Cooperstown Confidential (13 page)

Davis signed, and the woman, whose name was Kristen, produced a second baseball from her purse. She had no ticket for this one. “You don’t do charity signings, do you?” she asked hopefully.

Davis shook his head. “Sorry, but they won’t let me,” he said. For emphasis, he directed her gaze to a middle-aged woman sitting nearby, wearing an MAB shirt; the selling of baseball autographs is a trust-but-verify business.

Another fan approached with a baseball, and Davis signed it. She inspected the signature and said, “I bet you went to a Catholic school. You have very nice handwriting. Lou Piniella does, too. He went to a Catholic school.” Davis smiled. “Enjoy,” he said.

A middle-aged man came up to the table clutching two posters so crammed with signatures that Davis had to search for a spot to write his name. Davis read the names out loud—Hank Aaron, Pete Rose, Willie Mays. “These are worth some money,” he said.

“Yep,” said the man, “one is for me. The other one is putting my daughter through graduate school.”

“Enjoy,” said Davis, handing over the signed posters. As the man walked away, Davis turned to me and said, “That thing is worth a fortune.” He knows the business from both sides of the table. “I’ve got a ball from David Wells’s perfect game,” he said. “Isn’t that something?”

On the way out of the show, I stopped in the men’s room, where I encountered Goose Gossage. He peered at me warily. “We met at the Waldorf,” I reminded him. “I went with you to the Letterman show?”

“Right,” he said, uncertainly.

“I was in the car when you told George Brett you were sorry you didn’t hit him in the neck.”

Gossage brightened. “Now I remember. Yeah. Tell you what, buddy, I should have, too.” He reached out and slapped me on the back in a moment of restroom camaraderie. “How you doin’, buddy?”

“How are
you
doing? This is your first show as a Hall of Famer.”

“Great, fantastic!” he said. “HoF!” He had the giddy tone of a man who had just discovered that he could print his own money.

* Just for the record: The Museum of Sex has fifteen thousand artifacts, most of them donated. The largest single donor was Ralph Wittington, a librarian at the Library of Congress, who gave the museum between eight and nine hundred boxes of pornography. According to Sarah Jacobs, the curator, many items are donated by children and grandchildren of departed loved ones; usually these artifacts are discovered postmortem. The museum also has exhibits. When we drove by, it was featuring “Kink: Geography of the Erotic Imagination.”

* Gossage was tried as a starter in 1976. He started 29 games that year—he had started a total of 8 games in his four previous seasons—and he never started another game in his remaining seventeen years in the big leagues.

† Bunning was passed over by the writers and chosen by the Veterans Committee. In those days, that meant being chosen by a committee handpicked by the Hall itself.

* Rose is the all-time leader in career hits; in 1985, he broke Ty Cobb’s record and ended up with 4,256. He accomplished this by going to bat roughly 10 percent more often than any other hitter in the history of baseball. He wasn’t the greatest hitter in baseball history, but he was the most frequent.

* A few weeks later, Wagner was injured and missed the rest of the 2008 season.

Verkman told me that, with sorrow, he was demoting Wagner to “unlikely.”

* Since long before my Uncle Pinchus mistook the Detroit Tigers for the Jewish People, there has been confusion among Jewish fans over who was, and wasn’t, a member of the tribe.

Many believe that Johnny Kling, the old Cubs catcher, was Jewish. He wasn’t, although his wife was, and Kling let people believe that he might be Jewish, too. Who knows—that may be what they told his wife’s parents.

On the other hand,

Jimmie Reese, Babe Ruth’s Yankee roommate, is often mistaken for Irish, when his real name was James Hymie Solomon. Presumably the Babe was in on the joke.

In recent years, scholars of Jewish baseball have discovered that Lou Boudreau’s mother was Jewish, although he was not raised Jewish and never publicly discussed it. That’s more than enough, however, to get him on the Hall of Fame scrolls along with Greenberg and Koufax. Some also add Rod Carew, who married a Jewish woman and raised Jewish children but, despite much speculation, never took the final plunge himself. My friend and colleague Gary Rosen-blatt calls Carew “the longest convert.”

