There is likely no image in baseball history as consummate, as metaphorically rich and breathtakingly pure, as that of Willie Mays’s backside, running down the deep cavern of the Polo Grounds centerfield, head up and glove up higher, with the baseball descending to him, 450 or so feet from its launch off of Vic Wertz’s bat, late in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series. It is pure baseball, and the choice of this image for the cover of Bill Madden’s homage to that great season seems both inspired and pleasantly obvious. The greatest player making the greatest play on the greatest stage.
But Madden’s narrative is oblique to this sort of “pure baseball nostalgia”; indeed, his subtitle pushes out into the sociological waters that his forebears in New York sportswriting had skirted or loosely handled at the time, and his work is equal parts celebration and indictment of baseball’s early days of integration. It’s a tough narrative to latch onto, in one sense, because it’s the season itself, other than any individual player or team, that is the protagonist, so that there is not particular thread, but a kind of tapestry, a mix of social issues and tensions woven into the on-the-field tensions of batting races and pennant races. The episodic feel of the book is occasionally frustrating, since we never stay with one player (not even Mays, certainly not Larry Doby, who broke the color barrier in the AL a few months after Jackie Robinson’s debut in the NL, and whom Madden once discussed helping with a full-length memoir) long enough to feel we know the person beneath the player. Madden creates the longing to know the men, but we end up knowing the times, especially the times for baseball, which are glorious and transitional and full of hidden slights. To the author’s credit, things never get soap-operatic, and he keeps returning to the games, to the standings, to the day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month slog of the major league season, with the ebbs and flows and constant streaks and tensions: the season, the flow of time, the inevitability of change and of triumph beside tragedy, seems to be the protagonist from start to finish.
That being said, the issue of race and of racism and of its opposite, true community, are paramount in Madden’s story. Of course (and sadly), ironies abound. Madden frames his tale around the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision to desegregate American public schools, and he points out that Baltimore was the first southern city to do so. But at the same time, with the St. Louis Browns moving to Baltimore and becoming the Orioles for the 1954 season, the rude awakening for the few black players in the American League was that Baltimore’s hotels were still decisively segregated. Indeed, rather surprisingly, “seven years after Jackie Robinson broke the color line in baseball that had existed since the game’s origin in 1876, half of the sixteen major league clubs—the New York Yankees, Pittsburgh Pirates, Boston Red Sox, Detroit Tigers, Cincinnati Reds, St. Louis Cardinals, Philadelphia Phillies, and Washington Senators—still had not integrated as of spring training 1954.” The Yankees come in for substantial vilification here, for their willingness to sign but not to promote or develop black players; they traded away rising stars Vic Power and Ruben Gomez before they made the big club, and eventual All-Star catcher Elston Howard was inexplicably loaned to Toronto of the International League for the whole of the 1954 season, though he’d been starring in the Negro Leagues and the high minors for seven years! (Just to spread the blame around a bit, though, the Cardinals had refused to sign Howard in 1947, even though he starred at a hometown high school and their lead scout, George Sisler, Jr. , said “I worked him out for two days and I’d stake my job on his ability to make it. But they won’t let me sign him.”) Furthermore, Madden indicts the Yankees and their icy brass are blamed for forcing Bill Veeck to sell the Browns to Baltimore, for colluding to keep Veeck out of the Los Angeles big-league market for which he owned the rights, forcing the sale of the Philadelphia A’s from Connie Mack’s sons to Yankee-friendly owners in Kansas City at the end of 1954 (and hence making KC more or less a major league feeder club for talent heading to New York). And these are the Yankee glory days?! Madden definitely casts a pall on the legends of the “golden age.”
