How The Other Teams Integrated, Part Five: 1954

This statue is gone now…

Ernie Banks was a turning point in the integration story. By the time he got called up in 1953, half the teams in the majors had integrated—more than half, if you count Carlos Bernier for the Pirates. By 1954, there are no happy stories left.

The early years of integration saw a lot of Negro league greats finally get their shot at the MLB. There was something triumphant about the premieres of guys like Satchel Paige, Monte Irvin, Sam Jethroe, and Willard Brown. Then you had young phenoms like Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, and Willie Mays. These guys signaled the kind of excitement and talent that Black players would bring the Major Leagues.

But Ernie Banks would be the last of those guys to integrate a team. By 1954, the remaining all-white teams started to stand out. They faced public criticism, protests, and potential boycotts. Many made hasty and desperate attempts to find a Black player they could stick on the field somewhere, just so they could say they checked that box, like a college admissions officer frantically looking for a student of color to put on the brochure.

This left many players caught in unpleasant circumstances that did them no favors. They often faced rushed developments in the minors, or little patience in the majors. Some faced both. Of the remaining eight players to break a team’s color barrier, six had negative bWARs for their career. And in some ways the two guys with positive numbers had the saddest stories.

But we will get to them in Parts 6 and 7. For now, we’re staying in 1954. We already touched on this year a little in Part 3, when we talked about Curt Roberts of the Pirates. Roberts, who debuted in April of 1954, was considered Pittsburgh’s first Black player at the time, even though he really wasn’t. But in addition to the Pirates, three new teams added Black players in 1954.

1954

April 13: Tom Alston of the St. Louis Cardinals

Tom Alston’s story is a great one. That is to say, it’s a completely depressing, tragic story, but a great illustration of how capitalism often works. Because Alston’s story really starts with the Cardinals getting bought by Anheuser-Busch in 1953. It was unusual at the time for corporations that big to own baseball teams, but the Cardinals were in a bad way: Their previous owner was being forced out after being convicted of tax evasion. So Gussie Busch, the president of Anheuser-Busch and grandson of its founder, stepped in to buy the team to keep it in St. Louis.

And Busch, realizing that the Cardinals were not integrated, but knowing that Black people bought beer and baseball tickets, too, ordered the team to get a Black player for the 1954 season. It was a textbook example of how the free market will supposedly abet racial progress. Busch wanted to avoid boycotts and increase sales—he saw no color but green. The team went out and sent $100,000 and four players to San Diego, a huge price, for first baseman Tom Alston. Busch invited the media to the Beverly Hills Hotel to celebrate the signing and announced: “When we purchased the Cardinals, I promised there would be no racial discrimination. However, Alston was not purchased because of his race.”

But this was clearly not true. Alston was coming off a decent year in the Pacific Coast League, but it was only his second season of professional baseball, and his numbers were good but not great. The Cardinals didn’t even have his age right—he was 28 by the time they signed him, but they had been told he was 23.

Clearly, what they cared about was his race. Probably what happened is they asked scouts about a good Black player, and someone mentioned his 6’5” frame and the hot start he’d had in 1953, and the Cardinals bit hard. Whatever the details, the team was using him to boost beer sales. At first, they said they would platoon him at first base with righty Steve Bilko, but Alston started on Opening Day against a lefty. They were trying to make him a star so they could justify the fanfare. By the end of the April the Cardinals traded Bilko, thrusting Alston into the full-time role.

At first, Alston rose to the occasion. On May 13, he was slashing .329/.402/.553. But then the slumps started. He went 1-for-14 over the next four games. He bounced back from that one, but then started walking less and striking out more. From May 30 to June 24, he didn’t have a single multi-hit game, and struck out 18 times while walking only six. By the end of June, his OPS had fallen nearly 300 points from its peak, and the Cardinals sent him to the minors. By then they had called up Brooks Lawrence, a Black pitcher they had gotten from Cincinnati’s farm system. Alston would get a few at-bats in each of the next three years, as St. Louis didn’t want to admit their mistake in overpaying for him, but by then Stan Musial had moved to first and the Cardinals had little need for Alston. He’d served his role and they were done with him.

Alston was haunted by his failure. He would later admit that he had heard voices in his head during his stint in St. Louis, a sign of the mental illness that would manifest in more extreme ways later in life. A few years later, during the offseason, he tried to kill himself. After other erratic behavior, he was sent to a psychiatric hospital, where he was administered shock therapy. Later he was arrested, once for assault with a deadly weapon and another time for burning down a church, supposedly because the voices in his head told him to.

He was committed to a state psychiatric institution for eight years. Two months after his release, he tried to burn down his apartment and was committed again. He spent the rest of his life on medication, in and out of state institutions, surviving on disability.

Meanwhile, the Cardinals did find some Black stars after Alston paved the way. In 1958 they added Curt Flood. Then in 1959, Bob Gibson and Bill White. In 1964, they traded for Lou Brock and won the World Series—the first World Series winning team for whom for four of the top five players (by bWAR) were Black.

