The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (8 page)

Hyland told Moore that he had heard about the strike and that the players ought to be pretty damn careful. He wasn’t saying anybody had to like “nigras.” He just wanted to tell them they were heading for trouble.

Moore is hazy about his end of the conversation. (I found him in Collinsville, in southern Illinois, on a simmering summer day made lively by the wails of a tornado warning siren. Moore was seventy-nine and undergoing treatment for prostate cancer. He recalled Doc Hyland speaking to him “about the Robinson thing” forty-four years before; he said he was not sure what he told Hyland.)

The conspiring ballplayers recognized that secrecy was essential. They believed wildly that a surprise strike, bringing baseball to a stop one day in May, would drive the nigger from the game before his supporters could counterattack. The press, which, as I say, had not been notably friendly to Robinson, was nonetheless an enemy of secrecy. The conspiring players agreed no words, no hints, no nothin’ to the sportswriters.

Once two people know a secret, as the saying is, it ceases to be a secret. Dr. Hyland felt honor bound to report what he knew to his employer, flinty old Sam Breadon, who was now planning to sell the Cardinals to secure himself a pecunious, quiet old age. Breadon was no social activist, but as a businessman he recognized that the strike could tear down the value of his franchise. Who wanted to buy into the Civil War? Breadon flew to New York. There, as he later said, “I talked things over with some of the men” at the New Yorker hotel. He heard enough to fill him with dread. He took a taxi to the Rockefeller Center building that housed the office of Ford C. Frick, the president of the National League.

Frick listened thoughtfully, heavily. He was not a confrontational man, nor even, over the years, a very strong one. But Breadon’s report stirred Frick as nothing in baseball ever had or would again. He proceeded to Ebbets Field at once — it was early in the afternoon of May 6 — and commandeered a small office high up, behind home plate, adjacent to the press room and the bar, where some hours later sportswriters would be drinking free whiskey, supplied by the teetotaling Branch Rickey. The office was secure because no sportswriter would be coming to work at Ebbets Field for several hours.

Frick called up seven Cardinals, individually. He did not want to address a group. He would divide the strikers before conquering them. Musial was not summoned.*

The message Frick delivered to each player was unyielding. It went like this:

If you strike, you will be suspended from the league. You will find the friends you think you have in the press box will not support you. You will be outcasts. I do not care if half the league strikes. Those who do will encounter quick retribution. All will be suspended. I don’t care if it wrecks the National League for five years. This is the United States of America and one citizen has as much right to play as another. . . . You will find if you go through with your intention that you will have been guilty of complete madness.

And there amid shafts of spring sunlight the strike withered. Was there ever a more glorious moment in sport?

A version of these events reached the ubiquitous Dr. Robert Hyland. Among the surgeon’s avocations was singing in a barbershop quartet. Good whiskey and nighttime crooning pleased the soul. One good friend, with whom Hyland sang, was a Canadian native named Cecil Rutherford Rennie, who wrote baseball for the
Herald Tribune
under the name of Rud Rennie.

By the time I came to know Rennie, in 1953, he had suffered a heart attack and had covered too many ballgames. He was noted then for the speed with which he composed his stories rather than for their excellence. But the somewhat younger Rennie was a fine newspaperman.

Rennie came to St. Louis with the Yankees early in May, and Hyland, in his cups, provided a version of the strike story. Rennie, not entirely sober himself, slipped away from the quartet and telephoned his sports editor, Stanley Woodward. ‘ can’t write this myself, Coach. It would trace back to Doc Hyland. Maybe you can do something with it.”

Woodward telephoned Frick, who would not speak on the record. In fact, he did not want to talk at all.

“In that case,” Woodward said, “I’m going with what I have What I have makes the National League look bad.”

“Now, Stanley,” Frick said, in his accustomed conciliatory way.

“Now nothing, Ford. What the hell happened?”

Frick grudgingly began to re-create events. He didn’t care for this; he didn’t care for this at all. He was giving a major story exclusively to the
Herald Tribune
which, despite editorial excellence, was neither as powerful as the
Times
nor as popular as the
Daily News
.

But if he held his tongue . . . Frick had been a newspaperman himself, rather an establishment character, a ghostwriter for Babe Ruth, and he was literate. He knew that a roused Stanley Woodward could write up a storm.

Some details were garbled in the long telephone conversation between Frick and Woodward. But on May 9, 1947, the
Herald Tribune
published what remains the sports scoop of the century, the story that did not make page one.

