The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (24 page)

“I wasn’t politically smart but I sensed — and my wife, Rachel, sensed — some of what was going on.

“Hell, we weren’t idiots. But Mr. Rickey
demanded
that I go. At that point in my life, if Mr. Rickey had told me to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, I would have said ‘Head first or feet first?’”

Rickey enlisted Lester Granger of the Urban League, the most conservative of the national Negro organizations, to help Robinson in his dilemma. Granger and Robinson finally put together a twenty-three-paragraph statement.* Granger did the actual writing, but Robinson was no voder, simply sounding programmed words.

His voice was high-pitched. He was not a dramatic public speaker. The force of his delivery in Congress — and it was forceful — came from the pain and the sincerity with which he spoke.

Robinson flew to Washington and testified on Monday, July 18. “It isn’t very pleasant,” he began in a crowded hearing room,

to find myself in the middle of a public argument that has nothing to do with the standing of the Dodgers in the pennant race — or even the pay raise I am going to ask Mr. Branch Rickey for next year. [Laughter.]

So you’ll naturally ask, why did I stick my neck out by agreeing to be present and why did I stand by my agreement in spite of advice to the contrary? It isn’t easy to find the answer but I guess it boils down to a sense of responsibility.

I don’t pretend to be any expert on communism or any other political “ism.” . . . But put me down as an expert on being a colored American, with thirty years’ experience at it.

Like any other colored person with sense enough to look around, I know that life in these United States can be tough for people who are a little different from the majority in their skin color or the way they worship. . . .

I’m not fooled because I’ve had a chance. . . . I’m proud that I’ve made good on my assignment to the point where other colored players will find it easier to enter the game. But I’m well aware that even this limited job isn’t finished yet. There are only three major league clubs with only seven colored players signed up,* out of close to four hundred major league players on sixteen clubs. . . .

A start has been made. Southern fans as well as northern fans like the way things are working. We’re going to make progress in other American fields, if we can get rid of some misunderstanding.

The white public should start appreciating that every single Negro worth his salt resents slurs and discrimination. That has absolutely nothing to do with what Communists may or may not be trying to do. . . .

White people must realize that the more a Negro hates communism because it opposes democracy, the more he is going to hate any other influence that kills off democracy in this country — racial discrimination in the army, segregation on trains and buses, job discrimination because of religious beliefs.

If a Communist denounces injustice in the American courts, or police brutality, or lynching, that doesn’t change the truth. . . .A lot of people try to pretend that the issue [of discrimination] is a creation of Communist imaginations. . . . But Negroes were stirred up long before there was a Communist party and they’ll stay stirred up long after the party has disappeared. . . .

I’ve been asked to express my views on Paul Robeson’s statement to the effect that American Negroes would refuse to fight in any war against Russia. The statement, if Mr. Robeson actually made it, sounds silly to me. But he has a right to his personal views and if he wants to sound silly when he expresses them in public, that’s his business, not mine.

There are some colored pacifists and they’d act like pacifists of any color. Most Negroes and Irish and Jews and Swedes and Slavs and other Americans would do their best to keep their country out of war; if unsuccessful, they’d do their best to help their country win, against Russia or any other enemy.

The public is off on the wrong foot when it begins to think of radicalism in terms of any special minority group. Thinking of this sort gets people scared because one Negro threatens an organized boycott by 15 million members of his race.

I can’t speak for 15 million, but I’ve got too much invested for my wife, my child, and myself in the future of this country to throw it away because of a siren song sung in bass. . . .

That doesn’t mean we’re going to stop fighting race discrimination. It means we’re going to fight it all the harder.

We can win our fight without Communists and we don’t want their help.

Robinson put down his papers in the hearing room. Someone shouted “Amen!”

There followed tumultuous applause.

