A PLACE OF HOPE

Shoulders of black, white and brown brush in a cramped clubhouse that, on this syrupy August night, is the color of contentment.

The tattooed Texan hugs a black man from Kansas City. A Puerto Rican clutches the hands of a Tennessean. The Mexican-American trainer is howling at a joke told by the black manager.

Whether they know it or not, the Savannah Sand Gnats are fixin’ to have a party.

Through the door rush five women.

“Cover up! Cover up!” the players shout.

“Relax!” the manager’s wife replies, giggling, setting up a huge white birthday cake in the middle of the room.

Summoned to the cake are two black batboys and two white pitchers. They are half dressed, dirt stained, and don’t care.

Candles are lit. Somebody blows them out. Somebody else grabs a knife.

Then, without warning or prompting, everyone sings, “Hap-py Birth-day . . . “

Some sing in English, others in Spanish. Some in the twangy tones of country, others in the rich tones of gospel singers.

They sing loud, without worry or reluctance, unable to hear aging Grayson Stadium creaking above them in the night wind.

This, in a place whose grandstands were once off-limits to blacks.

This, in a franchise that left town in the final week of the 1962 season because of racial conflicts.

This, in a league where 99% of the fans are white and only a few players on each team are black.

But this is a team too busy singing to understand.

“Get ya a big piece now,” says the Southern white pitcher to the black batboy, hugging him after the song.

A visit to the Deep South 50 years after Jackie Robinson’s first major league game reveals that in some ways, his struggle is still our struggle.

But that visit also uncovers the Savannah Sand Gnats, a modern-day tower of Babel that shows no sign of collapsing.

To those who fret that Robinson’s work was largely in vain, the Sand Gnats are a subtle yet powerful reminder that it was not.

A team with an African American manager, featuring players of several different colors and nationalities, living in the cradle of segregation, behaving as a family.

Eating Subway sandwiches together. Watching ESPN’s “Sports-Center” and dreaming together.

Sharing apartments and cars and the cost of pay-per-view fights. Attending pot-luck suppers and baby parties. Watching their small worlds expand, one broken stereotype at a time.

A kid from Brooklyn lives in an apartment with five Caribbean Latins and Mexican Americans. The white center fielder lives with the black third baseman and outfielder.

The manager’s two oldest sons are batboys who have been treated like little brothers by players who, two years ago, had never been in the same locker room with black players.

This is not a team of great prospects. But nowhere in baseball is there so much hope.

“We still have a long way to go, but . . . “ Manager John Shelby says. “But sometimes I look out on the field, and in our clubhouse and I think, ‘If Jackie Robinson showed up today, man, he’s not believing this.’ ”

*

A rainy Sunday morning. A toaster in a small visitors’ clubhouse beneath the stadium in Macon spits out four pieces of whole-wheat bread.

“Where’s our white bread?” shouts Scott Morrison, a white shortstop from Galveston, Texas.

“Something wrong with wheat bread?” Shelby asks.

“I just want white bread,” Morrison says.

“That’s fine,” Shelby says. “But what’s wrong with wheat bread?”

“Nothing wrong with wheat bread,” Morrison says.

“Sounds like something’s wrong with wheat bread,” Shelby says.

“Nothing, I promise,” Morrison says.

“Then why do you have to have white bread?” Shelby asks.

“OK, OK, I admit it--I’m just pro white,” Morrison says.

Shelby falls against a wall, roaring with laughter. The clubhouse erupts in more of it. Morrison is shaking his head, and smiling.

Nobody knew it would be like this.

When the Dodger-affiliated, Class A team gathered last spring in Vero Beach, nobody knew if these guys would even talk to each other.

A black manager. Two white coaches. A Mexican American trainer. A playing roster with two blacks, four Caribbean Latins, four Mexican Americans.

Not to mention, 16 Caucasians, many with short haircuts and sunburned necks.

The average age was about 21. The average number of words spoken between cliques was about five.

“I told them, ‘You know, if you don’t start talking, you’re going to be wearing the first uniforms in history with name tags,’ ” Shelby said.

The former Dodger outfielder was doing a better job of hiding his tentativeness.

“I really didn’t know what we would find down here,” he admitted.

Shelby, best known for his heroics as a Dodger center fielder in the 1988 playoffs, had worked last as the manager of double-A San Antonio.

His reticence as a player had translated into thoughtfulness as a boss. He was lauded for his patience and his ability to relate. He was rumored to be moving to triple-A Albuquerque.

Then the Dodgers decided this was the year he should tutor young longshots.

As the club’s lowest of three Class A teams, the Sand Gnats were filled with them.

“So we tell our family we’re going to Savannah and they all say, ‘Oh, no! That’s the Deep South.’ ” said Trina, Shelby’s wife and the mother of their five children. “And we knew why they said, ‘Oh, no!’ ”

As is the case with many black players, Shelby had experienced prejudice.

He once turned down a chance to play for an all-star team in Lexington, Ky., because its players had thrown rocks at him and called him names during their high school games.

In Bluefield, W.Va. in a rookie league, he was turned away from a promised room when the owner of the house saw he was black.

In Rochester, N.Y., in triple-A, a landlord reneged on a furnished apartment when she saw he was black.

