September Swoon
by William C. Kashatus
Introduction
On Sunday, October 4, 1964, Richie Allen, the Phillies’ rookie third baseman, walked into the visitor’s clubhouse at Cincinnati’s Crosley Field and readied himself for the most important game of a promising career. As he dressed in his gray-flannel uniform, Allen tried to make sense of what had happened to his team during the stretch. Up by six and a half games on September 20 with just twelve left to play, the “Fightin’ Phils” appeared to have clinched their first pennant in more than a decade. But the following day they went into a tailspin, losing ten straight before beating the Cincinnati Reds on October 2. Now the Phils were one game behind the Reds and the St. Louis Cardinals, both of whom were locked in a first-place tie.
Allen realized that his team no longer controlled its destiny. Not only would the Phillies need to defeat the Reds again today, but the Cards would have to lose their third game in a row to the lowly New York Mets. Only then would there be a three-way tie for first, forcing a round-robin playoff. On this final day of the season, then, Richie Allen found himself rooting for the cellar-dwelling Mets.
Out on the field, Frank Thomas, a power-hitting first baseman obtained from the Mets in early August as insurance, was taking batting practice. When Allen got to the cage, Thomas reminded his younger teammate, “It’s our turn today. The Reds started us on our ten-game skid. It’s our turn to get them back.”
Friday’s victory provided some relief for the team. Suddenly, they were themselves again, confident that they would win a playoff for the pennant. Now, on Sunday, they were seeking vindication, and it looked as if they might very well get it. Jim Bunning, the staff ace and a veteran of postseason play, would get the start. If the Phils could give him a few runs, Bunning could deliver the victory.
The Phillies bats came alive in the third inning when Allen doubled off the center-field fence, driving in Tony Gonzalez for the team’s first run. Reds manager Dick Sisler, had Johnny Callison intentionally walked, loading the bases. Wes Covington followed with a two-run single to right. Sisler lifted his starter, John Tsitouris, and called in left-hander Joe Nuxhall to face Tony Taylor, who promptly delivered a broken-bat single for a 3–0 Phillies lead.
On the bench, shortstop Ruben Amaro, who had already ordered $1,800 worth of World Series tickets, was praying. “Please, God, give us a shot,” he whispered. “Give us one more game.”
Allen struck again in the fifth, when he crushed a homer to center and followed it with a three-run blast to right the next inning. When the game was over, Bunning had pitched a six-hit shutout, walking just one batter, as the Phillies went on to a 10–0 whitewashing of the Reds.
Afterward, Gene Mauch, the temperamental Phillies manager, sat in the visitors’ clubhouse listening to the last few innings of the Cards’ 11–5 victory over the Mets. It was over for the Phils. St. Louis had clinched the pennant. All that could be heard was the sound of the radio and the hissing spray of the showers as players sat near their lockers, stunned. The Phillies had just suffered the greatest collapse of any team in major league baseball history. When the sportswriters entered, it was left to Mauch to explain the unexplainable. “I just wore the pitching out,” he admitted, taking a long drag on a cigarette. “Would you have done anything differently?” asked a scribe, almost apologetically. “If I knew how it was going to come out, I might’ve done a couple of things different,” Mauch replied. “When you manage the way I want to manage, you don’t miss something by a game or two.“
Again there was silence. Over the course of the 162-game season, the sportswriters knew when to tread lightly, especially with the Little General, who had a short fuse. “All I can say is that I wish I did as well as the players did,” said Mauch, wanting to end the interview. “They did a great job. That’s all I’ve got to say.”
Before he could get away, though, another reporter tried to buttonhole him. “Are you implying you did something wrong?”
“No,” snapped Mauch, “I’m implying nothing.” And with that he walked away.
Later that night, when the team’s chartered plane arrived at Philadelphia International Airport, there were 2,000 fans waiting for them. As the plane stopped at the gate, Mauch, expecting a lynching, stood and faced his players. “I want to be the first one off,” he told them. “You guys didn’t lose it. I did.”
Instead, he and his young club were enthusiastically cheered. Philadelphia had fallen in love with the Phils in defeat.
There would be no “next year” for those Phillies. Despite a lineup of talented young players and two of the era’s best pitchers, the team never did recover from the 1964 swoon, instead spiraling downward into mediocrity. In his elusive quest to capture the pennant, Mauch began to overmanage his young team. Frustrated with the results, he then traded away the Phillies’ future for proven veterans from other teams, few of whom panned out. Richie Allen, 1964 Rookie of the Year, was the pivotal figure of those teams. He was the Phillies’ first African American superstar but he was also his own worst enemy. Although he hit over .300 during the next three seasons and added another 177 home runs through 1969, his off-the-field behavior earned him a twenty-eight-day suspension, a $500-a-day fine, and ultimately a trade to the Cardinals. Johnny Callison was the other half of the Phillies’ slugging tandem, and the fan favorite. Voted runner-up to the National League’s Most Valuable Player in 1964, Callison almost slugged the Phils into the World Series with his thirty-one homers and 104 RBIs. Once dubbed “the next Mickey Mantle,” he finally seemed to realize his enormous potential. But after 1965 he never hit higher than .276 or more than 16 homers or 65 RBIs in a season.
Jim Bunning and Chris Short were the workhorses of the pitching staff in 1964. On three separate occasions during the stretch, Mauch gave each man the ball with only two days’ rest. Never did they refuse. Nor could they win, for they were exhausted by that point. Nevertheless, both pitchers continued to be productive after that fateful season. Bunning, who posted a 19–8 record in 1964, including a perfect no-hit game against the New York Mets, would go on to win another fifty-five games for the Phils and to see his earned-run average drop over the next three years before he was traded to Pittsburgh. Similarly, Short, 17–9 in 1964, would post another sixty-six victories over the next four seasons before his career was cut short by back surgery. If the Phils had had an effective bullpen, both Bunning and Short would have enjoyed even greater success.
Allen, Callison, Bunning, and Short were the nucleus of the team. As they went, so went the Phillies. The supporting cast was solid, but not nearly as talented as the core. It was also Philadelphia’s first truly integrated baseball team. Latin American players like Ruben Amaro, Tony Gonzalez, Cookie Rojas, and Tony Taylor provided speed on the base paths and a steady defense. African American players like Johnny Briggs, Wes Covington, and Alex Johnson added some power. Whites dominated the pitching staff as well as the catching. Dennis Bennett, Art Mahaffey, Ray Culp, and rookie Rick Wise were the other starters. Jack Baldschun, Ed Roebuck, and Bobby Shantz were in the bullpen. Clay Dalrymple and Gus Triandos split the catching duties. In 1964 this was a good team having a great year through 150 games. But in the final two weeks of the season, they were unable to jell. Nor would they ever again come as close to capturing the pennant. From 1965 to 1969, injuries, poor trades, and personal conflict among the players prevented the Phillies from finishing any higher than fourth place. Thus, a team that had the potential to contend for the next five seasons became tail-enders for the balance of the decade.
Today, Connie Mack Stadium, where the team played, no longer exists. Most of the players are now in their sixties and live far from Philadelphia. Only one, Jim Bunning, made it into the National Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown. Yet the 1964 Phillies still have a strong emotional hold on the City of Brotherly Love.
More than any other team in Philadelphia’s sports history, the 1964 Phillies saddled the city with a reputation for being a “loser.” Even when victory seemed certain, Philadelphia found a way to lose. Call it “bad luck” if you will, but the team’s infamous reputation became so ingrained in the fabric of the city’s sports culture that even when the Phillies managed to win their one and only world championship in 1980, the victory did not evoke as much emotion as the 1964 swoon. But beyond the fact that the 1964 Phillies managed to blow the pennant when it seemed to be theirs for the taking, there is another, more subtle, reason that the team evokes so much emotion among the fans. It was Richie Allen, whose remarkable talent and controversial behavior forced Philadelphians to confront the racism that existed in their city during the most tumultuous period of the civil rights era. The Phillies’ reputation as a racially segregated team in a racially segregated city is not without foundation. During Jackie Robinson’s quest to break the color barrier in 1947, the Phillies treated the Dodgers’ rookie worse than any National League team did. Pitchers threw at his head, infielders purposely spiked him on the base paths, and—in one of the lowest moments in baseball history—the Phils humiliated Robinson by standing on the steps of their dugout, pointing their bats at him, and making gunshot sounds. The Phillies were also the last team in the National League to integrate. They did not field an African American player until 1957, when infielder John Kennedy appeared in five games for the Phils—a full decade after Robinson broke the color line. Even then the Phillies maintained segregated spring-training facilities, a practice that was finally abandoned in 1962.
