Horace Stoneham and the Breaking of Baseball’s Second Color Barrier
Baseball history has not been kind to Horace Stoneham.(1) The owner of one of the most storied major-league franchises during a time when New York dominated the baseball world, who shocked that world when he moved his team to California in 1958, he has become nonetheless almost a forgotten man by those who chronicle the game. On those rare occasions when he is mentioned, it is usually to underscore his reputation as a hard-drinking, friendly yet plodding owner whose shortcomings prevail over his strengths, rather than to comment on his achievements or contributions to the game.(2) The course of this reception runs in large part because of Stoneham's personality A shy and reticent type, he never sought the public stage as did his fellow owners at the time; Jacob Ruppert, Larry MacPhail, Branch Rickey, and Walter O'Malley were outgoing men at ease with writers and journalists. For most baseball historians, Stoneham was affable but uninteresting, someone playing second or third fiddle in the music of New York City baseball, behind the Yankees and the Dodgers. Once he came to San Francisco, his Giants always seemed to finish second best, usually to the Dodgers, who, along with Walter O'Malley, became the darlings of the West Coast media.(3) The last thorough discussion of Stoneham as a baseball man was written over thirty-five years ago by Roger Angell, when he paid a visit to Candlestick Park in 1975, Stoneham's last year as the owner of the San Francisco Giants. Aware that after fifty-seven years of family ownership Stoneham was selling the team (indeed, the chief reason for the writer's visit), Angell views him rather nostalgically, as if granted a fleeting glimpse of a vanishing species, "the last of the pure baseball men, the owners who owned nothing but their team and cared for nothing but the game.'(4) Angell's account is largely an affectionate one, stressing Stoneham's congenial company, his shy somewhat reclusive nature, his well-known kindness and generosity, his sentimentality and loyalty toward his players and those who work in the franchise's organization, and above all else, his deep love for baseball history, especially the Giants' history, evident in his extraordinary recall of past games and previous greats, such as John McGraw, Frank Frisch, Mel Ott, and Carl Hubbell. Once the regular season started, Stoneham rarely missed a Giants home game but never ventured onto the field or into the clubhouse, preferring instead the isolation of his centerfield office in the Polo Grounds or his solitary perch in Candlestick Park's owner's box, high above the action, which is where he sat on the day of Angell's visit, reminiscing about the game he was leaving.(5) In his focus on Stoneham's character and personality, Angell follows the lead of Bill Veeck, a former baseball owner who dealt with Stoneham on many schemes and transactions. Veeck's portrait of Stoneham, different from Angell's in its sarcastic and irreverent slant, appeared almost ten years earlier in 1966 and portrays the Giants owner as one of the shrewdest operators in the game. Veeck was characteristically blunt in his assessment of Stoneham. "The two men I least cared to match myself against during my days of free wheeling hustling were Branch Rickey and Horace Stoneham."(6) Veeck catalogues Stoneham's many victims, himself included, who have wandered into negotiations with Stoneham, hoping to take advantage of his reputation as a notorious drinker and strip him of a player or two, only to end up drunk themselves, giving old Horace exactly what he wanted all along.(7) In 1958, according to Veeck, Phillies general manager Roy Hamey talked Stoneham into trading Ruben Gomez for the journeyman Jack Sanford, not knowing that Stoneham had lost faith in Gomez as a starter and had secretly yearned for a stalwart right-handed pitcher like Sanford. Sanford went on to great things for San Francisco, including winning twenty-four games in their pennant year of 1962; Gomez, on the other hand, won only three games and lost eight between 1959 and 1962. …
The Rise of Baseball's Racial Quota System in the 1950s
