Cooperstown Confidential (15 page)

What lucky team signed baseball’s best slugger in 2008? The answer is: none. Bonds didn’t get a single serious offer.

The baseball press handled this with astonishing equanimity. Bonds’s exile from the game—which is also his profession—was treated as a natural and positive development. He hadn’t been convicted of anything. He hadn’t confessed to anything. The evidence that he used steroids was anecdotal—he had grown bigger and stronger over time—but there were plenty of players in the game who had admitted to using ste roids. But Bonds was guilty no matter what. It was back to the days of Judge Landis, when not even a jury acquittal mattered.

In the mid-eighties, MLB had lost a series of collusion suits against owners who had refused to compete to hire expensive players. Salaries had been rising drastically since the end of the reserve clause, and Commissioner of Baseball Peter Ueberroth and the owners decided to put a stop to it. Top players no longer got offers from other teams, and sure enough, salaries declined.

The only problem was that this was illegal. Baseball’s collective bargaining agreement says: “Players shall not act in concert with other Players and Clubs shall not act in concert with other Clubs.” When stars like Tim Raines, Kirk Gibson, Carlton Fisk, and Hall of Famer Phil Niekro couldn’t get offers from other teams, it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to detect collusion on the part of franchises. MLB lost three straight cases and in 1990 agreed to pay $280 million in back wages to the players. This money was not awarded for damages; it is simply the amount the owners had swindled.

Marvin Miller, who founded the players’ union and was the chief witness in the first collusion cases, looked at the Bonds situation and saw an open-and-shut case. “It’s obvious,” he told me in the spring of 2008. “If Bonds decides to pursue this, it will cost the owners a lot of money.”

At the end of the 2008 season, with Bonds still unemployed, the Players Association came to a similar conclusion and announced that it had sufficient evidence for a grievance. The union agreed with Commissioner Selig’s office to hold off on an actual filing, presumably to give the sides time to negotiate. A senior union official conceded that the owners had learned from the debacle of the mid-eighties not to put collusion agreements in writing or discuss them in meetings where notes are kept. But, like Miller, he thought that the failure of a single team to approach one of the best players in the game spoke for itself. He predicted a collusion finding that would cost baseball $62 million, roughly three times Bonds’s last annual salary.

The cost to baseball in good will in the black community is likely to be much higher.

A great deal has been written about the estrangement of blacks from the game of baseball. The great gush of postwar black ballplayers has dried up. So has black rooter interest. In the early days of integration, black ballplayers with a flamboyant Negro-leagues style, like Jackie Robinson, Satchel Paige, and Willie Mays, threatened to change the game with their base-stealing and basket catches and jive talk. Baseball didn’t want to be changed. Vic Power, a good-fielding first baseman with the Kansas City Athletics, was disparaged for catching balls one-handed (it didn’t help Power’s popularity with the establishment that he also openly dated white women). Hank Aaron was praised for his quiet, workmanlike excellence. “In baseball, if you are a showboat, they bust you up,” said Dave Parker.

The National Basketball Association, which integrated after baseball, was far more open to black styles of showmanship and athleticism. So, after Jim Brown’s reign as rushing king, was the National Football League. Both leagues cultivated and promoted great black talent and allowed the players a wide measure of self-expression. Baseball didn’t. Its statistical obsessions, antique uniforms, and ancestor worship all look back to an idealized version of America that did not include blacks and that many blacks simply don’t share.

`Baseball’s distance from black America is evident even in the names of its players. Football and basketball rosters are packed with LeBrons and Carmelos and Tayshawns. At the start of the 2007 season there were sixty-nine African-Americans in MLB. Only two, Dontrelle Willis and LaTroy Hawkins, had what could be NBA-worthy names.

Fewer and fewer black kids even give baseball a thought. Little League teams are rare in America’s inner cities, and a lot of high schools have dropped the sport. On the college level, more than 40 percent of football players and about 60 percent of basketball players are black; for baseball, the figure hovers around 6 percent. Twenty-five years ago, almost a third of major-leaguers were African-American. Today it is less than 10 percent—3 percent for pitchers.