In 1990, Alston’s former teammate Joe Garagiola called him at the nursing home where he was living and arranged for Alston to throw out the first pitch at a Cardinals game. A nice gesture, but sort of achingly sad. Capitalism will chew you up, spit you out, and then throw a ceremony to commemorate the chewed-up version of you.

April 17: Nino Escalera and Chuck Harmon of the Cincinnati Red(leg)s

If Alston’s story is an example of the nefarious way that mass consumer capitalism can both expedite and corrupt desegregation, the more commonly cited “allies” in the integration fight are the military-industrial complex and the Cold War. A very high number baseball’s early integrators were veterans. Jackie Robinson had been an officer in World War II, and was famously court-martialed for defying segregation on a military bus. Larry Doby also served, in the Navy, where he roomed with Chuck Harmon.

“That’s why they took Jackie. Jackie was an officer in the military. He was an All-American at UCLA. That’s why I was picked,” Harmon would later say. “I served in the military. I went to college.”

The impact of military service is typically cited in three ways. First, it exposed white and Black players to one another, through games at military bases, proving that Black players were good enough to play with white players. Second, the military itself would be desegregated in 1948, which, coupled with the permanent expansion in its size after the war (in 1955, the US military was seven times bigger than it had been in 1940, despite it theoretically being “peacetime”), meant a lot of young American men were getting used to the idea of working alongside people of other races. And third, the Cold War itself became a force for desegregation, as the Soviet Union could persuasively use the treatment of Blacks in the US to undermine American rhetoric about “freedom.”

Harder to discuss, though, is the impact that military service had on Black Americans’ relationship to class. It is telling that Harmon would connect military service with college attendance in the above quote. The connection is not that both were integrated institutions—Harmon’s military service predated the integration of the armed service—but that both were paths of self-betterment, a way of pulling yourself up the class ladder. As explicit segregation fell, upward mobility for Black Americans increasingly meant succeeding in institutions run by white people. This is part of the origins of the “acting white” myth, and it continues to complicate discussions of race and class today. 

But for someone like Harmon, military service and college attendance proved he could succeed in white-run institutions. Harmon had actually been a star basketball player in college, and had bounced back and forth between the two sports through the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Reds, meanwhile, had started signing Black players in 1951, but had not called any to the major league roster, in part because their manager in 1952 and 1953 was Rodgers Hornsby, a notoriously racist old-timer.

In 1954, though, Cincinnati had a new manager and a new name—adopting “Redlegs” because “Reds” reminded people of communism (which was supposedly a bad thing) in the 1950s. They also had Harmon on their roster, as well as Nino Escalera, a Black from Puerto Rico. In the third game of the season, both made their debuts in consecutive pinch-hit appearances in the seventh inning. First, Escalera singled, then Harmon flew out.

Escalera got very little playing time the rest of the year, being largely used a pinch-runner and defensive replacement. In 27 of his 73 appearances, he never even came up to bat. He started only nine games. After the season, he was sent back to the minors, where he played for several seasons, before becoming a manager in Puerto Rico, and then a longtime scout in the MLB.

Harmon fared a little better, splitting time with Bobby Adams at third in addition to pinch-hitting. His numbers were nothing special, but good enough to stick around in 1955. That was his best season—he played some outfield, and drew enough walks to be a decent hitter. A month into the 1956 season, though, they traded Harmon to St. Louis. Around the same time, a 20-year-old Frank Robinson started to heat up, in route to a Rookie of the Year Award (the sixth Black NL Rookie of the Year in eight season) and Cincinnati’s best finish since before World War II.

By 1959, the team had also traded for Don Newcombe, and called up Vada Pinson—and finally dropped the stupid “Redlegs” name.

September 6: Carlos Paula of the Washington Senators

Bear with me while I work my way back to DC in 1954, but let’s start in Minneapolis, during last year’s protests over the killing of George Floyd. It’s tough to look back on those weeks now without thinking of all that happened after, but there really was a sense of possibility. Activists were burning down police stations and making demands for the dismantling of the mass incarceration system. Then, somehow, those demands went through the Acceptable Liberal Outrage Machine and came out as “recast voice actors on popular cartoons” and “paint the words ‘Black Lives Matter’ on some streets.”

Another such “demand” was: Remove the statue of Calvin Griffith from in front of Target Field, where the Twins play. Griffith, who died in 1999, had made racist remarks about why he relocated the team from Washington, DC, to Minnesota:

“I'll tell you why we came to Minnesota. It was when I found out you only had 15,000 blacks here. Black people don't go to ball games, but they'll fill up a rassling ring and put up such a chant it'll scare you to death. It's unbelievable. We came here because you've got good, hardworking, white people here.”

When announcing the removal of the statue, the organization said, “We cannot remain silent.”

Which was frankly ridiculous. They had remained silent for 42 years. Griffith made his comments in 1978, and they’d been reported on at the time. Two star Black players, Rod Carew and Danny Ford, demanded trades in the aftermath of the comments. But there was little fallout for Griffith, who maintained he didn’t do anything wrong—the Twins first put his statue UP 32 years later, in 2010, without any real acknowledgment of his racist remarks. They were perfectly happy remaining silent all that time.

