(fwd from William Mandel) Best Baseball Book I Ever Read

[Les Schaffer <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    To qualify myself to write about another's book on baseball, here is
a paragraph from my own autobiography:
    "We in the Bronx rooted for perhaps the greatest baseball team ever
fielded. In right field was Babe Ruth himself. In center there was Earle
Combs of the marvelous shoe-string catches who would then flip the ball
underhand to ex-pitcher Ruth, from whose mighty arm it would reach any
base faster and on a straighter line than most fielders could get it in
even without the delay of the relay. I saw that with my own eyes. There
was Lou Gehrig on first, second in homers only to Ruth. Among the
pitchers was Herb Pennock, with perhaps the most graceful wind-up the
big leagues knew -- neither Satchel Paige nor any other African-American
was allowed in them then. (The fight led by the Communist Daily
Worker's unsurpassed all-sports-writer, Lester Rodney, that brought
Jackie Robinson onto the Dodgers was not won until twenty years later.)"
    Lester Who? Well, a man about whom two master's theses were written
in the 1990s, and the book, Press Box Red, by Irwin Silber, Temple
University Press, just out. Master's theses about a sportswriter? A man
who the then just previous ex-president of the United States not only
talked to but whose paper he read. Here's how the top sportswriter of
the then nationwide Hearst papers, Bob Considine, reported it:
    "Among the sportswriters at the...party...was Lester Rodney, sports
editor of the Daily Worker, the Communist daily. Harold Conrad of the
Brooklyn Eagle was talking to [former president] Herbert Hoover...when
he noticed Rodney."
    "'Mr. Hoover,' Conrad said, 'I want you to meet the gentleman from
the Daily Worker.' He steered the ex-president over and introduced him.
    "'Your paper has been belting my brains out lately,' Hoover said to
Rodney."
    This was 1940. In the previous four years Rodney had made a national
issue of something taken for granted by whites since 1876, when
post-Civil-War Reconstruction of the South was reversed by the Supreme
Court, that
professional baseball was for whites only. The millions of immigrant
workers who had come from Europe in those sixty years and had
acculturated to baseball as the national sport (football and basketball
were college sports only, and higher education was for the few) had no
idea that there were Blacks of major league caliber.
    Rodney was an athlete, and still is: ranked No. 1 in California and
No. 2 nationally in the over-age-85 category in tennis. As a youth he
had been offered a 50% scholarship at Syracuse in track, but could not
accept it because his father had lost his business in the Great
Depression and family simply couldn't pay the other 50%. He played
basketball,
and baseball at the semi-pro level.
    When the Daily Worker launched a Sunday edition in 1936, he, a
reader but not yet a Communist, persuaded the editor that it needed a
sports page, and got the job, which soon appeared daily because the
readers voted for it 6-to-1. He couldn't imagine doing it from an office
or studio, as Ronald Reagan did his radio re-enactments of games. Rodney
showed up at the Dodger, Giant, and Yankee stadiums, all New York teams
then, talked to the players and managers, and was soon accredited. They
saw that he knew the sport, wrote about it well, and truly loved it.
    Very large parts of the book are direct transcriptions of Silber's
taped interviews of Rodney, who we find saying things like: "If DiMaggio
wasn't ballet, what the hell is ballet? Floating all that distance..."
or "What's more symmetrical than a 6-4-3 double play perfectly
executed?"
    In 1937 a group of writers including Rodney were talking to
DiMaggio, then in his second year with the Yankees. One asked him who
was the best pitcher he ever faced. He replied without hesitation,
"Satchel Paige," who he played against with major league stars on the
West Coast. Eleven years later, Paige, 43 years old, having finally been
hired by Cleveland the previous year, faced DiMaggio in relief, with the
Yankees and his team battling it out for the pennant. Cleveland had a
4-1 lead, but back-to-back singles with none out against the starting
pitcher put Yankees on first and third, and DiMaggio came to bat. Paige
was called in.
   Paige was no longer able to count on his speed to strike batters out,
but still
had superb control. Rodney's description of how Paige got DiMaggio to
fly out, even though one man scored, then got the next two on easy
flies, and
went on to got all three out in the ninth to win, is too long to
reproduce
here, but is the best piece of baseball writing I have seen.
   Being able to report on Paige in the majors was a personal triumph
for Rodney. In 1937, when the Kansas City Monarchs, Black, of which
Paige was a member, were in New York for a game, Rodney interviewed him
in his Harlem hotel. Paige told Rodney that he had read about the Daily
Worker's campaign to open professional baseball to Blacks. It had begun
with a three-Sunday expose the previous year, culminating with an
editorial by Rodney, in which he wrote:
     "Fans, it's up to you. Tell the big league magnates that you're
sick of the poor pitching in the American League. You want to see
Satchel Paige out there on the mound. You're tired of a flop team in
Boston, of the silly Brooklyn Dodgers, of the inept Phillies and the
semi-pro Athletics....Demand better ball. Demand Americanism in
baseball, equal opportunities for Negro and white."
