Authors: David Halberstam
In fact, Shannon was very much in the Cardinals’ plans, and in 1964 they called him up, Bing Devine said, to make their outfield complete. They were not thinking batting average, for he was hitting only .278 in Jacksonville, but he was a very good defensive player, with one of the best arms in the league, and he would hit for power, they thought. But the Cardinals were still far back and had not shown any signs of making a pennant run. There was no doubt that the tension and frustration on the team was mounting. As far as Johnny Keane was concerned, the source of this was Dick Groat, the shortstop. Groat was a good player, professional, smart,
and
very heady, but someone to be watched, Keane thought. He had a tendency to be something of a clubhouse lawyer, a man who always seemed to be whispering something to other players, often, Keane was sure, words of discontent. That, in fact, was true—“Whispering Smith,” his teammates called him, after a fictional character of the day—but whether he was the true source of dissidence was another thing. It was true that Groat was down on Keane at this point. Groat liked to use the hit-and-run play and he was very good at it, which was no small achievement, since he was one of the slowest players in the league. That meant Groat had to call for the hit-and-run himself when he was sure the opposing team was completely unprepared, since he could not do it in situations that normally mandated it. Keane had given him permission to do that earlier in the season, but in one game it had backfired, and Keane was so irritated that he had taken away the right to call the play. That, in turn, had angered Groat—it limited his freedom at the plate, and he thought it a too-severe rebuke by an untested manager of a senior player. There was no doubt that he sulked after Keane restricted his freedom, but his teammates did not think he was truly sowing dissension—it was just Groat being Groat. There was always a touch of the shadow manager to him, which was almost inevitable in a player with his exceptional baseball knowledge and whose mind was always in the game.
Still, Keane was angry. Not only was the team playing below expectations, but with the pressure mounting on him to win and his own job in jeopardy, he saw Groat as a challenge to his control. He became determined to flush out the shortstop as a malcontent at a team meeting in New York, where the Cardinals had gone to start the second half of the season after the All-Star Game. The meeting unfolded as a sort of theatrical play in which Johnny Keane had written all the lead parts: Keane got up and told the team that he knew what was going on, that there was someone out there who was always second-guessing him and he was damn well tired of it. It was a curious scene, this normally mild man in a genuine rage, prancing back and forth with his odd little pigeon-toed walk in front of a room of silent players. Whoever was doing it was damn well undermining the team as well, Keane continued, and he was not going to stand for it. “Maybe I’ll lose my goddamn job, but I’ll promise you this—I’m going to take some of you with me,” he said as he finished up. Then he went around the room asking each player if he had any criticism of the way the team was being managed. “Flood, you got anything to say?” Flood said he did not. “Brock, you got anything to say?” Brock said he did not. Eventually he came to Groat. Groat stood up and said, “Well, John, I think you’re talking about me.” “
You’re goddamn right I am,
” Keane said. “John,” Groat continued, “I did not mean to undermine you or to hurt the team. So let me apologize to the team if you think I did.”
Mike Shannon, just called up from the minors, nudged Bob Skinner, a veteran player, who was sitting next to him. “What the hell is this all about?” he asked. Skinner answered, “Mike, whatever you do, don’t say anything. Just keep absolutely silent.” Though Keane had cleared the air, it was not a particularly pleasant experience. All the players, one Cardinal remembered, were looking down at their shoes as Groat’s apology took place, and for many it seemed overkill on the part of Keane, a man whom they quite liked. It was something that should have been settled in private, between the two men. Some of the younger players felt uncomfortable being at a meeting where a grown man had to humble himself so completely when his sins were so small. If anything, some of the players thought, the meeting was more divisive than it was unifying, and it obviously reflected the mounting pressure on Keane and his awareness that, if things continued the way they were, he was on his way to becoming a minor-league manager or a major-league coach once again. Nor did the team rush out later that day and crush the lowly Mets. With two outs and a 3-2 lead in the ninth inning, Curt Simmons threw a change to Frank Thomas, who jumped on the ball and won the game for the Mets, 4–3.
That day Bob Broeg, who was the sports editor of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
was traveling with the team and, since it was the midpoint of the season, he decided to ask the Cardinal players what they thought was wrong. Some of them did not want to talk, and some talked reluctantly, only off the record, but Bill White, the first baseman, was quite willing to talk for the record. What was wrong with the team, he said, was himself. He was supposed to be one of the two power hitters on the team, along with Ken Boyer, and he was not doing the job—knocking in 100 runs as he was supposed to. A year earlier at this time, he said, he had already knocked in 60 runs; this year he had a measly 30, which adjusted for the entire season would come only to 60. Boyer was doing his job, he said, but he, Bill White, was not.
