The Last Innocents: The Collision of the Turbulent Sixties and the Los Angeles Dodgers

Dedication

For Jane and Cameron

Epigraph

So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?

—Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955–1967

I had one shot to make it in life—not in baseball—in life. I was fighting for my survival. . . . So if this didn’t work out, I don’t know. . . . My life would be over.

—Maurice Wesley Parker III, Los Angeles Dodgers, 1964–1972

Contents

Dedication

Epigraph

Genesis

Chapter 1       Surviving the Sixties

Chapter 2       The Frenzy of 1963: The Fearsome Yankees, the Epic World Series, and the Arrival of the Dodgers’ Reluctant Idol

Chapter 3       The Dodgers’ Victory, a President’s Assassination, and the First Seeds of a Players’ Rebellion

Chapter 4       An Upheaval Begins

Chapter 5       The Riotous Season

Chapter 6       Baseball’s Watershed

Chapter 7       The Last March

Chapter 8       Baseball Takes a Backseat to the World

Chapter 9       A Star Comes Home and Others Say Good-bye

Chapter 10     The Final Years

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Sources

About the Author

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Genesis

It came to this one night in New York City, during the middle of the 1956 World Series between the Dodgers and Yankees. After arguing in a bar with a Yankees supporter about the merits of their two teams, a twenty-five-year-old Dodgers fan went home, returned with a rifle, and shot dead his antagonist, who happened to be a local police detective.

These things happened.

No other American sport at the midpoint of the twentieth century sparked such fervor, idolatry, rage, madness. No other game was as sectarian in the adoration and hatreds it instilled; in the way it divided cities and sometimes families; and in the speed with which its young, strapping idols, in some cases ambling into stardom straight out of cornfields and back alleys, became deities for one group of fans and demons for another. Ticker-tape parades lionized the game’s winners. Merciless ridicule rained down on vilified losers. The emotional well-being of ordinarily sensible men and women rose and fell with their teams. The agonizing faithful of entire street blocks sat on stoops listening to radio broadcasts during a pennant race.

There was nothing else on the planet quite like it.

And luck had much to do with the game’s good fortune.

The truth went unadmitted during its boom years, but baseball largely owed its supremacy over American professional team sports, and its hold on the American psyche, to having launched itself before its rivals. In the nineteenth century, the major leagues sprang from the starting gate alone. This propitious bit of timing counted for everything. The fledgling organization that in time would come to be known as the National Football League wouldn’t be created until 1920; the enterprise eventually to be called the National Basketball Association wouldn’t arrive until 1946. By then baseball had been America’s chief sporting passion for decades, boosted early by a bit of marketing genius. The sport had captivated romantics with a dream event whose transcendent name—the World Series—would leave all competitors in its shadow for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.

If anything, on the eve of the 1960s, that shadow seemed to be lengthening. The mania for the game presented the perfect breeding ground for new baseball gods to be born in the American West, the ideal moment for the arrival of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The 1950s had been baseball’s most thrilling decade yet. The dynastic New York Yankees, as famous as any team in the world, stood as a symbol of American glamour and power. The National League’s burgeoning racial diversity and new talent made its challenges to Yankee superiority more heart-stopping than ever. In 1955 Brooklyn finally bested the Yankees to win its first World Series. The following year the Series spawned magic, in the form of a no-hit perfect game, with Brooklyn as the victim. The feat came from an unlikely Everyman, the hard-throwing but erratic Don Larsen, who was king for a day while pitching for a Yankees squad that, in regularly making gods out of flawed mortals, reclaimed the Series championship and looked as though it might reign forever.

So hypnotic was the World Series that it had risen to be a somewhat illicit holiday. It took priority over many adults’ jobs and children’s schooling during the week or so that it lasted. Hordes of men and women sneaked away from workplaces all over the country to watch the nationally televised afternoon games. Taverns filled. Classrooms were suddenly missing a few children. Normally attentive students concealed transistor radios in notebooks, stealthily listening to the coast-to-coast broadcasts. Big-city pedestrians, away from their offices, paused for long stretches in front of appliance-store display cases, where brand-new televisions showed the games from start to finish.

The obsession led strategists of both major political parties during the presidential campaign of 1960 to realize the obvious: they wouldn’t have the complete concentration of a significant bloc of voters until the great battle of early October—the one pitting the imperious Yankees against the National League pennant-winning Pittsburgh Pirates—finally ended. There is a politicians’ rule of thumb, particularly hallowed by Democratic politicians, that no election campaign starts until the World Series is over, wrote Theodore H. White in 1961, in his renowned book on the 1960 campaign. Many Americans couldn’t focus on the contest between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon until after Pirates second baseman Bill Mazeroski hit the winning home run in the bottom of the ninth inning of the decisive seventh game of the Series, giving Pittsburgh its first World Championship in thirty-five years.

