Pinstripe Empire (50 page)

Once Vic Power had been traded, attention turned to Howard as the logical “first.” He was, first of all, enormously talented. The Yankees also saw him as fitting in well, for he could play the outfield, first base, and catcher. He was also immediately popular with his teammates, no matter what their backgrounds or prejudices. Mickey Mantle, raised during the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma, told people, “I haven’t had a roommate since Billy Martin, but if I did, it would be Elston Howard.” Stengel, born just twenty-five years after
the Civil War, didn’t always say the right things (“I finally get a nigger and he can’t run”), but clearly liked Howard.

A native of St. Louis, Howard had played for the Monarchs in the Negro American League and was signed by the Yankees in 1950. In taking him, Tom Greenwade passed on his teammate Ernie Banks.

Howard made it to the Yankees’ spring training camp in ’54. The sight of a dark-skinned ballplayer in a Yankee uniform was eye-catching, to be sure. Ellie made favorable impressions and hit .351, but was farmed out on April 1. The Yanks kept Ralph Houk and Charlie Silvera as backups to Berra.

Elston then hit .331 for unaffiliated Toronto in 1954, winning the International League’s MVP Award and finishing second to Bill Virdon in batting.

No doubt there were people in the Yankee organization who feared that having negro players would keep away white patrons. Objections to the Yankee “policy” on maintaining an all-white team had gone on for years in the negro newspapers and among civil-rights activists. The argument might have carried more weight had the Yankees not been winning every year with what they had. Perhaps failing to win in ’54 played a part in moving Elston up.

Lee MacPhail, then the Yankees’ farm director, reflected on this years later. “I will agree that the Yankees may have perhaps dragged their feet a little bit,” he told author Jules Tygiel. “I can’t agree there was any racial bias there at all. The Yankees were very anxious that the first black player that they brought up would be somebody with the right type of character whom they felt was ideal. Elston was ideal.”

Wrote Arthur Daley in the
Times
, “Howard doesn’t carry a chip on his shoulder the way the aggressive Robinson does. Nor is he a hearty hail-fellow-well-met the way the popular Roy Campanella is. Elston is a nice, quiet lad of 25 whose reserved, gentlemanly demeanor has won him complete acceptance from every Yankee.”

Like Yogi before him, Elston got special catching instruction from Bill Dickey and would eventually be ready to succeed Berra behind the plate. In the meantime, he gave the Yanks tremendous versatility.

ON MARCH 21, Fishel announced that Howard had made the team. Fishel’s Yankee yearbook presented Howard as just another rookie in ’55, although
in ’56, he would write, “Elston came up to the New Yorkers last spring amid publicity and furor. Despite the pressure, he just played ball and won his manager’s and teammates’ confidence.”

The “publicity and furor” was most noticeable during spring training, when Howard was not allowed in the Soreno Hotel and instead resided in the home of Dr. Ralph Wimbish Sr., the president of the NAACP in Florida. But there would be trouble in the north as well. When the Howards wanted to build a home in Teaneck, New Jersey, there was community resistance, spray-painted epithets on their walls, and silent treatment from some neighbors. But there was also a warm greeting from many others, perhaps owing to Elston’s fame as a Yankee or just people doing the right thing.

Wimbish published a notice in the
St. Petersburg Times
calling on the Yanks and the Cardinals (who shared St. Pete) to lead the fight to end discrimination in the Florida camps, notably the ban on negro players in the team hotels.

Six years later, Dan Topping, disturbed by the lack of progress St. Petersburg had shown in accommodating all the Yankee players equally, announced his intention to move the team’s spring training to Fort Lauderdale. He didn’t reference matters of race, but rather to having a city to themselves. Topping’s action was at least in part a response to the rising voices of the civil-rights movement that were focusing on the absurdity of having men like Howard living in colored boarding houses where they had to answer a dinner bell to eat, rather than sharing a plush dining room in the team’s headquarters hotel with their teammates.

Howard was not, of course, what Robinson was to the Dodgers—the face of the team, the man who brought thousands of negro fans to home games. Nor was he what Mays was to the Giants—the most exciting player on the field. Ellie was a high-quality role player at first, not one who garnered headlines, not one who brought out hoards of new fans. During his time with the Yankees, the population of the Bronx was shifting, the African-American population going from just under 100,000 to more than 350,000 between 1950 and 1970, while the white population dropped from 1.3 million to 1.1 million. But it wasn’t reflected in ballpark attendance. Yankee Stadium remained a “white” place to be. The Major Deegan Expressway, begun in 1937, was finally opened in 1956, providing major highway access from New Jersey, Westchester, and Connecticut to the parking lots around Yankee Stadium, while those in walking distance generally stayed at home.

