Bill Veeck (21 page)

Later that month, though, Price strained the relationship. The Indians and White Sox were aboard a train from Los Angeles on their way to an exhibition game in San Diego. A group of Indians players shared a Pullman car with women bowlers on their way back from a tournament. Ever the prankster, Price released two of his snakes. Patkin reported that the women began screaming, with “some of them hanging on to the baggage racks, standing on the seats.” The panic caused the conductor to halt the train momentarily on the tracks while order was restored.

Boudreau was in another car playing cards, but when the conductor laid into him, Boudreau knew Price was responsible. He ordered him off the team and put him on a train back to Cleveland, wiring Veeck: “I THOUGHT I WAS THE MANAGER OF A BIG LEAGUE BALL CLUB NOT OF A CIRCUS.”
⁴⁶

Back in Cleveland, Veeck gave Price a good tongue-lashing, but he could not bear to actually fire either him or Patkin, so he sent them on a tour of the club's seventeen farm teams. “That's a worse penalty than even Happy Chandler could devise for that snake escapade,” Hugh Fullerton chuckled in his Associated Press column.
⁴⁷

At the beginning of 1947 Bill Veeck decided that the time had come to racially integrate the Cleveland Indians. He had long considered breaking the color barrier, and the previous July he had told Cleveland Jackson, a columnist for the Cleveland
Call and Post
, that he had several requirements for such an arrangement. He would purchase the contract of a Negro player only “through regular procedures, not by means of raids similar to Branch Rickey's grabs from the Negro leagues”—an allusion to the fact that Rickey did not pay a Negro league team for Jackie Robinson and several players that followed him. Any player he signed would need the highest “all-around qualifications,” including the ability to “take it.” And Veeck would bring in such a player only if his presence would mean the difference between a mediocre team and a championship one.
¹

Early in 1947 Veeck called Ray Dandridge in Mexico and invited him to his Arizona ranch for a talk. Dandridge, then thirty-seven, had been an outstanding third baseman in the Negro leagues and had been playing professionally for the previous seven years in the Mexican League under a lucrative $10,000-per-season contract from multimillionaire Jorge Pasquel that included living expenses and a maid. Dandridge had moved his wife and three children to Mexico City and was playing alongside several white former major leaguers who had jumped to the Mexican League in 1946 for guaranteed multiyear contracts, among them pitchers Max Lanier and Sal Maglie and former Pirates and Dodgers outfielder Max Carey, who managed the team in Veracruz.

The previous June, Gordon Cobbledick of the
Plain Dealer
had gone to Mexico to see why so many American players were willing to burn their bridges with their major-league teams by defecting to play for Pasquel. While there, he had seen why Dandridge was regarded as equal to or better than such highly skilled white infielders as Lou Boudreau, Johnny Pesky of the Red Sox, and Marty Marion of the St. Louis Cardinals.

Following Veeck's meeting with Dandridge, Cobbledick revealed how close Dandridge had come to being the first to break the color barrier. Cobbledick watched Dandridge play and then could not hide his admiration for him from his readers or from Veeck.

“[Veeck] said he wanted me to be the first one,” Dandridge related. “I even went to the Veeck farm in Arizona and talked to him, but I was playing in Mexico then, making pretty good money.” Dandridge asked Veeck about a signing bonus, but Veeck declined and, lacking an option or an offer, Dandridge decided not to sign lest he fail and end up without a job. Dandridge was also doubtlessly aware of other futile “tryouts” that had been granted to some African American players—notably the “don't call us, we'll call you” tryouts with the Boston Red Sox in 1945—and could see no merit in Veeck's offer.