To their credit, however, the organization made an earnest effort to integrate during the 1960s. Talented African American and Hispanic players were added to the roster, and their white teammates quickly welcomed them. They were young players, most of them in their early twenties, and their youthfulness as well as their desire to win transcended the racism of the earlier generation. By 1964 the players had created, both on and off the field, a special team chemistry that allowed them to play exceptional baseball for 150 games. It looked to be a team of destiny, the first Phillies squad to capture a pennant since the Whiz Kids fourteen years earlier—until the last fateful weeks of the season.
For myself, those Phillies, the very first team I followed in any sport, provided me with an introduction to the national pastime itself. Like most other passionate fans, I fell in love with the Phillies as a youngster and continue to follow them today. Their successes and failures provide certain benchmarks in my own life. Predictably, some of the most vivid memories of my childhood come from September 1964: hiding under the bed covers at night listening to the games with a transistor radio to my ear; my bus driver delivering an animated play-by-play on the ride to school; and, after the season ended, seeing tears in the eyes of so many fans—including grown men—who had had such high hopes.
Forty years later, I still wonder what exactly it was about that season that made grown men cry. After all, it seems foolish to get wrapped up with anything so insignificant as other grown men playing a child’s game. I guess I really did not know until I began writing this book. What I discovered is that while it’s easy to glory in a team triumphant, some of us fall in love even with a team in defeat. There is something uniquely endearing about the 1964 Phillies because they lost the pennant after such great striving. But there is something magical about a franchise that has a shameful history of race relations going on to field an integrated team that almost won the first pennant in more than a decade.
What it all boils down to is the business of caring. In 1964 the Phillies got many, many people to care deeply and passionately about the game at a turbulent period in Philadelphia’s—and the nation’s—history. Just as the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the counterculture, and the violence in the streets were beginning to rock the city, so too did an extraordinarily gifted team of young African American, Hispanic, and white athletes. While they were hardly the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Phillies were, for many of us, our very own “Boys of Summer.” They provided some stability in a period of great instability, something we could count on night after night, at least for 150 games. We reveled in their triumphs and cried in their defeat, probably because in them we saw a reflection of ourselves. In all these ways the 1964 Phillies won not only our loyalties but also our hearts.
Based on personal interviews, player biographies, and newspaper accounts, September Swoon details the careful cultivation, history, and eventual breakup of Philadelphia’s first integrated baseball team as well as the bittersweet season of 1964. Chapter 1 addresses the shameful story of race relations in Philadelphia’s baseball past and provides a useful context for understanding the challenges and rewards of integrating the Phillies during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Chapter 2 explores the process of integration itself for both African American and Hispanic players, how the club’s white players responded to that process, and the Phillies’ discovery and cultivation of Richie Allen, their first African American superstar.
The 1964 season is the focus of Chapters 3, 4, and 5. From the club’s fast start in the spring through mid-September, readers will appreciate the summer-long soap opera of close games, influential trades, and key victories that propelled the Phillies into first place and kept them there until the last week of the season. The September swoon may be difficult for many of the more seasoned fans to revisit, but for those who want to understand the collapse there is a game-by-game summary as well as ample explanation for it. Chapters 6 and 7 trace individual and team highlights, as well as Allen’s ongoing conflict with management, fans, and the sportswriters, a clash that ultimately led to the team’s breakup in 1969. The book concludes with a brief statement about the significance of the 1964 Phillies and Allen’s legacy to the history of race relations in Philadelphia baseball. In combination with the statistical material included in the appendixes, the Conclusion reveals the tragedy of unrealized potential for a team that should have been contenders throughout the period 1964 to 1969.
Still, 1964 will forever remain an enchanted summer for Phillies fans. For a team that had lost more games in the twentieth century than any other major league franchise, 1964 was a season to dream—of a pennant, of a perennial contender, and of a city of brotherly love.
Chapter 6: Seasons of Frustration
Spring training is usually an elixir for a team that suffered through a disappointing season the previous year. The Grapefruit League offers not only another chance for glory but also revival of the spirit. But when Gene Mauch walked into Jack Russell Stadium in Clearwater in February 1965, he was forced to confront the painful reminder of a blown pennant. The messenger came in the person of Howard Cosell, a brash, egotistical sports journalist who achieved nationwide admiration and hatred for his penchant for uncovering a scoop.
Cosell came to the Phillies spring-training camp to interview Mauch on camera. The Little General said he would talk, on condition that there would be no discussion of the collapse. Cosell agreed, and the camera began to roll.
“What was it like to lose the pennant after being six and a half games up with only twelve to go?” asked Cosell in his very first question, violating the pact he had just made.
Mauch, noticeably angered, glared at the obnoxious journalist and replied: “Fuck you, Howard.” Then he turned and walked away, ending the interview.
During the next three seasons, Gene Mauch was determined to clinch the pennant that had eluded him in 1964. The quest bordered on a personal obsession that eventually proved to be his downfall as a manager. Each year his efforts were frustrated by bad trades, injuries, and a growing distance between himself and his players, especially the team’s enigmatic superstar, Richie Allen. Desperate to land the veterans who could make the difference, Mauch and General Manager John Quinn traded away talented young prospects for seasoned veterans, all of whom failed to deliver the elusive flag.
In 1965, Quinn acquired Dick Stuart, a power-hitting first baseman from the Boston Red Sox, for pitcher Dennis Bennett; pitcher Bo Belinsky, a free-spirited hurler with a lively arm, from the Los Angeles Angels for first baseman Costen Shockley and pitcher Rudy May; and pitcher Ray Herbert from the Chicago White Sox for outfielder Danny Cater. All three of the trades proved to be busts. Stuart was inconsistent at the plate, and his wacky defense earned him the nickname “Dr. Strange Glove.” Belinsky had great ability but very little understanding of how to pitch. He won only four of thirteen decisions and argued constantly with Mauch. Herbert, a junkballer, surrendered 162 hits in 131 innings and finished the season with a 5–8 record. Although Bunning (19–9, 260 K, 2.60 ERA) and Short (18–11, 237 K, 2.82 ERA) had good seasons, the Phillies pitching wasn’t nearly as good as the year before. In addition to the poor performances of Belinsky and Herbert, Art Mahaffey was plagued with arm troubles and finished a disappointing 2–5. Jack Baldschun and Ed Roebuck could not hold leads, and rookies Ferguson Jenkins, Grant Jackson, Morrie Steevens, and Gary Wagner were too inexperienced to help. In the clubhouse there were growing signs of discontent as Wes Covington and Tony Gonzalez openly complained about being platooned in the outfield. It is not surprising that the Phils struggled to play .500 ball for most of the season.
As so often is the case in Philadelphia when the Phils are out of contention early, the fans found some consolation in the exploits of individual stars, and there was no greater star than Richie Allen. The young third baseman picked up where he left off in 1964, entering the month of May with a twelve-game hitting streak and closing it with a 529-foot shot over the left-field roof at Connie Mack Stadium in a dramatic 4–2 come-from-behind victory against the Chicago Cubs. It was one of the longest home runs in baseball history. By the end of June, Allen was hitting .348 and had been named to the National League All-Star team. This African American superstar—the first in Philadelphia’s infamous baseball history—appeared to have captured the hearts of the fans. Then suddenly, on July 3, things changed for the worse.
Allen was taking ground balls at third base before that night’s game against the Cincinnati Reds, while Frank Thomas was in the cage taking his cuts. Johnny Callison, who stopped by to visit with Allen, suggested that they taunt Thomas for his poor showing at the plate during the previous night’s game against the Giants. With runners on first and third and one out, Thomas tried to avoid hitting into a double play by bunting the ball. After three failed attempts, the thirty-six-year-old slugger struck out. His own teammates found the scene hilarious, unable to control their laughter in the dugout. Now, Allen and Callison—both of whom had been the object of Thomas’s own ridicule several times before—were ready to get even.
Down in the cage, Thomas took a big swing and missed. “Hey Donkey!” yelled Callison, referring to the veteran by his nickname, “Why don’t you try bunting?” Instead of responding to Callison, Thomas glared down the third-base line at Allen and shouted: “What are you trying to be, another Muhammad Clay, always running your mouth off?” Insulted by the comparison with Cassius Clay, the colorful but controversial heavyweight boxing champion who had recently changed his name to Muhammad Ali, Allen charged the cage, and the two players went at each other. Allen hit Thomas with a left hook to the jaw, sending him to the ground. When he got to his feet, Thomas was wielding his bat and connected with Allen’s left shoulder. By now the rest of the team was at home plate trying to restrain the two players.
According to Allen, Thomas “knew it was Callison who had taunted him.” But Thomas’s response was, once again, directed at him. “The ‘Muhammad Clay’ remark was meant to say a lot,” insists Allen. “It reminded me of how Frank would pretend to offer his hand in a soul shake to a young black player on the team. When the player would offer his hand in return, Thomas would grab his thumb and bend it back. To him, it was a big joke. But I saw too many brothers on the team with swollen thumbs to get any laughs. So I popped him. I just wanted to teach him a lesson. But after he hit me with the bat, I wanted to kill him.”