For teams that actually were integrating, the sudden and drastic thrusting of black players into the ranks often leaps out. The careful preparations whereby Branch Rickey sent Jackie Robinson to play in Montreal for a year, and famously worked his amateur psychology to assure that Robinson would know what he was in for, seemed to have been the exception rather than the rule. The Cubs had done a junior version of the Yankees by leaving their major-league worthy black shortstop Gene Baker to play for four seasons as an all-star in the Pacific Coast League without a call-up, but when they did decide to integrate in late 1953, they signed Ernie Banks from the Kansas City Monarchs and immediately put him on a bus to Chicago. As Banks narrates it, “I went down to the clubhouse to get my uniform, looked around and saw all these guys, Ralph Kiner, Hank Sauer, and I’m saying, ‘Ho-ly! It’s the major leagues!’ But I’ll be honest, I was a little uncertain about being there. I wanted to stay with the Monarchs. I was raised in Dallas in a time of segregation. I didn’t understand integration. This was a whole different world for me. I had no fear—I learned that from the Bible. But I had lived in a black community, went to a black school, played sports at a black YMCA, played baseball for a black team with a black manager, and that was all I’d ever known.” But there were some gains amidst these travails: the Cubs opened 1954 with Banks at shortstop and Baker at second base, giving them baseball’s first black double-play combination. Likewise, the Indians teamed their all-star CF Larry Doby with rookies Al Smith in LF and Dave Pope in RF on August 6, creating baseball’s first all-black outfield—though, if anything, Doby’s introduction to the majors had been more shocking than Banks’s. Doby had been batting .458 for the Newark Eagles of the Negro Leagues in 1947 when Bill Veeck, then owner of the Indians, called on July 3, “telling him to report two days later to Comiskey Park in Chicago, where the Indians were playing a series with the White Sox. As Doby further recalled, his welcome to the big leagues as the first black player in the American League was anything but warm and congenial. Not until 1954 was Doby finally allowed to stay with the team during spring training in Tucson, as the team pressured the hotel to relaxed its segregationist policies.
Even if the steps towards racial equity, both inside and outside baseball, were still tiny in the mid-Fifties, Madden does capture certain hopeful turns, especially the dynamic of the central team in his story, the eventual world champion New York Giants. None of the players on the team was a crusader for race relations like Jackie Robinson or, among white players, Ted Williams—indeed, Madden relates that just a few years ago, Mays was still elusive on the question: “When I posed my first question to him about the ’54 Giants championship team’s unusual dynamic for that time, in which the core players were composed of so many white players from the South and three blacks—Mays, Monte Irvin, and Hank Thompson—he quickly cut me off. ‘I ain’t talkin’ about race,’ Mays said. ‘I’ll talk about anything else you want—the games, the World Series, Leo, whatever. But I don’t ever talk about race.’ ” And yet Monte Irvin affirmed to Madden that “none of those Giants talked about race. It just wasn’t an issue with them,” and so Mays’ avoidance was perhaps more genuine than it might seem. This team was strange, in ways baffling and ultimately remarkable.
The key player for this team’s successes was obviously Mays, who had missed the previous year and a half to military service, and whose return had Giants GM Chub Feeney (later president of the National League and one-time Jeopardy contestant!) singing a refrain to the press in the spring of ’54: “‘In six more days … in five more days … in four more days … we’re gonna have Willie Mays.” When Mays finally arrived, manager Leo Durocher bear-hugged him and began to shower him with gifts of clothing and jewelry. Monte Irvin noted that “Leo did all these things for Willie and forgot about all the rest of us. I remember Alvin Dark saying half-kidding one day, ‘Hey, are we still part of the team?’ ” Such behavior would seem tailor-made to create a cancer of favoritism in the clubhouse, especially with a team composed of a core of white southern players like Dark, Whitey Lockman, and Dusty Rhodes, but “there was no jealousy of Mays; rather, Mays’s effervescent personality and passion for the game endeared him to the southerners. He brought laughter to the clubhouse, and they had fun with him because he could also laugh at himself.” And he could play like no one ever had, or ever would. The first spring training split-squad game, Durocher waited to insert Willie, building the drama, then the team witnessed a 420-foot home run, a diving catch, and an over-the-shoulder catch in center, and then the patented catch-pivot-300-foot throw to double off a runner. “It was as though a bolt of lightning had struck and electrified the entire Giants’ spring training complex.”
But if Willie was the key performer on the team from day one, it was Alvin Dark who was the key figure, the captain with the athletic pedigree to match Mays (Dark had been in the same backfield at LSU with NFL Hall of Famer Steve Van Buren) and a burning competitive drive. There had been some concern when the Giants acquired Dark in 1949 that the shortstop would balk at playing beside black third-baseman Hank Thompson. “What they didn’t know was that, as [a] youngster in Lake Charles, Dark’s family lived a few blocks from the predominantly black area and that Dark frequently participated in neighborhood pickup games in which the blacks and whites mixed harmoniously.” And Dark’s deference and affection toward Willie remained undaunted a half-century later, at a reunion of the surviving members of the ’54 team held at SBC Park in San Francisco, where Dark lauded Willie as the “the greatest player I’ve ever seen. The best all-around player. The greatest,” and then Mays rose to a silent room and “looking down at Dark, the team captain, who lived his whole life in the South and, years earlier, as manager of the Giants, had been accused of having inherent racist views when a New York sportswriter for Newsday quoted him as questioning the ‘mental alertness’ of black and Hispanic players, Mays said, ‘I just want everyone here in this room to know I learned more about baseball from Alvin Dark than anyone else. More than from Monte here, more than from my father, more than from Leo. I love you, Alvin.’ For a moment Dark sat there and wept. Then he rose to embrace Mays, as the rest of his teammates got up from their tables to do the same.” In a narrative about the imperfections and immaturities of the baseball establishment in embracing integration, Madden’s finale here provides a transcendent glimpse of the possibilities of kinship across all boundaries.
