim meeting. The speeches that night, Flood recalled, largely seemed to be about taking some form of vengeance on the white man. Gibson was not impressed: “Sounds as if black power would be white power backwards. That wouldn’t be much improvement,” he said.)
One of the key players in helping to create the culture of the new Cardinal clubhouse was a man few people knew. George (Big Daddy) Crowe was gone from the team by 1964, but he played a vital role in bridging the gap from one era to another. Crowe was physically imposing, six feet two inches and about 210 pounds, and a man of immense pride and strength who was, without ever trying to be, a powerful presence in the clubhouse. If you were casting him in a movie, the writer Robert Boyle once said, you would want the young James Earl Jones. His influence on the team was vastly disproportionate to his actual contributions on the playing field. He had arrived with the Cardinals in 1959, an aging player, his skills on the decline, his legs and his feet causing him constant problems. He had played for a number of years in the Negro leagues, and the integration of major-league baseball had come more than a little late for him. He first moved into the world of white baseball in 1949, two years after Jackie Robinson had played for Brooklyn. Though his listed age was twenty-six, his real age was perhaps twenty-nine or thirty, and he played very well from the start. But the Boston Braves had been in no rush to bring him to the majors. He played for three years in the minors, hitting .354 with 106 runs batted in for Pawtucket in the New England League in 1949, .353 with 122 runs batted in for Hartford in the Eastern League in 1950, and .339 with 24 home runs and a league-leading 119 runs batted in for Milwaukee in the American Association in 1951. Only then had he made it to the majors.
October 1964 Page 7