Robinson flew back to New York in time for batting practice before a night game against the Chicago Cubs at Ebbets Field. He took over the Brooklyn ballpark in the sixth inning. Bob Rush, a hard-throwing right-hander, walked him with one out. Robinson stole second and went to third when catcher Mickey Owen threw the ball into center field. Robinson led far off third base, bluffing a break for home. With one out, the percentage demanded that he stay at third. A fly ball or a grounder would score the run.

But Robinson was all adventure, all surprise. As Rush went into a high-kicking windup, Robinson broke for the plate. Hurrying, Rush threw a fastball over Owen’s head. Robinson had stolen two bases in the inning; he’d stolen home.

Finally, in the eighth inning, he tripled to drive in Brooklyn’s third run. The Dodgers defeated the Cubs, 3 to 0, moving three and a half games ahead of the second-place Cardinals. Robinson had manufactured two of the three runs. That night he was batting .363 and leading the league in hits, runs, runs batted in, and stolen bases.

In an arch sidebar story, Louis Effrat of the
Times
focused on Robinson’s remark to Congress that he was going to ask Rickey for more money the next season.

“No comment” is all Rickey would tell Effrat.

Actually, Rickey’s cold frugality did not extend to Robinson, who had already moved up to a salary of $19,000, fine for the time. And, of course, Rickey knew in advance everything that Robinson would tell Congress and approved in advance everything that Robinson would tell Congress.

Teasing Effrat in the Ebbets Field press box, Dick Young of the
Daily News
said, “What would you do with a guy playing as great as Robbie? Give him a pay cut?”

“It’s a fresh angle,” Effrat protested. “They love the way I do that at the
Times
. They call me the Kid with the Twist.”

“Aaff,” Young said. “For God’s sake, Jackie’s
got
to get a raise.” He thought for a moment. The Dodgers were still having trouble finding accommodations for Robinson in Cincinnati and St. Louis. “He leads the league,” Young said, “in everything but hotel reservations.”

Viewed objectively, or with as much objectivity as I can muster, Robinson’s statement seems an outstanding articulation of an informed 1949 centrist position, black or otherwise. Segregation and implicitly segregationist congressmen were rebuked in an extraordinary way. Newspapers applauded with headlines:

JACKIE HITS ROBESON’S RED PITCH
JACKIE ROBINSON HITS A DOUBLE —
AGAINST COMMUNISTS AND JIM CROW

The only immediate criticism appeared in a cartoon published by the
Baltimore Afro-American
. A little boy labeled Jackie Robinson was pictured carrying a huge gun and tracking the gigantic footprints of Paul Robeson.

Robinson’s wife Rachel conceded years later “we didn’t fully understand what was going on with the House Un-American Activities Committee.” In essence, she says, right speech, wrong forum.

Robinson went further to me in 1972. Blinded by virulent diabetes, but more insightful than ever, Robinson said across morning coffee at his sunlit home in Stamford, Connecticut, “I would never criticize Paul Robeson today.”

“You disagreed with him,” I said.

“That was between us,” Robinson said. “We both had and have a larger disagreement with white society.

“Whites took away Paul’s career. They took away his wealth. Then white men called this a blacklist. . . .

“The salient fact of my life and the salient fact of Paul Robeson’s life is the same. We are black men in a prejudiced white country.”

Robinson died that October. Paul Robeson died in 1976. Two brave men had borne frightful pain.

*Robinson traced a certain amount of this comfort back to August 24, 1948, in Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. During the fourth inning of a Dodger-Pirate game, umpire Walter J. “Butch” Henline called a questionable strike on outfielder Gene Hermanski. The Brooklyn bench yapped at Henline and continued jeering after a warning to stop. Suddenly Henline whirled, ripped off his mask, and shouted: “You! Robinson! You’re out of this game!” Robinson recalled, “That made me feel great. Henline didn’t throw me out because I was black. He threw me out because I was getting on his nerves. It was wonderful to be treated like any other ballplayer.”

