October 1964 (33 page)

Ellie Howard came up in 1955, two years after Power was traded. He was the perfect player to break the Yankee color line—he had a sweet disposition, and he had the capacity to bury deep within himself the racial wounds inflicted by society. He had decided long ago that that was the path he was going to take. He was a man of the older generation, and his strength manifested itself not in rage at the injustices around him, as Bob Gibson’s did, but in his ability
not
to show his rage. He had learned as a boy to walk away from provocations, and he did it for the rest of his life. He had grown up in St. Louis and went to Vashon High, a school famous for its black athletes. When he was still in high school in the late forties, the Cardinals used to have tryouts for local kids, and one year he went. Day after day he made the cut, and it was soon apparent that he was the best player there, the one who hit the ball most regularly and the hardest. At the end the people running the camp apologized and told him they were sorry, that he was the best prospect there, but that the Cardinals did not sign black players. He went instead to the Negro leagues, and inevitably to the Kansas City Monarchs, where Buck O’Neil thought him an exceptional player and an uncommonly strong man. A few years later, a number of teams came after Howard, including Cincinnati. Buck O’Neil carefully shepherded him away from the Reds and to the Yankees. Tom Greenwade talked to O’Neil about a great slugger named Willard Brown. “You don’t want Willard,” O’Neil said, for he feared that Brown was now a little old and it was very important that the first black player on the Yankees be successful. “You want a young kid that I’ve got here who’s getting better and better named Ellie Howard.” Within the world of black baseball, the honor of being the first black to play for the Yankees was considerable, and O’Neil wanted him to be a Monarch. He thought Howard was both mature and strong and was sure he could handle this demanding role as the first black Yankee.

Howard was the most polite of men. As Dan Daniel, one of the senior New York correspondents, wrote in
The Sporting News:
“Howard, the first Negro to gain a place on the Bomber machine, was chosen for that situation sui generis because of his quiet demeanor, his gentlemanly habits and instincts, and his lack of aggressive attitudes on race questions. He came to the Yankees determined to achieve the position he now occupies, not as a crusader.” He was a man who kept everything in, and he never lost his temper. Years later, after Howard died quite young of a stroke, his widow, Arlene, would rage about the injustices of those years, and how she believed that repressing his rage had damaged his health. They both hated the fact that he was
always
under scrutiny, always being watched, that his behavior and his manners had to be so much better than those of everyone else. Both of them disliked it when people would tell them what an attractive couple they were, what a gentleman Ellie was, and sometimes say and sometimes imply that
if only all the rest of them could be like Ellie and Arlene, how much better it would be for everyone.
On occasion she could feel him stiffen just a little. The hardest thing was the loneliness of it all, the endless dinners and occasions at which they were the only black couple and everyone was watching them, to see if they were different, or if they would misbehave in some way. She knew that it was even worse for him, that day after day he was virtually alone at the ball park, where everyone was watching to see if he would blow it. Several years after he had joined the Yankees, they were at a dinner with Jackie and Rachel Robinson, and Jackie, who had no love for the Yankees, said he thought they were a terrible racist organization and that in some ways what Ellie was going through was as hard or harder than what he had endured. Robinson, at least, had always known that the front office was behind him, whereas Ellie knew that the front office had brought him up reluctantly.