One of those “young black players” to whom Allen referred was his best friend on the team, twenty-one-year-old outfielder Johnny Briggs. A speedy base runner who played the outfield with an exceptional instinct, Briggs was a player from whom the Phillies expected too much, too soon. With less than 200 games experience in the minors, the Phils had promoted Briggs to the majors for the pennant race in 1964. He played the outfield so effectively for twenty games that they decided to keep him on the roster in 1965. It was a mistake.
Briggs platooned in center field with Tony Gonzalez and was made the leadoff hitter as well. But he struggled to hit .230 for most of the season and never really felt comfortable with his role on the team, even stating that he would prefer being sent back to the minors just to play on an everyday basis. Ironically, the Phillies found themselves in a no-win situation with Briggs. While Briggs was a part of an earnest attempt to integrate the team, the Phillies only damaged his self-confidence by not sending him down for more seasoning. Perhaps their decision was based on potential, or simply a genuine desire to protect a young black player from discrimination at the hands of the Little Rock fans; something they learned from Allen’s experience. Whatever the case might have been, the Phillies failed on both counts. In fact, Thomas only made matters worse for Briggs in Philadelphia. “Frank Thomas often made racially inflammatory comments,” recalled Briggs, years later. “As a rookie, I’d never say anything when he made those remarks to me. I might tell Richie about it, just like some of the other black players. That’s about all I could do.”
According to Pat Corrales, reserve catcher for the Phils, Thomas “had been picking on Johnny Briggs all season, saying ‘Boy this’ and ‘Boy that.’” Allen “didn’t go for that.” He came to the defense of Briggs time and again. Finally, Thomas turned on Allen. Callison added that hard feelings between the two players had been building for quite some time. “I knew that Thomas had been riding Richie and that a fight was only a matter of time,” he said. “Richie was under control until Thomas took that swing at him with the bat. After that, it took five guys to keep Allen off Thomas. Our shortstop, Ruben Amaro, took a shot in the chops trying to restrain Richie.”
Amaro, who found himself in the middle of the brawl, also called it “a racial situation.” But he remembered it a bit differently than either Allen or Callison. “Thomas liked to intimidate his teammates,” recalled Amaro, “especially the young players, who called him ‘Donkey’ because he had a knack for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. But Richie wasn’t completely innocent either. He was taking ground balls at third before the game and started taunting Thomas, saying, ‘Hey Donkey, you can’t hit a ball past me!’ Thomas yelled back: ‘Okay, Richie X, see if you can catch this one!’ Of course, Thomas was referring to Malcolm X, a very controversial African American leader at the time. Allen got mad. He went over to the cage and told Thomas: ‘I won’t call you Donkey anymore and you better not call me Richie X.’ Allen returned to third base, and Thomas hits a screaming line drive in his direction that goes all the way down the line. Before you know it, Thomas is yelling at him: ‘Hey, Richie X, how come you didn’t catch that one?’ That did it. Allen stormed the cage and the fight began.”
During the game that followed, Allen hit two triples, one a 400-foot shot off the Ballantine Beer scoreboard in right-center field in the seventh, and Thomas followed it with a pinch-hit home run an inning later. But the Phillies lost to the Reds, 10–8, dropping them in the standings to fourth place, four games behind the league-leading Dodgers. After the game, Quinn placed Thomas on irrevocable waivers, denying that the fight was the sole reason for his decision. “We had talked with one club in particular,” the general manager explained to the press. “We were trying to work out a deal without success—even before the trade deadline—so it just isn’t the incident that occurred between Thomas and Allen. This is what we thought we should do for the best interests of the ball club.”
Mauch threatened Allen with a $2,000 fine if he discussed the incident with the press. When sportswriters asked the black slugger to give his side of the story, he said published versions of the fight were “false” but refused to go into any detail about it because “it might hurt Thomas’s chances of getting a job with another team.” “I’m sorry about the whole thing,” Allen told them. “I’m really sorry. I should have thought it over. . . . I know in the heat of a pennant race tempers flare. I’m also sorry they put Thomas on waivers, but I don’t work in the front office.” Allen pleaded with Mauch to spare Thomas, who had a large family to support. But the Phillies skipper refused to listen. When asked about the decision by the press, Mauch replied: “I had to choose between a thirty-six-year-old veteran who was hitting .250 and a twenty-three-year-old power hitter who was hitting .348, the kind of player you see once in a lifetime.” It was the worst thing he could have said.
Thomas took his case to the press, exploiting the role of a victim. “I’ve always liked Richie,” he insisted. “I’ve always tried to help him. I guess certain guys can dish it out, but can’t take it.” Thomas also told the sportswriters that he had apologized to Allen and to management for his part in the incident, but that the front office refused to reinstate him on the team. “I think you’re being unfair,” Thomas reportedly told Gene Mauch, before leaving the team. “We’re always agitating each other, and he hit me first.” Some sportswriters were sympathetic. While Sandy Grady of the Bulletin did not exonerate Thomas for “breaking baseball’s code by using a bat in a ballgame brawl,” he wrote that General Manager John Quinn “made a more impulsive decision” by putting Thomas on “irrevocable waivers” after the fight. According to Grady, Quinn made “a glaring mistake” by preferring “clubhouse harmony” to “loud, late-inning rallies” that could bring the Phillies a pennant. Other writers made Allen the culprit.
George Kiseda of the Bulletin wrote: “Allen’s refusal to tell his side of the story made him the villain in the eyes of the fans.” Insisting that he was more concerned about the implications of the Thomas waiver on the Phillies’ bid for a pennant, Kiseda explained that the fans were not “booing out of compassion for Thomas, but out of self-pity because they suspect they might have lost a pennant.” Larry Merchant of the Daily News, however, was relentless in his condemnation of the young Phillies slugger. For one full week after the incident, Merchant continued to hammer out columns that fueled rumors of racial divisiveness in the Phillies clubhouse. “If you want to give, you should be ready to take the agitating that goes on among ballplayers,” wrote Merchant in his July 6 column. “Allen gave but didn’t take. He lost his cool. His skin wasn’t so tough after all.” Allen “resents authority and he admits it.” When Thomas told him he was “mouthing off” it was a “fatal putdown, a kick in the gut.” It was like “telling him he was still a punk kid, mind your manners.” But Thomas’s release only “exposes Allen as a kid who caused a veteran to lose his job.” Merchant suspected that “an unspoken resentment must smolder between Allen and his teammates because they know he was wrong. To protect themselves, they will instinctively withdraw from him. Who wants to kid with a kid who might blow up?” While Merchant wrote that the incident had “no racial connotation whatsoever,” he did predict that “rumors of racial strife” would arise, as they “always do during losing streaks.” He did not have to write anything more; he had already planted the seed for controversy.
When Allen fans came to their hero’s defense, Merchant categorically refuted them. “Why don’t you give Richie Allen a chance?” asked thirteen-year-old Nancy Peahm. “His popularity is certainly stunted now. I am very disappointed for the reputation of Richie.” “You have every reason to be disappointed, Nancy,” replied Merchant. “But it wasn’t the sportswriters who started the brawl. If anyone hurt Richie Allen’s reputation, it was Richie Allen.”
Charles Liebman, a Temple University sophomore and editor of the Temple News, also took exception to Merchant’s “comments on the Allen-Thomas slugfest.” “Who cares about Frank Thomas?” he asked. “If I was a manager, I’d personally ship out any third-string outfielder who has the nerve to look cross-eyed at a budding superstar.” “If I was your journalism professor,” replied Merchant, “I’d ship you out. Your values stink.”
Another fan cut to the core of the controversy when he wrote: “I don’t think you’re being fair to Richie Allen when you write one version of the incident. Allen protected Thomas and hurt himself by not revealing what was actually said. I’m sure you can guess what was really said. I also feel that the fans are being unfair to Allen because Thomas is white. I wonder if they would have booed if the fight was between Allen and Covington and Covington was released.” Merchant, in his response, tried to avoid any complicity in creating a racial controversy. “The difference between you and I is that I don’t have to guess,” he wrote. “Players who were on the scene—white and Negro—have verified Thomas’s version. If Allen interpreted remarks made previously by Thomas as racial (whether they were or weren’t), then why did he start agitating him on fight night? The only element that has been omitted in this story has been omitted to protect Allen. I think the boo-ers are protecting an injustice—which, again, was perpetrated by the front office—although there are undoubtedly bigots among them. I don’t think it would make much difference if Covington was involved.”