      Paige said to Rodney:
     "Let the winners of the World Series play an all-star Negro team
just one game in the Yankee Stadium, and if we don't beast them before a
packed house you don't have to pay us a dime."
     Rodney asked: "Can I print that?" "Absolutely." Paige had gotten
nowhere with other papers. Rodney gave it the top of his page, under a
banner headline, and created a sensation.
     Talking to author Silber, Rodney said: "We never did have a plan
for the campaign. But a strategy did evolve. First was simply to raise
hell about the color ban and get it into the national
consciousness....Second, we set out to popularize the black stars and
document that the could compete at the Big League level. Third, shoot
down the notion that the white players and managers wouldn't stand for
it by directly putting the question to them....But maybe the most
important was to generate fan participation in the campaign."
     Dizzy Dean, 30-game winner, Hall of Famer, who had led the Cards to
two World Series wins, said that Paige is "a better pitcher than I am,
ever was, or ever will be."
     But there were equally outspoken racists. In 1938 Jake Powell, a
Yankee outfielder, an Ohio policeman in the off-season, said over a very
powerful radio station that his favorite activity was "beating niggers
over the head and throwing them in jail." (WGN, Chicago, July 29, 1938).
     The baseball establishment would have laughed that off before 1936.
But things had changed. Tens of thousands marched in the Communist May
Day parades in New York, and in 1938 it featured banners calling for an
end to Jim Crow in baseball. Uniformed baseball teams from three unions
were in the parade. At ballparks in New York and elsewhere, Young
Communist League members handed fans leaflets quoting ballplayers and
major-press sportswriters about the color line.
     Fans and black organizations demand Powell's indefinite suspension.
Commissioner Landis suspended him for ten days.
     Although as I personally can testify from experience in my native
New York, in Cleveland where, at 18, I was state circulation manager for
the Daily Worker, and in the South prior to the civil rights movement.
Communists had very high standing in the African-American community,
there were major Black leaders who were strongly anti-Communist. One of
them was A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters. But even he approached Rodney at a Negro League game where
Young Communist League members were circulating  petitions to open
so-called organized baseball to Blacks and said: "That's a wonderful
campaign your paper is carrying on, and it's getting results. You're
doing a great job."
    A Trade Union Athletic Association was organized in 1940, with
300,000 members. It became the spearhead of the petition campaign, and
ultimately 2,000,000 signatures were submitted to Commissioner Landis.
    The fight was not won until after World War II, during which the
draft took so many major leaguers that one team even tried out a
one-armed outfielder -- but no Blacks. Yet as early as 1939 the People's
World, West Coast equivalent of the Daily Worker, carried a column by
its David Farrell that was the first ever anywhere to spot Jackie
Robinson, then in junior college,as the likely initial Black:
     "Of the many fine Negro ball players I've seen in recent years,
Jackie Robinson strikes me as having the best chance to cut the buck in
organized ball."
     Rodney was a soldier in the South Pacific in the late autumn of
1945 when he got a cable from New York: "Congratulations. Dodgers
yesterday signed Jackie Robinson for Montreal team. You did it!"
     Because of the role of baseball in American life, there were those
who write that the breaking of its color line made a major contribution
to the change in the psychology of whites that won their support for the
civil rights movement of the following decade. At all events, as I
watched that seventh game of the American League play-off the other
night, with about as many faces of color on both teams as white, and
with the Yankees of both races hugging each other like brothers when
they won, I looked back with immense satisfaction to the role we who
were then Communists played in bringing this about.
    Rodney and I actually met for the first time about 1957, when we
were on the same side in the effort to get the Communist Party to become
totally independent of Soviet decisions. I left it that year, he the
following year. One of the remarkable things I was reminded of in
reading Silber's Press Box Red was that no other anti-capitalist
organization played any role in the campaign to Americanize baseball,
neither Trotskyists, nor the Socialist Party, nor the remnants of the
IWW.
    Bay Area people who may wish to meet the author and the hero of
Press Box Red may attend a book-signing at Silber's home, 4191 Fruitvale
in Oakland, at 3pm today, Saturday.
                                William Mandel




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The title of my autobiography, SAYING NO TO POWER (Introduction by
Howard Zinn), is based on my demolition of Sen. Joe McCarthy and later
of HUAC in hearings of 1953 and 1960. It is a history of how the
American people fought to defend and expand its rights since the 1920s
(I'm 86) employing the form of the life of a 30s AND 60s activist, one
who was involved in most serious movements: student, labor, 45 years of
efforts to prevent war with the USSR and Cuba, civil rights South and
North, women's liberation [my late wife appears on 50 pages], 37 years
on Pacifica Radio [where I reinvented talk radio, of whose previous
existence I had been unaware], civil liberties, and opposition to
anti-Semitism and to Zionism. You may hear/see my testimonies before
McCarthy and, later, HUAC on my website, http://www.billmandel.net  I am
the author of five books in my academic field, have taught at UC
Berkeley, and earlier held a postdoctoral fellowship, by invitation, at
Stanford's Hoover Institution.
 The book may be ordered through all normal sources. For an autographed
copy, send me $24 at 4466 View Pl.,#106, Oakland, CA. 94611
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