In most major-league ballparks, on most days, the number of black fans can be counted in three digits. The game is full of subtle and not-so-subtle cultural disincentives. Tattoos are frowned upon. Dreadlocks are, too. A home run hitter who bursts into a spontaneous end-zone-type dance is instantly denounced as a hot dog. Ballpark music tends toward “Take-me-out-to-the-ballgame” riffs and Queen-sized stadium rockers.

Jackie Robinson’s last appearance on the diamond came at the second game of the 1972 World Series, where he was honored on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his first season. Robinson, who suffered from diabetes, was extremely sick. He was also angry. Like his fellow revolutionary Babe Ruth, Robinson found himself excluded from baseball after his playing career ended, denied a chance to manage a team. There were no black managers in 1972. And so Robinson took what baseball imagined would be a nostalgic celebration of its racial liberalism and turned it on its ear. He was pleased to be recognized, he told the crowd, “[but] I’m going to be tremendously more pleased and more proud when I look at that third base coaching line one day and see a black face managing in baseball.”

Robinson died ten days later, at the age of fifty-three. It took three years before the Cleveland Indians hired Frank Robinson to manage. He did okay; over sixteen seasons, with four teams, he compiled a .475 winning percentage and never came in first. It is fair to say that he didn’t establish a trend. At the start of the 2009 season, there were still only four black managers in the big leagues, up from just two in 2006.

On April 15, 1997, fifty years after integration, Major League Baseball held a “Jackie Robinson Day.” His number, 42, was retired from the game forever. Seven years later, Commissioner Selig milked Robinson again, proclaiming that henceforth, April 15 would be Jackie Robinson Day. Selig and other major-league officials and players voiced the hope that this would help repair relations with blacks who had given up on the game.

Hostile relations between baseball and black America are a problem for the game—as Chris Rock said, it makes the game look like an exercise in reverse affirmative action. It also seems anachronistic. George W. Bush was a baseball man; but Barack Obama is not only the first African-American president but, not coincidentally, the first basketball player in the White House.

Playing racial catch-up has always been a problem for Coopers-town. In 1962, Bob Feller published an article in the
Saturday
Evening Post
advocating a “niche in the Hall of Fame for Satchel Paige.” Feller had barnstormed against Paige and, in the twilight of their careers, they were teammates on the Cleveland Indians.

Four years later, in his celebrated Hall of Fame speech, Ted Williams—nobody’s idea of a flaming radical—made his own plea for including Negro leaguers in Cooperstown.

Commissioner Ford Frick, backed by a representative of the Clark family, Paul Kerr, adamantly opposed putting Negro-leagues players into the Hall of Fame. Frick argued that (1) this would water down the standards of the shrine; (2) it would violate the rule that candidates had to have played at least ten years in the majors; and (3) no reliable statistics were available to judge the Negro leaguers. Objections 2 and 3 were transparently circular. Negro-leagues players had been prevented from playing in the majors—how were they supposed to log ten years? Similarly, they couldn’t have accumulated major-league-quality statistics. The first point—that the Negro-leagues players weren’t good enough—was refuted by Feller, Dizzy Dean, Joe DiMaggio, and the other Hall of Famers who had barnstormed against them. If further proof were necessary, there was Paige’s “rookie” season with the Cleveland Indians, 1948, when, well past the age of forty, he won 6 and lost 1, posting a 2.48 ERA. And, of course, Negro leaguers like Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, Jackie Robinson, and Larry Doby competed pretty well in the majors.

