October 1964 (16 page)

Still, there was no doubt that the first two years under Hemus were terrible ones for Gibson. As far as Gibson was concerned, Hemus looked down on him, rarely giving him starts, pulling him too quickly when he did start, and using him all too often to mop up in hopeless games. Yet Gibson’s sheer talent was so dazzling that the only person who seemed to doubt it was Hemus. Gibson hated Hemus as much as anything else because Hemus told him to work on his control, but then did not seem to give him enough chances to do it. Hemus, the other veteran pitchers thought, was jumpy and invariably too eager to pull a pitcher. Gibson felt there were too many games in which he barely got into a rhythm when Hemus would appear at the mound ready to take him out. Once, when a fly ball almost killed Bill White, a natural first baseman playing out of position in the outfield, Hemus somehow blamed Gibson. There were angry exchanges between them, Gibson asking Hemus what the hell he was doing when he went out to the mound, and Hemus saying that if Gibson could get some goddamn body out, he wouldn’t be out there. “He’ll never make a big-league pitcher,” Hemus liked to say about Gibson. “He throws everything at the same speed.” That was certainly true, thought Tim McCarver, who caught Gibson, but the speed was matched by few in major-league baseball.

Of the many things Hemus did and said that bothered Gibson, what stung the most was when the manager would discuss at a team meeting how they would pitch to hitters on an opposing team. He would tell Gibson not to pay any attention, that this did not concern him, implying, as far as Gibson was concerned, that he was some kind of lesser person, not as smart as the white pitchers. It was the ultimate insult to an extremely sensitive, highly intelligent young black man. Gibson never forgave Hemus for his predictions that he would never make it in the big leagues, or for failing to put him in the rotation, or for the fact that Hemus once mistook him for Julio Gotay, the soon-to-be-traded utility infielder who played better in practice than in games. Gibson thought that when Solly Hemus looked at him, he saw not a man but a stereotype. There was a game against Pittsburgh in 1959 in which an incident occurred that angered all the black Cardinals players. Bennie Daniels, a black pitcher, was on the mound for the Pirates. Hemus inserted himself in the second game of a doubleheader as a player. In his first at bat, Hemus edged his leg into a Darnels pitch and got a free ticket to first base. On the way down to first, he shouted over to Daniels, “You black bastard ...” The next time he came up, Daniels threw at him, and in time Hemus swung and managed to throw his bat at Daniels. Both benches were ready to explode. The next day, Hemus called a team meeting. The black players were sure that he would apologize for what he had said to Daniels. There had been no apology. Later, Hemus said that he had done it to fire up his team and went on to praise Daniels as a pitcher to his players. Daniels was unmoved by the gesture. “Little Faubus,” Daniels called Hemus, in honor of the governor of Arkansas, who had recently made a national reputation for himself by trying to block the integration of the Little Rock schools. The entire Hemus-Daniels incident left a bad aftertaste with the Cardinals. Bill White, slower to make judgments than many, agreed that a bridge had been crossed on the Daniels incident.

Hemus himself later felt he had been at the wrong place at the wrong time in those years with the Cardinals. Gibson, he believed, had been on the verge of becoming a great player, but was not yet there. He had constant control problems, and Hemus had wanted Howie Pollet, the pitching coach, to work with him on keeping the ball down. Hemus had been dubious about Flood’s hitting ability and felt the Cardinals needed more bats in their lineup; later Hemus decided that he had been completely wrong about Flood, more so than about any younger player he had ever dealt with, and he wrote Flood a letter to that effect. He did not think he had been racist. He had grown up poor in San Diego, in a neighborhood where the other kids had been poor as well, some black, some Mexican, some white. In the baseball world in which he had come up in the forties, harsh ethnic epithets had still been used: dago and Guinea, Polack and kike. When he had first broken in, he would get a scratch hit off Warren Spahn or Lew Burdette, two of the toughest men who ever played baseball, and they, apparently believing he was Jewish because his name was Solly, would scream, “Hemus, that’s a goddamn cheap Jew hit and you’re a goddamn Jew hitter!” When he had called Daniels a black bastard, he had done it because that was what you shouted in a confrontation like that, he thought. He had not meant to offend his own players. Instead, he had been the one, he felt, who had pushed the hardest with Bing Devine and Gussie Busch to end the segregated facilities in St. Petersburg because he had disliked the idea of splitting his ball club up, and he did not think that white players should be favored over black players. He was saddened that years later Gibson and Flood still thought of him as a racist. He accepted the blame for what had happened: the world had been changing but he had not, he later decided.

