Authors: David Halberstam
Finally, in desperation, the Cardinals sent for Clyde King, the top pitching instructor in their minor-league system. Bing Devine thought that King, who had a good eye for any hitch in a pitcher’s motion, might be able to pick something up. King flew in, studied Gibson, and decided that he had found a slip in Gibson’s motion on his slider: it was a barely detectable deviation that made the ball come in, if not slower, certainly fatter, with a significantly less sharp break as it reached the plate. It was the difference that baseball men said existed between the dime spin and the quarter spin on the slider. What they were talking about was the tightness of the spin as it was formed by the pitcher’s release: a dime spin, delivered with the proper release and snap, was smaller and tighter, and the break that accompanied it was sharper and more abrupt when it reached the plate, thus it was much harder to hit; the quarter spin was bigger and lazier, offering a better target to hitters. Gibson, like many pitchers who had slipped out of their groove, was coming under the ball slightly with his hand as he released it, thus
pushing
it somewhat, rather than positioning his hand and wrist correctly and driving the ball to get maximum break.
King’s visit helped. Gradually during the month of August, Gibson began to work back toward his groove. It was a hard time for him, his friend and battery mate McCarver thought. He was not so much angry as he was frustrated, and a frustrated Gibson was not an entirely pleasant phenomenon; weakness was the enemy of all athletes, and far more than most, Gibson resisted giving in to weakness. He hated the fact that he was burdening his teammates, rather than leading them.
How Bob Gibson felt on any given day mattered greatly to the St. Louis Cardinals. His was a towering presence on the field and in the clubhouse as well; his peer influence was all the more remarkable because he was a pitcher, not an everyday player. He played only every four or five days, and yet somehow he was gradually becoming the heart and soul of this team. If George Crowe had been the dominating figure in the past, and among the black players in the present it was still Bill White, then clearly the future belonged to Bob Gibson. McCarver watched his friend struggle that month, and kept his distance; he learned early on when to approach Gibson and when not to. A troubled Bob Gibson approached you; you did not approach a troubled Bob Gibson. They were becoming in that season not just teammates but friends. How Gibson worked out his relationship with McCarver was important not just to the two of them, but to the team as a whole. They were two of the strongest players on the team, and each was just coming of age. McCarver was the white son of a policeman in Memphis, one of the most segregated of cities. He was a raw and passionate athlete, driven to succeed no less than Gibson was. Ted Simmons, who came into the Cardinal organization a few years later, as the team was deciding to phase out McCarver, was intrigued by the two men. Simmons thought of Gibson admiringly as Wolf: predatory, loyal, powerful, dominating, single-minded, and with a singular instinct to find the weakness in others. Simmons equally admired McCarver, whom he thought of as Dog. The nickname Dog was not pejorative, for Simmons thought of McCarver as a fierce junkyard dog, utterly fearless, almost violent in protecting his territory, scrapping for every inch of turf, contesting everything on the field, reaching again and again beyond his natural abilities because he was so competitive.
They were to become the best of friends, McCarver and Gibson, with an enduring mutual admiration and trust. Baseball friendships could often be casual, based on whether a team did or did not trade a particular player to another team. But there was nothing casual about Bob Gibson; he had no choice over whom his teammates were, but he had a great deal of choice in his friendships. Generally in the baseball locker room, the better the player, the more popular he was and the more friends he had. That was not true of Gibson; if he was, as some teammates thought, a kind of samurai warrior on the mound, he was equally rigorous in his life. For him, friendship was based not just on ability, it was based on what kind of a
man
a teammate was; how he treated others, what he really believed in. McCarver, six years younger, was just establishing himself as Gibson’s catcher. Their relationship did not start well. There was from the start the powerful but invisible difference in the way that the white society in those days treated a white boy like McCarver as a local hero, while a comparable black youth of perhaps even greater ability rarely got any journalistic attention; as he did not get journalistic attention, he did not become a star, and that had a direct impact on his price as a bonus baby. McCarver, a heralded schoolboy athlete, signed with the Cardinals for a bonus of $75,000 and moved up quickly through the Cardinal organization. Gibson, a few years older than McCarver, and most assuredly as gifted an athlete, resented that—in the light of his signing bonus of $4,000. When McCarver first came up in 1959, young and unsure of himself, fresh out of a world of Southern white boys, he was raw meat for Gibson, someone to be tested, and Gibson had an early go at him. The Cardinals were on their bus, and McCarver sat sipping an orange soda. “That looks really good,” said Gibson as he went by him on the bus. “Can I have a swig?” Gibson knew, of course, that a young Southern white boy’s mind was filled with ideas that black people carried more and different germs and yet he knew McCarver would be afraid of angering an important pitcher on a team he had not yet made. McCarver, who had never shared anything with a black man, let alone something as intimate as a soft drink, looked at the bottle of orange soda, and then at the deadly serious face of Bob Gibson, and mumbled something. “What was that?” Gibson asked, as if he could not hear. “I’ll save you some,” McCarver said. Gibby was just checking him out, McCarver realized later.