By then, just to win a league pennant and reach the Series had become a cherished prize, nearly as big as winning the Series itself. Nine years earlier, with the sport at the zenith of its popularity, baseball presented fans with the most electrifying finish to any game in its history. With the Dodgers facing the Giants in the climactic contest of a three-game playoff for the 1951 National League pennant, Brooklyn led in the bottom of the ninth inning at the Polo Grounds, only to lose on a three-run homer off the bat of Giants third baseman Bobby Thomson against Dodger reliever Ralph Branca. The Giants’ euphoria was equaled in intensity only by Dodger despondency. Yet the game cloaked both the winner and loser with a glory and mystique that were portable when the two rivals bolted to the West together, seven years later. As always, baseball was the biggest victor.

This had implications for Los Angeles. The Dodgers, winners of the 1959 World Series in only their second year in the city, dominated the Southern California sports market, relegating the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams to secondary status, along with the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers, a franchise that arrived in 1960 from Minneapolis. The two junior sports were still several years away from the gripping theater that would accompany the introduction of the Super Bowl, Monday Night Football, and national telecasts of the NBA Finals. Other than a riveting championship game won in sudden-death overtime by the Baltimore Colts over the New York Giants in 1958, the NFL could point to nothing, in the broad public’s view, that matched the drama of an average World Series. Nor had the attention the press paid to the accomplishments of professional football and basketball’s stars come close to rivaling the adoration heaped on the milestone achievements of baseball’s legends. The most famous record in American sports—Babe Ruth’s sixty home runs in 1927—had been showered that year with a reverence equaled in the country only by the awe for Charles Lindbergh’s Atlantic crossing.

Bereft of the glittering athletic stages necessary for supreme drama, neither professional football nor basketball had produced cultural divinities like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella, Henry Aaron and Stan Musial, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, or, in 1961, Roger Maris, who would break Ruth’s single-season home run record that autumn, after surpassing Mantle during a summer duel that transfixed America.

Football’s only romantic heroes, figures who included the Olympic track legend Jim Thorpe, the University of Illinois’s Red Grange, and the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame, tended to spring from stirring collegiate contests. The NFL’s inability to spawn stars of the magnitude of baseball’s avatars or college football’s golden boys evinced its lesser standing. At times during the 1940s and ’50s, the Rams featured two glamorous quarterbacks, Bob Waterfield (who was married to film siren Jane Russell) and the immensely talented Norm Van Brocklin. Yet never did their fame rival that of baseball’s kings, which neatly reflected the disparity in status between the two sports.

As the 1960s arrived, the most famous rivalries in professional athletics—notably those between the Dodgers and Giants and the Yankees and Boston Red Sox—as well as the largest corps of new sports stars, like the Dodgers’ emerging pitching sensation Sandy Koufax, still belonged to baseball, leaving professional football as overshadowed as ever. The image of baseball’s dominance in Los Angeles was on display nearly any weekend the two sports clashed head-to-head. The mediocre Rams, playing a 1962 regular season game on a sunny September afternoon in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, drew fewer than 27,000 spectators. That was because more than 42,000 fans at that moment were in Dodger Stadium.

Baseball’s primacy was evident in the habits of young Americans especially. Several generations of ambitious boys and men—budding leaders, eggheads, and ruffians alike—had gravitated to the proving grounds of baseball sandlots. A robust and aggressive prospect named Mario Cuomo, a New York City native later to be his state’s governor, excelled as an outfielder during the early 1950s on the freshman baseball team at St. John’s University before accepting a contract signing bonus to play in the Pirates organization. He became a minor leaguer, only to suffer a beaning to his head during his first season that abruptly ended his athletic career.

Decades earlier, a teenage Franklin Delano Roosevelt, short on athletic ability but desperate to win his peers’ approval, took the position of lowly equipment manager for the Groton School baseball squad. In 1944, delivering one of the last campaign speeches of his life on a rainy day in Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, FDR shared a wish with the crowd: he hoped to see a game there someday. Grateful Brooklynites and fervent Dodger fans responded with a guttural roar, as if the president had expressed an intimate yearning to break bread with them. The moment served as a reminder of baseball’s linchpin status in the nation’s big cities. Simultaneously, it was a warning to any politician eager to bond with the urban electorate: failing to understand the tribal pull of baseball meant failing to understand America. Similarly, failing to possess a major-league team meant a city couldn’t rightly call itself an elite metropolis. It was a truth not lost on Los Angeles, which received a major boost to its image when the major leagues finally arrived.

During the 1950s, it didn’t matter where you lived: baseball, and the Dodgers, reached everywhere. In the middle of the decade the Dodgers organization had fifteen minor-league teams scattered around North America, guaranteeing that the franchise would leave an impression on sports lovers from Montreal to the Rockies, and from Montana down to the Lone Star State. One of those fans, a young Texan named Bob Oswald, had no major-league team to see anywhere close. But he occasionally attended the games of a Dodgers Double-A farm club, the Fort Worth Cats, whose roster back in 1955 included a speedy but struggling shortstop named Maury Wills. Oswald enjoyed the casual atmosphere of the Cats’ little ballpark, which emboldened the zany and raucous among the small crowds to cheer and jeer when the mood struck.

The Cats were fun, a nice diversion for Oswald. For more scintillating baseball, he tuned to radio and TV broadcasts of distant major-league games, especially those of the Yankees, his favorite team.