There was a reason for White’s problems. He had hurt his left shoulder during the off-season doing exercises, perhaps, he decided years later, inflicting some damage to the rotator cuff. His shoulder had yet to heal, and since he was a left-handed batter that was extremely damaging, because it robbed him of his power shoulder, the one he used to drive the ball. He had been getting regular shots from the Cardinal doctor, Dr. I. C. Middleman (of whom he was not a great fan, saying in private that the good doctor’s initials stood for I Cut), but none had given him any relief. In a way Bill White was the lineal descendant of George Crowe, though he had not played in the Negro leagues and had not lived through two different ages of black baseball history, as Big Daddy Crowe had. But from the start, in part because of his intelligence and his inner strength, he had been a leader among the black players, and not merely on his own team. When other teams came to St. Louis, the black players tended to check in with Bill White and talk with him about whatever was on their minds. White, too, was an impressive man physically, well muscled, so powerfully built that some of his teammates marveled that someone so big and strong and potentially muscle-bound could get around on the ball so quickly with his bat. White had not really wanted to be a professional baseball player, and had actually entered college, hoping to become a doctor. However, his athletic skill and the early offers to sign a baseball contract were too good to refuse.
He was exceptionally fair-minded and, as such, an immensely valuable teammate, for he had the ability to rise above his own problems to comprehend the complex feelings and motivations of others, instead of merely reacting with his emotions. He understood almost perfectly the historic moment when the black players had finally arrived, how much was invested in them on the part of those who had never had a chance to succeed and those who might come after, and he was determined that he and those blacks around him would use this great moment not just to play well but to make an even larger statement about black purpose and black ability. He was unsparing in his judgments about himself and the other black players. Long after Solly Hemus had been fired, he was capable of getting on Bob Gibson, if Gibson was having trouble with his control. There had been one game in 1962 when Gibson was pitching with the bases loaded and had walked a weak-hitting batter to force in a run. White had yelled at Gibson (as probably no one else on the team would have dared to), “Come on, Bob, you got on Solly for not using you, and now you got your chance and you’re not doing the job. Maybe Solly was right. Maybe you don’t belong here.”
Nor did his demand for excellence, for playing hard and doing your best, extend merely to his own teammates. The previous year there had been a young black player with Cincinnati who was obviously irate about not playing enough, and he had come up as a pinch hitter late in a game. He dogged the at bat, standing at the plate and taking three straight strikes, the bat never leaving his shoulder. After the game Bill White sought the player out and told him, “Listen, you cut that crap out. We can’t afford to do stuff like that. You’re hurting
everybody
when you do that. A lot of people worked very hard for us to be here and we’re not going to blow this chance.” Bill White seemed to know how to handle not just baseball but life, gaining the respect of everyone he met. Barnstorming with black players in 1960, Bob Boyle, a writer for
Sports Illustrated,
had been intrigued by the black baseball slang. “Was there any one of the black players who never cut a hog [and thereby never disgraced himself]?” he asked a couple of black players. “Only Bill White,” one of them said.
Bill White was one of those forceful and determined men who seemed strengthened by the adversity he had faced growing up. He was born in the Florida panhandle in 1934, but came north to Warren, Ohio, as an infant. His family had been sharecroppers who picked cotton for generations and became part of the great migration north that began in the earlier part of this century. Six brothers and three sisters, along with their mother, eventually moved to Ohio. The young men in the family found work in the steel mills, first one member arriving, and then another, each living with the other for a time and then finding a place of his own. In time, seven of Bill White’s uncles were in the Warren steel mills, which was hard and demanding work. The family matriarch was his maternal grandmother. Tamar Young was a dominating figure, called “Mother” by every one of her children and grandchildren. She ruled the family with an iron hand and a strong belief in the value of the switch to discipline children. Bill White’s father was not a presence in his life, for he had left the family early on; White’s mother was a sensitive woman who should have gone to college, but had lacked the money even though she had been the best student in her high school class.
Growing up, White remembered the singular forcefulness of his grandmother. In her politics and her attitude toward white people she was, he recalled later, not unlike the Black Muslims who surfaced in the sixties. Her hostility toward whites was uncompromising: she blamed them for stealing black people away from their native land, and for selling them into slavery; she blamed them for passing on their vices and diseases to blacks; and she blamed them for the alcoholism she saw all around. She was at once very antiwhite and very religious, a true believer in the literal word of the Bible. She was determined that no one in her family was going to slip into the failure and degradation that she believed whites had deliberately inflicted on black people. No one in her family was going to drink. No one was to use profanity. Everyone went to church. No one was to steal. The grandchildren had to be in the house by sundown. On one occasion when Bill White was five years old and his mother was reluctant to spank him for some minor infraction of the house rules, his grandmother took up a switch and punished both her daughter and her grandson. The essential code of the family was simple: life was filled with prejudice and injustice, and it was each member’s individual job not to succumb but to succeed, despite the efforts of those who would denigrate them.
