The Red Smith Reader

by Dave Anderson

  It was bush, of course. There is no other way to characterize Williams’ moist expression of contempt for fans and press, even though one may strive earnestly to understand and be patient with this painfully introverted, oddly immature thirty-eight-year-old veteran of two wars.

  In his gay moods, Williams has the most winning disposition and manner imaginable. He can be charming, accommodating and generous. If Johnny Orlando, the Red Sox maître de clubhouse and Ted’s great friend, wished to violate a confidence he could cite a hundred instances of charities that the fellow has done, always in deep secrecy.

  This impulsive generosity is a key. Ted is ruled by impulse and emotions. When he is pleased, he laughs; in a tantrum, he spits. In Joe Cronin’s book, this falls $5,000 short of conduct becoming a gentleman, officer and left fielder.

  The price the Boston general manager set upon a minute quantity of genuine Williams saliva, making it the most expensive spittle in Massachusetts, suggests that the stuff is rarer than rubies. However, this is one case where the law of supply and demand does not apply.

  Actually the $5,000 figure is a measure of Cronin’s disapproval of his employee’s behavior and an indication of Ted’s economic condition. Rather than let the punishment fit the crime, Cronin tailored it to the outfielder’s $100,000 salary. As it is, considering Williams’ tax bracket, chances are the federal government will pay about $3,500 of the fine, though it may cause some commotion around the Internal Revenue Bureau when a return comes in with a $5,000 deduction for spit.

  Baseball has indeed put on company manners since the days when pitchers like Burleigh Grimes, Clarence Mitchell and Spittin’ Bill Doak employed saliva as a tool of the trade and applied it to the ball with the ceremonious formality of a minuet.

  Incidentally, the penalty was applied after Williams drew a base on balls which forced home the winning run for Boston against the Yankees. He must have realized that a few more victories at those prices would leave him broke, yet the next night he won another game with a home run. With Ted, money is no object.

  Nobody has ever been able to lay down a rule determining how much abuse a paid performer must take from the public without reciprocation. It was either Duffy or Sweeney, of the great old vaudeville team, who addressed an audience that had sat in cold silence through the act:

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you for giving us such a warm and encouraging reception. And now, if you will kindly remain seated, my partner will pass among you with a baseball bat and beat the bejabbers out of you.”

  Baseball fans consider that the price they pay for admission entitles them to spit invective at a player, harass him at his work and even bounce a beer bottle off his skull. It is not recalled that Williams’ hair was ever parted by flying glassware, but verbal barbs from Fenway Park’s left-field seats have been perforating his sensitive psyche for years.

  There are those of a sympathetic turn who feel it was high time Williams be permitted to spit back. Miss Gussie Moran, trained in the gentle game of tennis, remarked on the radio that she approved, “as long as he didn’t spray anybody.” As in tennis, Gussie believes, marksmanship and trajectory count.

  All the same it is a mark of class in a performer to accept cheers and jeers in stride. One of the soldier citizens of the Boston press—it could have been Johnny Drohan—pointed this out to Williams years ago. Ted was a kid then, a buff for Western movies.

  Hoots and jeers were a part of the game, the man said, and everybody in the public eye had to learn to accept them.

  “Take actors, for instance, Ted. You see one in a good show and you applaud and go around talking about how great he is. Then you see him in a bad vehicle and you say, ‘He stinks. Whatever gave me the idea he could act?’ “

  “Oh, no, Johnny,” Ted protested, “not that Hoot Gibson. He’s always great!”

  PLAYED ON A TIN WHISTLE

  1947

  The other day in Newark, Larry MacPhail gave an interview in which he (a) vowed there wasn’t enough evidence adduced at the Sarasota-St. Petersburg “trials” to justify suspending Leo Durocher for five minutes, and (b) conceded that in granting the interview he was violating Happy Chandler’s gag rule, but (c) swore redundantly that nobody could shut him up, and (d) denied that he had ever been Chandler’s sponsor, before or after that jocund critter’s election as baseball commissioner.