With petty sarcasm and a patronizing style, Merchant launched a nasty character assault on Richie Allen. He might have denied fueling the flames of racial animosity that already existed in the city, but he did give greater credence to the rumors of racial divisiveness on July 9 when he wrote: “There is a mild form of hysteria sweeping [Philadelphia], sweeping with a dirty broom.” The Richie Allen–Frank Thomas incident has “surfaced a lot of underground whispers of fights and racial strife among the Phillies,” wrote Merchant. “Ordinarily, one doesn’t dignify this sort of trash with a reply,” he added, trying to absolve himself of any complicity, “but it’s apparent that this wasn’t an ordinary case. There is a latent bigotry involved that dates to the 1940s, when the Phillies were a lily-white club.”
At the same time Merchant was vilifying Allen in print, the Tribune, Philadelphia’s most popular African American newspaper, worsened the controversy by making it headline news. Allen had been the paper’s top baseball story since he signed with the Phillies in 1960, and its writers were quick to come to his defense. They were also quick to resurrect the Phillies’ racist history in order to explain the discriminatory treatment of the team’s first black superstar.
In one of the most damning columns, sportswriter Claude E. Harrison Jr. criticized the Phillies and Philadelphia for its shameful history of race relations. Pointing out that Philadelphia was the “last National League city to hire Negro ballplayers” and that San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Cincinnati all had marquee players who were black, Harrison insisted that Phillies fans “seem to rebel at the idea of a Negro being one of the team’s superstars” and that the “booing of Allen seems to bear this out.” Allen, according to Harrison, “certainly can’t be blamed for the firing of Thomas, who committed one of the biggest sins in baseball: striking an individual with a bat. Had Thomas hurt Allen and put him out of operation, would the boos still be bouncing off the center-field wall? Doubtful! Very doubtful!”
Harrison’s column only reinforced the racial animosity that already existed in Philadelphia. It was bad enough to resurrect the Phillies’ poor history of race relations at a time when the club had turned the corner on integration. But to underscore Allen’s problems with the fans, Harrison also wrote, that Johnny Callison, the white fans’ hero, was only an “average player” who “can’t live up to the press he receives.” In doing so, he undermined a growing friendship between the two players. To add insult to injury, Harrison, in a subsequent column, facetiously identified all the reasons why Allen “is an annoying fellow.” Harrison wrote that Allen “annoys Phillies fans because he refuses to buckle under”; he annoys “General Manager John Quinn at contract time by holding out for what he considers a good salary”; and he annoys “sportswriters because when asked a question, he usually thinks twice and says nothing.”
While Harrison’s column intended to show how Allen had vindicated himself with his critics, it also suggested that he was a spiteful individual who purposely stirred controversy. The column certainly did not help the slugger’s precarious situation. Both Harrrison and Merchant should have allowed the incident to die a natural death.
Frank Dolson of the Inquirer disagrees. He insists that it was impossible for the city’s sportswriters to dismiss the racial implications of the Allen-Thomas incident. “When Allen and Thomas got into their fight, the writers had to address it,” he said, in a recent interview. “It happened in full view. We couldn’t just sit on it. Since one of the players was black and the other white, it was hard not to perceive it as a racial issue. But I don’t think any of us consciously dredged up the story to stir controversy. After we reported it, the story took on a life of its own in a town that was experiencing racial problems.”
To be sure, the Allen-Thomas fight reinforced, in the minds of white Philadelphians, the racial stereotyping of African Americans as “troublemakers.” Whites pointed to the rise of the Black Mafia, a street gang based around Twentieth and Carpenter Streets, as a justification for the stereotype. Led by Benjamin Coxson and “Big Sam” Christian, this organized band of black gangsters controlled gambling, prostitution, and drug-dealing in the city’s African American neighborhoods. They gradually displaced the traditional “Pop system,” where older black men who were respected members of the community mentored black youth, encouraging clean living and education as the keys to success. Like churches and schools, the Pop system was overwhelmed by a dramatic increase in the juvenile population in the post–World War II era. These socializing institutions were beginning to crumble at the very moment when Philadelphia’s African American youth needed them most. The Black Mafia and the several black gangs that were sprouting up across the city in the late 1950s and 1960s offered a quick—and illegal—way to make money. In a study of 10,000 male adolescents who were born in 1945 and lived in Philadelphia, more than one-third had been arrested at least once by the age of eighteen, and half that number were arrested more than once. A later study of male adolescents born in 1958 revealed similar findings. For white city-dwellers, the statistics reinforced the negative stereotype of African Americans and, in the mid-1960s, colored their perception of the civil rights movement itself. Cecil B. Moore’s fight to overturn the will of nineteenth-century banker Stephen Girard, giving black youth the right to attend the all-white Girard College, fueled white animosity toward the city’s African Americans.
Moore, president of the Philadelphia NAACP and a controversial political figure, launched a campaign to integrate the college preparatory school in 1957. In that year, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Girard College, established in 1848 to educate orphaned white males, was “publicly aided to a sufficient degree to require non-discriminatory entrance policies admitting minority candidates.” When the Board of City Trusts, responsible for oversight of the school, prepared for integration, a separate governing body was created to overrule them. Moore argued that the act was a blatant evasion of the Supreme Court’s decision, and organized large-scale pickets to protest it. The longer the school refused to integrate, the more heated the African American community became. The situation became so severe by 1965 that 1,000 police had to be deployed in the neighborhoods surrounding the school to preserve order. Even the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. attended a rally urging nonviolent pressure for open admission.
In Philadelphia’s racially charged atmosphere, Allen’s own situation was inevitably distorted, not only by the press but also by the city’s baseball fans. Even though the Phillies star was hitting .328 and was named the starting third baseman for the National League’s All-Star team, fans continued to blame Allen for the fight. They labeled him a “troublemaker” and scrutinized his every act. Playing in Philadelphia became an increasingly hellish experience. Allen was “sucker punched” by one fan, others screamed “darkie” or “monkey” at him, and, in one especially painful act, a white father held his little boy up in the air with one hand and pointed at the black slugger with the other, teaching his son to boo.
There were times Allen admitted to “feeling the anger at the plate, ripping through [his] veins.” On July 9, for example, he hit a grand slam in the nightcap of a doubleheader against the San Francisco Giants at Connie Mack. The blow proved to be the margin of victory for the Phils, who defeated the Giants, 4–2. After hitting the homer, Allen saw the crowd of 37,110 giving him a standing ovation when just thirty seconds earlier they were calling him a “monkey.” He called the scene “the ultimate mind game.” Off the field, Allen received hate mail regularly. The front lawn of his Mount Airy home was strewn with trash, compliments of the neighborhood’s disgruntled fans. The abuse became so bad that Era Allen pleaded with her son to tell his side of the Thomas story. Some of Allen’s friends even urged him to hire a bodyguard. But the young third baseman took it in stride. “The fans are not the ones I want to beat,” he stated. “If I paid my money to see a ball game, I guess I’d raise a little hell too.”
But years later Allen admitted that all the abuse had taken its toll. “After the Thomas fight, I started playing angry baseball,” he confessed. “It seemed the whole city of Philadelphia blamed me for what happened. They hung banners from the bleachers at Connie Mack Stadium in support of Thomas. I began getting hate mail and lots of it. Most of the letters I got started off with ‘nigger.’ None of them were ever signed. Racists are cowards. After a while, I just dumped the mail in the trash, unopened.”
The negative press and the “mind games” the fans were playing with him inevitably affected Allen’s performance, as well as the badly bruised shoulder he suffered from the fight with Thomas. He hit only .271 in the month of July, but he refused to be taken out of the lineup. Still, he completed the 1965 season with a very respectable .302 average, 20 homers, and 85 RBIs for a team that finished sixth, eleven and a half games behind the pennant-winning Dodgers.
The Richie Allen soap opera may have been the focal point of the Phillies’ disappointing season, but it was part of a much larger race problem the nation was experiencing in the mid-1960s. That point was made clear when the Phillies traveled to Los Angeles to play the Dodgers that summer. On August 11 a Los Angeles Police Department officer patrolling the neighborhoods of Watts arrested a young black male on the suspicion of drunk driving. An ugly confrontation ensued, escalating into a full-fledged race riot. Over the next three days, 35 people lost their lives, 1,200 were seriously injured, more than 4,000 were arrested for civil disobedience, and property damage was estimated in the millions.
The Phillies flew down from San Francisco to play the Dodgers on Sunday evening, August 15, shortly after order had been restored. As their plane began its descent, the captain announced that he would be “forced to make a steeper than normal approach” to the airport due to the “fires and other difficulties that exist in the riot area.”
“Son—of—a—bitch,” murmured Gene Mauch, as he peered out the window at the black plumes of smoke and still burning fires below. “Those folks really mean business down there.”
The players saw a war zone as they traveled through downtown Los Angeles on a chartered bus from the airport to the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. Sirens blared. Police were on the lookout for random snipers. More than 13,000 national guardsmen occupied the streets to prevent further looting.
“Tonight’s going to be the crucial night as far as riots go,” observed Wes Covington. “I hear there is talk of them reorganizing.”