Howard was no shrinking violet when faced with prejudice, nor did the Yankees expect him to be. His wife, Arlene, could be particularly outspoken about injustice; the people knew not to mess with Arlene.

On April 14, 1955, Ellie entered the game at Fenway Park in the sixth inning after Noren had been ejected. He “came through with a run-scoring single on his first trip to the plate in the big league,” noted the
Times.
“Howard thus became the first Negro to play for the Yankees in a league contest. He received a fine ovation.”

It was not an easy season for him. Team hotels in Kansas City, Chicago, and Baltimore required him to find a separate “negro hotel” to stay in. But on a second trip to Kansas City, Stengel, in the city of his birth, told him to just go into the Muehlebach Hotel like everyone else and get a key. He roomed by himself—he wouldn’t have a roommate until Harry “Suitcase” Simpson became the Yankees’ second black player in 1957—but it was progress. And on the trip to Japan after the season, Howard and Skowron roomed together. Rizzuto and Berra became his very close friends. Bauer was very accepting. In fact, unlike the Dodgers when Robinson broke in, there were no incidents of any players demanding to be traded. It was, by that account, a very easy transition.

WHITEY FORD, NOW the undisputed leader of the staff, had an 18–7 season in ’55 and hurled consecutive one-hitters. It marked the first time that fewer than 20 wins would lead the league in victories. Turley was 17–13, and his 210 strikeouts were the most by a Yankee since 1910, although he also walked 177. Tommy Byrne (who had once walked 179) made a terrific comeback with a 16–5 record for the league’s top winning percentage.

Billy Martin returned from the army on August 31 to give the Yanks a boost down the stretch. On May 13, Mantle had the only three-home-run game of his career, and his first of a record ten games in which he switch-hit homers. Berra won his third MVP Award in five seasons.

AS THE YANKS battled defending champion Cleveland, the Indians went 13–9 against New York, the first time in seven seasons that Stengel’s Yanks lost a season series to anyone.

On Sunday, September 18, the final home date of the schedule, the Yanks beat Boston 3–2 before 54,501 on Phil Rizzuto Day. The day seemed
to energize the team. They were on a run of ten wins in eleven games, and they managed to win their twenty-first pennant by three games.

Once again the World Series pitted the Yankees against the Dodgers, who’d never won a championship and had lost four to the Yanks. Might the “wait ’til next year” have finally ended?

It certainly didn’t appear so after Ford and Byrne won the first two games, even with Mantle sidelined with a pulled leg muscle. Howard homered in his first World Series at-bat, but Robinson was the star of game one, stealing home on a play that Berra argued forever was a wrong call by the umpire.

No team had ever come back from an 0–2 deficit to win a seven-game Series. But moving to Ebbets Field without a travel day, the Dodgers won all three of their home games and led 3–2.

The Series returned to the Bronx, and Ford had the responsibility of saving the Yanks. He responded with a four-hitter, won 5–1, and set the stage for game seven, October 4, before 62,465 at Yankee Stadium.

A good number of Dodger fans were on hand. With season-ticket sales not anywhere near the heights of coming decades, World Series tickets could be had if one was willing to wait out long lines, perhaps overnight. And the New York newspapers loved the photos of the fans “camping out.”

This would be Johnny Podres against Byrne. The Dodgers scored in the fourth and sixth and led 2–0. In the last of the sixth, Sandy Amoros went to left field to replace Jim Gilliam, who had moved to second base in place of Don Zimmer.

Martin, hitting .333 in the Series, led off with a walk, and McDougald beat out a bunt to put two men on. Berra then lined one down the left-field line that had extra-base hit written all over it. It would surely tie the score. But Amoros, who was shading toward center, raced across the outfield grass and made a catch for the ages. At once he whirled and fired to Pee Wee Reese, the cutoff man, who pegged it to Gil Hodges for a double play on McDougald. The ball was hit so hard, and the catch seemed so improbable, that almost any change would have resulted in a hit. Many viewers felt that if Amoros’s glove had been on the other hand, he couldn’t have reached the ball. It was a turning point.