Strangely, there are more Jewish players in MLB today than at any time in history. Three played in the 2008 All-Star Game: Ian Kinsler of the Texas Rangers, Kevin Youkilis of the Red Sox (often mistaken for a Greek because of his nickname, “Euclis, the Greek God of Walks”), and Ryan Braun of the Brewers, known as the “Hebrew Hammer.” Braun’s mother is not Jewish, so according to Talmudic law he does not qualify as a Jew. It is my belief, however, that Talmudic law does not apply to Jewish baseball players who are kosher under the Lou Boudreau Exemption.

* A few months later, Verkman sold a ticket stub to Lou Gehrig Day, Yankee Stadium, July 4, 1939—the day Gehrig delivered his famous “luckiest man on the face of the earth” speech—for a record-setting $22,000.

SEVEN . . .
Bad, Bad Barry Bonds

I
n August 2007, Barry Bonds hit his 756th home run, eclipsing Hank Aaron’s record. The fan who caught it put the ball up for sale, and it was bought by fashion designer and businessman Marc Ecko.

Ecko was known for his lines of sportswear, his video-game company, his support for graffiti artists, and his work on behalf of the rhinoceros. He wasn’t exactly publicity-averse, and he saw the Bonds ball as a public relations investment. Ecko announced that he would run an online election among fans about what to do with the ball: donate it to the Hall of Fame as is, mark it with an asterisk and send it to Cooperstown, or shoot it into space. Eventually he decided to deface the ball—purportedly as a protest against Bonds’s alleged steroid use. Hall of Fame president Dale Petrosky accepted the offer, declaring that the Hall was “thrilled that we now have the opportunity to preserve [the ball] forever and to share it with everybody who wants to see it.”

Bonds already had a fraught relationship with Cooperstown. In the past, he had accused the Hall of selling memorabilia it collected from him. It had been Jeff Idelson’s task to reassure him that this wasn’t true. (“Sometimes he believes me and sometimes he doesn’t,” Idelson told me.)

The notion of a marked ball on display in Cooperstown ignited Bonds’s fury. He threatened a boycott, although he stopped just short of burning the bridge to Cooperstown. “I will never be in the Hall of Fame. Never,” he told a reporter. “Barry Bonds will not be there. That’s my emotions now. That’s how I feel now. When I decide to retire five years from now, we’ll see where they are at that moment . . . and maybe I’ll reconsider.”

Ecko’s publicity stunt fit in well with the campaign that baseball had been waging to delegitimize Bonds. The Hall of Fame had made its views known earlier that summer via an editorial in the
Freeman’s Journal.
Writers across the country denounced Bonds as a cheater, unworthy of the record. Commissioner Selig was at the game in San Diego when Bonds tied Aaron, but he conspicuously refrained from applauding. After the game he went home to Milwaukee, enabling him to skip Bonds’s record-breaker on August 7. He explained his behavior with a tepid statement: “While the issues which have swirled around this record will continue to work themselves toward resolution, today is a day for congratulations on a truly remarkable achievement.”

Selig’s attitude, like that of Petrosky and the Hall of Fame, was not a profile in courage. Bonds was extremely unpopular around baseball (outside of San Francisco), and disrespecting him in public was an assertion of the game’s integrity and purity.

Black America didn’t see it that way. They had seen this kind of thing before. In 1974, when Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s record, a large portion of white America was scandalized. “Dear Nigger” letters poured in, and Aaron was forced to travel with bodyguards.

Some pundits argued that Aaron had come to bat four thousand times more than Ruth, and his record should therefore have an asterisk affixed to it. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn skipped Aaron’s record-breaking game, a snub the usually mild-mannered star noted afterward with bitterness.

Aaron writes about this incident in his autobiography,
I Had a
Hammer.

Coauthor Lonnie Wheeler, who occasionally interrupts Aaron’s narrative for comments of his own, makes a surprising observation—that Aaron and Ruth had little in common aside from the fact that they were both referred to “publicly and frequently as ‘nigger,’ although Aaron was black and Ruth wouldn’t have been allowed to play big league ball if he had been.”

“It angered [Aaron] that he could not go about his private quest without being compared, criticized, cross examined, and cussed out in the context of a
broad-nosed white man
he cared little about” [italics added].

There are many ways to describe Babe Ruth, but Wheeler (and Aaron) chose one with a coded meaning. All his life, Babe Ruth was “suspected” of being a black man passing for white. He had, as Wheeler notes, “certain facial features that some regarded as Negroid.”

