Two Years Later, Neither Friends Nor Causes Have Been Won

Tom Lasorda snarled at me the other day. Orel Hershiser was charming. Fred Claire was justifiably proud of his performance as Dodger executive vice president. The team won a ballgame from Minnesota. But Tom Lasorda snarled.

“Not a very warm spring greeting,” I said.

“You know why,” Lasorda said, and looked away in anger.

I’m afraid I do know why. Lasorda is one of that band of baseball people who feel that I should somehow have protected Al Campanis, when he began immolating himself on the Dodgers’ opening night of the 1987 baseball season.

We were to work the “Nightline” show and celebrate the 40th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s major league debut. But our time on ABC would not be that simple. Ted Koppel is a brilliant interviewer who could, if he were here, squeeze controversy out of an orange. Before going live with Koppel, it is a good idea to prepare.

At 3 o’clock in the afternoon, one of Koppel’s people telephoned and asked what I thought Robinson would feel about the state of blacks in baseball today. There is an easy answer. “Jack would be pleased. In his era, marginal players went to the minors. Today, marginal blacks people every roster in the major leagues.”

There is one problem with that answer. I don’t believe it to be so. Robinson retired in 1956, after the Dodgers had announced that they were trading him to the Giants, a move that didn’t make much sense except as an ego trip for several Dodger executives.

That is an old story in baseball, trading a great player, indulging one’s power. The Yankees shipped portly Babe Ruth off to the Siberia that was the Boston Braves. The Reds let Pete Rose go to Philadelphia in 1979, the very season after Rose had batted safely in 44 consecutive games. But Robinson, as the first black player in the majors, held unique symbolic status. The Dodgers integrated baseball with Jack and it remains impossible to imagine him wearing any uniform but Dodger blue.

Hurt, even humiliated, Robinson responded by retiring. To tide himself over, he sold the retirement announcement to Look magazine for $50,000.

He then tried his hand at business.

“Have you thought about managing in the major leagues?” I asked one night at Robinson’s mansion in Connecticut.

“Of course I’ve thought about managing,” he said. “I think I know how you’re supposed to play the game. But you can’t be a manager unless you get asked.”

“Nobody asked?”

“Nobody in the major leagues. There was one call from the Vancouver club in the Pacific Coast League. I told them, sure, I was interested. They never called back.”

Jackie was hurting. “What the hell,” he said. “I’ve got other things to do. I don’t enjoy watching baseball that much anyway.”

Now it was almost 11:30 at night in New York and a director fitted a receiver into my left ear.

“Good evening,” Ted Koppel said, in his formal way. “I have to tell you that I grew up in England. I’m not familiar with baseball. You’re going to have to carry the show.”

Various nerves became electric. Nobody carries “Nightline” but Ted Koppel.

After some tape we went live and Koppel asked the question I had heard in the afternoon. I rejected the bland answer for a truthful one. I didn’t think Robinson would be pleased with the state of blacks in baseball because, as we spoke, there were no black club owners, no black general managers, nor any black field managers in the major leagues.

Koppel switched to Campanis in Houston, where the Dodgers were playing, and asked if what I had said was true and if so, to what did Mr. Campanis attribute it. Campanis said blacks lack the “necessities” to manage. Before he was through he added that blacks lacked buoyancy and couldn’t swim either.

At length, and after what seemed severe provocation, I put in this with sarcasm: “I understand, Al. Do blacks have the intelligence to work in the fields, the cotton fields, the baseball fields? Yes. But do they have the intelligence to manage? No.”

Within two days Campanis was out of baseball and Fred Claire was installed as the Dodgers’ de facto general manager.

I had known Campanis for three decades and had heard the story of his life, mostly a useful and productive one. He wanted to find a writer who could use his adventures as a basis for a novel. I had never heard him make a racist remark. When Jackie Robinson’s name came up, Campanis spoke with apparent pride of playing shortstop to Robinson’s second base at Montreal in the International League during 1946. He had taught Robinson the double-play pivot, Campanis said.

My reaction to his comment about black managers consisted of incredulity and shock. With Koppel hammering away at me, it was some time before I realized that I was watching a man destroy his own career. But by then Campanis had said so many repugnant things, that I wouldn’t have bailed him out if I could have. And I could not.

A few days later in the Cincinnati clubhouse, Eric Davis, the Reds’ wonderful young center fielder, said, “I saw you get Campanis on TV.”

“I didn’t get him. He got himself.”

“But you put in a zinger.”

Davis, of course, is black and I retreated until after the game. Then I said, “Eric, can you swim?”

“I’m a darn good swimmer.”

“Campanis says you lack buoyancy.”

Davis broke into an enormous smile. “I was just putting you on, and I got you, didn’t I?”

Other responses were less amusing.

A great Hall of Famer said, “We can’t have Jesse Jackson picking our managers.”

A prominent front-office man said that very few blacks went to major league games, so why should baseball bother hiring black managers.

Friends in the Dodger organization say that they wish the Campanis story would recede into history, which does not seem like sensible journalism to me. When Campanis, Koppel and I spoke, three blacks had managed in the major leagues, none with success. These were Frank Robinson, Maury Wills and Larry Doby.

Now, two years later, how many blacks have managed in the major leagues? The same three names. So with all the noise and hurt and anger, nothing has happened. Roughly a third of the major league players are black. Frank Robinson works in Baltimore, and 25 of the 26 managers are white. Jackie Robinson would not have cared for that at all.

Where is the talent? Surely Lou Brock was as game-smart as any player in his time, possibly excepting Pete Rose. When I last saw Brock, he was playing in old-timers’ games and running flower shops.

Bob Gibson’s competitive blaze was a wonder of the Western world. He was out of baseball, he said a while ago, and passing his days building decks for friends.

“If you lived in Omaha, I’d build a deck for you,” Gibson said.

Gibson as a manager? Can pitchers make good managers? Lasorda was a pitcher. No one can possibly manage more skillfully than Lasorda did last season.

Because the Dodgers integrated baseball, it was particularly distressing to hear a Dodger executive speak as Campanis did. But the integration of blacks as managers is not a Dodger problem. It is a baseball problem. What Campanis was rash enough to utter on network television is, in effect, what some, surely not all, baseball executives have said privately for many years.

It now seems as if I have to choose between suffering Lasorda’s snarl and being faithful to the memory of Jackie Robinson. That is not a difficult choice at all.

Would I today do anything differently on “Nightline” than I did in 1987? On sober tertiary thought, I might have worn a more assertive necktie.

(Roger Kahn, a lifelong follower of baseball, covered the Brooklyn Dodgers for the New York Herald Tribune. He is also the author of eight books, including “The Boys of Summer” and “Good Enough to Dream.”)