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[THE DAWN OF MODERN BASEBALL BY CARL WILKERSON]
I perceive that major league baseball began in the late-1940's, not
in 1871, 1876, 1901, 1920, or any of the other dates commonly cited by
so-called baseball historians. I support this claim by noting that the
top Caucasian professional baseball leagues that existed before the
color line began to go down in the 1940's cannot reasonably be called
major league baseball.
My defense will not be reliant upon the social utility of drawing the
line as a way to get even with bigots, although I personally find such
reciprocity not without appeal. It is rather an internal attack on the
"major league baseball" of those prewar years, dismantling the
notion that the games and pennant races could have been legitimate in
and of themselves in the context of the race issue.
My initial motivation for such specificity in setting a single date
on the dawn of major league baseball was the perceptible lack of
agreement as to how long the top North American professional leagues
have been playing essentially the same game they do now. Television
announcers regularly report on a player having broken one
"modern" record or another, with closer inspection revealing
that the date of transition used in the particular case may correspond
to, tautologically, nothing other than the last time another player was
more successful in the given category. Examination of the more
perceptible discontinuities in major league play since the first
professional team was formed in 1869 is instructive in other respects.
The central precepts of team sport were violated in the days of the
color line to an extent that severely contextualizes, and perhaps
entirely invalidates, American League and National League standings and
statistics before that time and the violations stem with logical
inevitability from the ban itself.
It is imperative to the integrity of an event that is competitive and
presented as such that all sides attempt, as a matter of good faith, to
win. Otherwise, what transpires is not a contest but an exhibition at
best, a farce at worst. The 1919 Black Sox scandal was not about the
Chicago players intentionally playing poorly as much as it was about
their intentionally playing less well than usual. The point of law, as
it were, had to address the latter act, else any player who threw a game
could counterargue that he hadn't done anything to hurt his team, he had
only declined to help it as much as usual on that particular day. This
rhetorical ploy was known by early-20th century baseball fans and
adminstrators to be used by would-be game fixers in approaching players
thought to be potentially helpful. The popular term for intentional
underperforming was "laying down," implying a more passive
(and less detectable) variety of subversion than flagrant misplay.
The ban on blacks playing in the American and National Leagues
created a conflict of interest in players that discouraged them from
full display of their talents. As in Las Vegas, where every successful
new strategy employed by gamblers is made illegal upon discovery by the
casinos and the biggest individual winners are rewarded with an
"informal" request to leave Nevada and never return, the
professional baseball players of the day were subject to attack on the
race issue if they became too good at what they did. Babe Ruth himself
was suspected of being a "secret Negro," a claim which he felt
compelled to deny frequently throughout his career. His denials may have
been rooted in whatever racism he harbored personally, but the prospect
of his being removed from his profession, however slim the probability,
must have motivated him as well. Did it perhaps motivate him, and others
with a little extra ability to burn, to keep a lower profile on the
field? It cannot have encouraged better play on his part.
Less prominent players also had to be concerned with passing the
"race test." For example, teams wanting to use Cuban players
had to establish that the players in question were "true
Cubans," that is, as opposed to black ones. Some of the players so
examined passed the test and some failed.
Player abilities are largely developed by the individual player. A
young person begins to hone baseball skills at an early age. The young
person spends certain amounts of time and energy on batting, throwing,
running, and other skills. Development is largely a function of this
allocation. Later, when coaches and managers become involved, it is
still the young person who has to execute, and the physical and mental
processes that accompany every action of the eventually-mature player
can still be said to spring from the player's own past and present
regimen to a great extent. The color line could not have been reasonably
ignored by a prospective professional ballplayer. Players had to
allocate a certain amount of their stamina and intellect to beating the
ban continuously, evading it every moment of their pre-professional and
professional lives. Certain players did not have to worry as much as
others about it, which only added to the inequities it caused. And, as
with Ruth, those who survived the entrance exam still had to worry, at
least in theory, about becoming good enough at the game to draw negative
attention and possible witch hunts, with the resulting absurdity that it
was possible for a player to be "too good" in what was
supposed to have been a competition. Taking practical steps to prepare
for race scrutiny, or at least the player's anticipation of its becoming
a nontrivial influence on his career, necessarily compromised player
training effectiveness and performance in league games. The resulting
contests were not entirely about who played baseball the best.