As the years passed, his sporting interests grew. He liked the great collegiate football powerhouses, especially Notre Dame, a team nearly as admired as the Yankees, he thought. A side benefit of rooting for Notre Dame was that his younger brother, Lee, who’d never had much interest in baseball, enjoyed football. Bob spent considerable time looking after his kid brother. Their father had died before Lee was born. Their mother, Marguerite, was generally cold and indifferent. She told them they were burdens, placing them in a New Orleans orphanage for a while, along with their older half brother, John.

All three boys eventually found themselves back with their erratic mother. They took refuge in games and outdoor activities. The two younger brothers enjoyed tossing around a football. Lee really threw a pretty good pass, Bob remembers. He was right-handed and he had good coordination. It was something we could share.

In time Bob got away from his mother for good, enlisted in the Marines, and later married. His little brother, buffeted by their mother’s frequent moves, began to drift as a teenager. In early adulthood, Bob and Lee lost track of each other for a while. After Lee did a stint in the Marines, Bob heard that he had renounced all ties to America and moved to the Soviet Union, where he began living as a Marxist.

In the summer of 1962, following three years in Russia, Lee came back to Texas, finished with Soviet life but as devoted a Marxist as ever. He brought with him a young Russian wife and a baby. Bob picked them up at the Dallas airport, Love Field. He couldn’t have cared less about his political differences with Lee, so happy was he just to be with his kid brother again. They had a great Thanksgiving dinner together with their families, and Lee talked with him for a bit about football.

By then Bob had a new team to root for, an NFL franchise founded in 1960 called the Dallas Cowboys. The Cowboys were just part of a recent bounty of riches for Texas sports fans. The state now had a second professional football team, located in Houston, and its first major-league baseball team, a National League expansion club called the Houston Colt .45s, a name aptly suited for a big, rugged land proud of its frontier justice roots. Texas professional sports were on the map, Bob marveled.

Sometimes, television would show the Yankees or Dodgers on the Game of the Week. Halfway across the country, he could turn on a live game happening in New York or Los Angeles. He watched Mickey Mantle, whom Bob was on his way toward meeting someday, though he had no way of knowing it, no way of seeing what was ahead for his family, either the horrific days or the gentle mercies. Life for the moment was great. He was doing well as a sales coordinator for a brick company in a Dallas suburb, with plenty of time left over for his close-knit family, an occasional round of golf, and hunting and fishing outings. The 1960s, he mused, were incredible. Jobs were plentiful for those who wanted them. Something exciting always seemed to be happening in the country. Rockets blasting off from Cape Canaveral. Capsules with astronauts landing in the Atlantic Ocean right on your television. To turn on the TV meant seeing sporting events a couple of times a week. Cowboy games. Baseball games. Mickey Mantle in Yankee Stadium. Sandy Koufax in Dodger Stadium. It was just wonderful, he thought. Had there ever been a better time?

Chapter 1

Surviving the Sixties

Most men must wait for their chance in baseball, as in life. The wait ruins many. Some succumb in the minor leagues to despair, a few to drink or drugs, the rest usually to an erosion of talent and will. Even for the minor-league lifer doing everything right, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe that his dream will ever be realized. It is hard to keep holding on.

In defiance of time, the smallest of players in this locker room has clung to the dream. He waited nearly all of the 1950s in the minors. Everything in a baseball life that matters has come to him late. It makes what is happening to him at this moment in 1962 a tad surreal. This small, lithe, light-skinned black man, once nothing more than a journeyman minor-league shortstop, once so little regarded that his own organization sought to trade him away, sits in the locker room at Dodger Stadium, suddenly a national celebrity. He is closing in on the greatest season of his career, on the brink of breaking a hallowed major-league record held by a baseball immortal, Ty Cobb. Life has never been so exhilarating. Wherever he goes in Los Angeles, people clamor to be introduced to him. Entertainers want him on their television shows. Privately, he has become closely attached to a famous and beautiful white actress, in the process drawing the silent scrutiny of an alarmed Los Angeles Dodgers executive.

A measure of Maury Wills’s new fame can be found in the pile of mail strewn in his locker. Alongside the pile sits a close friend, Sandy Koufax, on the brink of becoming baseball’s greatest pitcher. It says something about the America of 1962 that Koufax is opening and reading Wills’s mail, and that Wills pores over Koufax’s. It says something about the country that each man knows it’s smart not to run the emotional risk of reading his own mail.

A black and a Jew, the two men are united in wanting to protect each other. Some of the letters are just too hateful, too ugly, to be read aloud. Koufax thinks he can anticipate the ugliest by the crude pencil-scribbled addresses and big crazy-looking block printing on some envelopes. Oh, here’s one you don’t want to read, Maury, he says, scanning a letter, ribbing his friend a little, laughing, trying to keep the mood light about a subject that has worried both in the past, especially as Wills gets closer to breaking Cobb’s forty-seven-year-old single-season stolen base record. It will be another twelve years before Henry Aaron breaks Babe Ruth’s lifetime home run record. Wills is the first black man in history poised to take a cherished baseball record away from a white legend. Some racists around the country can’t take it, sending these anonymous missives that make no secret of their hope to see him fail, even be harmed. No danger is inconceivable during that volatile year. Civil rights workers have been beaten that summer during sit-in protests and marches in the South. The imminent court-ordered enrollment of a black student named James Meredith at the segregated University of Mississippi will spark a white riot on campus that leaves two dead. Wills tries staying focused on the game.

