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Dodger Blue Bloods
When Maury Wills, the Dodgers’ black shortstop, began dating Doris Day, the team told him to back off.
By JOHN SCHULIAN
May 20, 2016
Maury Wills was tough enough to steal 104 bases in 1962 on legs that were bloody and bruised from femur to fetlock, all the better to inspire his Los Angeles Dodgers while bringing thievery back to baseball. And still there were certain San Francisco Giants who failed to heed Wills’s kamikaze spirit, whether he was sprinting for home or daring them to tangle with him at shortstop. He wasn’t the biggest of men, so the Giants took to breaking up double plays by coming in standing up and trying to knock him into left field.
The teams were the Hatfields and McCoys of the National League, and Wills decided that the only solution to his problem was the rocket launcher he had for an arm. He fired the ball as hard as he could at the next upright Giant who thundered his way—a bruiser named Jim Ray Hart—and hit him right between the eyes, just left him for dead. That’s how tough Maury Wills was.
THE LAST INNOCENTS
By Michael Leahy
Harper, 473 pages, $26.99
But every time the subject of his salary came up, Mr. Wills became a punching bag for management, proving forevermore that when the subject is the good old days, payday isn’t one of them. There were no players’ agents, no multi-year contracts, no mega-million-dollar sluggers and fireballers. High-handed executives ruled with an executioner’s remorselessness, and $7,500-a-year utility infielders lived in mortal fear of vexing the wrong people. Mr. Wills would gear up for negotiations by giving himself pep talks, but they always turned to vapor. The insecurities that drove him to greatness on the field became the undoing of this often teary-eyed vagabond, who had been marooned in the minor leagues for eight full seasons.
On the other side of the desk sat general manager Buzzie Bavasi, whose job title made him sound respectable on the banquet circuit but who was really the chief enforcer for Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley. Bavasi listened to Mr. Wills’s pitch—perhaps plea is a better word—for a pay raise, then told him what the ball club had decided he was worth, with the same kiss-off everyone received: “Here’s your contract, let’s wrap this up.”
To read Michael Leahy’s well-crafted, resolutely human “The Last Innocents: The Collision of the Turbulent Sixties and the Los Angeles Dodgers” is to feel the anger that welled up inside the Dodgers of the era, not just Mr. Wills but Sandy Koufax, the lefthander who for six seasons may have been the greatest pitcher ever, and good-timing Don Drysdale, who would buy you a drink at night and stick his fastball in your ribs the next afternoon. They were pushed around, shortchanged, and lied and condescended to by O’Malley, the Brooklyn lawyer who struck gold when he moved the team west in 1958, and by Bavasi, who seemingly enjoyed being a bully way too much.
O’Malley, described by Mr. Leahy as “an undeniable futurist,” had visions of taking big-league baseball to Japan, going so far as to send the Dodgers there on a spirit-sapping 18-game tour after Baltimore swept them in the 1966 World Series. Bavasi fancied himself a backslapper with a joke for everybody and maintained an affection for the team’s boozers and chippy-chasers, regularly extricating them from the trouble that grew out of what he called their “shenanigans.” But Bad Buzzie never failed to emerge at contract time, friendships be damned, and he always had O’Malley’s blessing.
What the two of them didn’t realize—what no one anywhere in baseball’s power structure seems to have given a moment’s consideration—was that change was upon the nation like a prairie fire burning out of control. It began with the unthinkable—President Kennedy’s assassination—and it produced a great step forward in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
After that, chaos was as much a part of everyday life as Walter Cronkite’s nightly reports on the war in Vietnam and the protests, bombings, assassinations and riots back home. But even when Watts erupted in L.A. in 1965 and the smell of burning rage wafted all the way to Dodger Stadium, O’Malley and Bavasi felt smugly safe in their cocoon.
Mr. Leahy, a former Washington Post reporter who was raised in the San Fernando Valley and as a kid saw Koufax pitch a perfect game at home against the Cubs, thrives as he describes how the Dodgers navigated this strange new world. Life was tough enough for Wes Parker, a balletic first baseman who had grown up rich and white in Brentwood yet couldn’t escape a feeling of worthlessness.
Still, black players had it worse. When Mr. Wills began dating sunny, blond Doris Day, Bavasi ordered him to back off—and he did. There was more subtlety at work when it came to housing, but the message was clear: Certain neighborhoods were off-limits to black players and their families.
So it was that catcher John Roseboro and outfielder Lou Johnson were living near Watts when a simple DUI arrest gone wrong sent everything spinning sideways. Roseboro, the conscience of the team, got out his guns and guarded his home. Mr. Johnson, a Dodger only because the regular left fielder, two-time batting champion Tommy Davis, had broken his ankle, waited until a reporter asked him why he attacked the ball so viciously in batting practice. “Because it’s f—n’ white,” Mr. Johnson said.
The white Dodgers embraced him for his clutch hitting just the same, with Mr. Koufax leading the way when they won the 1965 National League pennant and marched off to claim their second World Series in three years. “He said he was proud of me,” Mr. Johnson told Mr. Leahy. “He said they couldn’t have won without me—this is my friend Sandy telling me.” The races were united by the team’s annual stance that it was in no position to hand out big raises.
Bavasi preached that a fat paycheck for one player meant less money for the others. He hit bottom when he bragged to Sports Illustrated about duping Ron Fairly, a tough out from USC, into signing a bad deal by letting him see a phony contract for a teammate. Even Mr. Koufax, whose every performance at Dodger Stadium brought in a million extra dollars, had to hold out with Drysdale in 1965 to clear the $100,000 barrier that was then baseball’s gold standard. The unfortunate Mr. Wills never did get there. Bavasi stopped negotiating at $97,000, vowing not to give up a penny more and watching Mr. Wills cave one last time.
The players seethed as O’Malley and Bavasi willfully forgot on whose backs the franchise’s success had been built. After the Orioles cleaned their clocks in the ’66 World Series, Mr. Koufax surrendered to his arthritic left elbow and slipped into retirement at age 30—“No farewell tour. No need for 55,000 cheers,” Mr. Leahy writes. Mr. Wills and Drysdale would be gone soon enough, too.
Everything in and out of baseball seemed to be in free fall the next spring as the Dodgers met with the union rep Marvin Miller, a labor lawyer who may never have collected baseball cards as a boy but who knew everything about their economics: The players got $125 a year for posing for them, and the Topps card company was making millions off their likenesses. No one needed a slide rule to do the math on how wrong that was, and Miller was just getting warmed up. The revolution had finally arrived.
—Mr. Schulian is the author of the novel “A Better Goodbye” and
the winner of the 2016 PEN ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing.
When Maury Wills, the Dodgers’ black shortstop, began dating Doris Day, the team told him to back off.
By JOHN SCHULIAN
May 20, 2016
Maury Wills was tough enough to steal 104 bases in 1962 on legs that were bloody and bruised from femur to fetlock, all the better to inspire his Los Angeles Dodgers while bringing thievery back to baseball. And still there were certain San Francisco Giants who failed to heed Wills’s kamikaze spirit, whether he was sprinting for home or daring them to tangle with him at shortstop. He wasn’t the biggest of men, so the Giants took to breaking up double plays by coming in standing up and trying to knock him into left field.
The teams were the Hatfields and McCoys of the National League, and Wills decided that the only solution to his problem was the rocket launcher he had for an arm. He fired the ball as hard as he could at the next upright Giant who thundered his way—a bruiser named Jim Ray Hart—and hit him right between the eyes, just left him for dead. That’s how tough Maury Wills was.
THE LAST INNOCENTS
By Michael Leahy
Harper, 473 pages, $26.99
But every time the subject of his salary came up, Mr. Wills became a punching bag for management, proving forevermore that when the subject is the good old days, payday isn’t one of them. There were no players’ agents, no multi-year contracts, no mega-million-dollar sluggers and fireballers. High-handed executives ruled with an executioner’s remorselessness, and $7,500-a-year utility infielders lived in mortal fear of vexing the wrong people. Mr. Wills would gear up for negotiations by giving himself pep talks, but they always turned to vapor. The insecurities that drove him to greatness on the field became the undoing of this often teary-eyed vagabond, who had been marooned in the minor leagues for eight full seasons.
On the other side of the desk sat general manager Buzzie Bavasi, whose job title made him sound respectable on the banquet circuit but who was really the chief enforcer for Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley. Bavasi listened to Mr. Wills’s pitch—perhaps plea is a better word—for a pay raise, then told him what the ball club had decided he was worth, with the same kiss-off everyone received: “Here’s your contract, let’s wrap this up.”
To read Michael Leahy’s well-crafted, resolutely human “The Last Innocents: The Collision of the Turbulent Sixties and the Los Angeles Dodgers” is to feel the anger that welled up inside the Dodgers of the era, not just Mr. Wills but Sandy Koufax, the lefthander who for six seasons may have been the greatest pitcher ever, and good-timing Don Drysdale, who would buy you a drink at night and stick his fastball in your ribs the next afternoon. They were pushed around, shortchanged, and lied and condescended to by O’Malley, the Brooklyn lawyer who struck gold when he moved the team west in 1958, and by Bavasi, who seemingly enjoyed being a bully way too much.
O’Malley, described by Mr. Leahy as “an undeniable futurist,” had visions of taking big-league baseball to Japan, going so far as to send the Dodgers there on a spirit-sapping 18-game tour after Baltimore swept them in the 1966 World Series. Bavasi fancied himself a backslapper with a joke for everybody and maintained an affection for the team’s boozers and chippy-chasers, regularly extricating them from the trouble that grew out of what he called their “shenanigans.” But Bad Buzzie never failed to emerge at contract time, friendships be damned, and he always had O’Malley’s blessing.
What the two of them didn’t realize—what no one anywhere in baseball’s power structure seems to have given a moment’s consideration—was that change was upon the nation like a prairie fire burning out of control. It began with the unthinkable—President Kennedy’s assassination—and it produced a great step forward in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
After that, chaos was as much a part of everyday life as Walter Cronkite’s nightly reports on the war in Vietnam and the protests, bombings, assassinations and riots back home. But even when Watts erupted in L.A. in 1965 and the smell of burning rage wafted all the way to Dodger Stadium, O’Malley and Bavasi felt smugly safe in their cocoon.
Mr. Leahy, a former Washington Post reporter who was raised in the San Fernando Valley and as a kid saw Koufax pitch a perfect game at home against the Cubs, thrives as he describes how the Dodgers navigated this strange new world. Life was tough enough for Wes Parker, a balletic first baseman who had grown up rich and white in Brentwood yet couldn’t escape a feeling of worthlessness.
Still, black players had it worse. When Mr. Wills began dating sunny, blond Doris Day, Bavasi ordered him to back off—and he did. There was more subtlety at work when it came to housing, but the message was clear: Certain neighborhoods were off-limits to black players and their families.
So it was that catcher John Roseboro and outfielder Lou Johnson were living near Watts when a simple DUI arrest gone wrong sent everything spinning sideways. Roseboro, the conscience of the team, got out his guns and guarded his home. Mr. Johnson, a Dodger only because the regular left fielder, two-time batting champion Tommy Davis, had broken his ankle, waited until a reporter asked him why he attacked the ball so viciously in batting practice. “Because it’s f—n’ white,” Mr. Johnson said.
The white Dodgers embraced him for his clutch hitting just the same, with Mr. Koufax leading the way when they won the 1965 National League pennant and marched off to claim their second World Series in three years. “He said he was proud of me,” Mr. Johnson told Mr. Leahy. “He said they couldn’t have won without me—this is my friend Sandy telling me.” The races were united by the team’s annual stance that it was in no position to hand out big raises.
Bavasi preached that a fat paycheck for one player meant less money for the others. He hit bottom when he bragged to Sports Illustrated about duping Ron Fairly, a tough out from USC, into signing a bad deal by letting him see a phony contract for a teammate. Even Mr. Koufax, whose every performance at Dodger Stadium brought in a million extra dollars, had to hold out with Drysdale in 1965 to clear the $100,000 barrier that was then baseball’s gold standard. The unfortunate Mr. Wills never did get there. Bavasi stopped negotiating at $97,000, vowing not to give up a penny more and watching Mr. Wills cave one last time.
The players seethed as O’Malley and Bavasi willfully forgot on whose backs the franchise’s success had been built. After the Orioles cleaned their clocks in the ’66 World Series, Mr. Koufax surrendered to his arthritic left elbow and slipped into retirement at age 30—“No farewell tour. No need for 55,000 cheers,” Mr. Leahy writes. Mr. Wills and Drysdale would be gone soon enough, too.
Everything in and out of baseball seemed to be in free fall the next spring as the Dodgers met with the union rep Marvin Miller, a labor lawyer who may never have collected baseball cards as a boy but who knew everything about their economics: The players got $125 a year for posing for them, and the Topps card company was making millions off their likenesses. No one needed a slide rule to do the math on how wrong that was, and Miller was just getting warmed up. The revolution had finally arrived.
—Mr. Schulian is the author of the novel “A Better Goodbye” and
the winner of the 2016 PEN ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing.