|
In an earlier time, an NBC radio sportscaster filled our Saturday nights with rousing stories. His name was Bill Stern, a.k.a. “The Colgate Shave Cream Man,” and here is one of Bill Stern’s memorable gems.
A President lay dying. Aides stood somberly about a long brass bed. At length, the President opened his eyes and motioned for a general to come closer. With his last breaths, the President said: “Keep baseball going. America needs the game.”
As Stern built to an amazing climax, his voice crackled. “That general’s name was Abner Doubleday. The dying President who pleaded for baseball was [ pause for dramatic effect ] Abraham Lincoln! . . .And now a message from our sponsor.”
Is this story true? Not even close. Stern’s fables ran so wild that serious journalists came to mock him as “Ol’ Stern-O.” Although Doubleday commanded troops at Gettysburg, there is no evidence that he became close to Lincoln. Besides, after John Wilkes Booth fired the fateful bullet, the President did not regain consciousness... But truth is not the point right here. Thousands, perhaps millions, of Americans, believed Stern’s Lincoln -baseball story. Across all my days, baseball, like Abe Lincoln, has been larger than life.
In actuality the game rose after the civil war, without help from Lincoln, or Robert E. Lee either, for that matter. People began to have more leisure time and franchises developed from Boston to St. Louis, from Brooklyn to Milwaukee. In 1876, the year of Custer’s Last Stand, the Chicago Cubs won the first National League pennant with a righthander named Albert Goodwill Spalding, later the sporting goods tycoon, starting almost every day. Spalding posted an implausible record: 47 and 13. Refinements followed and when the World Series began in 1903, the game assumed the general outline we know today.
As the author Donald Honig has pointed out, baseball’s ascendency coincided with the end of the American frontier. Once the country found its heroes in the Wild West. Such formidable characters as Kit Carson, Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp seized imaginations with their six-shooters. Now with the frontier settled, the nation turned inward and found new heroes on green grass nearer home. No guns and bullets. Bats and balls. These names were Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson and presently Babe Ruth. Then, in 1947, yet another baseball hero began the major-league career that made the greatest impact of them all. This was Jack Roosevelt Robinson of Cairo, Ga., Pasadena, Ca and Brooklyn, N.Y.
A history of baseball is, of course, a part of American history, and nowhere is this confluence quite so dramatic as in the thorny issue of American racism. In 1868 baseball’s governing body. the National Association of Base Ball Players, announced a ban on "any club including one or more colored persons." When the NABBP splintered in 1871, professional teams no longer were restricted by the bigotry rule.
In 1884, one Moses Fleetwood Walker, an African-American, played part of a season for the Toledo Blue Stockings of the then major-league American Association. He was a competent, if not outstanding, hitter and probably the best defensive catcher of his time. Fleet Walker came from an upper middle-class background. He was born in, Ohio, the son of Dr. Moses W. Walker, the first African-American physician in the village of Mount Pleasant. He enrolled in Oberlin in 1878 and played on the college's first varsity baseball team in 1881. He transferred to the University of Michigan law school the following fall. Walker played varsity baseball for Michigan in 1882. With Toledo two years later, he batted 263 in 42 games.
Toledo finished eighth in a twelve-team league and Fleet Walker was released... No baseball blacklist was formally announced -- blacklists seldom are – for the next 62 years no black man, however glorious his talents, was allowed to play major league ball.
Walker persisted in the minor leaguers, town ball, struggling, and then in a Syracuse bar six white toughs assaulted him, Walker reached for his knife, stabbed one in the gut. The man bled death and police arrested Walker. Charged with second degree murder, he won acquittal/ But these fearsome events took a toll.. In 1908 Fleet Walker, baseball’s spurned catcher, published a 47-page pamphlet titled Our Home Colony: A Treatise on the Past, Present, and Future of the Negro Race in America. In that pamphlet he recommended African Americans immigrate to Africa: "the only practical and permanent solution of the present and future race troubles in the United States is entire separation by emigration of the Negro from America." He warned "The Negro race will be a menace and the source of discontent as long as it remains in large numbers in the United States. The time is growing very near when the whites of the United States must either settle this problem by deportation, or else be willing to accept a reign of terror such as the world has never seen in a civilized country.” Read today, these lines are nothing less than chilling. They are the cold and bitter fruit of bigotry. Unfulfilled and forgotten, Fleet Walker died on May 11, 1924 in Cleveland, Ohio, when Jackie Robinson was five years old.
It was my great fortune to cover Robinson for the New York Herald Tribune during some of Jack’s great Brooklyn Dodger years. As Leo Durocher, then managing the Giants. put it grudgingly, “Robinson comes to beat ya. He plays a ton.” Triumphing over waves of prejudice, Robinson led the Dodgers to six pennants in ten years. School integration and all the rest came after Jack’s thrilling breakthrough. As Branch Rickey, the man who signed him, summed up, “A great thing about a box score is that it tells you how many hits a man has made and how many bases he has stolen. But it says not word about his color.”
Watching baseball in the 1930s, you sensed effects from the Great American Depression. Everybody on the ball field hustled hard all the time. The alternative to hustling? Virtual starvation. “When I made the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1934,” Cookie Lavagetto, a fine third baseman and later a manager. told me once, “it was a great day for the family. Back home in Oakland five people named Lavagetto came off the home relief.” At the time salaries were modest; $7,500 a year was good big-league pay. But in many cases that not only bought the pork chops, it literally saved the family home
Although the fabled Cincinnati Red Stockings played some games in California as long ago as 1869, Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis was the only major-league field situated west of the Mississippi, well into the 1950s. Population shifts had long called for expansion and with the introduction of jet airliners, California lay open for development. The great mover here was heavy-jowled, cigar-smoking Walter O’Malley, an amazing baseball man who looked like a caricature of a Tammany Hall politician. O’Malley relocated his Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. It is a measure of the passion baseball engenders in America, that old Brooklynites to this day rank O’Malley with Benedict Arnold. But the West Coast today has wonderful big-league playgrounds in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
More recently big league ball has gone international, matching America’s global trade and booming passion for travel. Big-league ball players used to come from Peoria or from a dozen towns called Springfield. They still do but now their team mates come from Osaka, Caracas, or Willemstad, the charming capital of the Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao. When fielders huddle around a pitcher these days, you can get the feel of a United Nations meeting.
Baseball surely reflects America but what to me is the game’s greatest accomplishment, leading the country into integration, remains unmatched. When I wrote earlier that baseball rose without the help of Abraham Lincoln, I was not entirely correct. Where would baseball be, where would any of us be, without the Emancipation Proclamation?
|