“A National League players’ strike,” Woodward began, under an eight-column headline,

instigated by some of the St. Louis Cardinals against the presence in the league of Jackie Robinson, Negro first baseman, has been averted temporarily and perhaps permanently quashed. . . .

In recent days Ford Frick, president of the National League, and Sam Breadon, president of the St. Louis club, have been conferring with St. Louis players. Mr. Breadon flew east when he heard of the projected strike. The story that he came to consult with Eddie Dyer, manager, about the lowly state of the St. Louis club was fictitious. He came on a much more serious errand.

The strike, formulated by certain St. Louis players, was instigated by a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who has since recanted. . . .

It is understood that the players involved — and the recalcitrants are not all Cardinals — will say that their objective is to gain the right to have a say on who shall be eligible to play in the major leagues. . . .

This story is factually and thoroughly substantiated. The St. Louis players involved will unquestionably deny it. We doubt, however, Frick and Breadon, will go that far. A return of no comment from either or both will serve.

Breadon, reported Bob Broeg in the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, “emphatically denied that there had been a movement to stage a protest strike.” Broeg quoted Breadon as saying, “The whole thing is ridiculous.”

Over the years, careful disinformation has been developed. Breadon came to New York suddenly to see why his team was losing ballgames. He spoke to Terry Moore and Marty Marion about drinking on the ballclub and about possibly replacing the manager, Eddie Dyer. Broeg himself still claims that there was never a strike threat. He adds that Woodward, who scooped him, was “guilty of barnyard journalism.”

One man who did not deny the story was Ford Frick. He never elaborated and seemed embarrassed to take credit for his own decisive action. A few days later he told a reporter for
The Sporting News:
“The National League stands firmly behind Jackie Robinson.”

Was there a strike threat? the reporter asked.

Frick said: “Any player who tries to strike will leave me no recourse but to suspend him indefinitely.”

Stanley Woodward wrote in triumph:

The blast of publicity which followed . . . the revelation that the Cardinals were promoting a players’ strike against the presence of Jackie Robinson, Brooklyn’s Negro first baseman, will serve to squash further strolls down Tobacco Road.

In other words it can now be honestly doubted that the boys from the Hookworm Belt will have the nerve to foist their quaint sectional folklore on the rest of the country.

The denial by Sam Breadon is so spurious as to be beneath notice. [The statement by Ford Frick] obviously is the most noble ever made by a baseball man.

That autumn Woodward’s article won the E. P. Dutton Award as the best sports reporting job of the year. (The Pulitzer Committee had not yet found the sports page.) By that time, of course, Robinson’s success was assured and the course of American history had been changed.

*The reasoning is mysterious. Sprinters run on the balls of their feet.

*Solomon’s view of the power of the law was optimistic. Nine years later, in 1954, the New York Yankees still employed no black players. They shipped an excellent first base prospect, Victor Pellot Power, a black Puerto Rican, to the Philadelphia Athletics, explaining to several trusted baseball writers: “Power is not the Yankee type. He’s a good ballplayer, but he’s always chasing white women.” It was not until 1955, ten years after passage of the FEP act, that the Yankees hired a black player, Elston Howard. “The truth,” George Weiss, the general manager, told me in 1954, “is that our box seat customers from Westchester County don’t want to sit with a lot of colored fans from Harlem.” Like Jackie Robinson, Weiss, who died in 1972, is a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

*Powell himself was no peony. Off season, he told reporters at his first Yankee press conference, he worked as a cop in Toledo, Ohio. When asked specifically what he did on the Toledo police force, Powell told the New York press: “I hit niggers over the head with my nightstick.”

*Herb Pennock died in 1948 at the age of fifty-three. Subsequently, he was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, obviously not the only racist so honored. The Phillies fired Ben Chapman midway through 1948, when he was thirty-nine years old. Chapman never again managed in the major leagues. Two years later, under Eddie Sawyer, the Phillies won a pennant.

*The grandfather of Ken Griffey, Jr., the 1990s young star outfielder.

*“Ford,” says Buzzie Bavasi, a close friend, “knew Stan had too much sense and class to be associated with a harebrained strike. The only ones he talked to were the troublemakers.”

W
HILE INTEGRATION
was stirring souls in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, Larry MacPhail was looking at a baseball problem in the Bronx. The Yankees of 1946 were mediocre. They finished third, seventeen games behind the champion Red Sox. No Yankee batted .300 in 1946. The team attracted 2.3 million customers, a Yankee record, but that was the heady wine of peace as much as Yankee baseball. Finishing last in the National League, the Giants drew an imposing 1.2 million. The postwar Yankee story in 1946 centered on Joe DiMaggio.

