The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (25 page)

CHAPTER SIX
JACKIE

J
ACKIE
R
OBINSON
did not go away easily. The spindly fingers of time caressing his shoulders, Robinson willed a last immortal charge, leading the Dodgers past the Braves for the 1956 pennant. Periodically, the old fire could sustain him, tricking him into believing his competitiveness meshed with O’Malley’s and Alston’s view of the future. And it was a fact: Even though he’d hit only .275 (his career average would be .311), played in the second-fewest games of his career, and wouldn’t even finish the season with one hundred hits, Jackie Robinson was brilliant in 1956, especially in those big games against Milwaukee, when it was clear that the difference between success and defeat would not be commodities as easily definable as simple talent or statistics.

Against the Braves, Robinson hit .347. In June, when the Brooks were struggling to stay afloat in a five-team race, he hit .321. In July, when most players and teams couldn’t keep their tongues from dragging the infield, the old man of the Dodgers led the club by hitting .368. Finally, in September, when it was time to win the pennant, Robinson hit .290 but scored seventeen runs and drove in twelve, his highest and second-highest totals of any month of the season.

He was stubborn and driven and dangerous, an asset to a team that lacked that furious thirst to compete, the critical difference to one that seemed oddly luckless, tougher than the Braves but insufficiently resilient against the Yankees. In a final World Series showdown with the Yankees, the last Subway Series for nearly half a century, Robinson was fierce and smoldering: a home run off Whitey Ford in the triumphant opener, two hits the next day as the Dodgers went up 2–0. As was the case during the season, he had a talent for discovering those lush patches of brilliance, as in the tenth inning of the sixth game, after the Dodgers had lost three straight and were facing the end, when Robinson singled home the only run of the game and pushed the Series to its winner-take-all conclusion. The finale, a 9–0 Yankee rubout at Ebbets Field, was explosive only in its confirmation of the Yankee mandate—over a ten-year period, the Yankees met the Dodgers in the World Series six times and lost but once, in 1955—and for being the final humiliation of Don Newcombe. Game seven ended Newcombe’s run as one of the signature pitchers of his time and sealed his reputation as a pitcher who came up the smallest when there was so much to be gained. Naturally, it was never that simple. Newcombe won 27 games in 1956 (the rare daily double of the MVP and Cy Young, too) and 123 as a Dodger, but in his career he never won a single postseason game.

In the end, Newcombe finally broke under the weight, and he would never be the same. Over the course of the Series, he punched out a fan after being tagged by the Yankees for six runs over the first two innings in game two, finished the Series with a 21.21 earned-run average in two starts, and, after being demolished again in game seven, left not only the field but the ballpark before the game was complete, disappearing for days before reappearing just before the team plane took off for an exhibition series in Japan. He would never win fourteen games again in a season and would never again pitch in the postseason.

Robinson, in the short term, did not fare much better. The two-out liner in game six (made all the sweeter because the Yankee pitcher, Bob Turley, intentionally walked Snider to get to Robinson) would be the last hurrah in a big-league contest. He went one for ten over the final three games, ending the Series when Johnny Kucks struck him out. On the Japan trip, a goodwill exhibition designed to spread the gospel of baseball, Robinson’s temper ignited in Hiroshima and made the lead of the United Press dispatch, “An outburst by Jackie Robinson
⁸³
highlighted the Dodgers’ 10–6 victory over the All-Kansai Stars today in the city that suffered the first atom bomb attack.” The story continued to state that Robinson’s “run-in with the umpire occurred in the third inning. He protested a decision so long and so loud that he became the first Brooklyn player to be ejected since the start of the Japanese tour.”

Robinson made two more pieces of news in Japan. The first was that he was not planning to retire to become manager of the Montreal Royals, the Dodger minor-league affiliate with which he began his career (Robinson was never offered the job). The second was that he said he expected to return to the Dodgers for an eleventh season in 1957. Walter Alston also said he expected Robinson back.

And then, eleven days before Christmas, the Dodgers traded him to the New York Giants. “Dear Jackie and Rachel,
⁸⁴
I do know how you and the youngsters must have felt,” Walter O’Malley wrote Robinson on December 14, 1956. “It was a sad day for us as well. You were courageous and fair and philosophical on radio and television and in the press. It was better that way. The roads of life have a habit of re-crossing. There could well be a future intersection. Until then, my best to you both, with a decade of memories. Au revoir, Walter O’Malley.”

If he had been caught unawares by the trade—the word he often used for the press was
shocked
—it was only because he forgot that first great rule of baseball, and maybe of life in the competitive world: There are going to be a lot of folks waiting for you on the way down. Baseball always had a way of reminding players that at the end of the day, they were just ballplayers, a reminder that the players always seemed to forget when they were at their weakest. Players had the shortest shelf life; they were, on balance, the easiest to replace, and would live on, if they were lucky and good, in the memory of the people who watched them and enjoyed their play. The real game took place far from the pitching mound, away from the batter’s box. That game was invitation-only, and most players, especially the superstars, were not invited. Ruth had left the game a whimper of his bombastic self, a panhandler for a coaching job, who would come up empty until the day he died. DiMaggio, too, would cut an awkward figure when it was time for him to leave the game, and so it would be for Jackie Robinson.

L
OOKING BACK
, it required an impossible leap of imagination to think of the retirement of Jackie Robinson as anything other than a moment of statesmanship, but the truth was just the opposite. In the winter of 1956, while Henry was basking in the afterglow of his first batting title, Robinson was at best remarkable, dynamic, polarizing. He was, for the first time, vulnerable: Age and sharply declining skills were unable to protect him from his controversies. On team letterhead that contained a photo of the 1955 title team—the team that won Brooklyn’s only World Series, with Robinson injured and on the bench in game seven—Alston wrote to Robinson on December 18, 1956.

Dear Jackie
,
⁸⁵

I appreciate your letter very much and I’m glad to know how you feel. As far as I’m concerned there was never any serious trouble between us, and what little we did have was greatly exaggerated by the press
.

I have always admired your fine competitive spirit and team play. The Dodgers will miss you, but that is baseball
.

Good luck to you and your family in the future
.

Sincerely,   
Walt Alston

F
EW TEARS INSIDE
baseball were shed when Robinson made his retirement official in January 1957, but Robinson’s walking away from the game had a tremendous effect on Henry. The two did not share many conversations and were not great friends, but Robinson was a nearly mythic figure for Henry, and his retirement seemed, in an indirect way, to close the first chapter of Henry’s baseball life. It was Robinson who had hatched the dream of playing major-league baseball, against white competition, succeeding in what had once been the foreign, prohibited land of white baseball. And here Henry was, twenty-two years old, winner of the batting title, fast being considered in a league with Mays, Musial, and Mantle at a time when Robinson was closing the book on his career—one ending and the other just getting started.

O’Malley may have admired Robinson, but he never exactly enjoyed him. There was no money in it for Walter. Robinson was part of the old regime, a Rickey hand, and O’Malley had never received any residual benefit from Robinson’s pioneering. History never credited O’Malley with any portion of the Noble Experiment. Alston and Robinson were never exactly warm. Robinson was a Charlie Dressen man, and Alston kept trying to replace him by trotting out new candidates for his position, as he did when the Dodgers acquired third baseman Ransom Jackson from the Cubs in 1956. Robinson muscled and flexed and reduced Jackson from an all-star in 1955 to a part-time player. Randy Jackson would be out of the league after 1959. “And when Jackie wants to try extra hard,”
⁸⁶
wrote Arthur Daley in the
Times
, “he’s a matchless performer, the best money player in the business.”

Certainly the skill to defeat an opponent physically and psychologically could have helped a club. Henry W. Miller of 29 Lincrest Street in Hicksville, New York, thought so. After the Dodgers won the title in 1955, Mr. Miller wrote a letter to Joe Brown, the Pirates general manager—the same Joe Brown to whom Ed Scott had written four years earlier about a younger Henry—suggesting the remedy for the sagging Pirates was Jackie Robinson … as
manager
.

