My father and I also watched baseball on our new 1949 RCA console television with the ten-inch screen. My boyhood passion and obsession was with the mighty New York Yankees just as they were beginning their dynasty of five straight World Series crowns from 1949 to 1953. In 1949 my dad and I went to see our first game together at Yankee Stadium; right fielder Hank Bauer and first baseman Joe Collins hit home runs in a losing cause.
My Yankees, however, didn't lose too often, and as each season wore on between 1949 and 1955 or so, I would follow every game, every statistic, every box score. I learned basic arithmetic just to be able to calculate batting averages and winning percentages. The Yankees battled the Boston Red Sox, the Detroit Tigers, and the Cleveland Indians from 1949 to 1953, muscling their way to championships each year. I was devastated by the 1954 season when we went 103-51, a gaudy .669 winning percentage, and lost to the Cleveland Indians who compiled a ridiculous record of 111-43, an unheard of .751. Losing like that just wasn't fair; I was racked with misery.
I had a lot of favorite Yankees during the dynasty years, like Mickey Mantle and a little-known third baseman Andy Carey, a lifetime .237 hitter in ten Big League seasons (.302 in 1954), who played in four World Series, winning two, in 1956 and 1958. When the ball went around the horn, he always tossed it underhand back to the pitcher, and he had enough power to put the ball over the left center field fence at Yankee Stadium, a prodigious wallop.
I loved watching Andy Carey, but I felt more "connected" to Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, and Yogi Berra, although I can't imagine I understood what my dad was talking about when he explained the Italian part to me. I had to be taught what it meant that "they were just like us." And to tell the truth, it didn't at first resonate with me as it seemed to do with some others of my friends and neighbors in the Italian section of town we lived in. The truth was I loved all the Yankees--but eventually I did come around to thinking it was terrific that those three future Hall of Famers happened to be Italian. Just like me.
Our biggest rival back then was the Brooklyn Dodgers, whom we beat in the World Series of 1947, 1949, 1952, and 1953, but gallingly lost to in 1955. The Dodgers had Jackie Robinson during all those years, the man who broke the color barrier in Major League baseball in 1947 (when he was Rookie of the Year), and later they had Roy Campanella, and a few other "colored" players who had come up from the Negro Leagues. I remember wrestling with Campanella's Italian name and wondering what that was all about. We weren't proud of him, or for that matter of Italian Carl Furillo either, the Dodger right fielder with a rifle for an arm--but that was because they were not Yankees, and that may all the difference. At least to me.
Being a Yankee trumped being Italian, so certainly it was more important than color. The Yankees, as a matter of fact, didn't have any black players--and were widely criticized for it (unjustly I thought back then)--until Elston Howard joined the team in 1955. I remember deducing, from 1949 to 1955, when I was ages seven to thirteen, that having an all-white team, like my Yankees, was a better thing than having a team of blacks and whites, like the hated Dodgers. My lily-white Yankees had to be right and the integrated Dodgers had to be wrong, which led to the conclusion that Major League baseball should be the domain of white people only. I wasn't a racist seven-year old, I was a seven-year old Yankee fan.
I could not have known back then that my Yankees had, in fact, the dubious distinction of having fielded another of the most notorious racists in baseball history, Jake Powell, an outfielder they obtained in a 1936 trade with the Washington Senators. He had hit .312 for the Senators in 1935, and had a combined batting average with the two teams in 1936 of .299 (7 HR, 78 RBIs). He was an important player in the World Series that year against the New York Giants, which the Yankees won, four games to two. Powell hit .455 in the six-game series, picking up ten hits, walking four times, hitting one homer, and knocking in five runs. He was a good player, a valuable addition to the Yankee lineup that won four straight world championships in the late 1930s.
Powell, however, had some serious issues. He'd been widely criticized in Washington, before he was traded to New York, for a play in which he collided with the great Hank Greenberg, breaking Greenberg's wrist and ending his 1936 season after only twelve games. Many believed the ferocious hit was the result of Powell's open anti-Semitism.
As a Yankee on July 29, 1938, Powell was interviewed on the radio before a game with the White Sox in Chicago. When asked what he did during the off-season to keep in shape, he replied that he was a policeman in Dayton, Ohio, and that the kept in shape "by cracking niggers over the head with my nightstick." He wasn't a policeman at all, as it turned out, and he later claimed he'd only been "joking," but the incident reveals how deep his own racism was and how widespread it had become in baseball, so widespread that such a reprehensible character as Powell could say such a shameful thing so casually on a radio broadcast. The storm of protest that followed, however, resulted in a ten-game suspension, not much more than a slap on the wrist.
Ironically, the Yankees had traded another racist and anti-Semite, Ben Chapman, to the Senators to get Powell in 1936. Chapman, according to the New York Times (July 27, 2008) regularly "taunted Jewish spectators at Yankee Stadium with Nazi salutes and anti-Semitic epithets." Later, when Chapman was manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, he became infamous, according the Times report, "for his vitriolic race-baiting of Jackie Robinson in 1947."
The story of black first baseman Vic Power, who never got to play for the Yankees, may even be a more telling example of Yankee racism. Power was a nineteen-year-old Minor League phenom in 1950, hitting .334 with 105 RBIs. The Yankees bought his contract and sent him to their minor league affiliate in Syracuse where he hit .294; the following year they sent him to Kansas City where he hit .331. In neither year did the Yankees call him up in September, when rosters were expanded to allow teams to see how their best minor leaguers could do in the Majors.
In 1953 Power did even better, hitting .349 with 217 hits and 93 RBIs, but still the Yankees ignored him. The trouble with Power was that he was "flamboyant," according to baseball observers, which meant that he drove flashy Cadillacs and went out with white women--and so the Yankees traded him in December 1953 to the Philadelphia Athletics (which would move in 1954 to Kansas City and later to Oakland). Esteemed baseball chronicler Roger Kahn quoted an unnamed "high-ranking" Yankee executive that year as saying there would never be a black man in a Yankee uniform: "We don't want that sort of crowd. It would offend boxholders from Westchester to sit with niggers." And Kahn also quoted Yankee traveling secretary Billy McCorry in 1953 as saying that "no nigger will ever have a berth on any train I'm running."
That's the team I was rooting for with all my heart and soul.
