Cooperstown Confidential (16 page)

Ted Spencer came to the Hall of Fame as curator in 1982, just as the museum was making a leap from the glass-case era to a more modern sensibility. “We don’t elect the members, we tell the story of baseball.” A big part of that job has been to find ways of making black baseball fit into the story of America without alienating fans who didn’t think the game’s history needed tweaking.

“Race has always been the hottest potato,” he says. “After 1990, we decided we needed to apply a cultural approach to the black history exhibit we wanted to create. We didn’t want it to be just a bunch of small-town white people telling a black story. We brought together a group of experts from around the country for advice. This was a breakthrough for us. We weren’t talking about hits, runs, and errors: we were providing an American narrative that showed the evolution of black baseball along the timeline of the general black experience.”

The decision to put up this exhibit was made by the board of directors, and it was regarded, Spencer recalls, as highly controversial. There were compromises. Focusing on the integration of baseball, for example, was relatively easy; but discussing the way individual franchises dealt with the issue was more complicated, especially since most of those franchises didn’t have much to brag about.

Spencer is from Boston; his home team, the Red Sox, was the last franchise in baseball to integrate. The Sox got their first black player, Pumpsie Green, in 1959. The Sox hadn’t won a World Series for forty-one years before Green arrived, and it took them another forty-five. Many people called it the Curse of the Bambino; Boston’s punishment for letting Babe Ruth go. But the post–World War II part of the long dry spell is more correctly called the Curse of Isadore Muchnick.

In 1945, Muchnick, a Boston city councilman, began raising hell over the failure of the big leagues to integrate. He threatened to challenge the permit of the Red Sox and Boston Braves to play baseball in Boston on Sundays (there were still Sabbath blue laws making Sunday games illegal, a legacy of Puritan New England). Under political pressure, the Sox and the Braves offered tryouts to three Negro leaguers: outfielder Sam Jethroe, second baseman Marvin Williams, and Robinson. The players were brought to Boston by journalist Wendell Smith, who had been championing the case of baseball integration for many years.

Dave Egan of the
Boston Daily Record
, a talented columnist (and, incidentally, Ted Williams’s most biting local media critic), wrote in favor of giving the tryouts a fair chance. General manager Eddie Collins, himself a Hall of Famer, proclaimed that that was his intention: “It is beyond my understanding how anyone can insinuate or believe that all ballplayers, regardless of race, color, or creed, have not been treated in the American way as far as having an equal opportunity to play for the Red Sox.”

But in 1945, racial exclusion
was
the American way, especially the American League way. Larry MacPhail, the Yankees GM, publicly supported integration and privately worked to prevent it. “We can’t afford to ignore the problem,” he wrote to commissioner Happy Chandler shortly after Chandler replaced Judge Landis. “If we do, we will have colored players in the minor leagues in 1945 and in the major leagues shortly thereafter.” MacPhail, like Eddie Collins, is a Hall of Famer. Supporting segregation wasn’t a disqualifier in 1939 when Collins got in, and it still wasn’t a problem in 1978, when MacPhail was selected by the Veterans Committee.

As for Robinson’s tryout in Boston, it was a failure. The Red Sox brought Robinson, Jethroe, and Williams to the park and had them shag flies and hit some batting-practice pitching. Manager Joe Cronin wasn’t there. Neither were any of the Red Sox players. When the session was over, one of the coaches who had been in charge told Jethroe, “You boys look like pretty good players. I hope you enjoyed the workout.” That was the last word that was heard from the Red Sox. The team finished seventh in the American League that year with infielders like Catfish Metkovich, Ben Steiner, and Ty LaForest. Who needed Jackie Robinson?

I asked Spencer if he had considered detailing the way the Red Sox and other teams, like the Tigers and Yankees, dragged their feet on integration. “I just never went there,” Spencer told me. “To be honest, I don’t know why not.”

The museum’s exhibit on integration also skips over the re sis-tance of many white players to their new black teammates, as well as the conspicuous absence of black managers. “We recognized that issue was out there, but we didn’t get into it. Those are judgment calls.”

Eventually, Major League Baseball gave the Hall $250,000 to find even more Negro leaguers suitable for enshrining. A screening committee of five members was established and produced a list of thirty-nine candidates. The Hall appointed a team of twelve baseball historians (“academic cranks,” in Bill James’s phrase) to make the final picks. Nine votes were needed for selection. Seventeen players and executives from the Negro-leagues and pre-Negro-leagues period were selected and, in 2006, inducted.

