October 1964 (29 page)

At his first spring training in Phoenix, Bill White quickly learned that he was not as gifted as he thought, that he could not hit the curve or the change, and that he had problems scooping balls out of the dirt. If he was going to make the big leagues, he was going to have to work harder than anyone else, he decided. He was going to have to make himself into a big-league ballplayer. So he went off to play with the Burlington-Graham team in the Carolina League. It was Class B ball, and it was a testimonial to the insensitivity of the men who ran baseball in those days that they did to Bill White what they did to so many young black players at that time; instead of letting him play on one of their farm teams north of the Mason-Dixon line, they sent him not merely to the South but to a tiny town with not even the marginal protection offered by an urban setting. White was not just the only black player on his team, he was the only black player in the
league
that year. It was 1953, the year before the
Brown
v.
Board of Education
decision. The South was already afire with much angry talk about the coming of northern integrationists, but the only integrationist around that year was Bill White. It was very hard for him, for his team played in small factory towns, and he became a kind of beacon to local rednecks, who would come out to the ball park and, for a tiny amount of money, yell at this one young black player, who symbolized to them a world beginning to change. Somehow he survived it, and managed to hit 20 home runs and bat .298. There was one day that summer when he got tired of being the recipient of all those cruel and ugly slurs, spit out of mouths as if they were machine guns; he yielded finally and gave them the finger. He and his teammates grabbed bats and had to fight their way back to the bus. There was another game in which a fan had gotten on him and yelled, “Bill, Bill White,” and when White turned toward him, the fan unloaded a staggering list of racial epithets. White, enraged, hit the next ball
through
the wooden fence, and as he crossed home plate he heard the fan yell out, “Okay, after that I’m going to call you Mr. White.”

Somehow after that season it seemed to get easier in his career, perhaps because he had been through the worst. He was no longer afraid. It was not about him, he knew, it was about them, and somehow he had managed to rise above it. Besides, some of his teammates, even the Southern boys, had been very good; if they had not understood all the problems he was facing, they understood a confrontation by a redneck mob, and they realized in some basic way that this was unfair, that it was a them-and-us situation, and they rallied to him. More than thirty years later, Bill White, an immensely successful man who was the president of the National League, violated his own rules about not getting involved in politics by going down to campaign for a man named Charlie Allen, a catcher on that Burlington-Graham team, who had stood by him in those early, dark days, and was running for sheriff.

After the Carolina League he played the next season with Sioux City in the Western League. That was, by contrast, a laugher, and there he hit .319 and 30 home runs. He came up to the New York team in 1956, and did well. He was making $4,000 and was called in by Horace Stoneham, the team’s owner, who told him he was going to get a $1,500 raise, which White thought generous until he learned that it merely brought him up to the major-league minimum. After 1956 he went into the army for two years, and when he came back Orlando Cepeda seemed installed at first after he had been voted Rookie of the Year. At the same time, Willie McCovey was burning up the farm system and was about to arrive midway through 1959 for an equally sensational rookie year, and he too would be voted Rookie of the Year; between the two of them they would hit exactly 900 regular-season home runs. The Giants seemed to have an abundance of big, powerful black first basemen, all three of whom would be National League All-Stars, and it was time, White decided, for him to go. He asked the Giants to trade him. The only two places he did not want to be traded to, he said, were St. Louis and Cincinnati, cities with reputations among the black ballplayers in those days as being difficult to live in. (“Bill, you’re my second best player on the team behind Mays,” Chub Feeney told him. “I’ll find a place for you.” “And he did,” White noted years later, “in St. Louis.”)

Eddie Stanky had scouted him for the Cardinals before the trade and enthusiastically endorsed the idea of picking him up. Stanky was a huge Bill White fan. White had played for him at Minneapolis in 1956, and he was the rare modern player whose work ethic satisfied the demanding, old-fashioned Stanky. If anything, White had been known among the other Minneapolis players as Stanley’s bobo—that is, his pet—the only player on the team whom Stanky never chewed out, and who even dared to talk back to him. Once Stanky caught White doing a crossword puzzle. “White, put that goddamn thing away and study a rule book,” Stanky said. “If I got a rule book we wouldn’t need you as a manager,” White answered as his dumbfounded teammates looked on, for no one talked to Eddie Stanky like that.

If White was apprehensive about St. Louis, he soon found that the city was changing. The people in the Cardinal organization made an effort to ease his way. Bing Devine was helpful, as was Al Fleishman, who did public relations for The Brewery and thought the integration of the Cardinal team one of the most important things on his agenda. Bob Hyland, general manager of KMOX—the powerful radio station that broadcast the Cardinal games—soon became a friend. Certainly the fiasco of the St. Petersburg breakfast meeting had been an early lesson to them, but they were all, in their ways, exceptional men and, more than most men in baseball in that era, understood the social problems of integration. They helped Bill White to find better housing as the size of his family increased; when he bought his third house in a white suburb, Bing Devine asked his lawyer to represent White in completing the sale, which gave it the imprimatur of the Cardinals and removed many potential racial difficulties. Hyland, as a gift, landscaped the entire grounds, and Johnny Keane, by then the manager, gave him a tree as a housewarming present. Those were, Bill White thought, generous acts at a time when few white people did things like that. Jack Buck, the broadcaster, had also tried to help him buy a house in his neighborhood—but houses there cost about $60,000 at the time and Bill White made only $12,000 a year. These men wanted Bill White to feel that he not only played for their team but was a friend and a part of their world as well.

He did well in St. Louis. At first he tried to power every ball. He had, after all, hit 22 home runs in the massive Polo Grounds as a Giant rookie, and he was sure he could hit 40 in the smaller Sportsman’s Park, so he swung for the fences every time. After a few weeks he was hitting .091, so he turned to Harry Walker, the hitting coach. Walker was a pure baseball man, and he could talk about the science of hitting for hours. He was an exceptionally talented, albeit demanding coach, a relentless perfectionist. When, either in a game or in batting practice, a hitter did something that displeased him, he would instantly yell out. He hated wasting a single at bat.

It struck Bill White in his first encounters with Harry Walker that the old racial attitudes might still be there. But Walker was a professional above all, and he was going to teach this big, strong young man how to hit, whether
either
of them liked it or not. It was obvious to Walker that White needed to learn how to discipline himself, and he had to learn that he could not pull every pitch. Walker had watched Bill White during spring training and thought he was potentially a very good hitter. He sensed White’s problem then: a man that strong on a team that lacked power hitters might be tempted to muscle the ball all the time. White had enjoyed a very good spring and had hit something like seven home runs in the preseason. That early success, Walker thought, would almost surely push him even more toward trying to be a pure power hitter. Spring training, Walker believed, was a deceptive time: the pitchers were not yet ready, and they did not go to their full repertoire, particularly their change-ups. Walker decided that he would not push White, but that he would let him start the season, and if things went wrong, then he would talk with him. But before that could happen, White, by then hitting below .100, came to Walker. “Harry, if we don’t do something, I’m going to be out of this league,” White told the coach. They were in Los Angeles at the old Coliseum, and Walker suggested they go out early each day before the other players were around, to work on his hitting. “You’re trying to hit a home run every time up,” he said. “Don’t do it—just try and hit the ball up the middle.” Walker taught Bill White to use his hands; to go inside out on his swing, but still to swing hard, in order to hit to left field; and, above all, how to use the entire field. “Damn it, Harry,” Harry Caray the broadcaster said, watching their workouts one day, “you’re going to take a power hitter and turn him into a Punch and Judy hitter.” No, said Walker, he was going to make him into a good hitter who could hit to all fields but who still had power. He was still to swing hard, Walker emphasized, but if he would wait just a fraction of a second instead of trying to pull everything, and if he would go with the pitch, he would not lose all his power.

Despite the immense social, cultural, and generational gaps that lay between them, there developed just the slightest glimmer of friendship. Harry Walker was born to teach; as a coach he had an almost maniacal need to pass on to others
everything
he had ever learned, and there were few more apt students in baseball than Bill White, a world-class listener. “You have to have one very good year to know what you can’t do,” Walker kept telling White, “and when you have your very best year, then you’ve learned your limitations. Then and only then you can understand what you can and can’t do.” When they discussed subjects other than baseball, such as race, the gulf between them was enormous. Harry Walker would talk about what he thought was wrong with blacks as he knew them in the South—that they were shiftless and lazy, that they did not take care of their property. It was not easy for Bill White to hear such things, but he came to respect Walker’s honesty and fairness; in some ways, at least, his mind was not closed. By July of that first year White was hitting over .360 and he made the All-Star team. He knew he owed a considerable debt to Harry Walker and he came to believe that he never would have lasted thirteen years in the big leagues if it had not been for Walker.

White’s bat was critical to this Cardinal team. During the 1963 season he dove for a ball along the first base line and bruised his shoulder. Johnny Keane took him aside and said, “From now on don’t dive for any balls. It’s not worth it. And don’t go into second base trying to take out the second baseman. It’s too big a risk. We need you for all one hundred and sixty-two games.” That season, his best year in the majors, he hit 27 home runs, knocked in 109 runs, and hit .304. But the 1964 season, to which he had looked forward, was turning into a disaster because of his shoulder injury. He hated feeling weak and knowing that his physical condition was directly responsible for the team’s poor performance.

While he was in New York he spent some time with Bob Boyle, who had become a friend when Boyle had written a wonderful piece on the last black barnstorming tour for
Sports Illustrated.
White told Boyle of his problems. Boyle thought that perhaps White was not getting the absolute best medical treatment available (in fact, Boyle thought that most team doctors in that era got their jobs by dint of being drinking buddies of the owners, an assumption that was sometimes not far from wrong). He suggested that perhaps White might see a specialist in New York. Boyle sent him to a distinguished orthopedic surgeon named Hans Kraus, who had helped Boyle with his severe back problems. Kraus was famous, having helped treat John Kennedy for his chronic back problems. White went to see him and Dr. Kraus immediately gave him a shot. Unlike the team doctor, who had targeted an area in the front of the shoulder, Dr. Kraus went after a spot in the back and White felt immediate relief. A few days later, in a doubleheader in Pittsburgh, White celebrated by getting six hits, including two home runs, and knocking in five runs. The Cardinals swept the series. It was the kind of day a power hitter should have and which he had not had all year. A critical piece had been restored to the Cardinal lineup.

J
IM BOUTON WAS HAVING
a hard time pitching in the early summer. His back had been hurting constantly since the spring, and he was not able to throw his fastball with full force. Bouton was a power pitcher without a power pitcher’s body—too small by the usual standards to be a big-league fastball pitcher; in his own words, he was a Volkswagen at the Indianapolis 500. His fastball was, at best, in the low nineties, and if he lost anything on it, then he was immediately vulnerable. Other, bigger, stronger, pitchers might encounter physical problems, but they would be strong enough or experienced enough to pitch their way through them; with Bouton there was no buffer zone, everything had to be perfect. Here he was, in his second big season, after winning twenty-one games in 1963, and he was without his real strength, which meant increasingly that balls hit off him were home runs. Curiously, Bouton was not in unbearable pain. He went to see Dr. Sydney Gaynor, who told him, “Son, if it hurts, just don’t throw.” It didn’t hurt, but he just could not throw as hard as he wanted to. He kept wondering what he was doing wrong. In June and July he experimented with his mechanics, but things only got worse. He was adjusting, except that his adjustments were the wrong ones.

Then, in mid-season, his shoulder and back began to feel better. His body was somehow healing itself. Later he was diagnosed as having had a low-grade chronic strain of the brachialis muscle, which attaches the biceps to the bone; this injury would, in any real sense, end his career as a power pitcher the next season. In retrospect, the fact that he had chronic arm and shoulder problems was not surprising, because he threw as hard as he could on every pitch, with a delivery so ferocious that his cap often flew off. He was well aware of his tenuous position as a star major-league pitcher. When he was pitching well he was able to get seven or eight strikeouts a game, but the line between being a star major-league pitcher and being out of the business entirely was a thin one for him, and he was well aware of it. He was, as much as anyone, the first fan as player, as a teammate once told him, someone for whom being a major-leaguer was an unlikely, indeed almost giddy, experience. It was not surprising that in some sense at least he always remained an outsider, able to see the frailties and vulnerabilities of big-leaguers in a way that most players, who had always expected to play in the majors, did not. It was not surprising that when his career was over he became not a coach but a writer. He had always had to work hard at being a baseball player. He barely made his high school team. Only in his senior year had he been able to pitch, and until then his nickname had been “Warm-up” Bouton. He was a walk-on player at Western Michigan, and he did not do well there, but then one summer he played for a very good team in an amateur league in Chicago, the Cook’s Sportscraft. Even here his career did not look bright (he was their number-four pitcher) until the National Amateur Championship in Battle Creek, Michigan, a double-elimination tournament. His team went up against a famed team from Cincinnati, which, it was said, never scored fewer than fifteen runs. The place was loaded with scouts, and that day Bouton pitched the single best game of his life, striking out ten, and after the game the scouts swarmed over him. His parents, who were middle class, thought the world of professional baseball a perilous place, and his father had made him agree that he would not sign unless he got a $30,000 bonus. The Yankee offer was considerably under that: a $6,000 bonus and three years guaranteed at $500 a month for five months, plus an additional $10,000 bonus if he made the big-league team. As far as Bouton was concerned, that was $30,000 and more, and his father, knowing, how much his son wanted to try professional baseball, finally gave permission.