Larry MacPhail wanted Yankee baseball to resound with carnival noises. He offered nylon stockings as gifts on Ladies Day. He booked the team on airlines in an era when train travel was both efficient and luxurious. He dispensed immoderate quantities of liquor to the press. But the ballclub did not win. On May 9, 1946, in a game against the Browns, DiMaggio dropped a routine fly ball. Two plays later, trying to take a single on one bounce, he misread the hop and the ball skipped past him. Two errors in a single inning. The Browns won, 6 to 1. In the press room later, MacPhail drank hard. After three bourbons he announced, “Looks like DiMaggio came out of service too damn soon. Biggest disappointment of my life. That guy may be all washed up.”

Sober the following day, MacPhail called Clark Griffith, the penurious old pitcher who owned the Washington Senators. According to one Washington sportswriter, MacPhail offered DiMaggio for Mickey Vernon, a rangy left-handed first baseman who had never hit as many as ten home runs in a season. Griffith turned down the deal.

The idea of that trade brings a denial from Lee MacPhail (“My father would have mentioned it. He never did”) and occasions shudders of horror in the Bronx (“Vernun fuh DiMaj? Whadaya? Nuts?”). MacPhail may have been drinking when he propositioned Griffith. That would explain his memory loss around the house. Or he may have felt embarrassed. Anyway, the deal was not as ridiculous as it seems. DiMaggio might have been through in 1946, an athlete dying very, very young. Vernon, while no superstar, was competent* and durable. He was also four years younger than DiMaggio and, in fact, played major league ball until 1960, nine seasons after DiMaggio’s retirement.

MacPhail’s next attempt to discard his somber center fielder showed the man at his roarin’ redheaded best. He invited Tom Yawkey, the multimillionaire bon vivant who owned the Red Sox, to join him for a night of talk and drink at Toots Shor’s. Yawkey kept his distance from the press, in the manner of many monied men, but Shor’s was a safe saloon for public drinking. By unwritten rule, what went on at Shor’s was off the record, unless a specific exception was made.

MacPhail steered Yawkey to a banquette in a corner and told him rollicking stories. How he had built a winner in Cincinnati. How he had patched together a champion for Brooklyn. What he had needed to create a winner there in 1941, MacPhail told Yawkey, was Billy Herman, the great second baseman of the Chicago Cubs. Philip K. Wrigley, the chewing gum manufacturer who owned the Cubs, hadn’t wanted to give up Herman, but MacPhail induced Wrigley to drink with him in a hotel suite. In four hours, MacPhail’s Dodgers had Billy Herman. “I
poured
drink for drink with Wrigley, but I didn’t swallow the stuff,” MacPhail explained. “I kept excusing myself to go to the bathroom. Then I’d throw my drink down the sink. After a while I was a helluva lot more sober than Wrigley. I pulled out some papers and he signed them. I got Herman for a coupla second-raters and some cash and won the pennant in Brooklyn. Some guys say we won it on the ballfield, around second base. Sure. But we also won it when I was filling a sink hole with good booze.”

MacPhail threw out no booze at Shor’s. He knocked back drinks, and Yawkey joined him. MacPhail got to his idea. “I have this big dago in center field. He hits the hell out of the ball, but to left center. We got a spot out there that’s four hundred seventy feet from home. He hits these tremendous drives, home runs anywhere else, and in my ballpark they’re just damn long outs.”

“That’s the way this game is,” Yawkey said. “I got this skinny kid, pulls everything left-handed, hits these long balls to right and right center. In my ballpark, right center reaches four hundred twenty feet from home.”

The men drank some more. Yawkey wanted to know what MacPhail thought about Rickey’s plan to bring “nigras” into baseball. Shor later recalled the conversation for me.

“Gonna kill our business,” MacPhail said.

Yawkey nodded. (Yawkey’s Red Sox did not employ a black ballplayer until 1959, fully
twelve
years after Robinson’s major league debut.)

They were both drinking hard and they were getting along very well. After a while, at two in the morning, MacPhail proposed his trade.

The Big Dago for the Skinny Kid.

No cash. No other ballplayers.

Even up, Joe DiMaggio for Ted Williams.

“Helluvan idea,” Yawkey said.