Covington’s prediction proved to be accurate. That night there was rioting in Long Beach and San Diego, 100 miles away. None of the players had the courage to go out. Instead they remained glued to the television set, watching the drama unfold. The experience must have been especially traumatic for Richie Allen, Johnny Briggs, and Alex Johnson, young black players who were struggling to establish an identity, not only as professional athletes but also as African American men in a white mainstream society. They were in early adulthood, a difficult period for anyone starting out on a career path. But the process of resolving the dilemma was especially difficult for them because of the much greater visibility of a professional athlete. They were not only encountering racism but also immersed in an environment in which they were forced to grapple with what it means to be a member of a group targeted by racism.
To eliminate any involvement in civil rights demonstrations, some clubs wrote clauses into the contracts of their black players forbidding them to “participate in any freedom marches.” Ebony magazine, a national African American periodical, attacked the clause, condemning the “handful of owners who believe that Negroes should be forever grateful that they were finally admitted to the majors and should never complain.” According to Ruly Carpenter, son of owner Bob Carpenter, the Phillies never required such a restrictive clause in the contracts of any of their black players. However, he did understand the position of the clubs that did resort to the clause. “Civil rights demonstrations could often be pretty dangerous,” he said. “If you had a good player, you certainly didn’t want him to get hurt. It was a way to protect your investment in the player.” The Phillies’ problems, on the other hand, had to do with with team chemistry, although they were beginning to be cast in a racial context.
During the final series of the 1965 season against the Mets, Wes Covington, a black veteran outfielder who had grown tired of being platooned, sat in front of his locker at New York’s Shea Stadium and lambasted the Phillies organization.
“This club should have won the pennant the last couple of years,” he told a group of Philadelphia sportswriters. “I’ve been on a pennant winner in Milwaukee, and I know what it takes to win a pennant. The club we had a year ago, one guy would break his back for the other one. Why, over one year, did we become a club of guys who just think about themselves? We lost twenty-three in a row in 1961 and we had better spirit than we have now. What happened in the last year? If you were the manager, and if you had managed a club the year before with the spirit we had, and something happened, would you as manager take charge then, or would you turn your back? There’s a damn good reason why this club is in the second division.”
Covington stopped just short of saying that Gene Mauch had lost control of the club. It did not matter. The veteran outfielder had worn out his welcome in Philadelphia and was traded to the Chicago Cubs for outfielder Doug Clemens.
There were other trades too. On October 27, Quinn sent the moody but talented young outfielder Alex Johnson, along with Art Mahaffey and backup catcher Pat Corrales, to St. Louis for veteran first baseman Bill White, shortstop Dick Groat, and catcher Bob Uecker. Shortly afterward, Ruben Amaro was traded to the New York Yankees for infielder Phil Linz. Finally, on April 21, 1966, Quinn sent twenty-two-year-old pitching prospect Ferguson Jenkins, first baseman John Herrnstein, and outfielder Adolfo Phillips to the Chicago Cubs for veteran right-handers Larry Jackson and Bob Buhl.
Allen was devastated by the trades. He had lost three of his best friends at a time when he needed their support most. Allen had mentored both Johnson and Jenkins when they first came up to the Phillies, teaching them how to deal with the precarious racial climate of Philadelphia baseball. They became close friends. But Corrales was Allen’s confidant. The two players were roommates at Little Rock and came up together through the Phillies organization. “As a Chicano with Indian blood raised in a tough neighborhood, I had already been through all the racial crap that Richie hadn’t as a kid,” said Corrales, reflecting later on the trade. “In Little Rock I had him laughing at all that crap. I could reach him. We were like brothers.” The trade, he added, was the “dumbest thing the Phillies could have done, as far as Richie was concerned.” At the time, however, the trades appeared to favor the Phillies’ bid to capture a pennant in 1966.
Larry Jackson and Bob Buhl were seasoned veterans who could give the Phils 200 or more innings of work each. Jackson was a twenty-four-game winner in 1964, and Buhl was good for ten twelve victories as well. Both would stabilize the Phillies rotation, which already consisted of three solid pitchers in Bunning, Short, and Culp. On the other hand, the only pitching the Phils gave up was Mahaffey, who could manage only a 2–5 record and an inflated 6.21 ERA because of a chronically sore arm, and an unproven rookie in Jenkins. Amaro was not much of a loss, having been demoted to Bobby Wine’s backup at shortstop, and his three seasons in New York would be marred by injuries. Linz, on the other hand, able to play second, short, third, and the outfield, brought postseason experience as well as versatility. White, Groat, and Uecker were also seasoned veterans with postseason experience, which made them more valuable to the Phillies in their quest for a pennant than Johnson, Herrnstein, Corrales, and Phillips, who were all young, unproven talent. As it turned out, the Phillies’ decision to trade youth for veteran talent cost them longer-term success. Johnson and Jenkins, in particular, blossomed into stellar performers elsewhere.
Johnson hit .298 in 140 games in his two years in Philadelphia. But within the Phillies organization the black ballplayer was considered “moody” and a “loner,” and there was no place to put him in the outfield with Callison, Gonzalez, and Briggs, who showed signs of superstardom. However, Johnson went on to compile a respectable .288 batting average and .953 fielding percentage in a thirteen-year major league career that included stints with the pennant-contending Cardinals, Reds, and Yankees. Jenkins did even better, becoming a Cy Young Award winner and a consistent twenty-game winner for the Cubs. At the end of his Hall of Fame career, he had collected 286 victories, 3,192 strikeouts, and an impressive 3.34 ERA. Some believe that Jenkins never showed any sign of that remarkable talent when he was with the Phillies. In his eight appearances, the young black hurler compiled a 2–1 record, 10 strikeouts, and a 2.51 ERA.
Clay Dalrymple, who caught Jenkins, thought otherwise. “Fergie had tremendous potential because he kept the ball down,” he recalled. “He didn’t walk many hitters, and he had a great attitude. But Mauch believed that black pitchers buckled under pressure. In fact, Fergie had problems picking up his signs. Gene always had complicated signs. In one game, Ferguson crossed me up a couple of times simply because he was guessing. Instead of coming to me, or to anybody on the team, to review the signs, he just kept quiet and tried to pitch. I’ll tell you one thing. That kid had great ability, and Mauch traded away one of the best pitchers in the game.”
Dalrymple’s remark suggests that the Jenkins trade was racially motivated. But when asked if Mauch harbored ill feelings toward the team’s African American players, the veteran catcher quickly rejected the notion, stating that it was a prevailing belief among many managers that black pitchers cracked under pressure. The Phillies’ other white and Hispanic players also discounted racial prejudice as the reason for the trade. The fact that the Phils obtained thirty-two-year-old veteran first baseman Bill White, an African American, from the Cardinals reinforces their belief. In fact, White, having experienced segregation as a young player, was an outspoken critic of major league baseball’s refusal to employ blacks in coaching, management, and broadcasting positions.
Raised in Warren, Ohio, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, William DeKova White briefly attended Hiram College before signing with the New York Giants in 1953. The Giants assigned him to their Danville, Virginia, farm team, where he was among the first black players in the Carolina League. Playing in the tobacco-belt towns of Raleigh, Greensboro, Durham, and Winston-Salem gave the nineteen-year-old Buckeye an education in the realities of the Jim Crow South, where legal segregation was a valued way of life. On the field, White was called “nigger” and “black cat.” Off the field, he was barred from hotels, movie theaters, and drugstore lunch counters. By 1960, his second year with the St. Louis Cardinals, he had had enough. During spring training in St. Petersburg, he leaked stories to the liberal northern press of Florida’s segregationist treatment of black ballplayers. Soon after, other black major leaguers began to speak out. Working together with the Cardinals general manager, Bing Devine, White convinced owner August A. Busch Jr. to put pressure on the owners for integration of some of the best motels in St. Petersburg, or see the Cardinals move out of Florida altogether. Realizing the financial implications of the threat, the motel owners agreed.
White, who helped St. Louis to a world championship in 1964, immediately became an impact player in Philadelphia. During the first two months of the 1966 campaign, the veteran first baseman’s defense saved many games for the Phillies, who moved within one and a half games of first place on June 8. After Memorial Day, White went on a hitting tear that carried through mid-July. At the All-Star break, he was hitting at a .350 clip with 9 homers, 10 doubles, 4 triples, and 29 RBIs.
