October 1964 (9 page)

Very quickly, as part of the new regime, two black players were signed, at the far-from-bargain-basement price of $100,000 each: Tom Alston, a minor-league first baseman who had played in San Diego and hit well there, and Memo Luna, a dark-skinned pitcher who was believed by the Cardinal ownership to be Cuban but was born in Mexico. Luna celebrated his good fortune at being signed by the Cardinals by pitching in both ends of a doubleheader and arrived in St. Louis with what was essentially a dead arm. He pitched less than one inning for the Cards in his career, gave up two walks and two hits, and retired from major-league baseball with an earned run average of 27.00. Busch did not regard this acquisition as a good start in improved race relations.

Tom Alston, by contrast, made a very good first impression on people in the Cardinal organization. At an early meeting, one of Busch’s public-relations men, Al Fleishman, warned Alston of all the terrible things that were going to be said and done to him. Alston put his hand on Fleishman’s knee and said, very gently, “I know I’m a Negro, and I know that there are going to be some people who hate me for nothing more than that. But that’s not my problem, that’s their problem.” Then he visited a nearby teachers college, where he told young black students that times were changing and that people were going to be judged not by their color but by their ability. He said that a new day was coming, that doors once closed were going to open, and he ended movingly: “When it does, be ye ready.” Alston, however, was not the answer to Busch’s prayers. He was a first baseman with good feet and good hands but a weak bat. In 1954 he came up 244 times and hit .246, with only 4 home runs. Those were not good numbers for a first baseman, and the pressure on him, some teammates thought, exceeded what he could handle. Alston stayed around long enough to accumulate 27 more at bats over the next three years.

Later that same year the Cardinals brought up a young black pitcher named Brooks Lawrence, who pitched exceptionally well; he had a record of 15-6 in 1954 and showed considerable promise for the future, but with Frank Lane as general manager, Lawrence was quickly traded away to Cincinnati. Clearly, putting talented young black players on the field was going to be harder than anyone expected, and was going to require far greater patience than the Cardinals had yet to display, as indeed putting together a first-rate team of any color was going to require greater patience than Busch had first expected. Yet, more than most teams, the Cardinal players came to deal with race with a degree of maturity and honesty rarely seen in baseball at that time. In 1961, a good fourteen years after Jackie Robinson’s professional debut, Bill White, the Cardinal black first baseman, challenged the concept of an annual whites-only players breakfast in St. Petersburg. Local businessmen there traditionally honored the visiting Yankee and Cardinal players, but, according to local custom, invited only the white players. White leaked to a reporter the anger of the black players about the breakfast, and, even more important, their resentment over segregating white and black players in separate living facilities—the whites staying at the best local hotels, the blacks forced to stay as boarders with black families in the black section of town. The policy for the breakfast meeting was quickly reversed (when White found out how early he had to show up, he asked his white teammate Alex Grammas if Grammas would like to go in his place). The housing problem was stickier because of Florida law. Finally, a wealthy friend of Gussie Busch bought a motel, the Skyway, and the Cardinals leased it for six weeks and rented some rooms in an adjoining one, the Outrigger, so that the entire team and their families could stay together. A major highway ran right by the motel, and there, in an otherwise segregated Florida, locals and tourists alike could see the rarest of sights: white and black children swimming in the motel pool together, and white and black players, with their wives, at desegregated cookouts. That helped bring the team together. Even Stan Musial, who had both the right, as a senior star, and the money to rent a house for his family during spring training—something he had looked forward to in the past—stayed at the motel and was a part of the team. That made a great difference, for Musial was not only one of the two or three greatest players of his era, he was one of the most beloved as well: he seemed to live in a world without malice or meanness, where there was no prejudice, and where everyone was judged on talent alone. He had always been a generous teammate, and he was always willing to help teammates and opponents alike with batting tips—although he was so spectacular a hitter himself, with such great wrist and bat control and so great an eye, that his tips were not always helpful. Once the young Curt Flood asked him how to wait on the curveball. At the time Flood was having trouble learning how to adjust his own swing to wait that final millimeter of a second in order to time it properly. Musial duly considered Flood’s request and then replied, “Well, you wait for a strike. Then you knock the shit out of it.”
(I might as well,
Flood thought,
have asked a nightingale how to trill.)

Another Cardinal player who set the tone was Ken Boyer, the third baseman and the captain of the team. By dint of his sheer professionalism and the nature of his personality, he was a role model to many of the younger white players. Boyer was from the Ozarks, which did not make him exactly a Southerner, but still a player from a region not necessarily known for its hospitality to blacks. But Boyer stayed at the motel too.