Three years after Williams’s Hall of Fame speech, Cooperstown still had not moved. In 1969, the writers finally spoke up. The unpredictable Dick Young, by now the president of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, forcefully put the case at the annual Hall of Fame induction ceremony:

Until now, there has been one failing, and the baseball writers intend
that this should be rectified. Nobody questions, certainly, the credentials
of these great ballplayers on my right. They all belong. But we do ask
the question, “Why should Waite Hoyt and Stanley Coveleski be in the
Hall of Fame and not Satchel Paige? Why should Roy Campanella be in
the Hall of Fame and not Josh Gibson?”

There are other men, great ballplayers, who certainly have a place
here in this shrine. They were not part of orga nized ball. When the rules
were set up, one of the rules was that you should excel for a period of ten
years, because time proves a man’s worth. And it might be said that
Satchel Paige did not play Major League ball for ten years and that Josh
Gibson did not play Major League ball for ten years. But was that their
fault, gentlemen? The answer, of course, is obvious.

Bowie Kuhn, then commissioner of baseball, agreed with Young. But the Hall’s board of directors was adamant in its refusal. A compromise was crafted: Cooperstown would establish a special display of Negro-leagues players, to be chosen at a rate of one per year by a committee of experts.

The announcement of this arrangement, at the start of 1971, caused a storm of outrage. “I was just as good as the white boys,” said the far-from-militant Satchel Paige. “I ain’t going in the back door to the Hall of Fame.”

Ebony
magazine, the organ of the black middle class, published a full-page editorial on the subject in April 1971. It was titled “And Now, the Biggest Shortchange of Them All”:

Leroy (Satchel) Paige was named to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Coopers-
town, N. Y. Well, he really wasn’t named to the Hall of Fame, seems he just
didn’t qualify for that honor. He didn’t play ten years in the majors. Instead
of being named to the Hall of Fame, he was given a niche in the National
Baseball [Hall of Fame and] Museum, a separate wing where they are inaugurating
a special exhibit from the famed black baseball leagues. Each
year a black player from the past will be voted into the museum and finally
everyone who visits the museum will get to see and read about Paige, Gibson,
Foster and the others
—
in the separate exhibit, of course. The Baseball
Writers’ Association won this hollow victory from The National Baseball
Museum and Hall of Fame, Inc., the private trust endowed by a scion of the
Singer Sewing Machine fortune and operated by his estate.

When it comes to baseball, the so-called all-American game, Satchel
Paige and other black stars who were kept out of orga nized ball for so
many years do not belong in any anteroom. They belong in the Hall of
Fame proper and the Baseball Writers’ Association should have continued
its fight a little longer. If state and national constitutions can be rewritten
and amended to correct injustices, surely something can be done
to the rules governing something so mundane as a sports Hall of Fame.

The Hall of Fame needs to take another look at how it has shortchanged
Satchel Paige. Black people will not in this day and age settle
for just half a loaf.

It took Cooperstown only a few months to understand the stupidity of its decision. On June 10, the Hall announced that a ten-member committee would pick worthy Negro leaguers, starting with Paige, for full membership. Before the committee was disbanded in 1977, it chose Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, Monte Irvin, Cool Papa Bell, Judy Johnson, Oscar Charleston, Martin Dihigo, and Pop Lloyd.

Robert W. Peterson, whose 1970 book
Only the Ball Was White
had a powerful influence on the baseball establishment, argued that the number of Negro-leagues inductees should be proportional to the number of Negroes in the country.

“There are now in the Hall of Fame sixty-eight players whose careers in the major leagues covered the period from 1900 to 1947,” he wrote. “During the 1900–47 era, the Negro percentage of America’s population remained fairly consistent at ten percent. Arbitrarily, then, it could be assumed that ten percent of the Hall of Fame members for that era should be Negroes.”

The idea of establishing a quota wasn’t seriously studied, but it did serve as a rough guideline when the Hall, in 1977, turned the job of choosing Negro leaguers over to the Veterans Committee, which chose nine more players: Leon Day, Willie Foster, Willie Wells, Bullet Joe Rogan, Smokin’ Joe Williams, Turkey Stearnes, Rube Foster, Ray Dandridge, and Hilton Smith.
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