*I collaborated with Robinson on a series of articles that ran under his byline in the black magazine
Our Sports
during 1953. Robinson came to our meetings with a vivid sense of what he wanted said. I typed, organized, punctuated, and spelled and occasionally questioned. Robinson provided the ideas. That was about how he had worked with Granger, Robinson said, “except Granger’s questions and suggestions were more than occasional, since we were dealing with a tremendous topic.”

*Robinson, Newcombe, and Campanella with the Dodgers; Thompson and Irvin with the Giants; and Larry Doby and Satchel Paige with Cleveland.

I got this fella who sucks up all the glory and plays only when he feels like playing. I never had one like that before.

— Casey Stengel on Joe DiMaggio

T
HE EMPEROR HAD TAKEN
to his bed.

His marriage to Dorothy Arnold, the blonde actress, was shot. She’d thrown him out and lured him back and thrown him out again. She was still shooting her mouth off to the gossip columnists. Bad husband. Out all night. Indifferent father.

The Emperor was coming off a rousing season. In 1948, he hit thirty-nine home runs, fourteen more than the Boston Blowhard. Plus
he
could catch a fly and make a throw. But now it was another season and the emperor couldn’t play at all. Play ball? He couldn’t walk without wincing. He was thirty-four years old and shrewd beyond his years. Joe DiMaggio always knew the score. It could be over. He could be all washed up.

And after that? Icon, deity, emperor, DiMaggio faced questions that tore at every ballplayer approaching the middle of the journey.

Alimony and child support ran to almost $10,000 a year. How could he make those payments if he didn’t play ball? There was the family restaurant back in San Francisco, but the family was large. The money got cut up a lot of ways. If he didn’t play ball, how would he make a living?

The Yankees were paying DiMaggio $100,000 for the season of 1949. But if he didn’t get better, DiMaggio knew, that cold-eyed bastard George Weiss would stop paying him anything at all.

And after that? What was he going to do with the rest of his life?

The Emperor was feeling poorly. He listened to the radio and read the papers and watched television and took painkillers. Without him, and with a clown for a manager, the Yankees were running up a big lead. Tommy Henrich. Bobby Brown. Allie Reynolds. Stengel. Stengel. Stengel.

The Emperor sulked in his suite at the Hotel Edison and told the operator that he didn’t want any calls today, or any visitors except for Toots Shor and Georgie Solotaire.

DiMaggio had been suffering from heel spurs, tiny spikes of calcium growing like needles out of the bone. The spikes cut into soft tissue with each step. Walking hurt. It was impossible to run.

In April, Yankee medical people dispatched DiMaggio to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where an orthopedist named John Bennett was renowned for successful surgery on athletes. Bennett told DiMaggio that he could remove the calcium spikes but that pain would persist for some time. “Eventually, Joe, the pain should go away. It’s a mysterious kind of thing. But there have been cases where a month or so after this operation, a patient went to sleep one night in pain and woke up feeling fine.”

As orderlies wheeled DiMaggio toward the surgical theater, a photographer appeared in the white hospital corridor and flashbulbs popped. DiMaggio sat up and began to curse. Then he said to the photographer, “I’ve always cooperated with you guys. Why are you doing this to me?”

The photographer stopped shooting. “It’s my assignment,” he said.

“I’ve cooperated with every photographer who ever wanted a picture,” DiMaggio said, white-draped on the hospital gurney. “All I’m asking for now is personal privacy.”

“Sure, Joe,” the photographer said. “I’ll tear up the negatives. I’ll tell my boss I couldn’t get a shot.”

A few days later, DiMaggio returned to New York on crutches and boarded up in the Edison, near Times Square, his home for half a year. DiMaggio was a hotel fella, not subject to domestication.*

George Solotaire was a short, stocky ticket broker who spoke glib, Damon Runyon English. Divorce was “splitsville.” Bankruptcy was “brokesville.” Want two tickets in row F? “I’ll see if I can get ya a coupla Freddies.”

Solotaire idolized DiMaggio, hung his clothing, sent out his laundry, and ran huge Broadway-Jewish sandwiches from the Stage Delicatessen to the convalescent. With ties to theater, Solotaire seemed always able to find showgirls aquiver to meet DiMaggio. Solotaire became DiMaggio’s closest New York friend during the Era.

Toots Shor worshiped at Shrine DiMaggio in a different fashion. “Daig is the greatest ballplayer ever,” Shor lectured favored patrons, columnists Bob Considine, Red Smith, and Bill Corum, and the repetition had the effect of magnifying DiMaggio’s formidable skills. You got nowhere, or at least I got nowhere, in later years submitting to Shor that Willie Mays ran faster, threw better, was more durable, and caught fly balls DiMaggio couldn’t have reached. Shor’s response: “Don’t advertise yer ignorance.”

Solotaire handled food, laundry, and show girls. Shor was supervising press secretary, minister of propaganda. The most favored chronicler was Jimmy Cannon of the
New York Post
. Cannon was passionate, egocentric, talkative, unmarried, and gifted in remarkable ways. Describing many years later one boorish sportscaster, Cannon wrote, “If Howard Cosell were a sport, it would be Roller Derby.”

“Jimmy had certain excesses,” says Ed Fitzgerald, who edited
Sport
, the dominant sports magazine during the Era, “but I believe, even including Hemingway, Cannon was the greatest writer in the world on two topics: Joe Louis and Joe DiMaggio.”

In his bestselling
Summer of ‘49
, David Halberstam suggests that Cannon “created not just the legend of Joe DiMaggio as the great athlete, but, even more significant, DiMaggio as the Hemingway hero, as elegant off the field as on it.” Actually, Cannon did not create the image of a silent, towering hero. DiMaggio himself created that. Joe DiMaggio and nobody else invented Joe DiMaggio. Cannon was merely the scribe, albeit a good one.

To this day, debate continues to hum about the point: How good was Joe DiMaggio, really? How much of his reputation is image and hype? One interesting, although negative, perception comes to us through an unusual statistical gauge of offensive performance called relative performance measurement, or RPM. This was created by an Illinois statistician with a name that might belong to one of those old Chicago Bear linebackers: Ron Skrabacz. “The concept of dominance,” Skrabacz writes in
The Baseball Research Journal
, “can easily be quantified and can be useful in comparing players with their peers or with players from other eras. Relative performance measurement shows which players were most dominant over their careers. . . . Can you compare Babe Ruth against Hank Aaron based on seasonal numbers or even career statistics? They hit against different pitchers and fielders and played with different advantages.”

Ruth, of course, played only against whites, which made his working day easier. Aaron played against whites, blacks, and Latins. Ruth played by day and made his trips by train. Aaron traveled by jet and mostly played at night. Aaron hit against fielders armed and armored with big gloves. Ruth had to swing at spitballs. Aaron was cared for by skilled trainers and modern doctors. In Ruth’s time, sports medicine was primitive.

To pick up Mr. Skrabacz, “What you
can
compare definitively is how Ruth measured up against his peers and how Aaron stacked up against his. By neutralizing era-specific factors [jet travel vs. train travel], you can judge the players on how well they dominated their peers.”

Skrabacz considers fifteen familiar categories, including runs, hits, singles, doubles, triples, homers, walks, steals, runs batted in, and batting average. Then he measures each player’s performance in each category against the performances of contemporaries. Since Skrabacz is seeking excellence, he flags only the top five players in each category, examining every season from 1900 to the present. “I calculate the numbers with simple arithmetic,” he says. “A point system awards the top player five points. That is, if you’re the leading hitter you get five. Second leading hitter gets four, down to the fifth leading hitter who gets one.”

With a little more arithmetic, Skrabacz has calculated the twenty-five most dominant offensive players in major league history. Here is his list:

From this list, Musial, Williams, Mays, Mantle, Mize, and DiMaggio played significant portions of their career during the Era. DiMaggio’s finish, twenty-second, places him in the second echelon of the top offensive players of all time. Commendable, but less than godlike.

