Commentary : It’s Certainly Baseball’s Ugliest--and Most Secret--Scandal

Baseball is a model of entrenched racial prejudice at B work. Al Campanis is the sort of man who makes it possible. Without the decent man who believes bad things and barely suspects it, bigotry couldn’t endure.

Jackie Robinson broke the color line forty years ago. Today, baseball does not have a single black general manager or manager. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say no black man in the game has significant authority.

Incredibly, there are 15 major league teams (including the Baltimore Orioles), who don’t have a single black, Hispanic or Asian in any management position -- a total of some 500 jobs.

This week on “Nightline,” host Ted Koppel asked Campanis, a vice president of the Los Angeles Dodgers who’s thought of as a typical but fairly distinguished baseball lifer, how this discrimination could continue so long.

“I don’t believe it’s prejudice,” said Campanis. “I truly believe that they (blacks) may not have some of the necessities to be, let’s say, a field manager, or perhaps a general manager.”

“That sounds like the same kind of garbage we were hearing 40 years ago about players,” said Koppel.

” ... Why are black men, or black people, not good swimmers? Because they don’t have the buoyancy?” answered Campanis.

“I’d like to give you another chance to dig yourself out,” said Koppel, “because I think you need it.”

So Campanis dug himself in so deep that, presumably, he will never, in a historical sense, dig himself out. “We have not stopped the black man from becoming an executive,” said Campanis. “They also have to have the desire, just as Jackie Robinson had the desire to become an outstanding ballplayer.”

You don’t have to be a Rhodes Scholar to connect those dots. That’s about as close as you can come, without actually wearing a hood, to saying that blacks are inherently not smart enough or industrious enough to be executives. Good ballplayers, sure. Competent to manage or run a team, no way.

The next day, Campanis apologized to the American public. The Dodgers said there was no way they’d fire their 40-year employee -- a symbol of baseball’s most successful franchise. It took the Dodgers another whole day to realize it was inconceivable that Campanis could keep his job. So, Campanis was fired. Probably with a huge nudge from an infuriated Commissioner Peter Ueberroth who, according to sources, cooked up this whole honor-Robinson campaign as a pretext to highlight the paucity of blacks in front office jobs.

From all reports, Campanis is stunned, ashamed, hurt and bewildered. He loved and admired Robinson. Under him the Dodgers have signed many black and Hispanic players. Los Angeles leads the majors in non-white management personnel (six of 28 in a USA Today survey). Campanis thinks of himself as something of a civil rights advocate within his own generation.

“In my work and in my personal life, I have never distinguished a person by reason of his color, but only by reason of his abilities,” Campanis said in a statement released by the Dodgers. “I feel that this is the saddest moment of my entire career.”

Even blacks have, to some degree, defended Campanis at a personal level. Ex-Dodger Davey Lopes said, “It’s like a guy who gets burned once doing drugs. He made one mistake and gets crucified.”

Campanis has paid a great price for being an unreflective man of his age and his station in life. He accepted the unspoken premises of the world that he moved in and mouthed rationalizations he’d heard over cocktails thoroughout his old-boy career. Networking didn’t start with yuppies. The whole baseball subculture is one huge palocracy where who you roomed with at Quad-Cities in ’58 can easily outweigh every other consideration.

How do you quantify baseball judgment? Or the ability to evaluate personnel or make trades or decide who to pay how much? You don’t. Often, you hire your friends and promote those with whom you feel comfortable.

Baseball insiders have no idea how hard it is to get inside if you aren’t born there. At the moment, baseball’s concept of a minority group member in “management” is an equipment manager who picks up wet towels or a token PR factotum. If you excluded those flunky job descriptions, the true pitcure would emerge -- an executive fraternity that’s more than 99 percent white and has no inclination to share an iota of power.

Every generation has its own garbage to clean up. In Campanis’ day, the battle was to find a black pioneer who was so tough and special that he could not only play the game but, in a sense, beat the whole structure of the sport.

Now, the task is to find, help and systematically promote those same special minority groups within the front office world. Like who? Anyone with brains and leadership ability would be a good starting point. Try Joe Morgan, Frank Robinson, Roy White, Ken Singleton, Lee May, Willie Stargell.

In baseball, the easier half of the civil rights fight is in the past. Now, every team wants black talent -- on the field. The second half of the battle has already proved to be far harder. How does baseball break through what women and other traditionally disenfranchised groups call The Glass Ceiling? That’s when you’ve gotten in the front door and can see the top but can’t get there. And can’t quite put your finger on why.

Baseball has never seen a time when it had men as distinguished as Ueberroth, Bobby Brown and Bartlett Giamatti in its three top jobs. We can be sure that a former Olympic chairman, a top heart surgeon and a former Yale president are ashamed of their game’s disgraceful lack of affirmative action.

Their leverage is three-fold. First, they can lobby behind the scenes. Second, they can speak out -- and mention names -- on race issues. Brown, for instance, might note that 10 teams in his American League are lily-white, led by the Yankees who are 0-for-50 upstairs.

Finally, they can threaten to quit if changes aren’t apparent by the end of the decade. None of these men needs the job he holds. But baseball needs them. The embarrassment at losing any or all of them would be enormous.

The sad but valuable legacy of Al Campanis might be that he demonstrated how subtle and ingrained the levels of bias are in baseball. In 1946, baseball became an emblem of integration, a symbol of democratic progress. In 1986, baseball is one of America’s most visible symbols of lingering and largely unregenerate racism.

That one of baseball’s best-known executives could disgrace his sport as Campanis did, and have no clue that he’d done it, shows the depth of baseball’s ugliest and most secret scandal.