As a boy at St. Mary’s Orphanage in Baltimore, Ruth’s nickname was “nigger lips.” Throughout his major-league career, bench jockeys called him “Nigger” and “Nig.” According to Fred Lieb, Ruth’s sometime ghostwriter, Ty Cobb once refused to share accommodations with Ruth at a hunting lodge in Georgia, saying, “I never have slept under the same roof with a nigger and I’m not going to start here.” In the 1922 World Series, Ruth invaded the Giants club house to challenge Johnny Rawlings, who had rained down a string of racial epithets on him during a game.

The stories that Ruth might be racially mixed were widely believed in the black community. According to Ruth’s biographer, Robert Creamer, “Even players in the Negro Leagues that flourished then believed this and generally wished the Babe, whom they considered a secret brother, well in his conquest of white baseball.” Hank Aaron, who himself came up in the Negro leagues, must have known this. What he probably didn’t know is that Ruth placed a statue of Blessed Martín de Porres next to his death bed. De Porres, a sixteenth-century Peruvian mulatto, is known as the patron of blacks and biracial people.

White America eventually made peace with Aaron’s conquest of Babe Ruth’s record. In fact, Aaron became a retrospective favorite of baseball writers, especially when they could contrast his nobility to Barry Bonds’s Rule 5–busting self. Stephen Cannella, a
Sports Illustrated
writer, captured the love: “When I see the footage of Aaron’s 715th home run, I’m still struck by the way he rounded the bases that night in Atlanta: quickly, purposefully, without a hint of self-congratulation, so focused and self-assured that he barely broke stride even when two fans hopped out of the stands to accost him as he headed for third base. Bonds caught Aaron, too, but in our hearts, the Hammer hasn’t stopped running, and 755 is still greater than 762.”

Despite the best efforts of the baseball media to whip up an Aaron–Bonds feud, the two men refused to go along. Aaron, who had played against Barry’s father, congratulated him for breaking the record. Bonds responded by praising Aaron’s prowess and generosity of spirit.

Whatever the motives of Bonds’s critics, black America saw a black hero getting beat up by white America. Comedian Chris Rock appeared on the HBO show
Costas Now
and voiced a common feeling: “Ty Cobb’s numbers are bullshit, and Babe Ruth’s numbers are bullshit,” he said.

A visibly surprised Bob Costas said, “Because of segregation—”

“Because they didn’t play against black players,” said Rock. “It’s like saying I won the New York City Marathon but no Kenyans ran that year. Babe Ruth has 714 affirmative action home runs.”

E. R. Shipp, a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist and an African-American, explained that she was rooting for Bonds “because so many others—especially white people—are rooting against this man who lives by his own rules of media engagement. White sports journalists are not accustomed to this and have accentuated the negative. That has poisoned the history.”

Some black ballplayers spoke up, too. “Whenever I go home, I hear people say all of the time, ‘Baseball just doesn’t like black people,’ ” said former All-Star outfielder Matt Lawton. “If Bonds were white, he’d be a poster boy in baseball, not an outcast.”

Not more than fifteen or twenty of the five hundred-plus BBWAA voters across the country are African-American. Black ballplayers have English in common with the writers, but the two groups don’t always communicate too well. There is a long history to this difficulty.

In 1946, after Jackie Robinson had been signed by Branch Rickey, the New York Baseball Writers’ Association made this the subject of a skit at their annual winter dinner. “Commissioner Chandler” carried on a dialogue with a butler in blackface, dressed in a Montreal Royals uniform. The Royals were the farm team to which Robinson had been assigned by Branch Rickey. The show included this dialogue:

Chandler: (Claps hands and calls) Robbie-eee! Robbiee!

Butler: Yassah, Massa. Here I is.

Chandler: Ah! There you are, Jackie. Jackie, you ole wooly-headed
rascal, how long have you been in the family?

Butler: Long time, K’unl. Marty long time. Edder since Marse Rickey
bought me from the Kansas City Monarchs.

Chandler: To be sure, Jackie, to be sure. How could I forget that
Massa Rickey brought you to our house. (Aside) Rickey
—
that no good
carpetbagger. What could he have been thinking of?