Gradually, the other men in the Cardinal organization had reluctantly come to Devine’s view that Hemus simply could not adjust to the complexities of managing modern baseball players. Moreover, they thought there were simply too many confrontations with umpires, too many days when he lost his temper, and too much energy being used up for matters that did not win baseball games.

Gibson’s control was the only thing standing between him and success as a big-league pitcher. He had made progress as he came up through the minor leagues. What he wanted in the Hemus years was to make the rotation and be given a chance to pitch regularly, or be traded. The other players were sympathetic to his dilemma. Bill White, the senior statesman among the black ballplayers, knew how frustrated Gibson was, and counseled him not to blow it. When Gibson would rage at Hemus, it was White who would counsel him not to explode, not to challenge Hemus, not to make the problem into something larger. By asking to get out of a good organization, he would quite possibly pick up the reputation of being a difficult, hot-headed young black man. “Don’t blow it now when you’re so close,” White would say. “Don’t burn yourself out on things you can’t change. Work on the things you can change.” As Gibson would continue in a fury, White would counsel him, “Your time will come. Believe me, it will come. What you want to do is be ready for it, so when they come to you and tell you to pitch, you know damn well you can go in and do it.”

Gibson was sure he was ready to pitch in the major leagues; he had an awareness of his fastball—that it was big-time major-league heat—and that his ball had exceptional movement. (Midway through his career with the Cardinals Gibson pitched in an All-Star Game against Joe Pepitone of the Yankees. With one strike on Pepitone, Gibson delivered, and Pepitone swung and missed. “Throw me that slider again,” Pepitone shouted out to the mound, and so Gibson threw the exact pitch again, and Pepitone swung again and missed. What amazed Joe Torre, who caught the game, was that it was not a slider, but a
fastball.
It simply moved so much that Pepitone thought it a breaking ball.) He was economical on the mound: his mechanics had a certain purity to them—a simple, fluid warm-up, and then the explosion.

Harry Walker, the hitting coach who had been around baseball all his life—his father had been a big-league player and a minor-league manager—thought Bob Gibson the greatest
athlete
ever to pitch in the major leagues. With that arm, that athleticism, and that passion, there should be no stopping him. Walker was puzzled by Solly Hemus’s inability to understand Gibson’s great potential. He did not think it was racial prejudice so much as Hemus’s failure to understand people who were different from him. Still, Walker watched with surprise as this great young player smoldered with resentment. One day when Hemus lifted Gibson early in a game, Gibson finally snapped. He went into the locker room and decided that that was it, he had had enough. He started to pack his things. Just then Harry Walker walked in on him. “What are you doing?” Walker asked. Gibson answered that he was no longer going to be jerked around, and that he was going. “I just can’t take it anymore,” he said. Walker gave him a long, appraising look. “You’ll be here a lot longer than he will,” said Harry Walker, whose brother Dixie was known almost as well for his reluctance to play with Jackie Robinson as he was for his ability as a hitter. Walker was right. By the middle of the 1961 season, Hemus’s third as the Cardinal manager, the team was playing below .500, and it was rife with tension and bad feeling. The problem now was in getting Gussie Busch to admit he had made a mistake in hiring Hemus. That was not easily done, but Dick Meyer worked steadily on him, and seventy-five games into the 1961 season, Hemus was fired and replaced by Johnny Keane.

At the moment of Hemus’s firing, Keane had been a coach on the team for more than a year. Initially, he had resisted it. He wanted to be a big-league manager, and he believed that the right path to that was to manage in the minor leagues. Bing Devine had argued with him, telling Keane he needed time as a big-league coach. In 1959, Keane finally agreed and left Omaha. So when Hemus was fired Keane was not only ready, he knew the talent better than Hemus did. Keane did a number of things immediately. He told Stan Musial he wanted him on the field. “You may be coming to the end of your career,” he told Musial, “but I want you to do it on the field and not on the bench,” and Musial’s final seasons were successful, even exuberant—in fact, the following season he hit .330 and came close once again to winning the National League batting title. Keane also told a very frustrated Curt Flood that he was the regular center fielder as of that day. Then he told Bob Gibson that he was in the rotation. “Bob, you’re going to start every four or five days. I don’t want you to worry about anything else. Just go out and pitch,” he said. Those were the words Gibson had wanted to hear. Gibson interpreted them to mean simply: You don’t have to worry about being pulled if you get in trouble in a bad inning. Just pitch. We’ll give you a real shot. The rest will take care of itself.