But, oh yeah, there was a baseball season in 1954, with a neophyte Cactus League spring training in Arizona that had the Giants scrimmaging the Indians no less than 21 times, in a World Series preview no one could have anticipated in light of the Yankees and Dodgers having dominated in 1953. There was the rollicking pennant race in the AL, with Casey Stengel leading the Yankees to 103 wins, his most in 12 seasons with the club, but losing out to Al Lopez’s Indians—the integrated team beating out the all-white defending champs (though Larry Doby’s HR and RBI crowns were not enough to give him the MVP, as Yogi Berra, the man he’d outslugged in the final week, 12 RBIs to 1, got the inexplicable nod). There was the native of Mexico, Bobby Avila of the Indians, beating out the black native of Cuba, Minnie Minoso, for the AL batting crown, in a historic showing. In the National League, there was the tight three-way pennant race, as the Giants held off first their arch-rivals, the Dodgers, then the late-charging Braves (whose clean-up hitting rookie Henry Aaron would likely have been the Rookie of the Year had he not broken his ankle, and the Braves hopes, late in the season). Likewise, the NL batting race was three-way affair, with two Giants (the slap-hitting leftfielder Don Mueller and, of course, Mays) chasing down the Dodgers CF Duke Snider, until “with one game to go, the batting race stood a virtual three-way tie, with Mueller at .3426, Snider at .3425, and Mays at .3422.” Mays hit a single, double and triple off the tough Phillies righty Robin Roberts to claim the title, in a charmed season where he also slugged .667, and, when the Giants were struggling early in the season, put the team on his shoulders: “Beginning on May 22 the Giants, who’d been wallowing at .500, went on a 41-11 tear-up to the July 11 All-Star break. Over that span, Mays hit twenty-three homers, one fewer than he hit in his entire first 155 games in ’51 and ’52.” And his hitting paled in light of the outlandish catches and dives and throws that he exhibited from centerfield!
Yet, wait, the most valuable member of the Giants during the 1954 season might not have been Alvin Dark or Willie Mays, nor even the rejuvenated young left-hander Johnny Antonelli, who came over in the off-season trade of Bobby Thomson to the Braves, and who went 21-7 with a 2.30 ERA. No, the protagonist for this season was the skipper, Leo Durocher, not only for his inspired handling of the team dynamics involving Mays and “everyone else,” not only for his literal Hollywood lifestyle with actress-wife Laraine Day, not only for his devil-may-care attitude toward both Giants ownership and the baseball establishment, but mainly because he had a managerial dream-season in 1954. After the slow start (and rumblings from owner Horace Stoneham about a replacement), all of Durocher’s pinch-hitting decisions seemed to work. Reserve outfielder Bill Taylor hit his first big league homer in the tenth inning of a scoreless game, after Durocher told him “Lose one, and I’ll give you a hundred bucks!” Journeyman Hoot Evers won a game in June on a pinch-hit homer against the Cardinals, “his only hit in eleven at-bats for [the Giants] when he was released a month later.” Remarkably, over the course of the season, Durocher’s machinations led to ten pinch-hit home runs, and “eight of them turned defeats into victories.” And, with a pinch of irony, Leo’s best pinch-hitter, hard-living Alabamian Dusty Rhodes, was a player whose reckless lifestyle had led Durocher to demand his trade a year before. But 1954 changed that whole dynamic, and the skipper admitted later “Dusty was the one guy I didn’t have any training rules or curfew with. Hell, I’d often take him out to the bars!” The manager’s confidence in Rhodes’s steely nerves would pay dividends at World Series time. In the meantime, Durocher’s only glaring failure this season was his perpetuation of a long-standing animus towards the gentlemanly Stan Musial, who had charged the mound for the only time in his career as a result of incessant knock-down pitches from Durocher’s Dodgers in 1943, and who avenged himself by abusing Antonelli and other Giant pitchers in April of ’54 during a double-header: “The strategy, as it almost always did for Durocher when it came to Musial, backfired miserably. Stan the Man went 4-for-4 with six RBI in the first game on Sunday, slamming three homers, two of them off the rusty Antonelli, who lasted just four innings in the 10-6 Cardinals romp. In the second game Musial slugged two more homers for three more RBI. His five homers in a doubleheader were a major league record, and afterward Musial’s bat was sent to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.” Speaking of the Hall of Fame, Monte Irvin later reported that “‘I have to believe Leo was the only guy Stan ever had no use for. I just know that when Stan and I were on the [Hall of Fame] Veterans Committee together, Leo was the one guy Stan ever said he couldn’t vote for.” Yet, while alienating his opponents, even the genial Musial, the shrewd Durocher (who may have prepared the supposedly spontaneous quip “Nice guys finish last”) won the NL pennant and a World Series date with the team the Giants had played ad infinitum in the spring, the Indians.