Sportswriter John Lardner was a longtime observer and admirer of Branch Rickey. Assessing Rickey's St. Louis Cardinals before the 1934 season, a fiery outfit that would become immortalized as the Gashouse Gang, Lardner wrote presciently that Leo Durocher and Pepper Martin "have more energy and fire between them than you'll find in the entire rosters of many clubs." (1) When Rickey came to run the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s, Lardner watched as the executive built another powerhouse team. He saw through most of the smokescreens and cagey circumlocutions often employed by the man New York sportswriter Tom Meany memorably dubbed the Mahatma. When Rickey delayed Jackie Robinson's promotion from Montreal to Brooklyn until the last week of 1947 spring training, Lardner never doubted that the gifted black pioneer would make the roster and excel. Nor did the journalist ever believe that Rickey, despite his public vacillations, would not reinstate Leo Durocher as Brooklyn manager in 1948, given that his suspension for the entire 1947 season by commissioner Happy Chandler was unwarranted. Fast forward to 1954. Rickey is laboring in the fourth year of a so far very unsuccessful Pittsburgh Pirates rebuilding project, but Lardner, the eldest of many gifted writing sons of immortal humorist Ring Lardner, is still eager for Rickey's opinion on matters of sporting and social importance. In the Newsweek magazine May 10, 1954, issue, Lardner devotes his regular column to a discussion of "The Fifty Per Cent Color Line." It is a piece inspired by a recent incident concerning Rickey's former team, the Dodgers, who benched left fielder Sandy Amoros on days that Don Newcombe was pitching. Lardner realizes that Brooklyn management fears the precedent of a starting lineup with five black players: Newcombe, Amoros, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, and Jim "Junior" Gilliam. (A year before, by the way, a lot of controversy had surrounded Jackie Robinson taking some playing time from Billy Cox at third base.) Remembering that Rickey had presided over the Dodgers' initial integration "boldly, thoughtfully and successfully," Lardner writes, "There are times when you wish he had worked the old field a while longer. What would he do, for instance, about the 50 per cent color line if he were still in Brooklyn?" (2) In his heyday in Brooklyn, Rickey would usually give a thoughtful answer to a thoughtful question. Before the start of the 1950 season, his last year in Brooklyn, Rickey frankly admitted that when he traded fleet black center fielder Sam Jethroe to the Boston Braves, it was the first time in his long career he had let go of a player who might be better than those he retained. He conceded that ownership's fear of too many black players was a contributing reason, but he felt that, on the positive side, the Braves would at least have joined the Giants and Dodgers as a third National League team in the market for black players. (3) By 1954, however, Rickey was not eager to engage in a public colloquy with John Lardner on the quota system. He had his hands full trying to rebuild the cellar-dwelling Pirates, who had waited until the same year of 1954 to bring up their first black player, second baseman Curt Roberts. Though Rickey had hired twenty-two scouts of color in his first years as Pittsburgh boss, their work wouldn't bear fruit until after Rickey's departure from the Pittsburgh helm in 1955. (4) Yet I think that Lardner's unanswered rhetorical question in "The Fifty Per Cent Color Line" remains a provocative and important one to historians. It seems to me no coincidence that the article appeared just a week before the United States Supreme Court issued its historic decision against school segregation in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. It is also no coincidence that from 1951 to 1959 the National League pennant was monopolized by the three teams with the most black players: the New York Giants in '51 and '54, the Dodgers in Brooklyn in '52, '53, '55, and '56 and in Los Angeles in '59, and the Milwaukee Braves in '57 and '58. …
The Role of Democratic Politics in Transforming Moral Convictions into Law
Professor Michael Perry's new book, Morality, Politics, and Law, is an ambitious attempt to address the extent to which moral and religious beliefs in a pluralistic society, such as ours, can legitimately influence law. He departs from the common opinion in legal circles that moral beliefs are a matter of taste or "values," and defends an older conception that it is possible to attain moral "knowledge." ' He also departs from the "liberal political-philosophical project," 2 which claims that it is possible (and desirable) for governments to steer a neutral course between competing moral understandings of the good. This, he suggests, is an illusion, and a disguise for the imposition of a particular moral structure without opportunity for open deliberation and reflection. Professor Perry brings some refreshing common sense to these riddles of moral philosophy. His "naturalist" approach has obvious roots in Aristotle-not a bad place to begin thinking about ethics. His dismissal of