The two friends open more envelopes. Wills comes upon yet another anti-Semitic letter meant for his friend, returning Koufax’s gentle teasing over notes to be avoided. You don’t want to read this one, Sandy, Wills chortles. This guy is serious.

Throughout the season, they have spent hours talking after games as each man receives treatment—Wills for his bruised and hurting legs, and Koufax for chronic pain in his pitching arm. For months the twenty-nine-year-old Wills coped alone with his hate mail. Finally, it became too much. He took a chance and began showing the letters to Koufax, something he hasn’t done with anyone else on the team.

What accounts for a bond between men? Wills wonders. They rarely hang out together away from stadiums. Each is a born compartmentalizer, their friendship largely confined to locker rooms and baseball diamonds. But their intense mutual admiration and shared zeal for winning has made them close, especially in these postgame hours when Wills benefits from Koufax’s soft-spoken observations, less direct advice than subtle reassurance that things will be okay; that each has the other’s back; that the strangeness of their lives is simply a function of the game, as is the craziness of some fans, media, and baseball management. Here’s another letter you don’t want to read, Maury, Koufax adds.

He leaves it at that, falling quiet. He is often the shell that closes as quickly as it opens. Long accustomed to his friend’s reserve, Wills laughs, and they’re done for another night.

THE HOMECOMING

This is a story about the odyssey of seven players during the turbulent 1960s. It also points a lens at some of their closest teammates and worthiest foes, as well as those in Dodger management who dominated their professional lives. It is a story about what it was like to be a major leaguer when the country was turned upside down by tumult, when players struggled to understand their place both in America and in a game controlled by baseball owners whose wishes were fiat. It is a story about players who made tens of millions for their team on the field but enjoyed few rights off it. It is a story about confusion and, ultimately, the kind of piercing self-discovery gained by players—like most people—only after struggles outside the public eye. The players’ private evolutions occurred while they performed in the most glamorous of settings, amid the Los Angeles Dodgers’ pennant chases and the team’s World Series appearances—three in a four-year span, which culminated in two World Championships.

They were ballplayers, not crusaders. Still, the sport had made some of them idols, and eyes were always on them, as if in fans’ constant belief that what they did would prove inspiring. Yet even as they starred in games watched by millions, they coped with anxieties and indignities their fans knew nothing about—some of their wounds deeply personal, others more common to the times, though no less painful.

At moments, their anguish reflected historic divisions coursing through the country. Some of the players, like Wills, had experienced the humiliations of stark racism and segregation for years and never would entirely get over the scarring. Several were disturbed over time by the escalation of the Vietnam War—in which they knew people who had gone into battle—and by the strife in America’s inner cities, where many had grown up.

Their tensions and dissatisfaction with the established order seeped into their baseball lives, with white and black Dodgers alike coming to believe they were being exploited. They fumed about their lack of real bargaining power, the front office’s meddling in their private lives, and baseball executives’ efforts to pressure them into accepting additional commitments, including overseas exhibition games, after a regular season ended.

Servility defined all aspects of their relationships with the Dodgers owner, Walter O’Malley, and the owner’s general manager, Buzzie Bavasi. Players were barred from using agents in negotiations, denied contracts that lasted any longer than a single baseball season, and routinely subjected to salary cuts if their on-field productivity suffered in the wake of injuries. Dodger stars began asking questions once regarded as unthinkable. Privately, they talked about possible salary holdouts, where once they would have quietly accepted whatever management offered. They planted the first seeds of a rebellion.

But even at their most disgruntled, they chiefly remained ballplayers, with the mind-sets of ballplayers. The seven players—Maury Wills, Wes Parker, Sandy Koufax, Tommy Davis, Jeff Torborg, Dick Tracewski, and Lou Johnson—cared most about winning. Even when their salaries were absolutely shameful during their early seasons, they’d at least had the euphoria that sometimes accompanied winning. No story about them can begin without focusing on the one who needed to win most, the one who would go to virtually any maniacal length to do it. The one who would—and did—throw a ball between the eyes of an onrushing San Francisco Giants baserunner and knock him out cold. The one who sharpened the spikes of his running shoes with a file before intentionally sliding into a Milwaukee Braves foe, slicing up his knee. The one who, in a moment of intense frustration, actually burst into tears once on the field after an umpire’s call had gone against him.

By 1962 his teammates viewed Wills as the Dodgers’ fiercest competitor. He was their lineup’s leadoff man, their offensive catalyst, their demanding on-field leader, and their hardworking, often tormented dynamo, capable of inspiring many of them even as he sometimes infuriated others.

