October 1964

by David Halberstam

  Mike Shannon, just called up from the minors, nudged Bob Skinner, a veteran player, who was sitting next to him. “What the hell is this all about?” he asked. Skinner answered, “Mike, whatever you do, don’t say anything. Just keep absolutely silent.” Though Keane had cleared the air, it was not a particularly pleasant experience. All the players, one Cardinal remembered, were looking down at their shoes as Groat’s apology took place, and for many it seemed overkill on the part of Keane, a man whom they quite liked. It was something that should have been settled in private, between the two men. Some of the younger players felt uncomfortable being at a meeting where a grown man had to humble himself so completely when his sins were so small. If anything, some of the players thought, the meeting was more divisive than it was unifying, and it obviously reflected the mounting pressure on Keane and his awareness that, if things continued the way they were, he was on his way to becoming a minor-league manager or a major-league coach once again. Nor did the team rush out later that day and crush the lowly Mets. With two outs and a 3-2 lead in the ninth inning, Curt Simmons threw a change to Frank Thomas, who jumped on the ball and won the game for the Mets, 4–3.

  That day Bob Broeg, who was the sports editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was traveling with the team and, since it was the midpoint of the season, he decided to ask the Cardinal players what they thought was wrong. Some of them did not want to talk, and some talked reluctantly, only off the record, but Bill White, the first baseman, was quite willing to talk for the record. What was wrong with the team, he said, was himself. He was supposed to be one of the two power hitters on the team, along with Ken Boyer, and he was not doing the job—knocking in 100 runs as he was supposed to. A year earlier at this time, he said, he had already knocked in 60 runs; this year he had a measly 30, which adjusted for the entire season would come only to 60. Boyer was doing his job, he said, but he, Bill White, was not.

  There was a reason for White’s problems. He had hurt his left shoulder during the off-season doing exercises, perhaps, he decided years later, inflicting some damage to the rotator cuff. His shoulder had yet to heal, and since he was a left-handed batter that was extremely damaging, because it robbed him of his power shoulder, the one he used to drive the ball. He had been getting regular shots from the Cardinal doctor, Dr. I. C. Middleman (of whom he was not a great fan, saying in private that the good doctor’s initials stood for I Cut), but none had given him any relief. In a way Bill White was the lineal descendant of George Crowe, though he had not played in the Negro leagues and had not lived through two different ages of black baseball history, as Big Daddy Crowe had. But from the start, in part because of his intelligence and his inner strength, he had been a leader among the black players, and not merely on his own team. When other teams came to St. Louis, the black players tended to check in with Bill White and talk with him about whatever was on their minds. White, too, was an impressive man physically, well muscled, so powerfully built that some of his teammates marveled that someone so big and strong and potentially muscle-bound could get around on the ball so quickly with his bat. White had not really wanted to be a professional baseball player, and had actually entered college, hoping to become a doctor. However, his athletic skill and the early offers to sign a baseball contract were too good to refuse.

  He was exceptionally fair-minded and, as such, an immensely valuable teammate, for he had the ability to rise above his own problems to comprehend the complex feelings and motivations of others, instead of merely reacting with his emotions. He understood almost perfectly the historic moment when the black players had finally arrived, how much was invested in them on the part of those who had never had a chance to succeed and those who might come after, and he was determined that he and those blacks around him would use this great moment not just to play well but to make an even larger statement about black purpose and black ability. He was unsparing in his judgments about himself and the other black players. Long after Solly Hemus had been fired, he was capable of getting on Bob Gibson, if Gibson was having trouble with his control. There had been one game in 1962 when Gibson was pitching with the bases loaded and had walked a weak-hitting batter to force in a run. White had yelled at Gibson (as probably no one else on the team would have dared to), “Come on, Bob, you got on Solly for not using you, and now you got your chance and you’re not doing the job. Maybe Solly was right. Maybe you don’t belong here.”

  Nor did his demand for excellence, for playing hard and doing your best, extend merely to his own teammates. The previous year there had been a young black player with Cincinnati who was obviously irate about not playing enough, and he had come up as a pinch hitter late in a game. He dogged the at bat, standing at the plate and taking three straight strikes, the bat never leaving his shoulder. After the game Bill White sought the player out and told him, “Listen, you cut that crap out. We can’t afford to do stuff like that. You’re hurting everybody when you do that. A lot of people worked very hard for us to be here and we’re not going to blow this chance.” Bill White seemed to know how to handle not just baseball but life, gaining the respect of everyone he met. Barnstorming with black players in 1960, Bob Boyle, a writer for Sports Illustrated, had been intrigued by the black baseball slang. “Was there any one of the black players who never cut a hog [and thereby never disgraced himself]?” he asked a couple of black players. “Only Bill White,” one of them said.