Gibson was always acutely aware of the different reactions of people to Bob Gibson the professional baseball player, and Bob Gibson the black man. White people often craved the friendship of the former, and sought his autograph and his friendship at dinner. But how would the same people treat him on the street? He
hated
it when white people made assumptions about him, when they noticed his careful dress, jacket and tie, and assumed that a black man that well dressed must be a minister. He never lost his wariness, and indeed, the more successful he became, the warier he became. In McCarver’s case, there were lessons and cultural habits to be unlearned. There was a terrible day in spring training one year that McCarver long regretted, when a young black kid slipped over the fence and stole some baseballs, and McCarver yelled something at him. Years later McCarver thought he had said, “Hey, stop that, you little cannibal,” while Gibson thought he had used the word
nigger.
McCarver looked up to see both Bob Gibson and Curt Flood studying him. He was embarrassed and later tried to apologize to Gibson. Gibson told him there was no need to apologize to him. But what he was really saying was: What you have to do is figure out why you said it. There was also the time McCarver was about to leave the locker room when he noticed a black man waiting for Gibson. He went back in to tell the pitcher, “There’s a colored guy waiting for you. He says he’s got a date with you.” “Oh,” said Gibson, “which color is he?” It was, McCarver came to understand, Gibson pushing him to be a better man and therefore a better friend as well.
As the distance between the two men closed, their relationship became tinged with humor. “Hey, Timmy,” Gibson once asked, “do you know how a white boy shakes hands with a Negro?” McCarver said he did not. So Gibson trotted out Curt Flood as his straight man, and they shook hands—Gibson the white boy, Flood the black. Afterward Gibson looked down at his hand a little self-consciously and wiped it against his pants. “You’ve done it before, haven’t you, Tim?” Gibson asked, and McCarver thought to himself,
Goddamn, he’s right,
and he admitted that he
had
done it before. The more Gibson teased McCarver, the more secure their friendship became.
Gibson did an exceptional imitation of McCarver, particularly on those occasions when the ball popped out of his glove. “Gigub,” he would yell, like a frog on a lily pad before he jumped into the water. Soon the rest of the team would yell it too, and McCarver became known as McGigub. By the middle of the 1964 season McCarver knew that he had earned Gibson’s respect as a professional baseball player. There were more and more occasions when the Sadeckis, the Gibsons, and McCarver and his fiancée went to dinner together. The signs of acceptance from Gibson were often subtle. He did not lightly go over to people and tell them that he liked them a lot, or that he thought they were great ballplayers. One had to be skillful in knowing how to read him. One year McCarver had led the league in triples, and the following spring he hit a triple in an exhibition game. Gibson said to him after the game, “Hey, you like to hit triples,” and it was something of a magic moment, McCarver thought. It was as if Gibson were saying, McCarver, you’re all right and you’re a pretty good ballplayer, and you may be all right as a man as well.