“With Bill over there at first, I don’t have a thing to worry about,” said Allen, who quickly endeared himself to the veteran infielder. White, a consummate professional with a remarkable work ethic, proved to be a positive influence. Like Allen, he had experienced racial discrimination firsthand and could sympathize with the young slugger’s plight. But unlike Allen, White had been around the majors longer and knew how to fight for change within the system. When, for example, black professional athletes from football, basketball, and baseball made plans to organize a union “for the purpose of gaining greater shares of the income generated by their respective teams,” White proved to be a voice of reason. “Maybe I’m old-fashioned,” he said, “but I feel we have all channels open to us, regardless of color, to make as much money as we can with our ability to play matched against the club’s ability to pay. If the Negro professional were to be separated from the main body of players, we’d not only be losing twenty hard years of progress since Jackie Robinson’s entrance into the game, but we’d also be removed from the free market of bargaining for top money. This would be a giant step backward.” His counsel was taken to heart, and the movement folded.
Bob Uecker also endeared himself to Allen. The two players developed a hilarious routine that included singing as well as a series of self-deprecating skits that kept their teammates in stitches, both in the clubhouse and on the road. One of Allen’s favorites was a slow-motion imitation of Bill White bailing out of the way of a blazing Sandy Koufax fastball. “Richie Allen was a real cashew,” joked Uecker, years later when he was a comic entertainer. “He liked everything about a ballpark except getting there on time. He also liked to sip the cooking sherry. We would get in the back of the plane, glowing slightly, and sing harmony, all the old barber shop songs. We were a happy pair.” Uecker helped Allen rediscover his fun-loving side, which he had stifled in the wake of the Thomas fight. The budding superstar began to loosen up, and, as long as the Phillies were winning, the fans as well as the press left him alone. But when the bullpen collapsed in mid-June and Callison suffered a prolonged hitting slump, the Phillies went into a tailspin, losing eleven of the next sixteen games, and the season took a turn for the worse. The Boo-Birds returned with a vengeance, and Allen was their primary target.
Allen was having a career year at the plate, but the fans were booing him every night. Even when Mauch moved him into the outfield in an attempt to spare his young star from the hecklers who sat along the third-base line, it only made matters worse. Fans sitting in the outfield bleachers threw pennies, bolts, or beer bottles at Allen, who began wearing a batting helmet just to protect himself from the projectiles. His only salvation came, it seemed, in a bottle. Matters came to a head on July 21t in San Francisco, when Allen missed curfew and Mauch slapped him with a $500 fine. The following day, when Bill Conlin of the Philadelphia Daily News asked the Little General if Allen was having trouble hitting the high fastball, Mauch, with a jaded sense of humor, replied: “No, he’s having trouble with the fast highball.”
Frustrated by his team’s losing ways, Mauch tried to turn things around by antagonizing his own players. Clubhouse tirades became more common, focusing on individuals who had an especially bad game. Once, after Dalrymple went hitless in three straight contests, Mauch exploded at his catcher, telling him he was “going to put a postage stamp on [his] head and send [him] so fuckin’ far to Alaska that no one would ever find [him].” No one was immune from the barbs, not even Mauch’s personal favorite, Johnny Callison. During a weekend series against the Giants at Candlestick Park, the slumping Phillies right-fielder misplayed a routine fly ball, and three runs scored. When Callison returned to the dugout, Mauch berated him for “dogging it.”
“That’s bullshit!” exploded Callison, insulted by the remark. “You can go fuck yourself!”
“That’ll cost you a thousand, Callison,” snapped the Little General.
Callison, his pride bruised, told Mauch that he wanted “out of Philadelphia.” He eventually paid $250 of the fine, and Mauch never bothered to collect the balance. Allthough the incident was soon forgotten by the two men, the Philadelphia sportswriters kept dredging it up. In the absence of winning, confrontation was the best topic.
Frank Dolson of the Inquirer was one of the writers in the Philadelphia manager’s doghouse. “Mauch was a fascinating character,” said Dolson, recalling the Little General‘s tempestuous behavior. “He once told me, ‘I’m sick of writing your God-damned column for you. You’re going to have to do it on your own, because I’m not going to talk to you!’ Then he stormed out. He wouldn’t talk with me for a while after that. After two months had passed and I’d served my probation, he’d act like nothing happened and provide some quotable responses. That was Mauch. In his mind, I had served my sentence.”
The Phillies finished fourth in 1966, eight games behind the pennant-winning Dodgers. There were plenty of reasons for the disappointing season. Callison had an off-year, dropping to just 11 homers and 55 RBIs. At age thirty-seven, Bob Buhl was too old to contribute much, as reflected by his 6–8 record and 4.77 ERA. The bullpen was horrendous. Darold Knowles, Roger Craig, Ray Herbert, Gary Wagner, Grant Jackson, Ed Roebuck, Terry Fox, and Steve Ridzik had a combined ERA of 6.19 and just twenty-one saves between them. Allen, Bunning, and Short provided the few highlights in an otherwise dismal season. Allen enjoyed his biggest year in a Phillies uniform with an impressive .317 average, 40 home runs, and 110 RBIs. Bunning won nineteen games for the third straight season, and Short won twenty.
The year 1966 was also a turning point for both the Phillies and major league baseball. Labor relations would soon begin to dominate the game, with the player union’s hiring of a new executive director, Marvin Miller, a labor economist for the United States Steel Workers. Before 1966, Judge Robert Cannon served as part-time legal counsel for the players’ union and acted in the interests of the owners and Commissioner Ford C. Frick. He made sure that salaries remained low by refusing even to consider arbitration, which would, in his estimation, destroy the reserve clause binding a player to one club. The average player salary was $16,000 a season, and the total payroll for major league clubs was $8,225,000. While a player might augment his salary with off-the-field endorsements, such an arrangement only went to the best players. Even then, star performers, like all the rest of the major leaguers, had to negotiate their salaries individually with the general manager, whose main objective was to cut the club’s payroll.
John Quinn, general manager of the Phillies, was adept at the bargaining process. With young prospects recently called up to the majors, he refused to pay the minimum bonus of $2,500. Players who had an off-year could predict a pay cut, along with the disparaging remark “You’re lucky that we’re even keeping you on the roster.” Bob Uecker, a veteran of many off-years, knew what to expect. In 1966 he went into Quinn’s office to negotiate a raise. When the Phils general manager told him he was lucky to be with any major league club, the future comedian said, “That’s okay, I’ll settle for the money you collected on Richie Allen’s last fine and I’ll still come out ahead.” Veterans who objected to Quinn’s offer would be scorned, or pressured into signing by the silent treatment. Jack Baldschun recalls holding out for $500 in 1965. “Quinn called me six times from spring training in Clearwater,” he said. “The last time he phoned he went silent for five minutes. I knew he wanted me to stick my foot in my mouth. But I didn’t. Finally, he asked, ‘Are you still there?’ I said I was and that he should just give me the money he was spending on all these phone calls. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you $50. C’mon down.’”
Even those who had successful seasons had to fight for a minimal raise. Tony Gonzalez, for example, asked for a $1,000 raise after the 1967 season in which he hit .339 and finished second to Roberto Clemente of Pittsburgh for the National League’s batting title. When Quinn offered to raise him just $300, Gonzalez, dumbfounded, asked: “Are you kidding me?” “No, I’m not kidding,” Quinn replied. “You players have to put people in the ballpark. We’re losing money because the gate has dropped. How on earth do you expect me to pay you more?” When Gonzalez refused to sign for such an insignificant amount, Quinn said: “All right, see if you can make more money cutting sugar cane down in Cuba!” The centerfielder sat out until late March when Quinn, who realized that he could not replace a player of Gonzalez’s abilities, grudgingly gave him the $1,000 raise.
“Management owned you in those days,” said Clay Dalrymple, who experienced his own share of Quinn’s curmudgeonly negotiating tactics. “Quinn could do whatever the hell he felt like doing with you. Most of us didn’t want to argue about money. We just wanted to play ball. The only guy Quinn never challenged was Jim Bunning. Jim wrote everything down—his statistics, his worth compared to pitchers on other teams. So when he went in to talk contract, he knew his facts. Quinn never gave him any trouble.”
Bunning had been the player representative for the Detroit Tigers before coming to Philadelphia. He had earned the reputation of a “briefcase ballplayer,” one who paid more attention to union business than to his pitching. Many suspected that Detroit traded Bunning for that reason alone. Quinn realized what he was getting, but he believed that Bunning’s pitching ability was worth whatever problems would create as a diehard union man.
To be sure, Bunning wasted no time creating problems for Quinn. When he arrived in Philadelphia in 1964 and learned that the Phillies made the players pay for parking at the ballpark, he challenged the policy, forcing ownership to rescind it. Over the next few years, the Phillies’ ace proved to be a successful negotiator as well. He met Quinn with the facts and figures of his previous season’s performance. If Quinn, who drank a lot, became belligerent, Bunning would suspend negotiations and meet another time. He also learned to go over the general manager’s head. “In dealing with John Quinn I had no luck,” admitted Bunning. “But if I went to Bob Carpenter and said, ‘Here’s what I’d like, Bob,’ he never would fight with me. Never would argue.”