Major League Baseball meant well. The Hall meant well, too. But the gesture went largely unappreciated. These new guys were all dead and long forgotten. Their inclusion at Cooperstown had about as much impact on the black community—especially alienated young black sports fans—as inducting the 1935 Tuskegee marching band.

Even worse, some of the choices actually engendered fresh bitterness. Somehow, the committee managed to ignore the one candidate who was still alive and kicking. Buck O’Neil was a former teammate of Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and other legends; a gifted storyteller who described the Negro-leagues experience with humor, affection, and a minimum of rancor, he had been featured in Ken Burns’s PBS documentary
Baseball
. America knew and loved him.

The committee rejected O’Neil on the grounds that he wasn’t a good enough player. This seemed arbitrary—after all, some of the other choices had no statistics all; some had even played on pre-Negro-leagues teams. O’Neil had a fifteen-year career as a slick-fielding, good-hitting first baseman. He had gone on to become the first black major-league coach (with the Chicago Cubs). As a scout, he helped sign Ernie Banks, Lou Brock, Billy Williams, and Elston Howard. He might not have been a Hall of Fame–caliber player, but he was certainly as good as many of the white mediocrities stuffed into Cooperstown by Frankie Frisch.

In any case, the 2006 Negro-leagues selections were not intended as a scientific assessment of talent: they were supposed to be a public relations gesture. Major League Baseball put out a press release slamming the Hall of Fame for its “glaring omission” and noting that “even democratic elections do not always produce perfection.” Of course, there had been no democratic election, just a dozen guys with paper ballots and tin ears.

Jane Forbes Clark blithely hailed this public relations disaster as a triumph for the Hall. “The Board of Directors is extremely pleased with how this project has evolved over the last five years—culminating in today’s vote,” she said. “This committee has held discussions in great detail, utilizing the research and statistics now available to determine who deserves baseball’s highest honor—a plaque in the Hall of Fame Gallery in Cooperstown.”
*
In 2007, the Hall of Fame announced that it was erecting a statue of Buck O’Neil and naming an award in his honor. O’Neil said nothing, since he had died in the interim.

Joe Morgan is one of two blacks on the Hall of Fame’s board of directors (the other is Frank Robinson), and he is often Cooper-stown’s designated spokesman on matters of race. At a press conference announcing the O’Neil statue and award, he said, “I don’t think this is necessarily trying to right a wrong. I think we’re just trying to honor a person—there are a lot of people who are not elected to the Hall of Fame that the public, myself included, think should be in the Hall of Fame.” The statement was a perfect example of Cooperstown’s racial bumbling.

But the Hall is still trying. In June 2008, the board of directors declared a special day to honor Jackie Robinson. A new plaque was mounted, lauding Robinson as a civil rights pioneer as well as a .311 hitter. Robinson’s widow, Rachel, came to Cooperstown to say thank-you with her customary grace. But nothing she said could change the fact that her husband had died angry, frustrated, and alienated from baseball—and that millions of black baseball fans feel the same way.

* Baseball scholars will note that although the winners of the Spink Award (for baseball writing) and the Frick Award (for baseball broadcasting) are honored during the Hall of Fame induction ceremonies and have their names listed in an exhibit in the museum, they don’t receive plaques and aren’t mentioned in the gallery itself. Wendell Smith, thus, is not a Hall of Famer in the same sense that Rickey Henderson is.

* Four other players were suspended for sixty days. In fact, none of the eleven suspended players actually missed a game. They were allowed to contribute part of their salaries to a drug program, submit to random testing, and do one hundred hours of community service.

* This form of reparation infuriated Bill James and other purists. “The simultaneous election of a large number of Negro League players and executives—many of whom had frankly no credentials whatsoever worthy of inclusion—was one of the sorriest episodes in the Hall of Fame’s history,” James wrote of the 2006 mass induction of pre-integration players.

* This quote appears in the “Baseball Hall of Fame Balloting, 2006” entry in Wikipedia. The reference is to a press release on the Hall of Fame’s Web site, baseball.org. That Web site now has a notice that reads: “The page you requested no longer exists.” If only public relations were that easy.