That the Baltimore Orioles signed him as an infielder, but put him in the outfield before he ever took a ground ball, also smacked of prejudice.

“That’s just the way it seemed back then,” he said., “If you were black, you played the outfield.”

So now he was going to take his family and spend the summer in the South Atlantic League, a bus circuit with teams in towns where ballparks once routinely banned players such as Jackie Robinson?

Ballparks such as his own?

Savannah’s Grayson Field, dedicated in 1941, is named after local politician William Grayson, who banned blacks from the city’s streetcars shortly after the turn of the century.

His son later threatened to remove his father’s name from the facility if Jackie Robinson were allowed to play an exhibition, so Robinson did not.

Also curious about their reception were the team’s two black players, Damian Rolls and Brian Foulks.

Rolls is a former first-round draft pick from Kansas City whose friends had chided him with, “Why do you want to play that white man’s game?”

Foulks joined the team early in the season from San Bernardino, where his white roommate had once warned him not to rifle through his possessions while he was gone.

“You get into baseball and you realize there are two worlds, black and white,” Foulks said.

Shelby took his team north from Vero Beach to a city where blacks and whites still live on their own sides of town. Where blacks are the majority in number but invisible at the ballpark. And he wondered.

How could these worlds ever meet? Could his team survive the summer if they didn’t?

And what about his Latins? Was it true that young whites were enraged at the increasing number of Latins in “their” game?

“We knew all the potential problems, but it was like we were called,” said Trina Shelby, who shares a deep spirituality with her husband.

“There was a reason for us to be sent here. We just had to figure out what it was.”

*

Shelby’s first rule was as simple, and thought-provoking, as the ones that followed.

Those chairs in front of your lockers?

Turn them around.

Now.

“I wanted all the players to face each other,” Shelby said. “As much as possible, I wanted them to see each other as people.”

His second rule involved punishment for such things as not cleaning the sink after washing your cleats, or playing with the tricky clubhouse thermostat.

If nobody admitted the misdeed, the entire team would pay the fine. If somebody later owned up, he would apologize in front of the group.

Once, when trainer Alfonso Flores was cranky, and acting it, he stood in front and apologized without being asked.

“I wanted them to learn to respect each other, regardless of who they were or how they looked,” Shelby said.

He spent more time in the clubhouse than in his office. He walked from locker to locker, sharing everything from jokes to philosophies of baserunning, allowing the players to call him by his nickname, “T-Bone.”

When his family arrived for the summer, oldest sons John T. and Jeremy, 12 and 10, immediately became batboys. Justin, 8, would also run around the field before games.

Shelby was proud of his brood, proud to tie shoes before team meetings or accompany the little one to the shower after games. His team watched every moment of this, some of them in awe.

Sadly, for many of the small-town whites, it was the first time they had seen a black man as a father, a teacher, a positive role model.

They said they will never look at blacks the same way again.

“My grandfather, he still drops the N-word,” said Jeff Bramlett, an outfielder from Cleveland, Tenn., who had never played with blacks until signing as a pro. “I wish he could be here, to see this, to understand.”

Colors other than the team’s unique brown and green combination soon disappeared.

When five Latino players needed a sixth roommate, and Brooklyn pitcher Mike Bourbakis needed a place to live, the choices were easy.

“I got friends back home that would not believe this,” Bourbakis said. “But you live with somebody and you realize, we’re all the same.

“We’re all calling our girlfriends. We all get homesick. We all like to watch “SportsCenter.” You don’t need to speak English to play cards.”

When another white player was left without a roommate recently, he asked Bourbakis to join him. There would be only the two of them, with no language barriers.

Bourbakis declined.

“He acted like it was a big deal and I’m like, ‘Why move?’ ” Bourbakis said. “I like where I’m at, who I’m with.”

Peter Bergeron, an outfielder from western Massachusetts, recently had his hometown friends wondering who he was with. During a phone call home, he told them he was, “marinating.”

It’s a word he borrowed from roommate Damian Rolls. It means relaxing. Bergeron’s white friends thought he was nuts.

“I really don’t even think about him being black,” Bergeron said. “I don’t know a lot of his music, he doesn’t know a lot of mine but, you know, we’re both kind of silly. What’s the difference?”

The white players speak in amazed tones about the time several unmarried Latinos showed up at a party being held for one of the married player’s babies . . . at Chuck E. Cheese.

The Latinos talk about how the white guys have learned enough Spanish to implore them to, “Usa tu el parque,” or use the whole park.

“That was their generation,” Rolls said of baseball racism. “This is ours.”

And the Sand Gnats’ record? Well, they finished the first half of the season at 30-41, in fourth place in a four-team division.

But they are at 23-24 in the second half, have been winning games with ninth-inning comebacks and challenging more experienced teams. Every night is a potential party.

It was during one comeback that Shelby’s 5-year-old daughter, Tiara, was standing along the third-base line, blowing soap bubbles.

Soon, it seemed, half of Savannah’s white children had joined her, a million kids blowing bubbles that floated onto the field, rising over Shelby’s head in the third-base coaching box.

He looked up and laughingly ran his hand through them, those tiny, beautiful, colorless bubbles.