As the ban was an informal one, never appearing as black-letter law
in any official American League and/or National League documents, the
individual teams were technically at liberty to field black players from
the beginning of the 20th century (and before). That they did not
attempt to do so, preferring to participate in the unspoken moratorium,
violated the principle of competition as well. Some cooperative
elements, inevitably, must exist for league games to be held. But
blanket immunity for collaboration cannot be granted in an environment
in which competition drives the validity of the enterprise to such an
extent. It is difficult to blame the successful teams for preferring the
status quo; it is easy to blame the perennial losers for not hiring all
of the black ball stars they could and going to any extreme to see to it
that none of their opponents got too rambunctious with the new talent.
The Athletics of the late-1910's, the Red Sox of the 1920's, and the
Phillies of the 1930's would unquestionably have benefitted from having
had Rube Foster, Martin Dihigo, and Ray Dandridge respectively.
Preferring to take the easy route, these teams effectively threw season
after season in the same way the Black Sox threw the 1919 World Series.
They couldn't be bothered to try.
Is there anyone who can explain why watching a game in which one team
is losing on purpose is worthwhile? I am not referring to situations
such as the insertion of the mop-up reliever in baseball or the
third-string quarterback at the end of a football game. Those situations
are marked by the presence of two mitigating factors: the teams are
cutting their losses so that they have a better chance of winning future
games, and the personnel on the field, given their identities, are still
trying to win the game if possible. No conflicts of interest exist. Even
conceding for the sake of argument that the athletes in the American and
National Leagues were in general superior to the black ball mainstays in
prewar times (a "concession" that one might well prefer to
describe as "falsehood"), the former were compromised in their
ability to pursue the goal of winning to a perceptible extent by the
side effects of the color line. Teams that abdicate the goal of winning
in favor of deliberate suboptimality are not teams. They reduce to
triviality the completion of the "games" in which they engage,
games which are the only evidence their league has to offer of its
legitimacy and worth. A thrown game is no game, and the games played by
the American and National Leagues during the days of professional
baseball apartheid were thrown games in the strictest sense of the term.
The prewar pennant races took place in the shadow of conditions that
were measurably more racist in certain major league cities than in
others. St. Louis and Boston, for example, were often cited as worse
towns than most for blacks. To claim that the racism, and regional
fluctuations therein, were irrelevant since there were no black players
in the majors at that time is like saying that racism is not a problem
in all-white neighborhoods. For example, Forsyth County, Georgia, became
noteworthy in the early-1990's for not having had a black resident in
several decades. Closer examination suggested that the absence was a
result of conditions so inimical to blacks that none had remained in the
county long enough to have been rightly called residents. It was the
social condition in question that had caused and maintained the
demography.
The concept of the level playing field is not strictly enforced in
baseball, with franchises building their teams around their parks and,
on occasion, their parks around their teams. However, there are, and
must be, some restrictions on home team advantage. Minimally, killing
off or maiming for life opposing players is, and must be, implicitly
forbidden. Such an observation may seem ridiculous now, unless you have
lost a relative to a lynching, and there are quite a few people alive
who have. It has been nearly fifty years now since Brown vs. Board of
Education was first addressed by the U.S. Supreme Court. A lot of people
who were around then are around now, or at least their first two or
three generations of descendants are. Or they should be.
It would be petty to assess the historical effect of regional pockets
of racism solely in terms of how they have influenced baseball games.
That is not to say that one cannot, conversely, assess the games in
terms of how they have influenced by regional pockets of racism. Why
should the manager of the Chicago Cubs, for example, have to cave in to
those who would maintain a hostile environment in St. Louis by leaving
any of his players home when playing road games against the Cardinals?
If I had been managing the Cubs in 1935, I would not have left Gabby
Hartnett home for a road game against the Cardinals. Had I been managing
the Cubs in 1998, I would not have left Sammy Sosa home for such a game.
The implications for fair play of having to leave any number of players
home for road games are obvious. Racism did have a casualty count, and
the pervasiveness of its more violent aspects was such that not even a
baseball game could take place in certain parts of the country without
being influenced by it.
One hears often that history is written by the winners. Examined more
narrowly, history is written by those who are still around to write it
today. It follows that any version of history which a given group
promulgates at the expense of other groups' ability to compile, not to
mention circulate, other versions, must be looked upon as suspect.
It is not petty to mourn the effect of genocide on discourse.
Eliminating persons with knowledge of a culture has been a historically
effective way of curtailing the presence and influence of that culture
in general discourse. As the individuals who sustain the culture are
dispatched, the culture itself naturally succumbs to attrition. Is there
a black American, Canadian, Mexican, Cuban, Honduran, Salvadorian,
Belizian, . . . , or Falkland Islander alive who will maintain that the
exclusion of "colored men" from the American and National
(and, indeed, Federal) Leagues between 1884 and 1947 had no measurable
effect on the game as played by these leagues? To claim that "the
damage is done [and cannot be undone]" and that it is best to
"let bygones be bygones" is to accept and reinforce the aims
of the initiators of the "color line." If one dismisses the
loss incurred by the game (never mind the persons thus excluded) as not
worth examining, one is guilty of upholding the "color line"
oneself in the sense that the "color line" was a line of
propaganda that was sustained by passive as well as active destruction
of opposition and evidence that might serve opposition. So far from
having no choice but to accept what transpired under such twisted
circumstances as valid, one has no choice but to throw out the results.
This practical and theoretical imperative is binding for scientific
reasons as well: "reality control" encompasses diddling with
the conditions before the testing has begun as well as throwing out
subsequent results that one does not like.
Without taking the statement to be true in the extreme, I note that
history is consensual. Some range of popular assent would be a necessity
in redrawing the line initiating modern major league baseball history if
it were to be put into practice. To maintain that the "color
line" was not of sufficient import to merit selecting 1946 or 1947
as when modern major league history began is to take on the
counterarguments of quite a few black Americans, Canadians, Mexicans,
Cubans, Hondurans, Salvadorians, Belizians, . . . , and Falkland
Islanders in addition to taking on the responsibility of coming up with
a more logical year for candidacy. Are you so worried about Babe Ruth
being stripped of some of his statistical legitimation that you never
even think to extend the same amount of concern to Josh Gibson?
Did YOUR parents have to use the side or rear door to the stores in
their home town? (The doors are still there in the rural south, by the
way, their isolated and architecturally-inefficient presence along
otherwise-featureless long brick walls a tangible and measurable
reminder of exactly how willful the segregationists were about ensuring
their ideals.)
Did YOU have an older sister with a gift for numbers who nonetheless
received little or no math education while not-too-bright kids went to
"public schools" that were better-funded than your siblings'
by several orders of magnitude? (We won't even talk about the so-called
"literacy" tests that were administered in the United States
to blacks but not to whites to prevent the former group from voting.)
If you really think that Jackie Robinson was an inadequate augur of
the world to come, don't convince me, convince a black woman or man, or
better still, convince someone who wasn't "really" black but
who got pigeonholed as such early on and never escaped the label.
Because until you do, you will never, ever get the "consensus"
necessary to establish any other time as historically more significant.
And, if brushing them off in the hope that they will ultimately grow
weary of arguing and go away is your preference, I remind you that it
was the failure of this approach that allowed the color line to go down
in the first place.
It may seem hard-headed of me not to believe the pre-1946 American
League and National League to have been "major league
baseball." With Ruth, Wagner, Mathewson, Gehrig, Hornsby, Cobb, et.
al. spending their careers playing in one or both of the two leagues,
one might ask how I could not regard them as having been "major
league"? My response is that, on the contrary, I didn't regard them
as having been "baseball." "Race" is a term that is
often used, not without cause, synonymously with "assigned social
role."
Assignment of a given player to the "white" group or the
"black" group was ultimately at the discretion of the
commissioner's office, which was the authority of last resort on such
matters during Kenesaw Mountain Landis's term in office. The assignment
of status was even made explicitly by Landis in some cases, with a given
organization trying to classify a player as "white" but being
thwarted. This operationalization of "whiteness" was such that
once it was in place, "competition" among the teams in the
white leagues could not possibly have retained integrity. This was in
part because a team wasn't truly at liberty to improve itself under such
a system. An upwardly-mobile team could not freely scout, recruit,
acquire, develop, or trade for players under such a system, since their
fortunes might ultimately hinge on whether Landis's temperament would
favor them in a particular case. With such a spectre at the end of the
tunnel, teams gave up on certain players "just to be on the safe
side," with some of the players being dismissed before they had had
a chance to play for the organization at all.
Even more of a conundrum, given the simple-minded taxonomy employed
by the baseball establishment, must have been the issue of how to deal
with Cubans and Polynesians and native Americans and Arabs and Mexicans
of heterogeneous ancestry and so forth. The ban on "blacks"
presupposed that race was univariate, dichotomous, and discrete. With
such tepid assumptions as the foundation of their conceptual model, the
racists made it impossible for Landis or anyone else to be
"fair" within the context of its application, there being no
logically consequent standard against which "fairness" could
have been judged. I expect the racists would have said that they
"just knew" who was white and who was black, a statement whose
articulation would only have supported my case.
copyright
by Pattie Thomas and Carl Wilkerson 2002
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