EIGHT . . .
The Marvin Miller Affair

T
he first time I met Marvin Miller, I was half an hour late. I actually arrived at his apartment house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan almost an hour early, just to make sure I could find it, and then went around the corner to a coffee shop to read the paper. I was back at exactly 10:30 A.M., right on the dot. Miller was past ninety, and you don’t waste the time of a man that age.

I rang, and Miller opened the door. “You’re late,” he said. “You said you’d be here at ten.”

“Ten-thirty,” I said. “I’m positive.”

“It was ten,” Miller said, “but come in and sit down anyway.” His voice startled me. It was the voice of a much younger man, relaxed and utterly charming. Miller would hate the comparison, but it reminded me of Ronald Reagan on the radio.

I sat down on the couch, Miller facing me. He had a keen look in his brown eyes, but he
had
mixed up the hour of our appointment and I wondered—as you always wonder about very old people—if he was completely focused.

Miller was wearing a sweater and a pair of khakis. As the executive director of the baseball players’ union, he generated vast fortunes for the men he organized and led. A few years ago, Alex Rodriguez introduced Miller to his wife at a party and told her, “Say thank you to this man. He’s the one who bought us our big, fine house.”

There was no hint of big money here. The living room was comfortable and unassuming, books stacked neatly on the glass coffee table, some interesting pieces of artwork on the walls, a few family photos. It was the sort of living room a retired college professor would have, or an honest judge. Later I learned that Miller’s wife, Terry, whom he met in Brooklyn in 1936,
had
been a professor of psychology. She walked through the living room, nodded hello, and then sat a table in the kitchenette, absorbed in the
New York Times
. They had been married almost seventy years, and she probably wasn’t expecting to hear her husband tell an inquisitive stranger anything she didn’t already know.

Miller wasn’t exactly surprised by my questions, either. A lot of reporters had been calling lately, wondering if he thought he was going to make it into the Hall of Fame, after losing out in 2007 when the Veterans Committee, including many players who had become multimillionaires due to his efforts, turned him down. For 2007 the Hall had once again changed its rules, appointing a twelve-member body to consider the candidacies of former executives like Miller. A lot of people, including me, thought that Miller was a lock. He had never worked for a major-league team, but he was nonetheless, in the words of the venerated broadcaster Red Barber, “along with Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, one of the two or three most influential men in baseball history.”

Marvin Miller walked his first picket line at the age of ten, side by side with his father, in front of the clothing store where Alexander Miller worked as a salesman, on the Lower East Side of New York. This was a rare moment of father-son solidarity. Alexander Miller was an Orthodox Jew who insisted his son study Hebrew four days a week and prepare to become a bar mitzvah boy. He did, under protest, but the rift this argument caused never healed completely.

Miller grew up during the Depression, rooting for the labor unions and the Brooklyn Dodgers. His favorite player was an already-overthe-hill Dazzy Vance. Miller went to college at Miami of Ohio for a while, graduated from NYU, and during World War II worked as a staff economist on the War Production Board. In 1950, he was hired as a research economist by the United Steel Workers, where he collaborated with future Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg developing negotiating strategies. When Goldberg left for Washington to work as secretary of labor under JFK, Miller took over as chief economist and assistant to Steel Workers’ president David McDonald. That turned out to be a bad career move. McDonald lost his post to I. W. Abel in a contentious 1965 election; Miller was McDonald’s man. He briefly considered running for a union office himself, but his wife vetoed it. Labor politics were rough in those days; candidates had a habit of getting shot. So Miller decided to look elsewhere for a job.

In December 1965, Miller ran into Dr. George W. Taylor, the dean of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He and Miller were old friends and fellow baseball fans. Robin Roberts, the Phillies ace pitcher, had recently asked Taylor to suggest a good candidate to run the players’ association. Taylor asked Miller if he wanted the job.

Miller met with Robin Roberts and his fellow search committee members, Jim Bunning and Harvey Kuenn. Bunning and Roberts are now in the Hall of Fame, and Kuenn ought to be; he was the best-hitting shortstop in the American League in the fifties, and a Detroit Tiger at that. The players were looking for someone who could help them set up an association that would bargain with the own ers over pension rights. They wondered if Miller would be interested in the job of executive director.