The frenzy of his record-breaking 1962 season exposed the full range of his emotions, his ecstasy in moments of great victory and his fury when a teammate’s mistake or a foe’s rough play damaged the Dodgers’ standing or his own pride. In his relentless drive, he felt his stresses mounting. In its intensity, so much about the season, both the good and bad, had added to his pressures. One of the year’s high marks seemed to have come when the National League tapped him to play in the All-Star game, and he returned to his native Washington, DC, the site of the first of two All-Star games that year.

It was a triumphal and emotional homecoming. He saw members of his family and signed autographs for local children in whose eyes he saw the same awe he had once reserved for his favorite players in the city.

For a while, the trip had the quality of a wonderful dream. How amazing, he thought, that the All-Star Game would be played just a short car ride from his old home, in District of Columbia Stadium, commonly called DC Stadium. He had spent many afternoons seeing the Senators of the past play in old Griffith Stadium, that palace where he had first thrilled as a child to the mingled grown-up smells of stale cigars and flat beers, where he had fantasized about donning a major-league uniform, though no black man had yet been given one. It was in Griffith Stadium, not long after Jackie Robinson had integrated the sport, where he participated in his first mass professional tryout alongside hundreds of other nobodies. He couldn’t wait to step foot now on a Washington diamond as one of the game’s elites. He basked in the pride of his family and friends, who marveled over his big blue equipment bag, the one festooned with the logo of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

On the day of the game, he didn’t travel on the National League team bus to the stadium. Instead, spending part of the morning with his family, he rode to DC Stadium with a friend, who dropped him off at a gate in front of the players’ entrance.

There, a security guard denied him entry, refusing to believe he was a player even after Wills gave his name and showed the guard his Dodgers gear bag.

Get outta here, boy, the security guard said.

Wills said he couldn’t leave. He was a player.

Get outta here. I’m not gonna say it again. You don’t belong here, boy.

I’m a player.

I told you to move, boy.

It had been a while since a white man called him boy. Wills pleaded with the guard to summon a National League official or player. At last the guard saw Cincinnati outfielder Frank Robinson, a black star who knew Wills well.

Do you know this guy? the guard asked Robinson.

Robinson took one look at Wills. Hell, never saw him in my life.

Baseball players have a sick sense of humor—they pride themselves on it, Wills would observe later. Robinson kept walking. A desperate Wills looked around for someone else. The guard had again ordered him to leave when a stunned National League official recognized Wills and swiftly ushered him into the clubhouse.

The rest of the day went well. President Kennedy threw out the honorary first pitch from his box seat near the dugouts. In the locker room, Wills saw his teammate and fellow All-Star Don Drysdale, the National League’s starting pitcher. Then he ran into Pittsburgh’s Dick Groat, selected as the National League’s starter at shortstop. Groat, whom he liked, surprised him with an apology that Wills hadn’t sought. You should be the starter at short, Maury, Groat said. You’re the one having a great season.

Wills didn’t enter the game until the sixth inning, when he pinch-ran for the legendary Cardinal Stan Musial, promptly stole second base, and scored the first run of the game when Groat singled. Newsreel footage caught JFK applauding the play. Then Wills led off the eighth inning by singling against Cleveland’s Dick Donovan. When Giants third baseman Jim Davenport followed by lining a sharp base hit on a couple of hops to Detroit’s left fielder Rocky Colavito, Wills made an unusually wide turn at second base, trying to tempt Colavito to throw behind him to the Yankees’ second baseman, Bobby Richardson.

It was a sucker play, a favorite Wills ploy. Colavito took the bait, gunning a throw to Richardson as Wills dashed toward third base in a bold baserunning move that American Leaguers, accustomed to a brand of ball that featured many sluggers but few speedsters, seldom saw. Richardson made a quick throw to third, but Wills beat it, diving past a protesting Brooks Robinson. The National League’s next hitter, Giant Felipe Alou, hit a fly ball into foul territory down the right-field line. From the time the ball left Alou’s bat, it looked like nothing more than a routine out and a squandered at-bat for the National Leaguers. But Wills saw an opportunity. As the American League right fielder Leon Wagner, a star for the Los Angeles Angels, glided into foul ground and made the catch, Wills tagged up and raced to the plate, narrowly beating Wagner’s throw in what would be the game’s final run, in a 3–1 National League victory. He won the game’s Most Valuable Player laurels, taking home with him a large trophy that he made sure the loathsome security guard had a good look at as he exited the stadium. I still don’t think the guy believed I was who I said I was, he remembers.

Wills viewed the day as miraculous. But the image of the security guard would haunt him forever, a nagging reminder of too many incidents like it. Such pain was all the more reason now to have Koufax regularly read the sealed, anonymous letters addressed to him. When the two friends finished, Wills went out and stole more bases, getting ever closer to Cobb and the record. Better than anyone else, he realized the magnitude of his imminent achievement, and the improbability of his place here.