Arthur Patterson suggested a rebuttal shortly before his death in 1991. “DiMaggio played for us at Yankee Stadium for thirteen years,” Patterson said. “During that time we won ten pennants. I’m sure I’m not as good with numbers as Mr. Skrabacz, but ten for thirteen isn’t bad, and we don’t win ten, or anywhere close, without DiMaggio.”

“Red,” I said, “after DiMaggio quit, the Yankees still won the pennant in six of the next seven seasons.”

“That tells us nothing about DiMaggio,” Patterson said. “It just says that Mantle was great and Stengel was a genius.”

As he lay about his hotel suite in sharp, persistent pain, DiMaggio did not want to see any sportswriters, not even Cannon. Any one of them, Cannon included, might start asking questions. Would he ever play again? DiMaggio did not want to see teammates, either. He missed playing ball. He missed the cheers. Seeing his teammates could just make that longing sharper. It hurt not playing and, to tell the truth, it hurt that the Yankees were winning all those games without him.

DiMaggio later said, “I guess I was . . . a mental case. . . . The team kept sending me checks. Whenever one came, I told myself, ‘You’ve certainly done a swell job of earning this money.’ . . . I had trouble getting to sleep. . . . If my playing career was over, what was I going to do? Lying awake, sometimes until five in the morning, I figured out at least a half dozen careers. I must have been really upset, because right now I can’t remember any of them.”*

He was close to emotional collapse one morning in June when the pain in his left heel eased, as mysteriously as doctors at Johns Hopkins had foretold. DiMaggio had looked over the abyss and hadn’t liked what he saw. He threw himself back into the world. He took batting practice and swung until his hands bled. He had special high shoes crafted, with heavy padding at the heel and toe spikes only. Eliminating heel spikes cut down on impact where the spurs had grown.

On June 27, DiMaggio went out to play his first game of the year. He had missed three months. His intensity glowed like Vesuvius, circa
A.D.
79. Then he popped out four straight times.

The game was on a Monday night, an exhibition between the Yankees and the Giants to raise money for sandlot baseball and determine what the
Herald Tribune
called “the Trans-Harlem championship of Manhattan and the Bronx.” The Yankees defeated the Giants, 5 to 3.

DiMaggio did not hide from reporters. “I thought I was ready,” he said. “Now I’m not sure.”

The Yankees caught the Owl, an overnight train for Boston, where on Tuesday they would open a three-game series against the Red Sox. DiMaggio declined to accompany the team. Next morning he took two more hours of batting practice in empty Yankee Stadium.

He caught a three o’clock plane for Boston but declined to check in with Casey Stengel.

A dozen writers pressed Stengel at Fenway Park. Was he going to put DiMaggio in the lineup?

“I don’t know,” Stengel said loudly. “I’m waiting for him to tell me whether he can play.”

DiMaggio was sitting twenty-five feet down the bench, adjusting the laces in his high-topped semi-spikes. “What about it, Joe?”

“Yeah,” DiMaggio said, clearly, distinctly. “I’m going to play.”

He was not asking. He was announcing. Stengel silently prepared the Yankee lineup:

Rizzuto, ss
Coleman, 2b
Henrich, 1b
J. DiMaggio, cf
Berra, c
Johnson, 3b
Lindell, lf
Bauer, rf
Reynolds, p

DiMaggio led off the second inning with a line single to left field off Maurice “Mickey” McDermott, a twenty-year-old left-hander from Poughkeepsie, New York. McDermott walked Long John Lindell, and Hank Bauer slugged a fastball over the left field wall. The Yankees had a 3 to 0 lead.

Rizzuto led off the third with a single. McDermott struck out Jerry Coleman and Tommy Henrich. Then DiMaggio cracked a fastball high over the left field wall. The Yankees won the ballgame, 5 to 4.