  Bill White was one of those forceful and determined men who seemed strengthened by the adversity he had faced growing up. He was born in the Florida panhandle in 1934, but came north to Warren, Ohio, as an infant. His family had been sharecroppers who picked cotton for generations and became part of the great migration north that began in the earlier part of this century. Six brothers and three sisters, along with their mother, eventually moved to Ohio. The young men in the family found work in the steel mills, first one member arriving, and then another, each living with the other for a time and then finding a place of his own. In time, seven of Bill White’s uncles were in the Warren steel mills, which was hard and demanding work. The family matriarch was his maternal grandmother. Tamar Young was a dominating figure, called “Mother” by every one of her children and grandchildren. She ruled the family with an iron hand and a strong belief in the value of the switch to discipline children. Bill White’s father was not a presence in his life, for he had left the family early on; White’s mother was a sensitive woman who should have gone to college, but had lacked the money even though she had been the best student in her high school class.

  Growing up, White remembered the singular forcefulness of his grandmother. In her politics and her attitude toward white people she was, he recalled later, not unlike the Black Muslims who surfaced in the sixties. Her hostility toward whites was uncompromising: she blamed them for stealing black people away from their native land, and for selling them into slavery; she blamed them for passing on their vices and diseases to blacks; and she blamed them for the alcoholism she saw all around. She was at once very antiwhite and very religious, a true believer in the literal word of the Bible. She was determined that no one in her family was going to slip into the failure and degradation that she believed whites had deliberately inflicted on black people. No one in her family was going to drink. No one was to use profanity. Everyone went to church. No one was to steal. The grandchildren had to be in the house by sundown. On one occasion when Bill White was five years old and his mother was reluctant to spank him for some minor infraction of the house rules, his grandmother took up a switch and punished both her daughter and her grandson. The essential code of the family was simple: life was filled with prejudice and injustice, and it was each member’s individual job not to succumb but to succeed, despite the efforts of those who would denigrate them.

  In some ways his experience with racial prejudice was slow in coming. In elementary school black and white children socialized, but later, he realized, as they entered junior high school, the socializing ended; parties we
re now segregated, and the black children were no longer invited. Similarly, at school dances he realized that the black children were on one side of the room and the whites on the other. As a football star and a boy with a powerful presence he had seemed likely to be voted student-body president, but the opposing forces deftly entered another black student as a candidate, the black vote was split, and he lost. He was, however, elected senior-class president, but at the class dance the adults chaperoning arranged things so that for the first time in recent history the class president did not dance the first dance with the queen of the class, who was white. His athletic ability in high school helped get him into college, and though a number of larger schools were interested in him, he chose Hiram College in Ohio, because it was said to prepare students well for medical school and it seemed to be a comfortable place. He got a grant of $250, which was to be applied against an annual bill of $750.

  In 1952, when he was eighteen, Bill White caught the eye of a scout named Alan Fey at an amateur tournament and was recommended to the New York Giants. Their early sorties into the black world had yielded, among others, Willie Mays, and with that success the Giants decided to double their efforts in that direction. Soon Tony Ravish, who was further up in the Giants’ hierarchy, showed up and smiled his approval on White as a prospect. Ravish took him to Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, where the Giants were playing (and which later turned out to be one of his favorite parks to hit in), and they signed him that day for $2,500 plus a new pair of baseball shoes, given him by Leo Durocher, the manager. They promised to let him come to spring training in Phoenix, and also that he would make the big leagues in three years. Cleveland was after him at the same time, but he preferred the Giants because the massive Luke Easter was playing first base for Cleveland, which seemed to eliminate his natural position. Ironically, by the time he arrived in the major leagues, in 1956, Luke Easter was gone from the Indians, and both Orlando Cepeda and Willie McCovey were moving up in the Giants’ farm system, potentially ready to challenge him for the Giant first-base job.

  White mentioned to Tony Ravish that there was a catcher on another team who he thought was a very good ballplayer, but Ravish, having seen the catcher, was not interested. “That guy has a little bitty skinny neck,” he said, reflecting the physiological biases of the time, “and we never sign a player with a turkey neck. Those guys never grow and fill out.” Size and power were the critical parts of the new Giant mandate, and that became clear to White when he showed up at his first instructional camp in Melbourne, Florida. Over the next few weeks, he played with Willie McCovey, then tall and somewhat skinny, but still awesomely strong—when White would hit a home run of 350 feet, McCovey would seem to answer with one of 370 feet. In other camps they were joined by Leon Wagner, Orlando Cepeda, Willie Kirkland, and, at different times, various members of the Alou family. The godfather of the nonwhite players in those days, both American blacks and Hispanic blacks, was an intriguing figure named Alex Pompez, who had owned a black baseball team; he was unusually proud of his ability not so much to scout black talent as to spirit it out of the Caribbean countries, which was not always easily done. Pompez was designated to baby-sit these young players in Melbourne, and he became something of a cult figure to them, telling them what was expected of them in the big leagues, and what life in the Negro leagues had been like, and how he had existed in the numbers racket until the mob had squeezed him out. His favorite story was how he signed the great Minnie Minoso in Cuba for his team in the Negro leagues. He arrived in Havana to get the man who scouts said was the best player in Cuban baseball at that time, but his early advances toward Minoso were not successful. Depressed at his failure, Pompez was about to return to New York when he was having his shoes shined at his hotel. “You’re Pompez, the baseball man from New York,” the shoeshine man said. Pompez said he was right. “You’re here to sign Minoso, our greatest player,” the man added. Pompez said that that top was right and asked how the man had known. “Because I am a brujo [pronounced broo-ho],” he said, using the local word for witch doctor. Then the witch doctor made a prediction: if Pompez went to Minoso’s house the next night at six P.M., Minoso would be ready to sign. Pompez did that, and found a rather terrified Minoso waiting eagerly to sign a contract. “How did you know he would sign?” Pompez asked his friendly brujo the next day. “Because if he did not his leg would have been broken,” the brujo explained.