THE MIRACLE

During the 1950s, as he languished for eight full seasons in the minors, Wills thought at several points that his career would end there. His failure, in turn, would mean the end of his productive life. He viewed himself as a man with no marketable skills outside baseball. He had turned his back on college, rejecting a football scholarship offered by an all-black school, Virginia State University, whose coaches had watched him star as a single-wing running back at Cardozo High School in Washington, DC. At eighteen, as a skinny five-foot-ten, 160-pound pitcher and occasional shortstop who boasted he could hurl a ball through a wall, he invested all his hopes in baseball. Signed for a $500 bonus and a salary of $150 a month, he joined the Dodgers’ minor-league organization in 1951, just four years after Jackie Robinson had become the major league’s first black player. It was an era when minority ballplayers remained rarities and could expect to face a torrent of racial taunts at ballparks.

Euphoric at the opportunity awaiting him, Wills never pondered the looming harassment. During his first year in the Dodgers organization, he rode a train to get to the club’s immense spring training facility, known as Dodgertown, formerly the site of an American naval installation. The grounds held a mythological appeal for young players who had never seen it. Depicted as a baseball utopia, Dodgertown had an enormous swimming pool, tennis courts, volleyball and badminton courts, an immense cafeteria and dining area, a billiards table, a theater in which to screen recently released films, and a putting green that at the time was merely the prelude to a real golf course. The facilities were available to major leaguers and minor leaguers alike, and if a player ever wanted a dip in the Atlantic Ocean during his off hours, the beach was just a stroll away.

Aboard the train, Wills envisioned the glorious accommodations in which he would soon be setting foot, a kind of heaven that would serve to confirm his shimmering future.

He arrived to find the vast complex sitting in the quiet, muggy, nearly all-white Florida town of Vero Beach. Segregation was the norm in Vero, blacks unwelcome in most establishments; nearly all restaurants there were off-limits to them. Like many young black players at the time, Wills rarely set foot out of Dodgertown. And, like all Dodgers, whether minor or major leaguers, he lived in the military-style barracks that had been used in the past to house US Navy personnel. But the minor leaguers lived in more crowded conditions, which seemed to scream what they would face over the next few weeks: a weeding-out process. Each of the rooms housed eight dreamers, with four sets of double-deck cots on which they could collapse at the end of long practice days, and a communal bathroom shared with everyone else on the floor. Heating and air-conditioning were nonexistent.

Immediately, the stifling minor-league barracks became the symbol of everything Wills wanted to escape. His goal was to reach the building across a small street, where the Dodgers’ major leaguers lived and where the accommodations guaranteed more room, in what looked to Wills like an indicator of the occupants’ exalted status. Looking for the swiftest route to success, he gave up his dream of pitching in favor of becoming an infielder.

Starting his career in Class D ball, the lowest rung of the minors, Wills hit a respectable .280 and stole 54 bases for the Dodgers farm club in Hornell, New York. Soon he was a full-time shortstop, beginning a slow, frustrating, ultimately depressing climb. Each season began for him at Dodgertown, where, during the lunch hour in the cafeteria, he and other minor leaguers had to wait until the major leaguers filled their trays before getting food for themselves. Watching Jackie Robinson and the rest of the famous faces filing past, Wills was filled with awe and envy, hardly able to stand another day in Vero Beach’s minor-league gulag, which had become a daily reminder of his failure to break through.

His anxiety grew with his understanding of the steep odds facing him in the Dodgers organization, where a half dozen minor-league prospects stood ahead of him in the competition to eventually succeed the Dodgers’ starting shortstop and future Hall of Famer Pee Wee Reese. The candidates included a young dynamo named Mike Korcheck, who played above Wills for the Dodgers’ Double-A Fort Worth club. Even some of his shortstop competitors believed Korcheck possessed all the necessary tools to be a big-leaguer—speed, power, a reliable glove, and a great arm. Then, after yet another spring training, in a reminder of life’s uncertainties and their own fragility, the Dodgers’ minor leaguers woke up one morning to hear that Korcheck had died in an automobile accident.

Yet nothing happening anywhere altered the status of Wills, who had impressed few Dodger officials. Scouts thought he was neither an excellent defensive player nor a long-term offensive threat. One of his rivals, a future Dodger infielder named Dick Tracewski, who though a year younger played for a Dodger farm club a rung above Wills’s, listened one day as a Dodger official said offhandedly that Wills was a subpar fielder. The word circulating through the organization was that Wills bobbled too many balls and hadn’t displayed the necessary range for making plays on grounders hit deep into the hole between shortstop and third base. While his arm was strong, his throws were often off-target and in the dirt. And his offense didn’t compensate for his perceived defensive deficiencies; he’d never demonstrated power or finished a year with an exceptionally high batting average. The most logical question about Wills seemed to be when the organization would trade or dump him.

By his eighth season in the minors, nothing about Wills had much changed, including his batting stance. He hit right-handed, and right-handed pitchers with sharp curveballs still gave him fits. Scouts and coaches estimated that Wills batted less than .150 against curveballs, an abysmal statistic that guaranteed he would never see the major leagues. His chief problem with the pitch, coaches believed, was that he flinched whenever a curve came anywhere near his body. It was a cutting observation; it implied that he regularly, if unconsciously, failed a test of nerves. There seemed no likely remedy, for the look of the pitch would never change. A curve thrown by a right-handed pitcher typically starts off near the shoulder of a right-handed hitter, before sharply breaking away from him and down over home plate. When a curve approached Wills, his shoulder and head subtly jerked. His backside often dipped and moved back. The flaw appeared fatal.