“I thought I would be jeopardizing a whole lot,” he later acknowledged, “so I refused. I wouldn't jump.”
²
How serious Veeck was about putting Dandrige in an Indians uniform is not known, but if he had made Dandridge an attractive offer, the names Veeck and Dandridge might now be as revered as those of Rickey and Robinson.
^az

In mid-February 1947, Veeck hired Louis Jones, a black public relations man, to “prepare the black segment of Cleveland for the arrival of a black ballplayer, unnamed.” A highly visible force in the community, Jones had been singer Lena Horne's first husband. Veeck then engaged Bill Killefer to “casually scout” for black players, using an updated version of the list he and Abe Saperstein had put together five years earlier. He had heard about a
young war veteran named Larry Doby, who was playing for Effa Manley's Newark Eagles of the Negro National League. On June 13, Cleveland Jackson, who had already tipped Jones to the presence of Doby, wrote to Veeck saying that he was “especially enthused” about Doby as a prospective Indian. Veeck answered that Killefer was already scouting him.
³
Veeck later acknowledged that the strongest influence on his decision came from Wendell Smith, editor of the black weekly the
Pittsburgh Courier
. Veeck believed that Smith, more than anyone, had “influenced Rickey to take Jack Robinson…. I had known Wendell since '42. So Wendell and Abe and I met a couple of times and we arrived at Larry Doby as the best young player in the [Negro] league.”
⁴

Veeck wanted to bring a black player directly to the majors, bypassing the minor leagues. “I'll handle him just like any other rookie,” he said, believing Rickey had put too much pressure on Robinson by starting him in the minors. In truth, however, Veeck did not have the option of sending a black player to either of his top farm teams, located in Baltimore and Oklahoma City, because those cities simply would not under any circumstances have accepted a Negro athlete.
⁵

Veeck knew that a year earlier, in Baltimore, Jackie Robinson had faced perhaps his toughest harassment while playing for the Montreal Royals. In Robinson's opinion, the taunts and threats of white Baltimoreans were worse than the intentional spikings he received on the field. On one occasion large numbers of whites crowded around the Royals' dressing room after a game, and Baltimore police had to disperse the crowd.
⁶
Doby had led the Newark Eagles to a championship in 1946. Shy and introverted, he had grown up in a poor but mixed neighborhood of Italian, Irish, Jewish, and black kids in Paterson, New Jersey, where he starred at East Side High School in baseball, basketball, football, and track. Doby ran for the winning touchdown in a game against Montclair High, a team that included astronaut-to-be Buzz Aldrin, which prompted Doby to later quip: “Given the circumstances at the time you could say that I had as much chance of playing in the major leagues as Aldrin did of going to the moon.”
⁷

Doby could later recall being subjected to a racist insult in high school only once, during a football game. He responded by whirling past the foulmouthed defensive back to haul in a touchdown pass. “That shut the guy up,” said Doby.
⁸
He then played basketball on a scholarship on the integrated team at Long Island University under legendary coach Clair Bee. In 1943, after three months at LIU, Doby signed a contract with the Newark Eagles of the Negro National League.

The first time Doby encountered Jim Crow was as a Navy draftee in 1943 when he was separated from his white high school friends on a train heading to basic training in Illinois, forced to ride in a separate car with other blacks. The reality of the enforced racial divide in the Armed Forces hit home when he was denied a chance to play for the famous Great Lakes Naval Training Station ball club, managed by Hall of Famer Mickey Cochrane, and had to play instead for the all-black team at an all-black camp. Later in the war he was permitted to play fast-pitch softball with white professionals on the small Pacific island of Mog Mog, part of the Ulithi Atoll, a fog-shrouded speck of a place that one veteran later said reminded him of the “eerie island in the movie
King Kong
.” The men he played with included Billy Goodman, who would go on to a career with the Red Sox, and Washington Senators veteran Mickey Vernon, with whom he established a lifelong friendship.
⁹

Vernon considered Doby the best player in the island's softball and basketball leagues. After Jackie Robinson signed with Montreal in 1945 and while Doby was still in the South Pacific, Vernon wrote a letter to Senators owner Clark Griffith asking him to give Doby a tryout, which never happened. Then, when Doby rejoined the Newark Eagles in 1946, Vernon shipped him a dozen Louisville Slugger bats in a gesture of respect and friendship.