“Put the Dago up there with your close-in left field wall,” MacPhail said, “and he’ll hit sixty homers.”

“Right,” Yawkey said. “Put the Kid in the Stadium, with the right field stands so close, and he’ll hit seventy!”

“We gotta deal?”

“We gotta deal!!”

“Shake.”

“Skoal.”

“Let’s have another.”

“There’s got to be a morning after . . .”

Maureen McGovern, who was not born until 1949, sang that hangover lyric decades later. When this particular 1946 morning after struck, Yawkey telephoned. “I can’t do it, Larry.”

“I thought we had a deal.”

“We did. I’m not denying that. But I can’t do it. They let Babe Ruth out of Boston. If I let Williams go, the fans will crucify me.”

“You’ll make new fans. Every Italian in New England will pay to see my guy.”

“No deal,” Yawkey said. “Excuse me. I’ve got to go and get a Bromo-Seltzer.”

* * *

As World War II had moved toward its mushroom-cloud conclusion, DiMaggio was out of shape, plagued by stomach ulcers, beset by arthritis, and brooding about the breakup of his marriage to a blonde starlet named Dorothy Arnold, whom someone has described as “spring training for Marilyn Monroe.”

After the 1942 season, with the draft closing in, DiMaggio enlisted in the air force. DiMaggio claims he never asked for special treatment, but the air force cast him as a celebrity soldier. His tours of duty took him no closer to a battlefield than the New Jersey pine flats, and DiMaggio, an enlisted man, was not your basic grunt. He found GI uniforms “a little skimpy” and hired a tailor to make alterations. Custom-tailored olive drabs. He lent his name to a sports column some forgotten ghost tapped out for service publications. And, for the entertainment of generals and admirals, he was required to play baseball.

First, Staff Sergeant Joe DiMaggio played center field for a team at the Santa Ana Army Air Base in southern California. “Our pitching was so bad,” he complained, “I once had to spend forty-five minutes chasing base hits around the outfield.” (Sherman was right. War
is
hell.) Later, transferred to Hawaii, DiMaggio starred for the Seventh Air Force team, a Pacific powerhouse packed with conscripted major leaguers and managed by a tall lieutenant named Long Tom Winsett, who had flopped as a Dodger outfielder across three seasons. Under manager Winsett, a lifetime .237 hitter, DiMaggio played ninety games and batted .401.

Viewed from Guadalcanal or Remagen Bridge, DiMaggio’s wartime hitch was a Sunday afternoon stroll beside the lily pond in southeast Central Park. But DiMaggio was not a Sunday-strolling character. In the best of times, he was high-strung, intense, chain-smoking. Wired, people say today. The older, milder term was “He’s a worrier.” Now as an enlisted man, the Wired Worried Clipper had real reason for concern. How long would the war last? Afterwards, whenever afterwards began, how much of his baseball skills would remain? There was no pension, much less job security, for major league ballplayers, and the war was robbing DiMaggio, as it robbed Bob Feller and Hank Greenberg, of prime earning years.*

Beyond that endemic insecurity, Dorothy Arnold’s decision to divorce DiMaggio troubled him in ways he did not fully understand. He was something of a roué, as famous among New York showgirls as he was among New York ball fans. But he was also the son of devout Roman Catholics. The Church, not prominent in his everyday life, asserted itself when DiMaggio married, as loudly as a bass organ chord.

DiMaggio insisted on a church wedding, which meant that Dorothy had to agree that their children would be raised as Roman Catholic. (She was nominally Lutheran.) She then decided to take instruction in the Catholic faith, although her conversion turned out to be less permanent than a cathedral. After the marriage, on November 19, 1939, in a huge ceremony at St. Peter and St. Paul’s, a San Francisco columnist reported that the DiMaggios’ wedding guests were so numerous and hungry that they consumed twelve turkeys, eight hams, fifteen chickens, and four sides of beef. This very gaudy, very crowded Italian Catholic wedding made front-page news for the tabloids.

Now, less than four years later, Dorothy was suing for divorce. The DiMaggio family was shocked. Divorce was unknown on the island near Sicily where the parents were born. How could that little blondie from Minnesota divorce their beloved Joe? The family felt scandalized and DiMaggio himself became a very angry man. He was a big, broad-shouldered character and on several occasions threatened to punch out people who asked about the divorce.