Afraid was the worst slur of all in baseball. It made Wills livid, ready to fight. No one doubted his effort or physical toughness. He fought teammates, foes, and anybody else when challenged; his pugnacity was fierce and well known. But the truth was undeniable: the curve frazzled him, even as he heatedly denied it.

By this time he’d thought of quitting. As his 1958 campaign began with the Dodgers’ Triple-A club in Spokane, Washington, his prospects looked more dismal than ever. Prospective stars, it was argued, do not spend eight years in the minors. Prospective stars are not ignored by the vast majority of other major-league organizations, which had shown their disregard for Wills by making no effort to trade for him. His only unique ability seemed to be that he could run and steal bases, and though this skill was eye-popping at times, it made him at best a novelty show in his critics’ eyes, a track sprinter in a baseball uniform. Wills, who had heard the whispered assessment, believed it was code for saying he played black; that he had adopted the style of the old Negro Leagues and sandlots of his roots.

Indeed, his past gave birth to his approach. He’d spent his youth in the tough, virtually all-black area of northeast Washington, DC, known as Anacostia. He lived in a housing project called Parkside, the seventh of thirteen children born to Guy O. and Mabel Wills. His dad was a hardscrabble Baptist minister, his mom an elevator operator. Wills found his way onto the Parkside’s baseball sandlots. With no money in the family for sporting equipment, he would usually fashion a baseball glove out of a paper bag and brace himself for the pain that came with fielding hard ground balls. He occasionally received tips from Anacostia’s semipro ballplayers, who on weekends at Parkside competed in organized games with caps fashionably askew and whiskey bottles sometimes jutting out of back pockets.

The semipros’ weekend games were neighborhood attractions. None of these rakish players would ever have a chance to display their skills for the all-white professional leagues, but they became heroes to the young Wills. At once bold, talented athletes and self-styled entertainers, their speed and antics thrilled the little boy. They bunted for hits. They stole bases. They exuded bravado and boasted hilariously: I’m gonna steal that bitch’s jockstrap. They dared to talk trash to an opposing pitcher, telling him what they were going to do before they did it. Always, in defiance of baseball’s conventions, they ran with abandon. They turned what looked like ordinary singles into improbable doubles, and doubles into triples.

The major leagues had left prodigious talent to wilt on such sandlots. Young Wills could easily have been just one more youth who never got out of Parkside. The youngster dreamed of joining the semipros’ ranks and playing with a whiskey bottle in his back pocket, too, until one summer day in 1943, when local officials ushered a white stranger in a sparkling baseball uniform to the sandlot to visit the children of the neighborhood. The white man’s name was Jerry Priddy. He played second base for a team and a league the ten-year-old Wills had never of heard before: the Washington Senators of the American League. The team played somewhere far outside Parkside—somewhere the boy had never seen. Someone gave Wills a baseball glove to use, and Jerry Priddy played a game of catch with him. He threw some ground balls to me and said I was good, said Wills; that I should get my parents to buy me some shoes. It was the day I stopped wanting to be one of the guys on the sandlot. I wanted to a major leaguer like this man in that nice uniform. Sometime after that, I took some buses and went off to see my first Senators game at Griffith Stadium.

Griffith Stadium was only about thirty minutes and two bus rides away, but the ballpark might as well have been on Pluto, so vast was the chasm between Parkside and everywhere else in white Washington. As a small boy, Wills hardly ever glimpsed a neighborhood outside his own. Parkside’s black residents couldn’t swim in most public pools or eat in the nearby white-only restaurants of Washington, Virginia, and Maryland. The child took it for granted that white people lived somewhere else, ate somewhere else, went to school somewhere else, and that black people wouldn’t ever play, swim, or live around white people.

Born into this arrangement, Wills seldom protested its indignities, even after nearly a full decade of enduring them in the minors. His fury, when he displayed it, was largely directed at himself and his own shortcomings as a player. He had crying jags when going through a bad slump. He suffered through bouts of depression. Resigned to absorbing racist barbs, he focused on his game to the exclusion of all else, the ranks of the ignored often including his young wife, Gertrude, and their children, with Wills desperate to show the Dodger brass he was deserving of attention. Nothing worked. Even as he climbed the rungs of the minors into the Pacific Coast League’s Triple-A ball—just one step from the majors—those who speculated over the prime candidates to succeed an aging Pee Wee Reese never mentioned his name. He’d been reduced to fodder for a possible trade, though even this seemed unlikely, since no other team was expressing interest.

The 1958 season, the Dodgers’ first in Los Angeles, would be Reese’s last. For a year already, the team had been mostly playing the declining legend at third base, a quiet signal that his days as a player were nearing the end. Dodger brass had believed that a heralded young player in the organization, Bobby Lillis, could be Reese’s successor. But Lillis’s bat disappointed officials. As the season rolled along, it became increasingly apparent that the heir apparent was reliable veteran Don Zimmer, whose numerous advantages over all his rivals included the fact that he’d been an occasional relief for Reese over five seasons, including the Dodgers’ 1955 championship year.