It sounded great—Miller had never lost his boyhood love of the game—until Roberts told him that his general counsel would be Richard Nixon. There was a logic to the suggestion. There had never before been an effective inde pendent players’ association, and a lot of the guys, especially from small towns and rural areas, were dubious about joining a union. Baseball players weren’t very po litical, but if they thought about it, they were mostly conservatives (even Jackie Robinson was a Republican). Miller was a Demo crat, a labor leader, and a New York Jew with slicked-back hair and a moustache. Roberts thought that hiring Nixon, who was between presidential runs, would balance out the ticket and make the association seem somehow more
American
.

Miller said no. He liked the idea, but he didn’t need a job bad enough to work in tandem with Tricky Dick. Roberts and the others thought it over and decided to go with Miller. A meeting of team player representatives ratified the choice. Not everyone was happy with the decision. Lew Burdette of the Braves, Dodgers first baseman Ron Fairly, Ron Santo of the Cubs, future Hall of Famer Eddie Mathews, and others publicly attacked the very idea of or ga nizing. Braves first baseman Joe Adcock spoke for many: “Pro sports,” he said, “has no place for unions.”

Miller very quickly came to a few basic conclusions about baseball. First, it was a business—an
American
business—that ought to be subject to the same rules of labor relations as any other. Players were employees. Team own ers were not their friends or patrons: they were their bosses. The own ers were also the boss of the commissioner of baseball, who served at their pleasure.

Miller also realized that his new members were very young, mostly unsophisticated men with little experience in the real world. This made them easy prey for owners who wrapped baseball in mythology and appealed to the players’ sense of responsibility to team.

The players had or ganized because they wanted a decent pension, but Miller decided that what they really needed was a crash course in economics. The game was awash in televi sion and radio money. Meanwhile, the average player salary was $19,000 and the minimum was $6,000—up a thousand bucks from 1947. A lot of players thought they had a sweet deal. Hell, they were making more than their buddies back home—the average annual salary for American men was about $5,000—and they got to play baseball instead of doing real work. Miller went from training camp to training camp and patiently disabused them of this idea. In his reasonable, mellifluous way, he explained that they were getting screwed. Not just anyone could play major-league ball; it was a rare and specialized skill. Baseball might be fun, but careers were short and hard and often ended suddenly. The players, not the owners, were the show, and they had a right—and a responsibility to their families—to negotiate and demand a free market price for their ser vices.

This ran counter not only to the interests of the owners but, weirdly, to American jurisprudence. Baseball contracts came with a “reserve clause” that essentially bound players to their teams for life. In 1922, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that baseball is exempt from antitrust rules because baseball games, even played by traveling teams, did not represent interstate commerce. A game, the court held, took place in only one state, and “personal effort, not related to production, is not a subject of commerce.” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. himself wrote that “exhibitions of baseball are purely state affairs.” The Supreme Court reaffirmed baseball’s special status and exemptions in rulings in 1953 and 1972. It was the law of the land.

Miller’s first few years at the Players’ Association were filled with consciousness-raising and salary-boosting; but he knew that to effect real change, sooner or later he would have to challenge baseball’s cartel. When Curt Flood decided to take the Cardinals to court over the reserve clause, Miller backed his play.

By the standards of 1969 baseball, Curt Flood was cerebral, artistic—and rebellious. When the Cards traded him to Philadelphia at the end of the 1969 season, Flood was thirty-one, at the height of a very good career. He was a sensational center fielder and lifetime .293 hitter.

Flood didn’t especially love St. Louis, but than again he didn’t want to be traded without any say in the matter. He decided to sue Major League Baseball. Flood went to the players’ union for support. Tom Haller, one of the members of the union board, asked him if he was making his protest as a black man.

“I’d be lying if I told you that as a black man in baseball I hadn’t gone through worse times than my white teammates,” he said. “I’d also say that, yes, the change in black consciousness in recent years has made me more sensitive to injustice in every area of my life. But I want you to know that what I’m doing, here I’m doing as a ballplayer, a major league baseball player . . . [the reserve clause is] improper, it shouldn’t be allowed to go any further, and the circumstances are such that, well, I guess this is the time to do something about it.”

With the help of Marvin Miller and the players’ union, Flood took his case to the Supreme Court. And lost.