Veeck sent Louis Jones to see Doby play at the start of the 1947 season. “We were playing the Philadelphia Stars in Newark, and he came to the game and he said Mr. Veeck said to talk to me and see how I felt about coming to be a big-league player, and he would come back in a couple of weeks and would take me to see the Yankees play against Cleveland—I guess Cleveland was coming into town.” Jones took him to that game and visited with him on several other occasions, including a game in Trenton where he asked Doby if he was ready to play major-league baseball. “I said, ‘I don't see any difference in the baseball.' So he said, ‘Mr. Veeck is thinking about a contract maybe in a week or two.'”
¹⁰

Meanwhile, Dodger scout Clyde Sukeforth, who had given Rickey a final endorsement of Jackie Robinson, personally scouted every game Doby played in the New York area in the season's opening six weeks. Veeck and his scouts had by then compiled, in Doby's words, “a foot-high notebook that had everything I'd ever done in my life from the time I was born.” Rickey was about to sign Doby when Wendell Smith told Sukeforth that he was about to be signed elsewhere. When Rickey found out that it was with the Indians, he relented, passing along the scouting reports and acknowledging that Doby's
signing with Cleveland would help the movement and ease some of the pressure on Robinson.

To conclude the deal, Veeck had to formally obtain Doby from Effa Manley, the owner and chief operating officer of the Eagles. Veeck intended to purchase Doby's Newark contract, but when he telephoned on July 1 to say he wanted to sign Doby, Manley asked, “Well, what do you plan to give me for him, Mr. Veeck?” Veeck said $10,000. “Well, I'm not a millionaire,” Manley replied, “but I am financially secure, I think, and ten thousand dollars looks like ten cents. I know very well that if he was a white boy and a free agent you'd give him a hundred thousand. But if you feel you're being fair offering me ten, I guess I'll have to take it.”
^ba
Veeck promised her an additional $5,000 if he kept Doby for at least thirty days. Manley wouldn't give her consent without clearing the deal with her husband, Abe, who thought the price was “ridiculously low.” Effa told Abe they had no leverage by which to force Veeck to up the ante, and if they refused the offer, they would be accused by fans and the press of depriving Doby of his shot at the majors. Abe ultimately consented.
¹¹

Veeck paid the $15,000 even though he probably could have gotten Doby for nothing. Unlike Rickey, who considered the Negro leagues to be “a racket,” Veeck's assessment of them was less judgmental: “They were at best marginal. They just scuffled.” Veeck knew Rickey had paid nothing for Robinson because Tom Baird, the white owner of the Kansas City Monarchs, couldn't stand in Robinson's way, and Veeck also knew Manley couldn't stand in Doby's way, just as she eventually could not prevent Rickey from taking pitcher Don Newcombe from her. “We could,” Veeck said, “just have reached out and said ‘Come on.' But we didn't want to do that and we did purchase his contract.”
¹²

Meager though Veeck's offer seemed to Manley, she knew Veeck was the only major-league official willing to pay for Negro leagues talent. With that in mind, she extended an offer to Veeck: “Take a look at [Monte] Irvin for a thousand dollars and then pay me what you think he's worth.”
^bb
Veeck declined,
acknowledging that he would “have difficulty bringing in one Negro.” He would regret not taking Irvin and later told Irvin, who became a close friend, “That was the dumbest deal I never did.”
¹³

Though improved, the Indians had fallen twelve games behind the Yankees when Veeck told the local writers at an impromptu press conference on July 3 that he had an announcement that might interest them.

“We've signed a new ballplayer named Larry Doby,” he said. There was a pause. “He's a Negro.”

The room was silent while Veeck let the words sink in.

“He'll be a great ballplayer,” Bill went on. “He's a second baseman with the Newark Eagles in the Negro National League.”

One reporter then asked when the new phenom was to report.

“In Chicago day after tomorrow,” Veeck said.

Doby's last appearance in the Negro National League was to be the next afternoon in a July 4 doubleheader at Newark's Ruppert Stadium. He was batting .415 with a league-leading 14 home runs. At a ceremony at home plate before the first game, his teammates gave him a toilet kit with shaving lotion, soap, a brush, and a comb. His mother and wife accompanied him and Louis Jones to Newark's Pennsylvania Station, where the two men boarded the
Admiral
for the overnight trip west. Doby had been informed that he would be unable to stay at the unintegrated team hotel, so he and Jones checked into the DuSable, the leading hotel for blacks in the city.