Before the 1966 campaign, Bunning approached Chris Short, the team’s number-two pitcher, with the idea of staging a joint holdout, as Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale of the Dodgers had done the year before. “Shorty was the worst negotiator,” recalled Bunning. “He always signed the first contract Quinn sent him, and it was terrible. I said, ‘Shorty, you won twenty games last year. Don’t you think you deserve a raise? But he didn’t have the stomach to hold out.” Bunning didn’t have to stage a holdout. After his third straight nineteen-win season, he signed for $70,000, the biggest contract awarded by the club to that date.
Bunning also assumed the role of Phillies player representative and became a relentless fighter for players’ rights. Complaining that pensions were too small, the Phillies’ ace pushed to create a more effective union and was instrumental in the hiring of Marvin Miller as a full-time, paid executive director of the Players’ Association in the spring of 1966. Immediately Miller addressed salaries and a more favorable basic agreement. He forced the owners to accept an outside arbitrator to solve any dispute in the basic agreement, a concession that eventually led to the elimination of the reserve clause in 1975. Miller also fought for a substantial increase in player salaries. Within a year of his hiring, the average major league contract jumped from $16,000 to $21,000.
Bunning eventually fell out of favor with owner Bob Carpenter because of his active role in the Players’ Association. “I can remember being harassed and harangued by John Quinn,” he said, years later. “Bob Carpenter came to me and said, ‘You don’t need Marvin Miller.’ I said, ‘No, Bob, if you were the owner and I was the player representative we wouldn’t need Marvin Miller. But you don’t own all the other teams, and I’m not the player representative on all the other teams. We’re getting a lot of corporate ownership in here, and we don’t have a clue who’s responsible and you don’t have a clue who’s responsible. So we need to be as firm as we can on what our rights are. If I had a dispute with you, I wouldn’t worry. We’d solve it. Not everybody has that kind of relationship, though.”
Bunning pitched just one more year in red pinstripes after that discussion, and it would be the most frustrating season of all. In 1967 the Phillies began to pay the price for trading their young prospects for other clubs’ veterans. Bill White, who tore his Achilles tendon in the off-season, reinjured it in spring training. When he returned to the lineup in May, he was still hampered by the tendon and managed to hit only eight home runs in 308 at-bats. Dick Groat faded even faster, hitting only .115 in twenty-six at-bats that season. Veteran pitchers Larry Jackson (13–15) and Dick Ellsworth (6–7), who was acquired in the off-season from the Cubs for Ray Culp, lost more games than they won. By the end of May, the Fightin’s were, in the words of Bulletin sportswriter Sandy Grady, “twenty-five guys wandering in the second division wasteland without any direction from the manager.”
Even the team’s stars struggled. Bunning, who went 17–15, should have coasted to a twenty-win season. He led the National League with 253 strikeouts in a league-high 302 innings, and his earned run average dropped to 2.29. But he got little offensive support, losing five 1–0 games. Short also pitched well, but still slipped to 9–11. Allen, who was named the starting third baseman for the National League All-Stars for the second straight season, should have had another tremendous year, but his numbers dropped to .307, with 23 homers and 77 RBIs. This time, he was not entirely without blame.
Once again, the Phillies, in what had become a curious pattern, traded away Allen’s closest friend on the team, Bob Uecker. Without Uecker’s comedic diversion, all the anger and resentment Allen had been feeling toward the fans and the press took control of him. “I’d been hearing that I was a bum for so long that I began to think maybe that’s just what I was,” he admitted, years later. Allen rebelled. He repeatedly requested a trade from owner Bob Carpenter. Each time the request was denied, the black slugger responded with curfew violations and excessive lateness to games.
By mid-season, Allen’s drinking was also a serious problem. “Before ball games, instead of going straight to the ballpark, I started making regular stops at watering holes along the way,” he admitted. “I had a regular route from my home in Northwest Philadelphia to the ballpark in the inner city. Whenever Mauch would smell booze on my breath, he’d throw a tantrum and then fine me. I told ’em, I expect to pay when I mess up. Let him put an envelope in my box, but don’t call me in for no lectures.” On Saturday evening, July 8, 1967, the sixth-place Phillies were scheduled to play the league-leading St. Louis Cardinals. Allen, who was hitting .328 with 11 homers and 40 RBIs, arrived at Connie Mack Stadium unable to walk a straight line or talk without slurring his words. He was told to go home by veteran coach George Myatt. But Allen stayed and was benched by Mauch, who slapped him with a late fine. Allen pinch-hit in the eighth and was called out on strikes as the Phils dropped the game, 6–4. Afterward, Mauch covered for his superstar, telling the press that he’d decided to give Allen “a rest.” When asked about the wisdom of benching his best player in a pennant race against the league-leading Cardinals, Mauch snapped: “Whatever goes on between Allen and myself stays that way!”
Allen refuted his manager’s story two days later, though. “Yes, I was late,” he admitted, responding to sportswriters’ questions about Saturday’s benching. “Yes, I expected to be fined,” he added. “No, there aren’t two sets of rules on this ball club. I wear the same uniform as others. I expect the same treatment.” He should have stopped there. Instead, Allen incriminated himself by confessing that he “finds it difficult to live within rules.” “I can never be a nine-to-five worker,” he said. “I can’t stand having a hammer held over my head.” Whatever else he said in his attempt to resolve the issue was lost on his inquisitors. On July 19, Allen made matters worse by arriving late at the ballpark for a game against the Los Angeles Dodgers, this time because his “car broke down.” Again, Mauch slapped his star third baseman with a late fine. It was becoming a joke among the writers, who knew that fines were no deterrent for Allen. He simply paid them, realizing that his $82,000 contract would more than make up the cost.
Sandy Grady of the Bulletin questioned whether Allen’s irresponsible behavior warranted such an exorbitant salary. “Instead of fining him, maybe the Phillies should have given Allen a $10 raise for a new alarm clock,” he joked. “Traditionalists shook their heads when Allen signed for an estimated $82,000, a moon-shot into the fiscal unknown for a fourth-year player.” Using Allen’s own words against him, Grady wrote: “Rich argued firmly, ‘Remember that I should be paid for what I’m doing now, not what I might do someday,’” and then added, “What he has done in July doesn’t count for much.” Stan Hochman of the Daily News was more caustic. “Allen marches to a mournful tune that only he hears, moving with an insolent grace,” he wrote, dismissing Mauch’s explanation that Allen needed a “mental rest” when he benched him against the first-place Cardinals. “It wasn’t that he was late or anything, was it?” Hochman asked patronizingly. “There aren’t two sets of rules for the twenty-four other guys and for Allen, are there?”
Bill Conlin, Hochman’s colleague at the Daily News, was more forgiving. “I like Rich Allen,” he wrote. “Behind that sleepy-eyed facade there’s one hell of a man submerged. It is a man’s man. Wild, to be sure, but it is a man you would want to hunt with, play games with, or just be with.” Conlin was surprised by Allen’s admission that he “never wanted to be a superstar” and that the only way he would be happy playing the game was “if they kept the fans and the press out of the ballpark.” He called the remark “childlike naiveté,” observing that Allen, “when cornered, invariably panics, then overreacts with the petulance of a black Billy Budd.” “The hang-up in the life of Rich Allen,” concluded the young beat writer, “is that he hasn’t discovered who he is.”
For the next few years, Conlin would vacillate between harsh criticism and his own childlike admiration for the black Phillies superstar. He even admitted the inconsistency. “Writing about Richie Allen in the 1960s, I kept veering from one point of view to another: awe, empathy, and finally disgust,” Conlin wrote, years later. “The awe was for his huge talent, the empathy for his rebellious streak and his endurance of needless racial hassles—many inflicted by his own ball club. The disgust was for his self-regard and indifference to the team.”
But even when Conlin was lauding Allen, his writing continued to stir up the specter of racial discord. In one especially poignant column, the Daily News scribe painted a sympathetic portrait of the brooding Phillies slugger against the ugly treatment of racist fans. “It should have been a happy night to Rich Allen,” began the piece. “He should have been grinning and content in the knowledge that his three-run homer in the twelfth inning won a game for the Phillies. But it is tough to grin when you come to the ballpark and there are letters calling you ‘Dirty, Black Nigger.’”
“It is tough to be happy when they start booing you during infield practice and from there the night is a steady escalation of abuse. So instead of being happy and grinning, like the stereotype we all expect a great ballplayer to be, Rich Allen said he would like very much to be traded to another team, any other team. It doesn’t make any difference.”
Conlin went on to point out that there had been 25,780 fans at Connie Mack Stadium to see the Phils defeat the Chicago Cubs, 5–2, on Allen’s home run. “All night that loud minority of bigots, self-styled professional critics, had booed him unmercifully,” he wrote. “It was as if he were a piece of garbage who had no business wearing a big league uniform. So he won the game for them, and when he did it they all cheered for him in a classic of hypocrisy.” After the game, Allen admitted that he “just wanted one thing, and that is to get out of Philadelphia.”
