Bill Madden - 1954: The Year Willie Mays and the First Generation of Black Superstars Changed Major League Baseball Forever

1954

ALSO BY BILL MADDEN

Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball

Pride of October: What It Was to Be Young and a Yankee

Zim: A Baseball Life (with Don Zimmer)

Damned Yankees: Chaos, Confusion, and Craziness in the Steinbrenner Era (with Moss Klein)

Copyright 2014 by Bill Madden

Photos courtesy of the New York Daily News and the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library (Cooperstown, NY)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Madden, Bill.

1954 : the year Willie Mays and the first generation of black superstars changed major league baseball forever / by Bill Madden.First Da Capo Press edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-306-82333-6 (e-book)

1. BaseballUnited StatesHistory20th century. 2. African American baseball playersUnited StatesHistory20th century. 3. Discrimination in sportsUnited StatesHistory20th century. 4. Mays, Willie, 1931I. Title.

GV863.A1M28 2014

796.357'64097309045dc23

2014000774

First Da Capo Press edition 2014

Published by Da Capo Press

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

www.dacapopress.com

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Jackie, Larry, Willie, Campy, Monte, Hank, Ernie, and Minnie: They turned seventy-eight years of baseballs injustice into a collective triumph of the human spirit.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A FEW DAYS AFTER THE 2000 SUBWAY WORLD SERIES BETWEEN the Yankees and the Mets I got a call from my agent with an intriguing book proposal. Larry Doby wants to write his autobiography, he said. Hes never told his story, and he specifically wants to know if you would be interested in doing it with him.

I was both interested and flattered. As a playera renowned slugger for the Cleveland Indians and Chicago White Sox from 1947 to 58Doby was one of the heroes of my fifties youth. It was only long after hed retired and gone to work as a special assistant for American League President Gene Budig, however, that I got to know him as a friend. I interviewed him a few times at his office on the twenty-ninth floor of the Major League Baseball headquarters at 350 Park Avenue in Manhattan, where the subject invariably always got back to his trials in 1947, when he became the second black player in baseball and first in the American League, and then the joy of 1954, when his Indians won an AL record 111 games, dethroned the five-straight world champion Yankees, and went on to play Willie Mayss Giants in the first World Series that featured players of color on both teams.

You know all those stories about 47 and 54, Doby was saying when my agent, Rob Wilson, and I visited him at his house in Montclair, New Jersey. Well, now I want to put them in a book so theyre therefor the record.

They need to be, Larry, I said. Everybody knows Jackies story. But not enough people know yours.

Doby smiled in appreciation. We shook hands and agreed to talk further to put a proposal together. What I didnt tell him was that for years I had wanted to write a book about the 1954 season, about how it was a watershed season for baseball in so many ways. For Doby, it was his peak season as he led the American League in home runs and RBI and, on the last day of July, made what witnesses said was one of the greatest catches ever by a center fielder. But seven years after Jackie Robinson had broken the baseball color line, 1954 was also a triumphant season for black playersand, in a larger sense, for baseball and the country as a whole.

For if Doby was the dominant player in the American League, Mays certainly emerged as the preeminent player in the National League, only with a flair and boyish innocence that all fans, black and white, quickly came to embrace. In blazing their own parallel trails, however, Robinsons and Dobys personalities did not lend themselves to affection from the fans. Jackie was outspoken and confrontational, whereas Larry was introverted and seemingly always angry. But affection was not what they were seeking; rather, they wanted acceptance and respect and in that regard, they accomplished their mission for all their black brethren.

Mays, however, was almost instantly beloved in 1954, much of that due to how seemingly easy it was for him to live up to the effusive buildup from his Giants manager, Leo Durocher. He just didnt realize it. He didnt want to know about race issues or social injustice, and he seemed immune to the indignities and epithets the other players of his race had to endure. All he wanted was to play.

Nearly sixty years later, when I interviewed Mays for this book, he had not changed. We were sitting in a room off the lobby of the Otesaga Hotel in Cooperstown, New York, during one of the Hall of Fame weekends. When I posed my first question to him about the 54 Giants championship teams unusual dynamic for that time, in which the core players were composed of so many white players from the South and three blacksMays, Monte Irvin, and Hank Thompsonhe quickly cut me off. I aint talkin about race, Mays said. Ill talk about anything else you wantthe games, the World Series, Leo, whatever. But I dont ever talk about race.

As Monte Irvin told me, none of those Giants talked about race. It just wasnt an issue with them, even if baseball, seven years after Jackies breakthrough, was still in its infancy when it came to integration, with half of the sixteen teams still without a black player at the end of the 53 season.

By contrast, Doby eagerly wanted to talk about it after holding back for so many years for fear of being portrayed as someone bitter toward baseball. When he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1998, it was almost as though hed been liberated. At that time he said, I never thought I was overshadowed. Mr. Robinson was first, but he gave me the opportunity, so he should have gotten everything he got. I feel Ive been rewarded for my merits, turning negatives into positives, as well as for my statistics.