  At his first spring training in Phoenix, Bill White quickly learned that he was not as gifted as he thought, that he could not hit the curve or the change, and that he had problems scooping balls out of the dirt. If he was going to make the big leagues, he was going to have to work harder than anyone else, he decided. He was going to have to make himself into a big-league ballplayer. So he went off to play with the Burlington-Graham team in the Carolina League. It was Class B ball, and it was a testimonial to the insensitivity of the men who ran baseball in those days that they did to Bill White what they did to so many young black players at that time; instead of letting him play on one of their farm teams north of the Mason-Dixon line, they sent him not merely to the South but to a tiny town with not even the marginal protection offered by an urban setting. White was not just the only black player on his team, he was the only black player in the league that year. It was 1953, the year before the Brown v. Board of Education decision. The South was already afire with much angry talk about the coming of northern integrationists, but the only integrationist around that year was Bill White. It was very hard for him, for his team played in small factory towns, and he became a kind of beacon to local rednecks, who would come out to the ball park and, for a tiny amount of money, yell at this one young black player, who symbolized to them a world beginning to change. Somehow he survived it, and managed to hit 20 home runs and bat .298. There was one day that summer when he got tired of being the recipient of all those cruel and ugly slurs, spit out of mouths as if they were machine guns; he yielded finally and gave them the finger. He and his teammates grabbed bats and had to fight their way back to the bus. There was another game in which a fan had gotten on him and yelled, “Bill, Bill White,” and when White turned toward him, the fan unloaded a staggering list of racial epithets. White, enraged, hit the next ball through the wooden fence, and as he crossed home plate he heard the fan yell out, “Okay, after that I’m going to call you Mr. White.”

  Somehow after that season it seemed to get easier in his career, perhaps because he had been through the worst. He was no longer afraid. It was not about him, he knew, it was about them, and somehow he had managed to rise above it. Besides, some of his teammates, even the Southern boys, had been very good; if they had not understood all the problems he was facing, they understood a confrontation by a redneck mob, and they realized in some basic way that this was unfair, that it was a them-and-us situation, and they rallied to him. More than thirty years later, Bill White, an immensely successful man who was the president of the National League, violated his own rules about not getting involved in politics by going down to campaign for a man named Charlie Allen, a catcher on that Burlington-Graham team, who had stood by him in those early, dark days, and was running for sheriff.

  After the Carolina League he played the next season with Sioux City in the Western League. That was, by contrast, a laugher, and there he hit .319 and 30 home runs. He came up to the New York team in 1956, and did well. He was making $4,000 and was called in by Horace Stoneham, the team’s owner, who told him he was going to get a $1,500 raise, which White thought generous until he learned that it merely brought him up to the major-league minimum. After 1956 he went into the army for two years, and when he came back Orlando Cepeda seemed installed at first after he had been voted Rookie of the Year. At the same time, Willie McCovey was burning up the farm system and was about to arrive midway through 1959 for an equally sensational rookie year, and he too would be voted Rookie of the Year; between the two of them they would hit exactly 900 regular-season home runs. The Giants seemed to have a
n abundance of big, powerful black first basemen, all three of whom would be National League All-Stars, and it was time, White decided, for him to go. He asked the Giants to trade him. The only two places he did not want to be traded to, he said, were St. Louis and Cincinnati, cities with reputations among the black ballplayers in those days as being difficult to live in. (“Bill, you’re my second best player on the team behind Mays,” Chub Feeney told him. “I’ll find a place for you.” “And he did,” White noted years later, “in St. Louis.”)

  Eddie Stanky had scouted him for the Cardinals before the trade and enthusiastically endorsed the idea of picking him up. Stanky was a huge Bill White fan. White had played for him at Minneapolis in 1956, and he was the rare modern player whose work ethic satisfied the demanding, old-fashioned Stanky. If anything, White had been known among the other Minneapolis players as Stanley’s bobo—that is, his pet—the only player on the team whom Stanky never chewed out, and who even dared to talk back to him. Once Stanky caught White doing a crossword puzzle. “White, put that goddamn thing away and study a rule book,” Stanky said. “If I got a rule book we wouldn’t need you as a manager,” White answered as his dumbfounded teammates looked on, for no one talked to Eddie Stanky like that.