Wendell Smith, a sportswriter for the African-American
Pittsburgh
Courier
(who had been turned down for membership by the BBWAA on the grounds that he didn’t work for a mainstream newspaper), called it a “Nazi opera.” But Arthur Daley defended the show in the
New York Times,
assuring readers that “no one’s feelings were really hurt.” The
Sporting News
gave the show a rave review, which wasn’t a surprise. The “Bible of Baseball” had long opposed race-mixing; in a 1942 editorial, its editor opined that most blacks and whites wanted to keep the game segregated and that the issue was being raised by “agitators ever ready to seize an issue that will redound to their profit and self-aggrandizement.” The publisher of the
Sporting News
at the time was J. G. Taylor Spink, for whom the Hall of Fame’s writer awards are named.
*
Wendell Smith won a Spink Award in 1993. Posthumously.

Smith’s protégé, Robinson, broke in with almost no media support. “The baseball writers at that time were very conservative,” Smith said in an interview many years later. “Individually, a lot of them were wonderful. But as a group they never have been known to be overly liberal. As an or gani zation, they didn’t do much to advance our cause.”

A lot of writers who didn’t like Jackie Robinson were, like Spink, believers that baseball should hold the color line. Others, like Dick Young
,
were sympathetic to Robinson in his first, mostly passive season with the Dodgers; Branch Rickey had asked him to adopt a mild manner in his first couple of seasons, and Robinson went along. But by 1949, he felt well enough established to begin acting like himself, and writers like Young didn’t care for the New Jackie at all. “Robinson has reached the stage where he says what he believes and says it without reservation, which is unfortunately a trait frowned on in most social circles,” Young wrote. In a private conversation, Young made this even clearer. “I’m telling you as a friend that a lot of newspapermen are saying that Campy [Roy Campanella, the Dodgers catcher and a former Negro-leagues star] is the kind of guy they can like but that your aggressiveness, your wearing your race on your sleeve, makes enemies.”

Mainstream sportswriters in those days were used to dealing with accommodating black athletes like Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, and Cam-panella. But Robinson was outspoken even for a white player in an era when jocks were supposed to be seen and not heard. In 1952, he publicly accused the Yankees—the only New York team without black players—of racism. The
Sporting News
denounced him for this with headlines like “Robinson Should Be a Player, Not a Crusader.”

In 1957, on the eve of Robinson’s retirement from baseball, Dick Young published an interview with Campanella in which the Dodgers catcher accused his teammate of being insufficiently grateful to baseball for the chance it had given him to play in the majors. Campanella later said that the conversation had been off the record, but it made big news at the time and soured Robinson’s exit from the game—as Young must have known it would.

In 1962, Jackie Robinson became eligible for the Hall of Fame. Dick Young endorsed his candidacy but added that Robinson didn’t have many friends among the BBWAA voters. Robinson, one of the two or three greatest figures in the history of the game, barely got into Cooperstown. Of the ten players elected by the BBWAA in the sixties, only Lou Boudreau, the Cleveland manager-shortstop, got fewer votes.

Robinson was the first black member of the Hall of Fame, but for many years Cooperstown treated him with studied indifference. His plaque hung with the others but made no mention of his special role in baseball history. As far as the Hall of Fame was concerned, Jackie Robinson was just another All-Star ballplayer, no more significant than Gabby Hartnett or Rabbit Maranville.

Since 1962, Robinson has been followed to Cooperstown by more than twenty black players. A few, like Bob Gibson, Dave Winfield, and Frank Robinson, have been aggressive, Jackie Robinson–style guys. Most, however, have been more in the easygoing mold of Cam-panella, players like Tony Gwynn, Kirby Puckett, and Willie Stargell, the sorts of black men with whom a white writer can share a joke or make a harmless little comment without whipping up a lot of static.

Dave Parker was definitely not in that mold. In his playing days he was 6'5", 230 pounds with a mouth to match—an intimidating figure to pitchers and writers alike. He broke in with the Pirates in 1973, replacing Roberto Clemente in right field (who had his own problems with baseball writers around the league, but was instantly sainted by the press when his plane, carry ing relief supplies for the survivors of a Nicaraguan disaster, went down in 1972). Parker proved to be a worthy successor to Clemente: twice he led the National League in batting average, and he was MVP in 1981. Lawrence Ritter named him one of baseball’s 100 all-time best players. But a lot of the Pirates beat writers found him sullen and uncooperative. Parker was a cocaine addict, which didn’t improve his social graces. And he didn’t use alone. The Pirates were the worst cokeheads in baseball. Even their mascot, the Pittsburgh Parrot, was using and dealing. Seven Pirates were suspended for a year by Commissioner Peter Ueberroth. Dave Parker was among them.
*