Remembering What Never Got To Happen at Stadium

Though Yankee Stadium is popularly known as the House That Ruth Built, and its shortened right field line was built with him in mind, the great Babe never cranked a fair ball out of Yankee Stadium. Neither did his teammate Lou Gehrig, nor Joe DiMaggio. Mickey Mantle came closest, whacking a couple off of the outfield façade. In fact, no major leaguer has ever popped a fair ball clear out of the stadium, but a Negro Leaguer might have. Though there are no photos of the event, it is said that Josh Gibson pulled one out to left field during a 1934 Negro Leagues contest.Gibson was a great player, but neither he nor any other black player of his generation played in a major league All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium. They had the talent, but they weren’t allowed to do so. Three All-Star Games have been played at Yankee Stadium. In the first, in 1939, Joe DiMaggio hit a home run and Red Ruffing started. Whitey Ford started the 1960 edition and Maris, Mantle, Skowron, and Berra were in the starting lineup. Yet those games were more significant for who wasn’t playing than for who was. The 1939 game took place years before Branch Rickey had even heard the name Jackie Robinson. In 1960, Elston Howard, the first, and for a long time only, black Yankee, was on the team, but he somehow never made it into the game. As a result of that decision by manager Al Lopez, it would not be until Willie Randolph and Reggie Jackson took the field in the top of the first inning in the 1977 All-Star Game that the Yankees shattered their last color barrier at Yankee Stadium.The Yankees were not the only practitioners of racial discrimination in baseball. The color line had been established long before the Yankees came on the scene, and it was perpetuated by generations of baseball magnates. However, as the game’s most successful franchise, one powerful enough to almost break the American League in half at one early point in a dispute over a player contract — the Yankees wanted a pitcher the league president said they couldn’t have; when they threatened to bolt with a few other teams and form their own circuit, the league caved — they must by necessity be considered the foundation stone of the policy. Indeed, it was Larry MacPhail, as Yankees president, who wrote baseball’s official response to the signing of Robinson, a disgusting document which argued that the Negro Leaguers were not good enough, and that, even if they were, increased attendance by blacks at major league games would diminish the value of the franchises. George Weiss, who became the team’s general manager in 1949, or two years after Robinson made his major league debut, echoed this sentiment by saying in an unguarded moment that his customers wouldn’t want to sit with — well, we won’t use the word he did.It was also Weiss who refused to integrate the Yankees until 1955, and then only in the face of increasing activism on the part of the Naacp and other organizations, always claiming that the Yankees would promote an black player just as soon as they found one who lived up to their high standards. Apparently they were looking behind the drapes and under the sofa, not on the sandlots and ballparks of America. Somehow their excellent scouts were capable of digging Mickey Mantle up out of Nowhere, Oklahoma, but they couldn’t find a black player anywhere, even when they began showing up in the major leagues and were available for trade, no scouting necessary.Those days are gone now, the architects of the policy long dead, and the Yankees, and particularly the Steinbrenners, have long since proved they will play anyone who will help them win, even giving chances to Steve Howe, Darryl Strawberry, and Dwight Gooden when no one else would. Still, the team of Monument Park, if it is to lay claim to its past, and having this last game at the stadium is all about the past, must take all of it, the bad as well as the good. Next Tuesday night, dozens of current greats of the game, a platoon of Hall of Famers, and a constellation of baseball notables will come to the Bronx to attend an exhibition and bid farewell to a stadium that has seen so much happen in its 85 years of existence.But it’s all redundant. We know what happened there, and don’t need any more excuses to play those films back one more time. Instead, it would be far more fitting for those assembled to take a moment to note all the things that didn’t happen there, all the history that Yankee Stadium missed because of racism. One of the most famous moments in the history of the park was Lou Gehrig’s farewell. With a disease slowly killing him, Gehrig considered that field and those players and said, “Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” Josh Gibson also was slowly killed by a disease, a tumor devouring his brain, at age 35. His farewell, if any, went unrecorded.Mr. Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible for yesnetwork.com and is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel.

Remembering What Never Got To Happen at Stadium

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