“I wasn’t optimistic that we’d win the case, and of course we didn’t,” says Miller. “In 1972, the reserve clause was upheld by a 5–3 vote. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote for the majority. He admitted that baseball was, in fact, interstate commerce. He conceded that the game’s legal status was an “anomaly” and an “aberration.” But he didn’t care.

Harry Blackmun was the Supreme Court justice who wrote
Roe v.
Wade
and other landmark Constitutional opinions. But when it came to baseball, he was a nine-year-old boy. Here is how he prefaced his legal argument:

It is a century and a quarter since the New York Nine defeated the
Knickerbockers 23 to 1 on Hoboken’s Elysian Fields June 19, 1846, with
Alexander Jay Cartwright as the instigator and the umpire. The teams
were amateur, but the contest marked a significant date in baseball’s beginnings.
That early game led ultimately to the development of professional
baseball and its tightly orga nized structure.

The Cincinnati Red Stockings came into existence in 1869 upon an
outpouring of local pride. With only one Cincinnatian on the payroll,
this professional team traveled over 11,000 miles that summer, winning
56 games and tying one. Shortly thereafter, on St. Patrick’s Day in 1871,
the National Association of Professional Baseball Players was founded
and the professional league was born.

The ensuing colorful days are well known. The ardent follower and
the student of baseball know of General Abner Doubleday; the formation
of the National League in 1876; Chicago’s supremacy in the first
year’s competition under the leadership of Al Spalding and with Cap
Anson at third base; the formation of the American Association and then
of the Union Association in the 1880’s; the introduction of Sunday baseball;
interleague warfare with cut-rate admission prices and player
raiding; the development of the reserve “clause”; the emergence in 1885
of the Brotherhood of Professional Ball Players, and in 1890 of the
Players League; the appearance of the American League, or “ju nior circuit,”
in 1901, rising from the minor Western Association; the first World
Series in 1903, disruption in 1904, and the Series’ resumption in 1905;
the short-lived Federal League on the majors’ scene during World War I
years; the troublesome and discouraging episode of the 1919 Series; the
home run ball; the shifting of franchises; the expansion of the leagues;
the installation in 1965 of the major league draft of potential new players;
and the formation of the Major League Baseball Players Association
in 1966.

Then there are the many names, celebrated for one reason or another,
that have sparked the diamond and its environs and that have provided
tinder for recaptured thrills, for reminiscence and comparisons, and for
conversation and anticipation in-season and off-season: Ty Cobb, Babe
Ruth, Tris Speaker, Walter Johnson, Henry Chadwick, Eddie Collins, Lou
Gehrig, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Rogers Hornsby, Harry Hooper,
Goose Goslin, Jackie Robinson, Honus Wagner, Joe McCarthy, John Mc-
Graw, Deacon Phillippe, Rube Marquard, Christy Mathewson, Tommy
Leach, Big Ed Delahanty, Davy Jones, Germany Schaefer, King Kelly,
Big Dan Brouthers, Wahoo Sam Crawford, Wee Willie Keeler, Big Ed
Walsh, Jimmy Austin, Fred Snodgrass, Satchel Paige, Hugh Jennings,
Fred Merkle, Iron Man McGinnity, Three-Finger Brown, Harry and Stan
Coveleski, Connie Mack, Al Bridwell, Red Ruffing, Amos Rusie, Cy
Young, Smokey Joe Wood, Chief Meyers, Chief Bender, Bill Klem, Hans
Lobert, Johnny Evers, Joe Tinker, Roy Campanela, Miller Huggins, Rube
Bressler, Dazzy Vance, Edd Roush, Bill Wambsganess, Clark Griffith,
Branch Rickey, Frank Chance, Cap Anson, Nap Lajoie, Sad Sam Jones,
Bob O’Farrell, Lefty O’Doul, Bobby Veach, Willie Kamm, Heinie Groh,
Lloyd and Paul Waner, Stuffy McInnis, Charles Comiske, Roger Bresna-han,
Bill Dickey, Zack Wheat, George Sisler, Charlie Gehringer, Eppa
Rixey, Harry Heilmann, Fred Clarke, Dizzy Dean, Hank Greenberg, Pie
Traynor, Rube Waddell, Bill Terry, Carl Hubbell, Old Hoss Radbourne,
Moe Berg, Rabbit Maranville, Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove. The list seems
endless.