Baseball Committed a Real Crime

In an age when top stars of stage and screen were taking off their clothes to play scenes before millions of people all over the world, when convicted murderers were getting two-year sentences, when the public was making folk heroes out of two-bit safecrackers, when songs were being written and movies were being made about moronic gunmen of the old West, the commissioner of all baseball one day moved forthrightly to stamp out a major threat to our civilization. He threw Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays out of baseball.

Now, in a way, he showed commendable restraint. I mean, he could have put down Mickey Mouse instead of Mickey Mantle. He could have shot Santa Claus. He could have kicked Babe Ruth out of the Hall of Fame, outlawed the infield fly rule.

This was tinkering with the image of baseball on a grand scale. Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were not just of baseball, they were baseball.

Their crime? Well, they accepted $100,000-a-year jobs in an industry baseball disapproved of.

The industry happened to be perfectly legal, and the companies involved were sanctioned, licensed corporations whose stock was listed on the big board or traded over the counter. The industry was and is a tax-paying part of the business community. It has even been known to do its bit for charity.

Baseball’s quarrel was not with the companies involved, it was with the voters of New Jersey, who saw nothing wrong with it, who saw it as just another capitalistic venture, no better or no worse than the oil business.

What Mantle and Mays did involved no heavy lifting, no long hours or bad working conditions. They didn’t have to collect bad debts on the waterfront, or throw deadbeats off bridges or into the East River. They weren’t bouncers or enforcers or couriers, they didn’t have to launder funny money or lobby in Congress. They just had to be there, shake a few hands, make people welcome.

The gambling industry wanted them for their names and reputation, of course, for somewhat the same reason that other private industries hire retired generals and admirals and/or secretaries of state. It’s as American a tradition as the hayride.

Baseball, of course, is the last stand of horse-and-buggy thinking in our time. The lovely part of baseball is, it’s always 1913. Baseball not only resists change, it heads back through it.

Baseball’s antipathy to games of chance and everything connected to them goes back to 1919--just yesterday to baseball--when the game was shocked to its flannel suits by the apparent fixing of the World Series by Arnold Rothstein and a company of bookmakers from Broadway.

Baseball kicked eight men out of the game over that caper and kept them out. To my knowledge, those were the only men ever kicked out of the game besides Mays and Mantle.

Now, putting Mantle and Mays into that seamy company is the real crime.

The worst crime Mantle ever committed was to swing late on a 3-and-2 curve, or maybe drink a beer on Sunday in Salt Lake City.

I’ve never seen Mays do anything that could be considered dishonorable, never mind dishonest, in his whole life.

In fact, I can remember one night when an umpire ruled a catch by Mays in center field not valid. The call cost the Giants a game and in the clubhouse afterward, while sweating, cursing players vilified the umpire, someone asked Mays about the play.

“I trapped it,” he replied with a shrug.

You couldn’t accuse former Commissioner Bowie Kuhn of picking on patsies in banning Mays and Mantle. The community at large hadn’t been so shocked since the Vatican unfrocked St. Christopher.

Between them, these guys had 1,196 home runs, 5,698 hits, 3,512 runs batted in, 867 doubles. These were not Lou Chiozza and Augie Galan the commissioner was coming down hard on. These were registered icons of the grand old game.

Given that baseball was so badly scarred, not to say scared, by the Black Sox scandal, and given that it was so resolutely planted in the high-button shoe era, the game went to great, not to say ridiculous, lengths to protect its “integrity.” It once barred a man of the probity of Bing Crosby from ownership until he divested himself of an interest in a race track.

There wasn’t a ballplayer in the big leagues who didn’t play the horses or buck the house at a dice joint. A guy who will try to make a living hitting the curveball is a natural-born gambler anyway.

But the tradition that gambling is the No. 1 evil threatening baseball was so ingrained with Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis when he was commissioner that the game that gives only a few months’ suspension to guys caught trafficking in drugs gave Mantle and Mays life.

Baseball didn’t offer them jobs, just suspension. Baseball doesn’t do much for its heroes. The game never seems to find spots for its Babe Ruths, Jimmie Foxxes, Mickey Mantles et al. But it wants to be able to tell them what to do--and what not to do.

A better idea would be to suspend Judge Landis and all he stood for--or did not stand for. Arnold Rothstein is dead, and ballplayers make so much money today that the treasures of England couldn’t fix a Sunday doubleheader.

And Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, Kuhn’s successor, is an 80s person, not a Gay Nineties one. He did not want to preside over an enterprise that would not permit Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays on a ball field. It was an obscene, destructive use of power he wanted no part of and quickly ended.

Baseball has got its center fielders again.