The Cardinals not only dealt with the white-black issue better than most teams, they did it, Tim McCarver noted years later,
before
the team had won a pennant, whereas most teams tended to come together on the question of race only after winning. The mutual respect Cardinal players had for each other cut across racial lines. The team bridge game was an important daily ritual, pitting Bill White and Ken Boyer against Bob Gibson and Dick Groat. While it was a game, it was more than a game, because if these men, the four leaders on the team, had to play together on the baseball field by law, what they did in the clubhouse was their own choice. That did not mean that they agreed on everything: White and Gibson liked and admired Boyer, and sensed that he had the capacity to grow on the issue of race, but they were aware that the changes in attitude that some younger men, such as Tim McCarver, were then undergoing might well be beyond Boyer’s reach. Boyer was for integration in general, but he was made very uneasy by other aspects of more profound social change. Racial intermarriage, especially, seemed to bother him. But at least they could argue about it and find some mutual measure of respect, and once when Boyer was at a bar, some man made a remark about Gibson. “The trouble with that goddam Gibson is he’s a racist,” the stranger had said. Boyer gave him a long cold look. “You don’t even know the man,” he said with contempt. (In the early sixties, Cassius Clay, not yet Muhammad Ali, became pals with some of the Cardinal players who were staying at the same segregated motel, and Clay convinced Curt Flood and Gibson to come to an early Black Muslim meeting. The speeches that night, Flood recalled, largely seemed to be about taking some form of vengeance on the white man. Gibson was not impressed: “Sounds as if black power would be white power backwards. That wouldn’t be much improvement,” he said.)

One of the key players in helping to create the culture of the new Cardinal clubhouse was a man few people knew. George (Big Daddy) Crowe was gone from the team by 1964, but he played a vital role in bridging the gap from one era to another. Crowe was physically imposing, six feet two inches and about 210 pounds, and a man of immense pride and strength who was, without ever trying to be, a powerful presence in the clubhouse. If you were casting him in a movie, the writer Robert Boyle once said, you would want the young James Earl Jones. His influence on the team was vastly disproportionate to his actual contributions on the playing field. He had arrived with the Cardinals in 1959, an aging player, his skills on the decline, his legs and his feet causing him constant problems. He had played for a number of years in the Negro leagues, and the integration of major-league baseball had come more than a little late for him. He first moved into the world of white baseball in 1949, two years after Jackie Robinson had played for Brooklyn. Though his listed age was twenty-six, his real age was perhaps twenty-nine or thirty, and he played very well from the start. But the Boston Braves had been in no rush to bring him to the majors. He played for three years in the minors, hitting .354 with 106 runs batted in for Pawtucket in the New England League in 1949, .353 with 122 runs batted in for Hartford in the Eastern League in 1950, and .339 with 24 home runs and a league-leading 119 runs batted in for Milwaukee in the American Association in 1951. Only then had he made it to the majors.

What Crowe had learned in so unusual a life, filled as it was with so much success gained at so high a price, commanded the respect of his teammates—white and black. He was someone who had a history, and that invested him with authority. He seemed to imply in what he said, and in what he did not say, and even in his body language that whatever was happening, he had seen it all before. He was certainly not going to be undone by anything he encountered. He was, thought Bob Boyle, very calm, very quiet, but his silences had as much meaning as his words. By the time he played for the Cardinals he was primarily a pinch hitter. He would sit in the dugout waiting, an immense black man wearing slippers in order to make it easy on his feet, which were clearly older than the rest of him. On one occasion Carlton Willey, a pitcher who loved to throw sliders, was pitching against the Cardinals, and Big Daddy looked out at him, half bored, and said, “Sometime in the next three innings they’re going to come to me and make me put on my shoes and go up to bat, and that young man out there is going to throw me a slider inside and I’m going to hit that pitch over the 354 sign.” Two innings later that is exactly what happened.

He was a man to be listened to, and, most assuredly, not to be crossed. During spring training in 1960 Big Daddy was not pleased with the calls of Ed Hurley, the home-plate umpire, who came from the American League. Crowe started getting on Hurley early in the game, his voice strong, penetrating, and distinctive. There was no doubt when he yelled out his dissent that Hurley heard every word. Finally Hurley had enough, pointed at Big Daddy, and said, “Crowe, that’s enough—you’re gone! Now get the hell out of here!” That enraged Big Daddy, who started to walk the length of the dugout as if stalking Hurley. Finally, he pointed at Hurley, his words coming out now in real anger. “Ain’t no meat too tough for me, Hurley.” It was not a routine confrontation in baseball, where quick flashes of temper are the norm. Rather, it was something more threatening that seemed to suggest that if things went any further, if
Hurley
transgressed any further, his authority as an umpire might come to an end as Crowe’s authority as a human being superseded it. The scene was more than a little frightening to some of the younger Cardinal players, and frightening, they suspected, to Hurley as well, who looked shaken.