The 1954 World Series was probably the most exciting sweep ever, with perhaps the best and most decisive Game One ever (though the 1988 Dodgers walk-off, with the gimpy Kirk Gibson taking the unassailable Dennis Eckersley deep, has similar resonance). That game, on September 29, 1954, was “the first World Series game in history with players of color on both teams. In large part, of course, this had to do with the absence of the Yankees, winners of six of the previous seven World Series and who remained the most prominent of the four teams (the Red Sox, Tigers, and Phillies were the others) who had still not integrated.” Not much was made of this fact among sportswriters. Instead, the stadium itself, Manhattan’s quirky Polo Grounds beneath Coogan’s Bluff, would provide the real drama, the decisive idiosyncrasy for the hometown team. The dimensions of the ballpark included a mind-boggling 483 feet to dead center, and something akin to 260 feet down the right field line, and thus Willie Mays was able to track down Vic Wertz’s line-drive 460 feet from home with the most famous catch, indeed “The Catch,” and then spin and hurl the ball back to second base in time to keep both base runners from scoring, in a tie game in the bottom of the eighth inning—a play immortalized by Daily News photographer Frank Hurley on his Hulcher 70 high-speed camera, designed for military surveillance work. A baseball ballet for the ages, captured in five extraordinary frames. The Indians stranded their baserunners, and though they put on two more in the tenth (after a double by Wertz, who hit a line-drive almost every at-bat in the series), they couldn’t break through. Then Durocher played a final pinch-hit hunch, with two on in the bottom of the tenth, and Dusty Rhodes hit a pop-fly to right-field. In another extraordinary photograph included in the book, Indians rightfielder Dave Pope is leaping high against the 12-foot fence, with second baseman Bobby Avila also in the frame (Avila apparently thought it was shallow enough for him to make the play before the wind caught it)! Then the ball descended into the first-row spectators and the game was over. Madden notes that “When it came to cheap-shot home runs, this one had no doubt been the dandy of them all. It was the accepted slang of the day to call such shots ‘Chinese home runs.’ ” He adds that New York’s Chinese community protested the public use of this disparaging phrase. (A petition to the Giants brass included this irrefutable line: “It isn’t the fault of the Chinese if have 258-foot fences.”)
From there, the Series swung in the Giants’ favor, and when Al Lopez, down three games to none, decided to pass over the veteran Bob Feller to pitch Bob Lemon on two days’ rest, the Indians’ fate was sealed. Lemon gave up seven runs through five innings, and Monte Irvin later revealed that “We knew we could hit their pitchers. The only one Leo said he was a little worried about was Feller, and Lopez never used him.” For Indians slugger Al Rosen, the miracle 110-win season of the Indians had drained them by the World Series, and then they’d been felled by a double trick of fate: “The first game was probably the turning point. We got beat by a catch on a ball that would’ve been a home run in any other ballpark in baseball, and a home run that would’ve been an out in any other park.” Ah, the ironies, the opportunities missed and those doggedly seized hold of, the hunches and panics, the justice and the injustice, the equality declared amidst inequality, the “Golden Age” played under a cloud. Bill Madden weaves all these taut strands into a narrative web that, if not sharply focused and linear, nevertheless has many spirals and twists that intrigue and even stir the reader. Ultimately, the Indians are perhaps the more apt metaphor than the Giants, when it comes to judging the meaning of the 1954 season—so much accomplished, so many surprises and triumphs, but so much left undone and frustrating. The march toward the pennant and the World Series is a long journey, even in the best of seasons—the march toward equality for a society, even more so.
Michael R. Stevens is professor of English at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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