Yankee History and New York Media, Part 4: Integration and The Yankee's Original Sin

 

At the start of this year’s World Series, the media remarked a troubling fact: for the first time since 1950, there was not a single American-player on either team’s roster. Sadly, given the troubling decline of interest in baseball among African-Americans over the 21^st Century, this was perhaps inevitable.

I can’t begin to truly speculate on the cause of the current problems baseball has with African-Americans. But I have been painfully aware of the fact that as much baseball wants to celebrate Jackie Robinson as a truly great moment – which it was – with the passage of time, it seems that baseball increasingly wants to gloss over the fact that the rest of integration of the sport was slower and took far longer to truly take effect. And while the Yankees were not the root cause of this, they may have been the major reason for its protracted delay in the sport. This prejudice would eventually lead to the collapse of the Yankee dynasty and a fundamental weakness in the American League that would decades to redress.

As baseball now wants you to forget, when Branch Rickey chose to integrate baseball, his fellow owners did not sing hosannahs to him. On the contrary, his fellow National League owners did not want the experiment to succeed and subtly and not so subtly pressured their teams – who didn’t need a lot of reasons – to make Robinson’s rookie year as painful as possible for him. Some of the pressure was alleviated when Bill Veeck, the owner of the Cleveland Indians and a maverick among owners, signed Larry Doby in July of 1947.  When Robinson led the Dodgers to a pennant and box-office breaking crowds and Veeck managed the same thing with the Indians the following year (leading them to their last World Championship to date), reluctantly the rest of the majors began to follow suit.

To be clear the Yankee management was not an aberration when it came to integration. Many of the bigoted club owners in both leagues were just as determined to put off integration as long as possible, no matter how great the pressure from the media. Philip Wrigley of the Cubs and Bob Carpenter of the Phillies and Gussie Busch of the Cardinals would wait until late in the 1950s to begin integration. Tom Yawkey, owner of the Red Sox, made sure his team was the last to integrate in 1959. (In reality, the ‘Curse of the Bambino’ had far more to do with the institutional racism within the Red Sox organization.) But given the Yankees’ dominance of in the 1950s, its not that hard to argue that if the Yankees had been willing to follow the lead of the Giants and Dodgers, a lot of these teams would have had much less wiggle room.

And the racism started from the front office. George Weiss, by even the kindest standards of the penny-pinching GMs of that era, was a horrible human being to deal with, feeling no remorse in keeping salaries artificially low (“they have to be hungry for those World Series checks,” he say when challenged) trading players when they held out, releasing veterans when the became useless. But his nadir as a manager and a human being came in his utter refusal to face integration. “I will never allow a black man to wear a Yankee uniform,” he said once. But when African-Americans started to picket Yankee Stadium during the Korean War, he began to feel the pressure.

So he did what so many  bigoted GMs did: he signed a handful of black players to Yankee minor league contracts. Then he would have the gall to say when criticized: “the Yankees will bring up a Negro when one fits the Yankee standards.” Then, as these players began to show they could meet the standards, he traded them away to organization. In the case of Vic Power, a superb defensive first baseman was accused by the New York Media of being ‘hot-tempered’, a showboat,  and ‘liking white women.’ The fact that his record would have been good enough to be a Yankee was vehemently denied.

That left one Yankee in the organization: Elston Howard, an outfielder by profession. In the spring of `1954, he was changed to a catcher, a position that Yogi Berra had dominated for six seasons and would continue to be regular for another five. The media was outraged.

Howard was brought to spring training in 1955. Robinson himself once said that Howard may have had a harder time coming up more than him; at least the Brooklyn front office was completely behind him. Weiss was not. He was going to live in segregated quarters during spring training in the South and accept it, he would stay in colored hotels in places like Kansas City and keep his mouth shut, and in Southern towns said they wouldn’t play the Yankees in exhibitions if Howard was there, he was going to miss a game. It was hard enough to do all this as Jackie Robinson, but he was willing to fight. Elston Howard spent much of his career as a Yankee being considered an Uncle Tom.

And he got no further support from the front office. No other African-American players would come up through the farm system until Weiss left the Yankees in 1960. They would only have one black more man play for the Yankees during that period, an outfielder named Harry Simpson, who was traded to the Yankees in 1957, played as a backup outfielder for a year and a half, and was then traded back to Kansas City in June of 1959. He would deal with the casual racism of his manager Casey Stengel (“I finally get a n---er, I get the one who can’t run) he said. And by being changed to a catcher, he would spend his most productive years being used as a substitute catcher and outfielder. When he finally became a regular catcher in 1961, the four seasons that followed showed the world what they might have missed. In 1963, he became the first African=American to win the American League MVP. He has occasionally been suggested for the Hall of Fame, I think if he’d had a real career (as a regular outfielder or catcher) he probably would have made it to Cooperstown.

Because so many teams were inclined to follow the Yankees lead when it came to integration, this weakened the American League as a whole. While the Yankees dominated the postseason, in the All-Star Games played during this same era, the National League would dominate, winning thirteen of seventeen games. During the same era the Yankees were at their peak, African-Americans would win fourteen of sixteen NL MVPS. It would take a long time for the effects of this racism to be felt, but in 1965 the Yankees fell to sixth place, then last the following year. The Twins, who won the pennant in 1965, were powered by several great Cuban players including Tony Oliva and Camilio Pascual, as well as the first twenty game African American pitcher in the AL, Mudcat Grant. The next year, the Baltimore Orioles would replace the Yankees as the most dominant team in the AL, helped by great players like Frank Robinson, pitchers like Mike Cuellar and future stars like Don Baylor and Eddie Murray while in the 1970s, the Oakland A’s would form a dynasty of their own with such African-American talent as Vida Blue, Bert Campaneris, and an outfielder named Reggie Jackson.

As for Elston Howard, after his playing career ended, he became a Yankee coach, and hoped someday to become the first black man to manage the Yankees. Though he was infinitely more qualified than many of the men Steinbrenner would end up hiring over the years, he would never get a shot. Part of that was because, like Jackie Robinson, he died young, passing away in 1980 at the age of fifty-one. But their was another subtext that Robinson himself pointed out throughout his career – baseball was far slower when it came to hiring black men for management or front office jobs. It wasn’t until 1975 that Frank Robinson became the first black man to manage a team. Their has been some increase in minority hiring in the decades to follow – Dusty Baker is currently managing the Houston Astros and has been one of the most successful managers of the new millennium – but black management is still scarce to come by. During Steinbrenner’s tenure, unlikely candidates like Bucky Dent and Stump Merrill would manage the team. The Yankees still have yet to hire a black manager. A rival New York National League Team became  the first in the city to that as well – Willie Randolph, who played second base for the Yankees during their championship run in the 1970s managed the Mets from 2005 to 2008, leading them to a division title in 2006.

No one is saying that the racial issues baseball is having these days are directly connected to the state of Yankees; in this case it would be giving them far too much blame. But as much baseball may commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s integration as its shining moment – when baseball led the country – it is worth remembering that the sport, like everything else in America, had to be dragged kicking and screaming to full integration. It needs to be noted that throughout the turbulent 1950s, powerful white men gave into pressure from without very reluctantly, dragged their feet all the way, and often mouthed support while actually giving little to the people involved. That is part of the Yankee tradition that they don’t talk about in all the literature that’s been written about it. And its why Elston Howard’s story needs to be talked about as much as Jackie Robinson’s.  That’s what baseball is too.