Opening Day by Jonathan Eig

Author:Jonathan Eig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

FIFTEEN

A GOOD THING FOR EVERYBODY

Sooner or later, all the Negro-league ballplayers noticed the white men in the grandstands. The parks were mostly empty that summer, as the fans who once rooted for the Newark Eagles or the New York Cubans or the Homestead Grays shifted their attention to Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers. So when the white scouts in their rumpled suits plunked themselves down in the good seats behind home plate and started taking notes, everyone with a bat or glove snapped to attention. They ran out their pop flies, took the extra base when they could, and slid a little more ferociously into second to break up double plays.

Who would be next? On buses during road trips, on the field during batting practice, even in the dugout during games, that was the question the black ballplayers asked. Was Ol’ Satchel too old? Would the Dodgers promote Roy Campanella from Montreal? Was Monte Irvin of the Newark Eagles ready to make the leap? And how many big-league clubs were prepared to take on black players? Only one or two? All of them? How many jobs were the men fighting for, exactly?

Reporters at some of the white papers seemed to think the Boston Red Sox might be the next team to step up. Others said Cleveland, or Pittsburgh, and some reporters even suggested that Ben Chapman had been thoroughly cured of his prejudice and that his Phillies were ready to sign Reese “Goose” Tatum, who played baseball for the Indianapolis Clowns and basketball for the Harlem Globetrotters. No one expected much movement from the ball clubs in the circuit’s most southern cities: St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Washington, D.C. Still, the consensus among writers seemed to be that every team, or nearly every one, would be integrated inside a couple of years.

So the scouts scribbled their notes and wired their reports back to the home offices. Older black ballplayers like Oscar Charleston, believed by many to be one of the best ever to play the game, found work as scouts thanks to their long-running associations with the Negro leagues. But most of the work remained in the hands of the white men who had been trawling the sandlots and schoolyards in search of white players for so long. Suddenly these men—skilled with stopwatch and scorecard, not psychology—were being asked to conduct interviews and evaluate the character of the black men they were evaluating. Bias remained, and team owners worried far more about the personalities of their prospective black players than they did about the white ones. It was one thing to find a black man who could play the game, the thought went, and quite another to find one who could handle the sort of challenges that had greeted Robinson.

It was a thrilling time to be a Negro-league player, and a frightening one, too. Gone was the world they had known and in which they had thrived. For some, the new world would offer undreamed-of opportunities and unimaginable wealth and fame. For many more, it would mean the end of their careers in baseball.

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