“Thank you for your letter
⁸⁷
of October 25 in which you recommend Jackie Robinson for consideration as manager of the Pittsburgh club,” Brown wrote in response three days later. “You were most kind to offer your advice, and I can assure you that I have the same high regard for Jack Robinson as you do.” In other words, Mr. Miller, leave the front office work to the professionals.

The
Defender
promulgated the Montreal rumor, advocating that Robinson be given the opportunity to make history once again, this time by becoming the first black manager in professional sports. At the same time, Robinson was rumored to be in the running for the Vancouver managerial position in the Pacific Coast League. In this case, the rumors were off by nearly twenty years, for baseball would not hire a black manager until 1974.

If anything, the first month of his retirement was far from tranquil. Warren Giles, the National League president, had no comment upon receiving Robinson’s retirement filing, not even the slightest recognition that the game Robinson left was not the game he had entered. Robinson gave an interview later in the month, saying the Dodgers were justified in their concern about the hand injury that reduced Campanella to a .219 hitter in 1956. Jackie and Campanella, two men who saw race in starkly contrasting terms, were never particularly close. Campanella’s nonconfrontational style appealed to writers in general and to one in particular, Dick Young. Young found Campanella and told him Robinson had said he was washed up. When Campanella struck back (“A lot of people are happy to see Jackie gone,” the catcher said), Robinson found himself at the airport in Chicago, preparing a statement in between connections from New York to San Francisco.

“Campy is quoted as saying
⁸⁸
that our relationship had ‘cooled off’ over the past few years,” the statement read. “Absolutely no good would be served by my saying why it ‘cooled.’ I have no argument with Campy and I don’t want one. In addition, I’m too busy as chairman of the NAACP Fight for Freedom campaign to concern myself with arguments of this type.”

Robinson had taken a swat at his vanquished foes, the Braves, telling one captive audience that the Braves lost the pennant because “one or two of the key Braves players were out ‘nightclubbing’ with the pennant on the line.” It was bad enough that the Braves had lost the pennant on the second-to-last day of the season, and now on his way out, Jackie was pouring a fifth of bourbon into the open wound. That sent Johnny Logan into a lather. Logan chafed at Jackie Robinson for publicly flogging the Braves. If Robinson was going to suggest the Braves partied their way out of the money, Robinson, Logan believed, should at least name the players he knew to be carousing. Otherwise, Logan thought, Robinson was being a coward for covering the entire team under one blanket accusation, for there were players like the catcher Del Crandall—whom Grimm used to call without admiration “the milk shake drinker”—who almost certainly were not burning the midnight oil.

Spahn said Robinson had developed a real hate for Milwaukee, ever since a couple from that city sued him for forty thousand dollars when he accidentally flipped his bat into the stands. Still, Robinson’s greatest crime was his candor. Days after being traded to the Giants, he received a letter from his favorite manager, Charlie Dressen, who by that time had begun what would be a short managing stay in Washington. Dressen wrote the letter in his squat, loopy longhand on Washington Senators stationery (“Office of the Manager”) and thanked Robinson sweetly for never failing to mention Dressen’s considerable influence on him (“Players rarely give their managers any credit,” he wrote). The letter was written with a sense of warmth, which underscored the fact that the relationship between the two men went beyond the professional, proof that during the tumultuous period of integration, a legitimate friendship had formed. Dressen had always believed that Robinson was the best baseball player he’d ever managed, and it was clear that Robinson was never more comfortable than when he played under Charlie Dressen. Dressen invited Robinson to Yankee Stadium when the Senators traveled to New York, and said he understood if it was too early yet for Robinson to step into a big-league ballpark, having quit the game so recently. Dressen then asked Robinson to remember, even in retirement, a key portion of the ballplayer code: