5. The Dodgers Cast of 1952

If you spent some effort getting to know the Dodger cast, you found a wonderful assortment of characters, happy to share their experiences with a young sportswriter who appeared to be at least reasonably trustworthy and showed a decent respect for their big-league skills.


I talked pitching with Preacher Roe and Carl Erskine. Roe, a rural doctor's son, disguised his ferocious intelligence behind a hillbilly manner. "Even when ah do strike out Musial," Roe said, "the wind from his swing plumb blows me off the mound." After the droll comments, Roe held forth on the subtleties of his art, as we rode trains or ate bacon and eggs in coffee shops around a league that extended from Boston to St. Louis. In 1952 baseball had not yet recognized California. "Sometimes when I'm gunning for a hitter I can get with a slow curve down low," Roe said, "I set him up with a fastball around the eyes. That's a ball, fer sure, and he won't swing, but like it or not he picks up the speed of that pitch. And that clicks somewhere in his head. Now, when I throw the slow one, he's still reacting to the fast pitch up around his eyes. He swings too soon. I got my man. He makes out on a pitch in the strike zone, but he gets thrown off by the pitch around his eyes. When I hear someone sayin' the high fast one was a bad pitch because it was a ball, I got to wonder what they might be talking about. This game is not as simple as it seems." Nor was Roe himself. To supplement his Dodger salary he taught geometry in a Missouri high school....


Erskine, trim and serious, threw a strong overhand curve and had a change of pace that was always surprising the hitters. As he released the change, Erskine pulled hard, as though drawing down a window shade. This had the effect of imparting terrific spin. "The hitters," Erskine said, "pick up this ball that's spinning like the dickens, rotating like a fastball. They react to the rotation and when they first pick up the pitch they think they see a fastball. That spoils their timing. They get off balance. By the time they adjust -- all this takes place in less than half a second -- it's too late. That's why a lot of changes get popped up, or sometimes even get a hitter so paralyzed that he can't swing the bat at all." Erskine spoke about his work with passion and eloquence. He was a lover of narrative poetry and sometimes in those distant days he recited from memory long works by Robert W. Service. These people fascinated me. The craft of Roe and Erskine was not the sort of stuff one learned playing weekend sandlot games at Lake Mohegan.


Gil Hodges, strong and quiet, liked riddles and puzzles. Duke Snider, the sometimes melancholy prince, never drew as much happiness from his great gifts as he might have. Carl Furillo followed a solitary star ... Hugely popular Roy Campanella spun out minstrel-show stories. "In the old colored leagues I sometimes had to catch a triple-header. That's right. Three games on a hot Sunday afternoon. They didn't pay me much for playin' the three, but I didn't mind because" -- pause, soulful look, wink -- "they was giving me fifty cents a day meal money! Hey, that's true. Ask anybody that was there."


Jackie Robinson was a gentle, thoughtful, loving man, disguised as a firebrand. As the first black to play in the major leagues, Robinson was the first target of bigots on the field, in the grandstands, in the press box. His defense was to put forth a bristling personality, needling and jockeying in sharp and sometimes nasty ways. "It's like I've got antennae," he said. "I can tell who's an anti before they even speak." By 1952 few of Robinson's antis dared argue against the right of blacks to make a living in the major leagues. But most of the sportswriters complained that Robinson was "uppity." I marveled at a curious thing: the same qualities that made a white ballplayer a battler, a competitor, a hard-nosed son-of-a-buck, those very same qualities made Jackie Robinson an uppity coon ... Ol' Minstrel Show Campy was a terrific fellow, they though, just because he resembled an end-man in not-very-dark  black face. Robinson exuded an air of complete independence, and that was not acceptable in a Negro. Like Robinson, I found this thinking outrageous....

Presiding over this Continental Congress of a baseball team was Harold "Pee Wee" Reese, the shortstop and captain. Raised amid the racism of Kentucky, he had exorcised his own demons and worked quietly to get others to do the same. He didn't lecture on civil rights. Reese disliked drawing attention to himself. He simply accepted Robinson as a buddy. At a time when a third of the country's  schools were still segregated, Reese and Robinson went to the racetrack together, played cards together and warmed each other up with a thousand games of catch. Once the games began, they played hit and run and executed double plays with something close to genius.


....Simplistically, Reese was the older brother everyone always wanted to have. In the words of Heywood Hale Broun ... he was both a gentleman and a gentle man. Which is not to say he didn't play rugged, competitive baseball. He was a wonder.


IMAGE: Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson

Memories of Summer, Roger Kahn

copyright 1997 Hook Slide, Inc.

University of Nebraska Press