October 1964 (32 page)

For all his gentleness and kindness, Bill Yancey was a tough man. One of the points he liked to make to Downing was that the players in the Negro leagues had been very tough. They might have been friends, but they played hard, because it was a rare opportunity in the America of the thirties and forties for a black man to make a good wage, and the competition for places had been fierce. The players had come at each other, spikes high, he said. Yancey sold beer from the brewery to taverns in the black area of Philadelphia in the off-season, which was not a calling for the faint of heart. He was also a strict disciplinarian. “If you ever get too big for your britches,” he would say, pointing at his ass, “I’m going to get a fungo bat and hit you right here.” In his own universe of heroes two men stood apart: Jackie Robinson and Jesse Owens. Everyone in this era knew how hard it had been for Jackie because it had been reasonably well documented by the modern media. But very, very few, Yancey liked to say, understood what Jesse had done, out there alone in an earlier age. “Jesse,” Yancey liked to say, “had been alone in the most final and complete sense that a man could be alone, and he never said anything to anyone.” He had never complained. He just worked harder and he never showboated. He was a man as tough on the inside as he was fast on the outside. Those were the black men that other black athletes should measure themselves against.

Yancey warned him that it would not be easy in the South, but even so, segregation came as a shock to Downing. When he arrived at the Yankee minor-league center at Bartow, Florida, he somehow thought, despite the warnings, that the Yankees, being the Yankees, would not permit their young players to be so gratuitously humiliated. Somehow, fourteen years after Jackie Robinson’s debut, he had not expected to be separated from his white teammates as if he were a lesser being. There was a terrible moment that he would long remember when he first arrived and had gone up the steps of the hotel. Someone stopped him and said, “No, no, you don’t belong here,” and Downing answered that he did, that he was with the Binghamton Yankees. But then they explained it to him—that the white players stayed at the hotel and he and a few other players stayed with a black family. Eventually he got past that memory, but it never entirely went away.

He pitched for the first time in 1961 in Binghamton, and did very well, though a certain wildness was there. He had far too much talent and too much raw power for that league, and he was striking out a batter in almost every inning. In mid-July, with his record 9-1, he was called up to the major-league club. Downing called Yancey to tell him what he thought was the good news, but Yancey was furious. As far as he was concerned, it was the worst thing that could happen to a gifted young player. “I’m very much against it,” he said. “You’re not ready for it yet. You’ve got to learn to pitch in these leagues level by level.” Yancey wanted him to spend at least half a year in Double A ball. As far as Yancey was concerned, Downing had succeeded merely by overpowering weak competition, and he had not passed the most critical hurdle of all: he had not learned to deal with adversity. He had not reached the moment when pure talent was not enough. Downing was not that good, he thought, because no one was that good.

Everything Yancey predicted turned out to be true. Al Downing pitched against Washington, and got knocked out in the second inning. It had nothing to do with talent; it was all about his knowledge of pitching. He had never been in real trouble in the minor leagues, so when he got in trouble in the majors he did not know what to do. In the past his answer had always been to reach back and simply throw harder. That had never failed before, but it failed him now. As he tried to throw harder he kept missing the plate. He had no capacity to change speeds, or to go to different pitches. In the minors, there were at most two men on any team who could hurt a pitcher, so when a pitcher got into trouble, he always tried to overpower them, figuring he would either strike them out or walk them. Then he went right back to his power against the other hitters. The game against Washington was a nightmare for Downing, and he lost his confidence. He was thereupon sent to the bullpen, but he was terrible there. He hated to get up when the call came from the dugout. He was throwing pitches all over the bullpen, and was something of a danger to the other bullpen pitchers. For the first time, he hated going to a ball park. Years later, Ralph Houk told him that they had wanted to send him down almost immediately after his performance in Washington, but they had been afraid they would damage his confidence even more, and so they had let him stay on.

Later in the year he was sent down to Richmond, and for a time he struggled. In 1962 he spent the year at Richmond, and for a while things went poorly. Slowly his confidence came back. In the last month of the season he began to get back his sense of self. He was 9-13 with Richmond, and by the end of the season, he felt he was ready for the major leagues. After all, there was a small difference between hitters in Triple A and those in the big leagues, and with the arrival of expansion even that difference had been blurred a good deal.

Yancey thought he was ready now, and his lectures began to change somewhat. Now they were more about how to handle himself in the big leagues. He should dress conservatively, like a gentleman. It was the sign of a quality person and it did not cost very much more to dress well as it did to dress poorly. With his clothes he would be saying important things about himself to people who would be watching him very carefully. In addition, he was to show respect to everyone and to have good manners, and indeed, in his rookie year, Yogi Berra went out to the mound to talk to Downing and later came back to the dugout shaking his head. Someone asked him, “What’s the matter, Yogi?” “I was trying to tell him what to throw next,” Berra said, “and he kept calling me Mr. Berra.” In addition, Yancey emphasized, he had to understand the new pressures on him in terms of friendship. Suddenly he was going to be a celebrity, and therefore he had to be wary of instant friendship. As the first black Yankee pitcher, there were going to be all kinds of people coming after him, wanting to befriend him, some out to get something, even if they did not know what it was. Nor was he merely talking about the pressure of New York City. In every city the Yankees visited there would be people eager to get a slice of Al Downing, and they would know what hotels the Yankees stayed at and where the ballplayers went to eat. They would be quick to make moves on him, and they would be subtle and seductive. Stay with your old friends, and stay with your friends on the ball club, Yancey told Downing. Watch what Ellie Howard did, Yancey said. Howard had been through it all, as the first black on the Yankees, and he knew how to deal with the pressure both off and on the field.

During that rookie season of 1963, Downing truly arrived and went 13-5. As a celebration Bill Yancey took him to one of his favorite hangouts in Harlem, the Red Rooster. It was a celebration, an acknowledgment by Yancey that Downing had not only made the big leagues but was ready for his coming out. The Red Rooster was a famous place, and when they got there, Downing could feel Yancey’s pride as he introduced the young pitcher to the owner: “This is Al Downing, the new pitcher for the New York Yankees.” A fuss was made over him, and a book was brought over for him to sign. It contained the autographs of all the great celebrities who had visited—Louis Armstrong, Sugar Ray Robinson, Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Earl Hines, Lionel Hampton, and Ella Fitzgerald, among others. The pages were so crowded with such celebrated names that it took Downing a long while to find a page with only one name, and he prepared to sign his own name there. “No! No! No!” said the owner, “That’s Willie Mays’s page! No one else signs on that page!”

The Yankees were sure that Downing was ticketed for greatness. Everything about him seemed right. He had a world of talent, and it was quite possible that in terms of pure ability he was one of the two or three most gifted young pitchers in the league; in addition, he was unusually mature, highly intelligent, and a model citizen. There were games when his control was near perfect and he was unhittable, and then days when he seemed to be trying too hard and missed the plate, getting in his own way. They were waiting for him not just to flash the greatness they were sure could be his, but to add to it a level of consistency, so that when he went out on the mound they could be sure they were going to get seven or eight strong innings. But it was not a process that could be rushed. So far this had been a reasonably good season for him. On August 9 he had pitched against Baltimore in a big game, and had won, 2-1, giving up only four hits. That made his record 9-4. Then, four days later, he beat the White Sox. Just when he seemed in a groove, however, he slipped out, losing his next three starts.

T
HE OLD YANKEE MAGIC
wasn’t working. The other American League teams no longer rolled over and played dead for them. Indeed, the older Yankee players noticed something new: one of the key Yankee weapons—intimidation—no longer worked. Other teams, for instance, the up-and-coming Baltimore Orioles (managed by ex-Yankee Hank Bauer), not only had talented young players such as Boog Powell and Brooks Robinson in their regular lineups, but their pitching staffs might well have been better than that of the Yankees. The Chicago White Sox had fine young pitchers, and even the once-lowly Minnesota Twins (only so recently the parsimonious Washington Senators) had added the wondrous Tony Oliva that year. The ownership of other teams was getting better and more professional, their systems were better, with better scouting, while meanwhile the Yankee system was in decline. The old Yankee recruiting pitch—that if you signed with the Yankees you got less money in the short run and more in the long run as well as the chance to play with the best—had less and less appeal. Young men were signing with the team that offered the most money, and after the Yankee scouts made their pitch, rival scouts whispered that if you signed with the Yankees, you remained buried in their farm system.

George Weiss, the unpleasant but skillful creator of the great dynasty, had been aware by the late fifties that Dan Topping, the more involved of the Yankee owners, wanted to get rid of him, so Weiss had begun to cut back on his investment in the farm system and in signing young players. Whether Weiss had cut back to improve his own numbers, for his bonus was based, in part, on the profits each year, or to show two increasingly disenchanted owners who took the team’s success for granted that he could still run a professional baseball team, no one was sure, but there was no doubt they had cut back.

Moreover, they were paying much more heavily for Weiss’s racism than anyone had realized at the time. That racism was an unfortunate reflection of both snobbery and ignorance: Weiss did not think that his white customers, the upper-middle-class gentry from the suburbs, wanted to sit with black fans, and he did not think his white players wanted to play with blacks, and worst of all, he did not in his heart think that black players were as good as white ones. He did not think that they had as much courage or that they played as hard. That, thought Leonard Koppett, who had covered the team for many years for the
New York Post
and in 1964 for
The New York Times,
was his single biggest mistake. For in the past a key to the Yankee success was that in addition to signing such superstars as DiMaggio and Mantle, they had always been able to sign a prototype player who was at the core of winning baseball—a very tough kid, wildly aggressive, who played hard, and who often signed with the Yankees for less money than he had been offered elsewhere because the Yankees were the Yankees and always won and these kids wanted to
win.
They were hungry, and they were driven for success: for them, being in the big leagues was not enough; they wanted to excel once they were there. These were players, Henrich, Bauer, or Kubek, who maximized their ability, who played above their level in pennant races and World Series games, and who helped give the Yankees their special advantage of playing well in tough games. They were tough kids, red asses or RAs, as they were known in the baseball vernacular. Here, more than anywhere else, thought Koppett, Weiss’s racism had egregiously blinded him, for he did not see what was in front of him every day: that young black players coming into the big leagues exemplified the mental and spiritual toughness now that the Yankees had once demanded. Their lives had been strewn with far more obstacles than the white players’; since owners monitored how many black players they carried, there were very few black benchwarmers or backup players then. Either you were a starter or you did not make it. George Weiss did not understand the rage to succeed that drove so many of these young men, the passion to make up for so many years of racism and segregation and to avenge wrongs inflicted on those who had gone before them and who had been denied the chance. The harshest judgment on George Weiss, thought Leonard Koppett, was that he did not understand that the kind of player he had always sought out in the past, the tough kid who was at heart as much warrior as baseball player, was now, more often than not, black, and that among the new generation of red asses, a great many were black.

The Yankees were not a team that would have signed a Bob Gibson, for Gibson would have been too threatening to many of the people in management. It was no surprise that when the Yankees had finally brought up a black player, it was Ellie Howard, a talented, immensely hard-working player without the speed that marked the new generation of black stars (when Howard first arrived, Casey Stengel pronounced, “I got the one who can’t run,” and then, when Hector Lopez arrived, also black and also slow, the joke was amended to: “We’ve got the
two
who can’t run”). If Vic Power, the great black Puerto Rican player, who had shown a quick bat and a great defensive ability in the Yankee farm system, had been somewhat different in his temperament, he might have been the first black Yankee, but Power did not fit the Yankee mold. He fielded with an un-Yankeelike panache and exuberance, playing first base not unlike a shortstop, one teammate noted (he was to win six Gold Gloves in the American League); in addition, he insisted, while in the minor leagues, on driving a Cadillac convertible, not only with the top down, which was bad enough, but accompanied by a white woman in the front seat. Of the many things forbidden to the first black Yankee, that was the most forbidden of all. On several occasions representatives of the major-league team went to him and urged him to change his ways, telling him they were not going to bring him up unless he did, but Power merely said to his roommate at the time, Hector Lopez, “They [the Yankees] can tell me a lot of things. They can tell me to play first base or the outfield, and how to hit, and whether they want me to pull or not, but they cannot tell me which women I can go out with.” So Power languished at the highest level in the Yankee farm system: he hit .294 with Syracuse of the International League in 1951, which got him to the Yankee farm team in Kansas City in 1952, where he hit .331, which got him
another year
in Kansas City, where he led the league with a .349. That got him traded to the Philadelphia Athletics in December of the same year—a deal in which the Yankees got back very little. The Yankees, he told reporters years later, were waiting to see if he could turn white before they brought him up, but he could not do it. In succeeding seasons he loved to play against his old club, pronouncing it not “the Yankees,” but “the Jankees.” “The Jankees do not like me very much,” he would say, but “I like to play against the Jankees and I like to beat them.”