Time was running out. Podres was pitching the game of his life. He set the Yanks down in the eighth and in the ninth got Skowron on a comebacker, Bob Cerv on a fly to left, and Howard on a grounder to Reese at short. “Next year” was here, as the Dodgers won their first and only world championship in Brooklyn.

After the Series, the Yankees headed on a twenty-five-game tour of Hawaii, Japan (including a game in Hiroshima), the Philippines, and Guam, winning twenty-four and tying one. Almost the entire roster and a good part of the front office went, with newlyweds Andy Carey, Johnny Kucks, and Eddie Robinson making honeymoons out of it, and Casey and Edna Stengel celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary.

FOR BASEBALL FANS in 1956, four words said it all: Triple Crown, perfect game.

Mantle was still just twenty-four and had already been making his mark. In his first full season, 1952, he was third in MVP voting. He was the homer king in 1955 with 37. He was starting to show up on magazine covers regularly. Kids were taping his photo to their walls; Mickey Mantle T-shirts were available. He appeared on the
Perry Como Show
. Teresa Brewer recorded “I Love Mickey.”

During spring training in ’56, he hit a ball perhaps 590 feet into an area in right center at Al Lang Field surrounding the St. Petersburg Fountain of Youth. The regular season was no less impressive, with Mantle becoming the first switch-hitter to win a batting title (.353), and to this adding the homer (52) and RBI (130) titles for a Triple Crown and his first of three MVP awards.

On May 30, Mantle, batting left-handed, reached the facade above the upper right-field seats with a shot off Pedro Ramos that had a chance to be the first ball to ever clear Yankee Stadium. The ball struck the green frieze (as some called it) 107 feet above the ground.

He hit only five homers in September; up until then, it looked as if he might break Babe Ruth’s immortal record of 60. He ended August with 47, whereas Ruth had ended August of 1927 with 43. People hadn’t focused on anyone breaking Ruth’s record since Hank Greenberg hit 58 in 1938. (Ralph Kiner had 54 in 1949 and Willie Mays had 51 in 1955, but neither was ahead of Ruth’s pace throughout the summer as Mantle was.)

With eight games left in the season, Ted Williams was leading Mantle in the batting race, .356 to .352. Mick went 4-for-11 in the final week to Ted’s 4-for-24, and wound up eight points over Williams.

An era came to a close on August 25—Old-Timers’ Day—when a batboy found Rizzuto and told him that Stengel and Weiss wanted to see him. Phil hadn’t been playing much, but when he arrived before his two bosses, he
thought they were seeking his opinion on a roster move. They said they had a chance to pick up a big bat for September and wondered who on the roster he thought might be expendable.

Whether naïve to the process or in denial, he named everyone he could think of before realizing it was to be him all the time. He was shocked. He’d been there since 1941 and was being released on Old-Timers’ Day, with many of his old teammates in the house. What further humiliated him was that he was being released to make room for the return of Enos Slaughter (from Kansas City)—a player older than he was!

It was Phil’s good fortune that he bumped into Stirnweiss, who walked him out to his car and told him not to talk to writers and to just give himself a day to cool down. This proved to be perfect advice. Instead of knocking the Yankees, he stewed quietly at home. Not long after, the people from Ballantine Beer and WPIX approached him about moving to the broadcast booth the following year.

It was the start of a new forty-year career for the Scooter, who became one of the most popular sportscasters ever. At first intimidated by working with Mel Allen and Red Barber (Barber had little respect for ex-players becoming overnight broadcasters) and by those unhappy with his forcing Jim Woods out of the booth, Phil cautiously learned the craft. He was at first a very good, almost classic announcer, learning as he did from Allen and Barber. But when he became the senior broadcaster, he developed an endearing manner that turned generations into Yankee fans. He was a pro when it came to reading commercial copy, and his lack of ego made all of his many partners into stars in their own right; but he was Peck’s Bad Boy when it came to slipping out early to beat the traffic, getting distracted by a gift of canoli, writing “WW” in his scorecard for “wasn’t watching,” calling enemy players “huckleberries,” and proclaiming “Ho-leee cow!” for great moments. A great all-time Yankee and future Hall of Famer, he was at once your favorite uncle, teaching the game, decrying the lack of good bunters, and clearly rooting for the Yankees, who, after all, paid him without fail (except for World War II) from 1937 to 1996.