The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World by Kahn Roger

Author:Kahn, Roger [Kahn, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SPORTS & RECREATION/Baseball/Essays & Writings
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2012-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

The Red and the Black

THE THREE NEW YORK CITY ballclubs drew more than five million fans in 1949, despite a disappointing finish by Leo Durocher’s evolving Giants. Durocher had uttered one classic comment on his well-liked predecessor at the Polo Grounds, stumpy, congenial, uncomplicated Mel Ott. “Nice guys finish last,” Durocher said.

“Right,” pronounced the Daily News’s tart-tongued Dick Young when the 1949 baseball season ended. “And not-so-nice guys finish fifth.”

Both the Yankees and the Dodgers battled through pennant races that turned and twisted and blossomed until Sunday, October 2, the very last day of the season. The Giants, who finished twenty-four games behind the Dodgers, made news somewhat more subtly. On the eighth of July, the team was integrated.

Earlier the Giants had signed two distinctly different black athletes and assigned them to the Jersey City farm team in the International League. During a barroom brawl somewhere in Texas, Henry Curtis “Hank” Thompson, an infielder who stood a broad-beamed five feet, nine inches, had beaten a man to death. “The way things worked in the South then,” reported Garry Schumacher of the Giant front office, “when one colored guy killed another colored guy, it didn’t count. The white cops wouldn’t even make arrests.” Thompson proved pleasant enough, except when an occasional rage gripped him, and not notably bright. Baseball integration was proceeding at a most lethargic pace. But history often moves unevenly. Just two years after Robinson’s first Brooklyn season, the stern character barrier to blacks — no drinkers, no rowdies — was coming down. Henry Curtis Thompson was a bibulous man.

Along with Thompson, the Giants signed a black of faultless character and keen intelligence, Monford Merrill Irvin, an outfielder who had graduated from Lincoln University, a small Negro college in Pennsylvania, affiliated with the Presbyterian Church. Irvin was thirty years old. Racism kept big Monte Irvin out of the major leagues during most of his prime playing seasons. Irvin was courteous, thoughtful, soft-voiced. To Robert Creamer of Sports Illustrated, perhaps unconsciously mouthing some prejudice of the time, “Monte Irvin sounds like a Latin professor.”

Into July, Thompson hit .303 for Jersey City. Irvin hit .373, with fourteen steals and fifty-two runs batted in across sixty-three games. They were then promoted to the Polo Grounds. “Of course we knew segregation was wrong,” says Charles “Chub” Feeney, vice president of the Giants at the time. “My uncle [Giant president Horace Stoneham] knew it and I knew it, but pure idealists we were not. Competing in New York, against the Yankees and the Dodgers, the resource we needed most was talent. Whatever Durocher told you, Leo’s brain alone was not enough. In 1949, the Negro leagues were the most logical place in the world to look for ballplayers.”

Still, the best young player in Negro baseball, indeed the best young player in the world, was not allowed into white baseball for another season. Quite simply, Willie Howard Mays, the eighteen-year-old center fielder for the Birmingham Black Barons, was a wonder.

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