T
HE YANKEE SCOUT FIRST
saw the young pitcher in 1959 at a high school all-star game in New Jersey, and he liked what he saw: an incredibly smooth delivery, and an exceptional natural fastball. He went over to the boy, who was soon to be eighteen, and who turned out to be well spoken and thoughtful. The boy had pitched only two innings and had been somewhat disappointed that day in his own performance, but the scout reassured him and started checking in regularly—how he was doing, where he had pitched, whether he still intended to go to college, as he had first said. It was a scene almost as old as professional baseball, but now there was a new twist to it: both the boy and the scout were black, and the scout was working for the New York Yankees, one of the last teams to get around to entering the chase for talented black players. The boy’s name was Al Downing, and in time he would become the first black pitcher for the Yankees. The scout’s name was Bill Yancey, and he would one day enter both the Negro Baseball Hall of Fame in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. Denied the chance to play in both sports, Yancey, like Buck O’Neil, had become a professional scout, first for the Milwaukee Braves, who had been quick to seek the best young black players. Yancey developed a strong relationship with Roy Harney, the general manager of the Braves in the fifties. In the late fifties, when Harney worked for a brief time as the general manager of the Yankees, Yancey continued to scout for him, though he remained wary of the Yankees as an organization.
Yancey believed he had found in Downing the young man who might become the first black pitcher for the Yankees. Aware of the pitfalls ahead for any talented young player, but particularly for a talented young black player who bore the burden of being the first at anything, he was extraordinarily gentle and careful to nurture his recruit. He called him often and dropped by the Downing house regularly. Soon he became Uncle Bill to Downing, and his wife, a stunning woman who had once been a dancer at the Cotton Club, became Aunt Louise. She was also the standard by which Yancey compared disappointing prospects, as in “Louise can hit better than that,” or “Louise has a better arm than that young man.” Aware that Downing was thinking of going to college on a basketball scholarship, Yancey encouraged him to try college, telling him that baseball would always be there for him. When, after a year of college, Downing decided he wanted to try professional baseball, Yancey brought him to the Yankees. “I won’t sign anybody,” he told Downing, “that I don’t think can pitch in the major leagues.”
The Yankees were the right organization for him, Yancey thought, not just because they were ready to correct their lack of black players, but also because Downing was a left-hander and the Yankees always needed left-handers in that park; at that moment there were precious few talented ones in their farm system. He got Downing a bonus of sixteen thousand dollars. He could have gotten him a little more, he told the boy, but he preferred to use his extra leverage to start Downing a little higher in the Yankee farm system. It was better to begin in Class B rather than D, because if he started in D, he would have to burn up that much more time and energy climbing up the minor-league ladder. Only later did Al Downing realize how shrewd Yancey had been, thinking from the start in long-range terms. In addition, Yancey was trying to minimize the years Downing would have to play in small Southern towns. A few weeks after he signed, Downing was at Yancey’s house and they were watching a game together. Juan Pizarro, a gifted left-hander from Puerto Rico, was pitching for Milwaukee. “You see him?” Yancey asked. “You think he’s a good pitcher?” Downing said yes, he did. “You’ll be better than him,” Yancey said. That was thrilling, the fact that Bill Yancey thought he would be better than Juan Pizarro, who was already pitching in the big leagues.
Yancey, Downing later thought, was an uncommon man, who was determined to make sure that Downing had some sense of the past as well—of his roots, and of those who had gone before him. So as Yancey became closer to Downing, he would come by on Sundays to pick him up and take him to the homes of some of the old-timers from the Negro leagues, such as Judy Johnson and Pop Lloyd, and he would introduce Downing to them. “Hey, Yank,” they would say as they met, “is this the kid?” There was something thrilling in that, that he was “The Kid,” and that these legendary men of the Negro leagues knew about him, talked about him when he was not there, and in some way were counting on him to make it. There was, Downing thought, something wonderful about watching Yancey with his old teammates from the Harlem Rens or the New York Black Yankees. Very few of them had money and most of them lived simply. But they had the gifts of laughter and camaraderie. They had shared a great deal: bad bus trips, being cheated on their promised pay by shady local promoters, white and black, and being run out of certain towns if they dared to beat a local white team. They
knew
they had been good enough to play in the major leagues, and they had often barnstormed on all-Negro teams against white All-Star teams from the majors; they would mention a white player of considerable reputation and would laugh and say, “Hey, we hit him, we hit him good”—though it was true that they retained a very considerable respect for the fastball of Bob Feller. It was clear to Downing that Yancey was taking him on these jaunts to show him there were men who had gone before him and who had not had the chance that Al Downing was getting. He owed it to them to succeed.