It is certainly nice that the Twins finally saw fit to remove Griffith’s statue (this is why you should not be putting up statues of fucking OWNERS in the first place), but we should not let the offensiveness of Griffith’s comments obscure something else about them: They were wrong. Black people DID, in fact, go to baseball games, especially in DC. So much, in fact, that the Homestead Grays of the Negro National League relocated from Pittsburgh to Washington in 1942, to capitalize on all the Black baseball fans. The Grays typically drew more fans than the Senators. There were Black fans; they just didn’t want to watch Griffith’s shitty baseball team.

Griffith knew this. Calvin’s uncle and adoptive father, Clark Griffith, had made good money in the 1940s renting out Griffith Stadium to the Grays. That, in addition to simple, personal bigotry, is part of why the elder Griffith had fought so hard to keep the league segregated: He knew integration would be a threat to the Negro leagues, and therefore a threat to his rental income. If the Negro leagues folded, then the Griffiths might have to invest money in making the Senators competitive, which they were famously averse to doing, having the smallest farm system in the league.

The Senators had also become something of the Team of the South. At this point, there were no teams in Florida, none in Texas, and the Braves were still in Milwaukee. St. Louis was sort of the South, but really more of the Midwest, so many baseball fans from the former Confederacy rooted for the Senators. Indeed, Richard Russell, the segregationist Senator from Georgia and dean of the Southern Caucus, was a big Senators fan. Clark Griffith knew that any Grays fans he attracted might come at the expense of the southern white fans he already had.

Oddly, given this pandering to segregationists, the Senators were known for signing Cuban players. One of their three full-time scouts was Joe Cambria, who owned a team in Havana and used it to recruit Cuban players like Zoilo Versalles and Tony Oliva. There were rumors that some of the Cuban players Washington played prior to 1947 were light-skinned Blacks, but nothing to confirm those rumors. Heading into the 1954 season, it seemed like the team would finally break its color barrier. Four Black players were invited to spring training, all from Cuba, including Carlos Paula. At the start of the season, three were sent back to Cuba, while Paula played for the Senators’ minor league team in Charlotte.

It was reported that Paula would be called up “at the first sign that there is a compelling need for him.” In June, Paula was hitting .352 with nine home runs, but the Senators insisted he still wasn’t ready. Finally, in September, they called him up to the majors. He started both games of a double-header, hitting a two-run double and a single in the first game. After that, he went cold, collecting only two more hits in 19 at-bats for the rest of the year. The next year, Paula’s bat got him into the regular lineup. He hit .299 with six home runs and 20 doubles. But his defense, which had always been the knock on him, was atrocious, and the press was unforgiving; coverage from Bob Addie of the Washington Post barely tried to hide its racism.

During spring training in 1956, Paula went back to Cuba to care for his sick mother. The team fined him for not coming back on time, and then sent him to the minors. He worked his way back up, but after only 15 hits in 33 games, he was sent back down again, this time for good.

The first American-born Black would not take the field for Washington until the next season, when they used pitcher Joe Black for 12 innings. The first African-American regulars wouldn’t make the team until 1960, the year before they became the Twins. Once the team was in Minnesota, its soft ban on Black players disappeared. Earl Battey would be their starting catcher for the next seven years. Zoilo Versalles would win the team’s first MVP award. The team’s biggest star in the 1970s was Rod Carew.

Which brings us back to Griffith. When the Twins announced they were taking down his statue, Carew released a statement that generally supported the decision, but added some additional context.

“I can tell you when I got to the major leagues with the Twins in 1967, Calvin was my most ardent supporter. He told manager Sam Mele that I was the Twins everyday second baseman. I saw no signs of racism whatsoever… In 1977, my MVP year, I made $170,000. When the season was over, Calvin called me into his office, thanked me for a great season, told me that I had made the team a lot of money and handed me a check for $100,000… A racist wouldn't have done that… When he traded me prior to the 1979 season, Calvin told me he wanted me to be paid what I was worth. Later that year the Angels made me the highest paid player in baseball. A racist wouldn't have done that.”

I don’t really agree with some of Carew’s characterizations, specifically his certainty about what “a racist” would or wouldn’t have done. But I think these details show the materialist nature of Griffith’s racism. He may not have harbored personal animus toward Black people—he may even have shown generosity and loyalty to them in some circumstances—but he was perfectly willing to exploit them for material gain. If discriminating against them was good for business, then he would do it. If it was bad for business, then he would stop. A lie like “Black people don’t go to ball games” only makes sense when seen through the prism of a Senators’ business model built on white fans, where “Black people don’t go to ball games” was actually a viable profit-maximation strategy for a while.

In other words, “Was Calvin Griffith a racist?” is the wrong question. Soon you’ll start talking about whether he has racist bones. The point is that he propagated a racist system, and removing his statue without changing the system is the kind of symbolic gesture that is worse than useless.