Dorothy was less inclined toward silence. She told reporters that her home life as Mrs. DiMaggio was dull. Joe went out a lot, leaving her alone. He liked to have fun with the boys. At least she hoped it was the boys. She herself liked to entertain and found nice apartments, even a penthouse on Central Park West, in New York, but Joe didn’t seem to want to be the host at parties. He liked to go out with the boys. At least, she hoped it was the boys. She thought the arrival of their son, Joe DiMaggio Junior, would secure their marriage. But the baby, she complained, couldn’t compete with Joe’s other interests, the boys he loved to talk and drink with at Toots Shor’s. At least, Dorothy concluded, raising one carefully plucked brow, “I
hope
it was the boys.” Subsequently, on instructions from her attorney, Joseph P. Haller, Dorothy shut up. Early in 1944, she divorced DiMaggio following, as
Time
magazine put it, “four and a half years of marriage, two trips to Reno and one child.”

Like very few — Charles Augustus Lindbergh comes to mind — Joe DiMaggio is a neurotically private public man. In a memorable observation that appeared in
The Aspirin Age
, John Lardner wrote: “Lindbergh was deliberately responsible for his continuing fame and notoriety [after the solo flight to Paris in 1927]. Loathing the blatant contactual phases of publicity, he showed nonetheless one of the truest gifts ever seen on this planet for attracting it. . . . It appeared that he needed fame to subsist, to support his confidence in the role he had won. Here is the paradox that engrosses his analyzers: a man supernormally ingrown and aloof becoming with sure instincts a chronic public figure.”

If we substitute DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in 1941 for Lindbergh’s historic flight — and I don’t mean to diminish either accomplishment — we have a splendid parallel. Later DiMaggio would celebrate or compensate for his retirement from baseball by marrying Marilyn Monroe. Then, having plighted his troth with the most famous blonde on earth, DiMaggio faulted the press and public for intruding on his privacy. If Colonel Lindbergh noticed, he would have offered a steely but approving smile.

DiMaggio was born in the Bay Area village of Martinez, California, on November 25, 1914, the eighth child of a couple who emigrated from Isola delle Femmine, a small, impoverished island off Palermo. All the boys — Thomas, Michael, Vincent, Joseph, and Dominic — were given the middle name Paul. It was impossible in the cabin household where Joe DiMaggio began life to forget that Paul was his father’s favorite saint. Giuseppe Paolo DiMaggio, Sr., never learned to read English. The household language was Italian.

In 1915 the family moved to a ground-floor apartment at 2047 Taylor Street on the slope of Russian Hill in the North Beach section of San Francisco, about a quarter mile from the dock. Giuseppe had bought a fishing boat that he named for his devout wife. In a phenomenon astonishing not only to baseball enthusiasts but to geneticists, the three youngest children of Giuseppe and Rosalie — Vince, Joe, and Dom DiMaggio — grew up to become major league center fielders.*

DiMaggio has not been expansive about his early years, but he says, “My parents told me I was knock-kneed and I had to wear some kind of braces. After that I had weak ankles. When I was seven or eight I picked up a broken paddle and started swinging. My sister Frances liked to pitch to me. They tell me I hit my sister’s stuff pretty hard.”

DiMaggio attended Hancock Grammar School and San Francisco Junior High before entering Galileo High School. He neither achieved nor aspired to distinction on school teams or in the classroom. After a while he quit school and went to work in an orange juice cannery. He peeled oranges eight hours a day. “I used to wonder,” said his sister Marie, “if Joe was backward. Not quick.” She was suggesting retardation. “I mean, I wondered what was the matter with Joe. Then I decided it was mostly that he was so shy.”

The baseball talent bloomed on rocky sandlots for teams called the Salesian Boys and the Jolly Knights, and then we find an oft-told and still lovely story. A shy and lonely boy, a social wallflower, steps onto a ballfield and suddenly assumes great grace and strength and beauty. “Joe,” said his brother Tom, “could always hit like hell.” At eighteen DiMaggio played 187 games for the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League. He batted safely in sixty-one straight games and knocked in 169 runs. That was in 1933. After that, someone else had to peel the oranges in the cannery. The Yankees signed DiMaggio two seasons later.

With some urging from the Yankee front office, two California veterans, Frank Crosetti and Tony Lazzeri, agreed to take DiMaggio with them to his first major league spring training in 1936. Lazzeri and Crosetti shared the driving and then — it may have been in Texas, it may have been in Alabama — Lazzeri turned to DiMaggio and said: “Okay, champ. It’s your turn to drive.”