In some ways his experience with racial prejudice was slow in coming. In elementary school black and white children socialized, but later, he realized, as they entered junior high school, the socializing ended; parties were now segregated, and the black children were no longer invited. Similarly, at school dances he realized that the black children were on one side of the room and the whites on the other. As a football star and a boy with a powerful presence he had seemed likely to be voted student-body president, but the opposing forces deftly entered another black student as a candidate, the black vote was split, and he lost. He was, however, elected senior-class president, but at the class dance the adults chaperoning arranged things so that for the first time in recent history the class president did not dance the first dance with the queen of the class, who was white. His athletic ability in high school helped get him into college, and though a number of larger schools were interested in him, he chose Hiram College in Ohio, because it was said to prepare students well for medical school and it seemed to be a comfortable place. He got a grant of $250, which was to be applied against an annual bill of $750.
In 1952, when he was eighteen, Bill White caught the eye of a scout named Alan Fey at an amateur tournament and was recommended to the New York Giants. Their early sorties into the black world had yielded, among others, Willie Mays, and with that success the Giants decided to double their efforts in that direction. Soon Tony Ravish, who was further up in the Giants’ hierarchy, showed up and smiled his approval on White as a prospect. Ravish took him to Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, where the Giants were playing (and which later turned out to be one of his favorite parks to hit in), and they signed him that day for $2,500 plus a new pair of baseball shoes, given him by Leo Durocher, the manager. They promised to let him come to spring training in Phoenix, and also that he would make the big leagues in three years. Cleveland was after him at the same time, but he preferred the Giants because the massive Luke Easter was playing first base for Cleveland, which seemed to eliminate his natural position. Ironically, by the time he arrived in the major leagues, in 1956, Luke Easter was gone from the Indians, and both Orlando Cepeda and Willie McCovey were moving up in the Giants’ farm system, potentially ready to challenge him for the Giant first-base job.
White mentioned to Tony Ravish that there was a catcher on another team who he thought was a very good ballplayer, but Ravish, having seen the catcher, was not interested. “That guy has a little bitty skinny neck,” he said, reflecting the physiological biases of the time, “and we never sign a player with a turkey neck. Those guys never grow and fill out.” Size and power were the critical parts of the new Giant mandate, and that became clear to White when he showed up at his first instructional camp in Melbourne, Florida. Over the next few weeks, he played with Willie McCovey, then tall and somewhat skinny, but still awesomely strong—when White would hit a home run of 350 feet, McCovey would seem to answer with one of 370 feet. In other camps they were joined by Leon Wagner, Orlando Cepeda, Willie Kirkland, and, at different times, various members of the Alou family. The godfather of the nonwhite players in those days, both American blacks and Hispanic blacks, was an intriguing figure named Alex Pompez, who had owned a black baseball team; he was unusually proud of his ability not so much to scout black talent as to spirit it out of the Caribbean countries, which was not always easily done. Pompez was designated to baby-sit these young players in Melbourne, and he became something of a cult figure to them, telling them what was expected of them in the big leagues, and what life in the Negro leagues had been like, and how he had existed in the numbers racket until the mob had squeezed him out. His favorite story was how he signed the great Minnie Minoso in Cuba for his team in the Negro leagues. He arrived in Havana to get the man who scouts said was the best player in Cuban baseball at that time, but his early advances toward Minoso were not successful. Depressed at his failure, Pompez was about to return to New York when he was having his shoes shined at his hotel. “You’re Pompez, the baseball man from New York,” the shoeshine man said. Pompez said he was right. “You’re here to sign Minoso, our greatest player,” the man added. Pompez said that that top was right and asked how the man had known. “Because I am a
brujo
[pronounced broo-ho],” he said, using the local word for witch doctor. Then the witch doctor made a prediction: if Pompez went to Minoso’s house the next night at six
P.M.,
Minoso would be ready to sign. Pompez did that, and found a rather terrified Minoso waiting eagerly to sign a contract. “How did you know he would sign?” Pompez asked his friendly
brujo
the next day. “Because if he did not his leg would have been broken,” the
brujo
explained.