His wife alone knew the price he paid. She would watch when things had not gone well at the ball park. He would withdraw, not talking to her or their children. He became very moody in those years, putting an unnatural pressure on himself to succeed. He was very much aware of the short curve of his career, that he had gotten to the big leagues later than most players and that, even then, he had been slowed down because Yogi Berra was in front of him. Arlene Howard liked to say that she was the one who got his ulcer. She was enraged when, rather late in his minor-league career, when he was twenty-four and already in Triple A ball, the Yankees decided to turn him into a catcher. She was convinced that would slow down his big-league career, for not only would he now have to learn to catch, a difficult adjustment for any player, but he would have to play behind Yogi Berra, only four years older than he was, a sure Hall of Famer. She felt that it was a racist decision, in some unconscious way, at least. She yelled at him, telling him that he had to demand a trade, that what the Yankees were doing was terribly unfair, and that, after all these years, someone else could learn to catch. “Let the Yankees trade for a catcher! They were able to trade for everything else. Let it be someone else’s turn!” But he merely waved her objections aside, for he wanted to be a Yankee, he loved the aura of the team—“the great pinstripes,” she later called them when she was angry. The Yankees were different, he would say, when she protested—they were special. She remained unconvinced. He never said anything when Stengel referred to him as a nigger or as an eight ball, or when Rudy York, scouting another team for the Yankees, described the color of what he said were a nigger’s hands. Ellie Howard always held it in. Whatever ethnic slurs he heard in the major leagues, it was never going to be a problem, he once said, for whatever it was, he had already heard much worse. Stengel had wounded him, he had not expected words like that from a manager, but he understood that the manager was an older man and that similar quirks showed up in the way he treated some of the white players. Stengel never apologized for the use of ethnic slurs, for he was not the kind of manager who apologized to his players. However, as the years passed, there were certain small kindnesses from him directed at Ellie Howard, in part, the catcher thought, to apologize for his earlier insensitivity.

By and large, his teammates were a great deal better than the front office and the manager. At first, he had felt alone; he did not have a roommate because the Yankees did not yet have a second black player and were terrified of the idea of rooming a black player with a white one. On certain occasions he ate alone as well. But in general they accepted him, and accepted him quickly. Phil Rizzuto and Bill Skowron were particularly helpful, and the Fords—Whitey and Joan—seemed oblivious to color. Mickey Mantle was Mickey, generous to all, although not by temperament destined to live as conservatively as Howard. The one player on the team who articulated racial resentments was Jim Coates, a middle-inning relief pitcher from Virginia. In the past Coates had made little secret of his racial attitudes and that irritated some of the players. In 1961, when the Yankee team made its annual trip to West Point, Whitey Ford decided to settle the issue once and for all, and he arranged a boxing match in the army gym between Coates and Howard. Suddenly the two men were in the ring and it was a very serious business; no referee, no rules, just two men—one white, one black—slugging away as a lot of resentment came to the surface. Howard flattened Coates, and that ended Coates’s racial sniping.

All of us, white and black, Arlene Howard later said, were part of an age in which everything was changing and all the rules were different; one society, which was segregated, was coming down, and another, ostensibly integrated, was replacing it. Everyone was trying to do the right thing, and at the same time everyone was very tentative. Howard himself had been amused by a trip the team had taken to Japan, on which most of the wives had gone as well, but which Arlene had missed because she was pregnant. When they got back to the United States and the group was breaking up, everyone was kissing and embracing and saying good-bye, but no one knew how to treat Ellie: did they embrace him, did they kiss him, or did they shake hands. Suddenly everyone seemed flustered.

Management seemed not to care about his problems. The Howards always had difficulty finding housing, first when they came to New York and needed an apartment, and later when their family grew and they wanted to build a house. In 1959 they found a vacant lot in Teaneck and decided to build there. Arlene was not sure she was fond of the neighborhood, but Ellie liked it—he could hop into his car, go over the George Washington Bridge, and be at the Stadium in a matter of minutes. Just to make things a little easier, their builder bought the lot for them. Suddenly a neighborhood meeting was called about whether the Howards should be allowed to build and whether the neighborhood would accept them. Arlene was enraged:
Who are they to judge us!
she thought.
We are good people, we are responsible, we are a good family with good children. My husband is the first-string catcher for the New York Yankees, if that matters, which it should not, and these people are proposing to sit in judgment on us.

The irony was that by 1964 he was probably the team’s best player, admired and respected by all his teammates. The year before he had been the league’s Most Valuable Player. If it had not been for the issue of color, he would have been a far better choice to succeed Houk as manager than Berra, for he had earned the respect of his teammates in a larger social sense, as Berra had not. But major-league baseball, let alone the Yankees, was still more than a decade away from letting a black man manage white players.

The Yankees were clearly in trouble. Mantle continued to shuffle in and out of the lineup, his great talent only sometimes showing through his injuries. More often it was not so much his talent that one saw now but a memory of that talent—the wounded hero, struggling with his body, looking old and vulnerable in the outfield, looking almost awkward at the plate, and then, as if in a moment seized out of the past, one swift, powerful swing and the ball jumping off the bat into the deepest part of the stands. A day or two later, though, reporters would be clustered around his locker asking about the latest leg pull or hamstring injury and whether he was going to be able to play that day. His right leg, one teammate said, seemed to be made not of muscle and cartilage but jelly; it was as if there were nothing there to control the leg until it was wrapped, but tape was no substitute for his cartilage. By mid-August he was batting .458 against lefties, and only .235 from the left side against right-handers. Those on other teams who watched him play, such as Jim Bunning, when he pitched for the Tigers, were puzzled as to why he did not give up the switch-hitting and simply bat right-handed all the time.

Maris was having problems too, and by early August Berra was not playing him against left-handers. Maris said he simply could not pick up the ball well against them. He was still a good all-around baseball player, but with two thirds of the season gone, he had only 14 home runs and 40 RBIs. At one point the starting Yankee outfield of Mantle, Maris, and Tom Tresh was so banged up that all three were limping. Once, when they came into the dugout from the outfield, Mantle looked around and said, “All we need now is a flag and a drum.”

Ralph Terry was still bothered by a sore arm and was largely ineffective. Bouton, whom they had counted on to win 20 games, was bothered by his arm, which hurt just enough to limit his effectiveness, but not enough to keep him out. At mid-season his record had been 8-8. They had hoped before the season that Bill Stafford or Roland Sheldon might win 15 games, but neither was having a good year, and they ended the season with a total of only 10 wins between the two of them. Stan Williams, for whom they had traded Moose Skowron, was proving a disappointment. He had seemed like a 15-game winner when they had made the trade, and in 1963 he won 9 games for the Yankees, but in this year his record was 1-5 for the season, and he would be gone the next season, sold to Cleveland in a cash transaction.

In some ways the bullpen had done reasonably well. The two young relief pitchers working out of it, Steve Hamilton and Pete Mikkelsen, had given the Yankees much more than they expected. Mikkelsen, with his heavy sinker, more than justified Berra’s decision to choose him over Metcalf as far as the other pitchers were concerned. But by mid-season Berra already had a reputation for misusing his bullpen, for getting his pitchers up too early and too often and having them throw too much. That was proving not merely a physical drain on the pitchers but an emotional one as well, for relief pitching was an unusual part of the game. It demanded instant adrenaline—a pitcher half-dozing in the bullpen, then suddenly called into action in the middle of the game, had to jump-start himself emotionally as well as physically. But to get up, to get the rush of adrenaline, and then to sit down was very hard on the bullpen pitchers. Most of them thought Sain would have done a better job protecting them. By mid-season Hamilton, who had had a record of 7-0 at one point, largely as a reliever, had a sore arm and was unable to pitch for almost a month. He had been used too often. Hamilton was a breaking-ball pitcher, and he depended primarily on his curve. But when he got tendinitis, his breaking ball became a partial slider, a slurve.

Most ominous of all, the other pitchers suspected, was the condition of Whitey Ford. That year Ford was pitching on guile, control, and pure courage. His arm hurt all the time, and on occasion, when he would go out to warm up he would have
nothing
—his ball had no movement and little speed. Then he would go out and, with the guts of a burglar and the help of his reputation and a little doctoring of the ball, he would somehow manage to go seven or eight innings and win. For much of the season Ford’s courage and shrewdness worked, and his record at the midway point was 12-2. But he was beginning to have circulatory problems in his left (pitching) arm, where the muscle was so developed that it cut off the circulation in the arm (Ford would later joke that because there was no circulation there, he did not sweat on his left side and he was the only player in the league who could get ten days out of a five-day deodorant pad). More and more he depended on experience and tricks now. No one in the league knew better how to use a hitter’s strengths against him than Whitey Ford. He had been taught by the best, Eddie Lopat, a great Yankee pitcher of similar skills who had triumphed on the basis of intelligence more than God-given talent. Lopat had made it his business to know every hitter’s strengths and weaknesses and had always managed to keep even the best hitters off balance. When Ford was young and new in the league, Lopat sat with him in the dugout on the days when neither was pitching and gave him a running tutorial, talking through every game, studying every batter, anticipating what each pitch should be, teaching Ford that each pitch helped set up the next pitch.