Known as Popeye for his resemblance to the cartoon character, Zimmer had likely lost his best years during Reese’s reign at shortstop. Zimmer’s bad breaks were more than figurative: no one else in the Dodgers organization had been so prone to horrific injuries. In 1953, while leading the Triple-A American Association in homers and RBIs, he had suffered a beaning that left him unconscious for more than a week and unable to speak for nearly two months, with doctors drilling holes in his skull to ease a life-threatening swelling.

Left with blurred vision for several more months, the twenty-two-year-old Zimmer had been told by doctors that his career was finished. It wasn’t. Zimmer became a utility player for Brooklyn, able to play any position in the infield. Then, in a 1956 game against the Cincinnati Reds, disaster struck again: a fastball broke Zimmer’s cheekbone and ended his season. Eventually doctors had to fill the holes drilled in his head with a special metal. Zimmer, complaining about nothing, quietly emerged from his rehabilitation to resume his role behind Reese and fill in wherever else the Dodgers needed him. By 1958 his stoic perseverance had made him beloved, the model of the selfless team player, the only deserving successor to Reese in his boosters’ eyes.

At five-nine and a strongly built 175 pounds, Zimmer seemed a symbol of the Dodgers’ robust future, a multifaceted talent who possessed something that Wills never would—home run power. Zimmer had hit 15 homers for Brooklyn in 1955 in only about a half season’s worth of games—a star-in-waiting, believed many Dodger officials. Even Wills regarded him as a player with great gifts—a strong arm, a sure glove, and a competitive fire that matched Wills’s own. By the midpoint of the 1958 season, Zimmer was the provisional starting shortstop, as the slowing and injured forty-year-old Reese faded into the shadows. The Dodger brass was prepared to take another look at the rookie Lillis if Zimmer faltered, but the new shortstop’s play was quickly ending all talk of alternatives. The wisdom of Zimmer’s elevation seemed beyond question, and Wills felt no bitterness, only envy and an escalating worry that his time was running out.

It was. The baseball world ignored Wills as much as ever. He was hitting less than .250 in Spokane. By mid-season he was in a funk, for the first time showing signs to worried coaches of giving up. The once obsessively driven practice player, who had thought nothing of badgering lazy teammates, was now occasionally horsing around and cutting corners during pregame warm-ups. One afternoon, the new Spokane Indians manager, Bobby Bragan, noticed him not even bothering to hit right-handed during his last batting practice cuts, just walking into the batter’s box closest to him and desultorily stroking a few pitches as a lefty.

Bragan walked over and surprised him with a pair of questions. You ever thought of hitting left-handed? Of trying to switch-hit?

No, Wills said.

Bragan put an arm around him. He’d never done that before. Something was up. Wills braced himself. I think you should try to do it, Bragan said. I think you’re afraid of the curve.

It was the old criticism, and it infuriated Wills. Usually he told whoever said it that he wasn’t afraid of a damn thing. But this time, worn down and desperate, he just listened. Bragan said it looked as though he possibly had the swing to hit as a left-hander. Maybe, Bragan suggested, Wills could be developed into a switch hitter. If they could make it happen together, Wills wouldn’t ever again see a curveball that began as a pitch thrown at his body. He would hit left-handed against right-handed pitchers, and right-handed only against left-handed pitchers. Any curve thrown to him by any pitcher would start on the outer half of home plate, far away from his body. Bragan believed the change would eliminate Wills’s flinching for good.

Hitting left-handed would also place Wills one step closer to first base, Bragan pointed out. It would undoubtedly mean more chances to beat out ground balls for infield singles. But the whole scenario would depend on Wills first learning to hit effectively as a left-hander against real pitching. What Bragan didn’t say was that the chances of it working out were remote. Most switch-hitting experiments end terribly, with the typical hitter awful from both sides of the plate. To have any chance, Wills would need constant practice, and he didn’t have time to waste.

Let’s work on it, Bragan prodded.

A morose Wills agreed to try.

Within a couple of weeks, he was officially a switch-hitter. For the remainder of the year, his improvement at the plate was at best paltry. He ended the 1958 season with a measly .253 average, though Wills and Bragan saw reason for hope, even if no one else in the Dodgers organization did. The brass still wanted to unload him. Fresco Thompson, who headed the Dodgers’ minor-league organization, later admitted that the club looked to give Wills away. Finally the front office found a possible suitor, the Detroit Tigers, who had their own problems at shortstop and were willing to consider any slightly promising minor leaguer. The Dodgers said the Tigers could have Wills for only $35,000—they wouldn’t even need to send along a player in exchange. The Tigers vacillated, their interest shaky. What had Wills really done, after all? Tiger officials agreed to the deal only under the condition that, if they didn’t want Wills after evaluating him, they could nullify the transaction.

The Tigers brought Wills to spring training, but soured