  Incidentally, as this is written, word comes from Cincinnati that Chandler has rejected an appeal by the Brooklyn club to reopen the Durocher case and has declared it is closed. Which it isn’t. Which it cannot be. Which the jocular commissioner is going to have to learn, apparently the hard way. More on that shortly.

  Now, as to MacPhail’s interview, there is more here than a mere statement by the complainant against Durocher that Durocher got a bum rap. MacPhail, it must be remembered, was the man who blew the whistle on Durocher, and what has happened to Leo must be on MacPhail’s conscience. If he feels Durocher got a bum rap, the only one he can blame is himself.

  In popping off about the case, however, the president of the Yankees has openly and flagrantly defied the authority of the commissioner. The day after the decision was announced, he called a press conference and therein violated Happy’s edict of silence. Since then Charley Dressen, the Yankee coach who was also suspended by Chandler, has appeared in uniform each day at the ball park in open defiance of the spirit of Chandler’s order.

  And now MacPhail, having entered an official plea on Durocher’s behalf, pops off again in a reckless challenge of the royal edict. The fact that one is in ardent agreement with MacPhail on this point doesn’t alter the fact that he has publicly tossed down the gage to Chandler, who cannot ignore the challenge without making himself more ridiculous than ever.

  It is now clearly up to the commissioner. He can either throw the book at MacPhail for an offense infinitely more aggravated than any crime Durocher committed, or he can back down, admit he is licked, and get out.

  Chandler has said repeatedly that if the test ever came and the baseball people refused to accept his authority, he would resign. “And,” he always adds, “I’ve never been out of a job.”

  Well, here’s the test and here’s his chance. He must whip MacPhail or run. And whichever course he takes, it is difficult to see how the result can fail to establish Durocher as the greatest benefactor of baseball since Doubleday.

  It is noteworthy that Ford Frick, president of the National League, concurred with the Brooklyn club in seeking reconsideration of the Durocher case. Since MacPhail’s formal request for similar action was made through Will Harridge, the president of the American League is also drawn into line on Durocher’s side.

  These men, Ford Frick and Will Harridge, are men who have the best interests of baseball at heart. If Chandler stubbornly holds out against them, where will the public conclude that his interest lies? On the side of baseball and justice, or on the side of a fifty-thousand-dollar job?

  Broaching a small cask of bile in Cleveland the other day in response to published criticism of his administration, Chandler spoke enviously of sportswriters, who, he thought, must be in communion with the spirit of Judge Landis, since they can guess what action Laughing Boy’s predecessor would have taken on any given problem. The commissioner said he had no such contact with the other world and, consequently, had to depend on his own judgment, an unfortunate substitute.

  Actually, it demands no gift of second sight to know what Landis would have done in a given situation. Any commissioner who would take the trouble to study up on his job would know what Landis did do in similar circumstances.

  For example, it is difficult to believe that Landis ever would have permitted the Brooklyn-Yankee quarrel to reach the malodorous state it achieved during the spring. But when an unpleasant situation did become publicly unpleasant, he saw to it that the solution was publicly arrived at.

  Thus in the case of Bill Cox, president of the Phillies, who took to the radio microphone to enlist fan support
for himself when he had been unfrocked for betting on ball games. It had become a publicized, if not public, issue, and so Landis conducted a public hearing on Cox’s fruitless appeal for vindication.

  The judge never tried to snatch an issue out of the headlines and settle it in a dark room. On the contrary, when Cox’s attorney hinted that he could, but would prefer not to, introduce evidence that “might not be so good for baseball,” the judge rared up and snapped: “If it is bad for baseball, by all means produce it!”

  Read the record on the judge, Mr. Chandler, and you won’t have to envy anyone who can guess what he would have done. You’ll know what he would have done, because you’ll know what he did do. His form was clearly established.

  Recently Dan Parker quoted Mr. Chandler to the effect that an unholy alliance existed among Mr. Parker, Tom Meany, Dave Egan, of Boston, this bureau, and others who have not always seen eye-to-eye with the commissioner. “And I wouldn’t be surprised,” Mr. Parker said Mr. Chandler said, “if there’s a lot of money behind it.”

  I wish to state, using the first person, that if I can get paid for thinking Happy Chandler has performed like a clown and a mountebank, then I want all of that kind of money I can get. Ordinarily I have to work for mine.

  O’MALLEY’S HOUSE OF HORRORS

  1956

  Walter O’Malley, president of the world champion Dodgers of Jersey City, shares with other persuasive men a gift for supporting an argument with figures that can’t easily be checked. James Thurber, when he wishes to smash an adversary in debate, employs a similar tactic. “As you know, of course,” he says, “the Prestwick Report settles all doubts on that score,” etc. The other fellow has not read the Prestwick Report, partly because there is no such thing, and backs off in mortified surrender ashamed of his ignorance.

  John McNulty, passing without credentials through a gate at the racetrack attended by a Pinkerton who does not know him, merely jerks a thumb toward the man behind him in line and says, “He’s all right, he’s with me.” If you are vouching for another, it stands to reason that you’re all you pretend to be and probably more.

  Back to O’Malley. He has said more than once that physical maintenance of Ebbets Field cost $100,000 a year. When he first proposed moving some of Brooklyn’s home games to Jersey City, a question was raised about the expense of restoring a ball park that had been abandoned for years to mosquitoes and automobile races. O’Malley said pooh, it could be done for $25,000.

  While amateur mathematicians were pondering these figures—$25,000 to convert a racing plant into a ball park and $100,000 to maintain a ball park as a ball park—Jersey authorities came up with an estimate of $129,000 for the refurbishing job. Is it still Mr. O’Malley’s plan, as he said in the beginning, to pay for the reconditioning plus $10,000 rental? That seems to add up to an investment of $139,000 for seven games in a park that holds 10,000 fewer customers than Ebbets Field.

  After attending the Abbey Theater in Dublin, Roger Bannister, the foot-racer, wrote: “I asked myself why every Irish phrase has a link with the heavens. Why did even their pennies bear harps?” No other Irishman excels Walter O’Malley at musical keening, at crying with a loaf of bread under each arm.

  Almost every season, it is the gate for the last game that enables the Dodgers to break even. They’d have finished in the red if the World Series hadn’t gone seven games. Yet over the last ten years, the Dodgers have done more business at home and on the road than any other club in the National League. How do the others manage to get by?

  In the last three seasons, of course, Milwaukee attendance has offered a phenomenon unmatched in baseball. The Boston-Milwaukee total over a decade, however, doesn’t touch Brooklyn’s figures for the same period.

  Moreover, the Dodgers own their park. For one lacking the president’s acknowledged financial acumen, it is difficult to understand how he expects to increase his net by paying rent in a smaller playground, while maintenance costs continue at home.

  In his campaign to persuade Brooklyn fans that Ebbets Field is a house of horrors which they should not visit, O’Malley has declared repeatedly that the Dodgers can’t play there after 1957. Why not? They own the joint. Nobody’s foreclosing.

  If an ideal site were available in Brooklyn, could the Dodgers assume the huge expense of building a new stadium? Authorities have not encouraged a belief that the city would build them a new store. What’s with O’Malley, then? Does he have his eye on some distant city?

  If he were to propose moving now to Minneapolis or Los Angeles, the other owners would surely say: “Abandon the second-best corner in the league? Look, up to now we’ve moved only the dead horses. Act your age, Walter.”

  A couple of years hence, however, after constant reiteration of Dodger woes dramatized by such devices as the Jersey City caper, the owners might come to accept the theory that Brooklyn is a ghost borough, and a change of venue might be approved.

  There is no pretense here of ability to read a mind as deep as Mr. O’Malley’s. Bannister had an encounter with the Irish grasp of finance when he sought to tip a Dublin porter for carrying his bag.

  “Sure,” the man scoffed, “and what would I be doing charging a handsome fellow like yourself, and you with all the Olympic glory of Zeus, and the gods of Ancient Greece, on your jacket? If I were to charge you, and heaven forbid that I should, ‘twould be only threepence. Why don’t you make it a shilling?”

  NO CRUSADES FOR CAMPANELLA

  1958

  It was after dinner on a March evening in Dodgertown, the Brooklyn baseball team’s tropical concentration camp at Vero Beach, Florida. A jukebox was going full-blast in the big lounge where the players took their ease, talking, reading, playing cards, checkers, or pool.

  “Come here,” said Frank Graham, Jr., who was the Dodgers’ publicity director then. “Get a load of this.”

  He pushed open a screen door and nodded toward the rear of the administration building where the kitchen is.

  “This club,” he said with justifiable pride, “has the highest-paid orange-juice squeezer in the world.”

  Sitting on a bench beneath the stars, helping the kitchen help and gabbing away thirteen to the dozen, was Roy Campanella, the most valuable player in the National League and one of the greatest catchers ever to pick a runner off second base.

  The dishwasher and cooks and waiters were his pals. So were the players and coaches and newspaper men, the Pullman porters and dining-car staff and cab drivers. That’s the way it always has been with the ample and amiable, cheerful and disarming gentleman who was carried, critically injured, into Community Hospital, Glen Cove, Long Island, before dawn yesterday.

  In the great social contribution which baseball has made to America since 1946, Jackie Robinson was the trail blazer, the standard-bearer, the man who broke the color line, assumed the burden for his people and made good. Roy Campanella is the one who made friends.

  No crusades for Campy. All he ever wanted was to live right and play ball. If he can never play again—and reports of the terrible damage suffered in an auto crash suggest that he never can—it will be a deep sorrow. He will be grateful, nevertheless, to be alive.

  Campy has an uncomplicated appreciation of the good things that have happened to him, and a capacity for honest, unquestioning gratitude. If he were asked why he should be grateful for his chance in baseball—why he or any other decent person in a democracy should feel it necessary to thank anybody for letting him do what he could do superlatively—Roy would frown thoughtfully and answer something like this:

  “Maybe I don’t have to, but just the same I’m grateful it happened to me. I can remember when it couldn’t happen.”

  If he comes successfully through the present crisis, everybody will be grateful.

  “The thing about Campy,” a fellow said one day, “he never knew he was a Negro until he went out to play ball.”

  That isn’t quite so, of course, but it has elements of truth. Son of a white fat
her, he grew up in a Philadelphia neighborhood that was as much white as black and the streets and schools and playgrounds where he spent his boyhood made no question of color.

  When he was fifteen and good enough to become a professional, no scouts from organized baseball knocked at his door. A bid from the Bacharach Giants was more than he expected. After that, it was the Baltimore Elite Giants and winter ball in Latin America, and it was a good life. Roy never asked for more until Branch Rickey offered more.

  Even then, he only half believed the chance was real. Probably full realization of the changes he was seeing didn’t come until the night in Nashua, New Hampshire, when his manager, Walter Alston, was chased out of a game and asked Campy to take charge. Alston isn’t much for making speeches. Giving the nod to Campy in front of the other players, he was saying without words: “You are more than the best and smartest ballplayer on this club. You are a leader. These fellows respect you. They’re white and you’re not and it’s never going to make any difference again.”

  For ten years, Campy has brought pleasure to millions. Fans watching him work were looking over the shoulder of an artist. It was even better at the squad games in Vero Beach, where one could get close enough to hear as well as see him. Joking with the hitters, encouraging the pitcher, he always had charge of those games.

  “All right,” he would tell a young pitcher in the last inning, “you’re leading by five runs. Just throw hard down the middle, because even with good hitters the percentage is three to one against em.”

  “Only trouble with Newk,” he said on one occasion when Don Newcombe was having indifferent success, “he don’t push hisself.”

  Campy never hesitated to push hisself. Right now he’s got millions pulling.

  REGGIE JACKSON’S THREE HOMERS

  1977