It was hard, Bob Gibson later thought, for white players of that era and for black players who arrived later to understand how much Johnny Keane meant to the black players of that team, how much they liked and trusted him. If they were not the black players of the pioneer generation, they had come up right behind them: most had grown up in ghettoes, and their way into the big leagues had often been difficult, often through a still-segregated minor-league system. This obstacle course remained the foundation of big-league baseball, and it was rife with prejudice. Playing on minor-league teams in tiny Southern towns meant the crowds—even the home crowds—were usually hostile. Worse, most of their fellow players were rural country white boys, who, more often than not, seemed to accept the local mores. Some of Bill White’s teammates rallied to his side when he had been abused by fans. But Curt Flood, who started in the Cincinnati organization, had a harder time. He had endured an unbearable season in the Carolina League, which he later came to call the Peckerwood League. In the Carolina League, the kindest epithet yelled at him was “nigger”; it got worse after that. The more they yelled at him, the harder he played. The next year, in Class A, with the Savannah Redlegs, it was not much better. One of the few white teammates who befriended him, Buddy Gilbert, thought he had never seen anyone as lonely as Curt Flood. Here he was, Gilbert thought, intelligent, sensitive, talented, a good teammate who played hard all the time, by far the best prospect on the team, and yet he lived completely apart from his teammates. By Georgia law, Flood and Leon Cardenas, a black Hispanic teammate, could not even dress with their teammates; they had to dress within a separate cubicle in the locker room. Gilbert, a Tennessean and a seriously religious man, thought this prejudice loathsome. He had invited black players to his home in the past, and had been upbraided for it by some teammates. He tried to bring Flood food on occasion, when he could not eat with the team. At park after park they would walk on the field together, Gilbert to center field, Flood to third base, and the epithets would rain down, the crudest and most brutal language Gilbert had ever heard. “I don’t know how you stand it,” he would tell Flood again and again. Even his simple acts of friendship were considered offensive by some of their teammates. “You know what you are, Gilbert?” more than one teammate said to him. “You’re a goddamn nigger-lover.” “No,” he would answer, “I just like people.” Sometimes Gilbert thought he did not know who was worse, those teammates who went through the motions of being friendly with Flood but made cruel racist remarks when he was not around or the ones who refused to talk to him at all. “I don’t understand you,” he told one teammate. “You pat him on the back when he’s here, and then you say terrible things the moment he’s gone.” Gilbert knew that there was a lot of prejudice in America, but he thought that in sports a person could overcome it, that his teammates would respect Flood for his abilities and see past his color. But in Savannah, Flood was playing hard and extremely well, and yet that did not win over his teammates. For Flood, the worst part of that year were the bus rides; after a long doubleheader in the brutal heat, he would get back on the bus, but when it stopped and everyone else got off to eat, he would have to remain behind. Flood later decided that if he could stand those two years, he could stand anything.

Nor did blacks always receive kindness and instruction from the representatives of the big leagues, who were there ostensibly to help them develop their skills. Many of the minor-league managers were tough men whose own careers had been disappointing. What was especially hard about it, the black players believed, was that those who were supposed to be on your side—your teammates, and your manager—rarely were; the organization that was supposed to be behind them did not appreciate the ordeal they were experiencing. Baseball’s executives had clearly decided that they needed black ballplayers in the game, that the talent was too great to ignore. But, the young blacks of that generation wondered, did they really belong? Were they really wanted? Or were they to come, make their contribution, and then be gone as quickly as possible when the game was over? They experienced a spiritual loneliness, a sense of being apart from those who were supposed to be teammates, and of doubting the loyalty of the men for whom they played. For many of them the worst moment came when they showed up for spring training at the hotel where the rest of the team was staying only to be told that, no, they were not to stay there, they were to be taken instead to a seedy hotel in the black section of town, or to a home that had been turned into a boardinghouse where the black players from several different teams stayed. It was a slap in the face. In fact, nothing highlighted the differences between the white and black experiences in the major leagues so much as spring training. Almost all veteran white players loved spring training—it was a chance to be in the sunshine with their families, to go fishing, and to recover from a long, difficult winter. They thought of it as a kind of paid vacation. The black players, by contrast, hated it. Bob Gibson disliked the boardinghouse in St. Petersburg in which he and other black players stayed and the overbearing black woman who ran it, who, he thought, charged the players too much for their room and board. She was someone, he believed, who was making a good thing off other people’s pain and humiliation. Years later he would talk about her with scorn and anger as if all this had happened only the day before.