In another era Crowe might well have been a manager, or even a general manager, and one of his protégés, Bill White, went on to become president of the National League. No one was going to abuse anyone or bully anyone on a team as long as George Crowe was there. And no one was going to toss racial epithets around lightly. He became, not surprisingly, the self-appointed judge of the team’s kangaroo court, a job for which he seemed to have been ordained at birth. He loved setting fines on the players for their minor mistakes—missing a sign, or failing to move a runner ahead with either no outs or one out—and his commentary was a far more important part of the team’s byplay than the fines collected. Almost unconsciously, he merged the culture of the two races, for he was a black man who had lived for a long time in a black man’s world, and when he came to the white man’s world he brought with him a distinctly black sense of dignity and pride.

T
HE 1964 SEASON BEGAN AS
something of a disappointment for Mel Stottlemyre. Until the 1963 season he moved with surprising ease up the difficult ladder of minor-league baseball. Success had come readily, if not exactly effortlessly, to Stottlemyre. A Yankee scout named Eddie Taylor picked up on him when he was pitching for Yakima Valley Junior College and had written to his superiors, “He has a good sinker and the courage and the control to use it right. I would recommend signing him for a small bonus or a larger bonus contingent on performance.” Signed by the Yankees, Stottlemyre went to a rookie-league team in Harlan, Kentucky, where he was impressive, and where the scouts and managers quickly sat down to grade him. The highest classification they could give was “Yankee,” which meant that he would end up with the big-league team; the next highest grade was “major leaguer,” followed by “AAA,” and then “AA.” His first report card said, “He has no outstanding faults. He has a fastball that sinks, and a pretty good curve. He needs to develop a change. He is serious about baseball. I classify him Yankee.” In his next season, 1962, at Greensboro in the Carolina League, he won 17 games and lost 9, with an earned run average of 2.50. Based on so promising a performance, he was invited to spring training with the major-league ball club in 1963, when he was only twenty-one years old.

From the start, Stottlemyre’s best pitch was an unusually sharp sinker ball. How and why he was able to throw such a vicious sinker fascinated his teammates. He did not have particularly large hands, which might have been the answer, but he had exceptional flexibility in his wrists, which helped greatly with the sinker ball. That flexibility was in part natural, but when he was in college Stottlemyre had seized on it and done a considerable number of drills with light weights, drills that were designed to maximize his ability to give the ball such snap. He knew early on that this was his ticket. His ball always seemed to move. In the spring of 1963, working out with the big-league club, he was not particularly pleased with his performance, though unbeknownst to him, his superiors were quite impressed. Johnny Sain watched him carefully and thought for a time that Stottlemyre might be ready to go directly to the major leagues, skipping, as very few players do, the critical years of apprenticeship in either Double A or Triple A. Sain watched Stottlemyre with increasing admiration and at one point called aside Ralph Terry, one of his pitching protégés, the star of the previous World Series, and an aficionado himself of pitching technique. “Ralph, I want to show you something,” Sain said, and they moved over to about fifty feet from where Stottlemyre was warming up. Terry looked over and saw a slim, young right-hander who was throwing a good but not great fastball with seeming ease. But every ball seemed to come in right at the knees of the batter, and then suddenly break down. “With most young pitchers who attract your attention in the spring,” Sain told Terry, “it’s because the ball comes into the catcher so hard and you hear this huge explosion in the catcher’s mitt. But you think about it, Ralph—usually the catcher is jumping in all kinds of different directions trying to spear the ball because the pitcher’s control isn’t worth a damn. But look here at how sweet this kid is. Every pitch breaking down below the knees, right around where the strike zone is every time. Good movement too—every pitch has a wicked little break.” Terry asked who the pitcher was. “A kid named Stottlemyre. Just out of B ball. Won sixteen or seventeen games there. I’m recommending him for the majors right now. I think he’s ready,” Sain said. But in the end the Yankee field staff decided that Stottlemyre was not quite ready and assigned him to the Yankee Triple A team in Richmond, Virginia.