There were exceptions to all the negative press. Both the Inquirer’s Allen Lewis and the Bulletin’s Ray Kelly continued to operate on the old school philosophy of writing about the game and not about the personal lives of the players. Their accounts were much more objective, concentrating on Allen’s on-the-field performance while offering nothing more than a brief acknowledgment of his off-the-field problems. Predictably, Claude Harrison of the Tribune also suspended his judgment of Allen’s escapades, insisting, amid all the scandalous reports: “Allen is the third baseman most National League managers would want in their lineup.”
All the negative press was temporarily suspended on August 24 when Allen’s season came to an abrupt end. While trying to push his stalled car up the driveway of his Mount Airy home in the rain, Allen’s right hand slipped and went through the headlight. Two tendons were cut, and the ulna nerve was completely severed. Rushed to Temple University Hospital, the young Phillies star underwent a five-hour operation to repair the damage. Two five-inch pins were placed in the wrist to keep the rejoined tendons in place until they healed. The arm was then encased in a cast from shoulder to fingertips. Doctors gave him a fifty-fifty chance of making a comeback. Immediately rumors spread among the press that Allen’s story of an accident was a cover-up, that he had actually been knifed in a bar fight or had jumped through a window after being caught sleeping with a teammate’s wife. Fortunately for Allen, none of the stories made it into print.
With their most prodigious hitter lost for the rest of the season, the Phillies found themselves juggling the lineup. Fringe players like Gary Sutherland, Billy Cowan, and Gene Oliver saw more playing time than they would have otherwise. Other regulars were forced to play out of position in order to make up for the lost offense. Tony Taylor moved to third base, Bobby Wine played first, and Cookie Rojas set a team record by becoming the first Phillie ever to play all nine positions. Considering all the inconsistency, the Phillies were lucky to finish the season in fifth place with an 82–80 record.
What had happened to this once-promising team of young black, white, and Hispanic players? Just three years earlier they had come within three games of clinching a pennant. Now, they were struggling to stay out of the second division. Ownership blamed the changing dynamics of baseball. Bob Carpenter cited the beginnings of the amateur draft in 1965 when the Phillies, like every other major league team, had to take a number and wait their turn to pick a prospect. No longer could Carpenter outspend the other clubs, which was how he had secured the services of such talented pitchers as Robin Roberts, Curt Simmons, and Chris Short. “We were lost souls after they implemented the draft,” said Carpenter’s son Ruly, in a recent interview. “All of a sudden we couldn’t go and sign the guys we wanted. Instead, the draft forced us to choose in the reverse order of where we finished. Since the Phillies finished near the top in ’64, we were among the last to pick. We tried to group the prospects by talent and then decide who to take in the second or third rounds, but it was absolute chaos.”
In the first year of the amateur draft, the Phillies selected near the bottom and got pitcher John Adamson. In 1966 they selected another pitcher, Mike Biko, and in 1967 they chose yet another hurler, Larry Keener. All three were busts, not one making it beyond Double A ball. Consequently, the Phillies were forced to trade for pitching talent.
Mauch blamed himself for the decline. “What happened after 1964?” he asked, trying to explain the inexplicable in a 1991 interview. “Let me put it in real simple terms. The Phillies had a manager who was so cocky, thought his players were so good that he thought he could beat anyone at any time. But the chemistry we had after ’64 just wasn’t the same. That’s baseball. It’s a difficult thing to repeat.” But Ruly Carpenter believes that Mauch did “a hell of a job with what he had.” “If you stop and look at the those teams in the mid-sixties, you’ve got to admit that they were good, but not championship caliber,” he insisted. “The ’64 club, in particular, accomplished a lot for their abilities, but they weren’t a great team because they couldn’t reproduce the same performance in subsequent years. The fact that that team contended is a testimony to Gene Mauch’s genius as a manager.”
The players, on the other hand, believe that the team’s downfall was the result of trading away talented but inexperienced prospects for proven veterans in a desperate attempt to clinch a pennant. In the process, management mortgaged the club’s future. “I thought we took a turn for the worse in ’65, trying to make up for ’64,” said Dick Allen recently. “Poor trades took us down the wrong road, especially losing Fergie Jenkins, who went on to become a consistent twenty-game winner with the Cubs.” Johnny Briggs agreed. “We never had any real chance after ’64 because we didn’t have the pitching you need to win close ball games,” he said. Briggs cited the trading of Ferguson Jenkins as a major reason for the team’s inability to regroup after the collapse. Together with the sporadic playing time that he and another black outfielder, Larry Hisle, received, the Jenkins trade underscored Briggs’s belief that the Phillies “just didn’t give blacks much of a chance.” White players like Rick Wise and Clay Dalrymple, and Hispanic players like Cookie Rojas and Tony Taylor, also agreed that the Phillies might have contended after 1964 “if there had been some changes in the right direction,” noting that age as well as injury eventually took its toll on the club.
Contributing to these problems was the negative press the Phillies and their superstar Richie Allen received after Frank Thomas was waived in July 1965. Mauch later admitted that both he and the Phillies had mishandled the situation. “Thomas was going to go anyway,” he conceded. “I should have shipped him sooner. Instead the press came down on Richie’s head. If he did one little thing wrong, they would see it as so much worse because, in their heads, he was a bad guy.” According to Tony Taylor, the press “never knew Dick Allen.” “They made a much bigger thing out of the fight than it really was. They knew that Thomas liked to intimidate young players, but he was also a popular veteran who was brought over here to Philadelphia to help win the pennant. Dick, on the other hand, was still a young player making his name. Everybody on the team liked him. But the press blamed Dick for Thomas’s release. Since Dick was black and Thomas was white, they made it into a racial thing and gave Dick the label of a ‘trouble-maker.’ It wasn’t fair.”
Johnny Briggs was also quick to dismiss the racial rhetoric surrounding the incident. The sportswriters “never knew the details behind the fight,” he insisted, “because Mauch ordered Richie to keep quiet. Thomas agitated everybody on the team. He was just as abusive to the white guys. But the press turned that fight into a racial issue and refused to let up.” Bob Uecker, on the other hand, saw the problem stemming from the unrealistic expectations of the press and the fans, both of which he characterized as “smart and mean.” Allen became a lightning rod for their frustration with the Phillies’ losing ways. “No matter how much Richie accomplished,” said Uecker, “it was never good enough to satisfy his critics. Some just didn’t like him, his color, his style, or his habits. Others simply felt he didn’t get the most out of his huge gifts. But more often than not, he came through for us.”
Sandy Grady, Larry Merchant, Stan Hochman, and Bill Conlin, in particular, led the media’s assault on the Phillies. They belonged to a new breed of sportswriters, inspired by the pull-no-punches style of Dick Young of the New York Daily News. Young and these “chipmunk writers” believed that they had a responsibility to tell athletes, coaches, and owners that “they’re full of shit, and then go out and face them the very next day.” Their inherent combativeness allowed them to stand their ground against an angry player and still manage to cull some insightful remarks from him. But it also created an adversarial relationship. No longer would the writers and the players spend their days together on the road trading barbs or drinking in bars together. No longer would the writers shield the players from the public by refusing to print the nasty little secrets of their private lives. In the 1960s, players and managers began to distance themselves from the writers because of their jaded coverage, which celebrated controversy and discouraged the fair play, heroism, and grace that the national pastime once represented.
“I despised the Daily News,” admitted Clay Dalrymple. “Their writers didn’t cover the game. They were simply spouting off their opinions about how the players should be. For me, their opinions weren’t worth shit. None of those guys ever wore a major league uniform. What gave them the right to pass judgment on me or my teammates? Ray Kelly of the Bulletin and Allen Lewis of the Inquirer were fine sportswriters. I could always be frank with them because I trusted them to quote me accurately. If I told them my remarks were ‘off the record,’ they’d honor it. None of us could do that with the Daily News writers, though. They had to get a lot of their material through hearsay. They’re the guys who invented the story that race was dividing our club. None of us saw it that way.”
Dallas Green, who would have his own share of problems with the media as manager of the 1980 World Champion Phillies, underscored the confrontational style of the Philadelphia media. “The press doesn’t like to talk positively about sports in this town,” he said. “I wasn’t an ostrich, but I can’t say there was the kind of racism within the Phillies organization they were seeing in the mid-sixties. I just didn’t see it in the decision-making process, the scouting, or the handling of the players.” Ruly Carpenter echoed those sentiments. “Sure we had run-ins with the press,” he admitted. “But we certainly didn’t make any decisions based on what the press wrote, and certainly not on the basis of a player’s skin color. My father, when he owned the Phillies, and later, when I assumed control of the club, made our decisions based on what the manager, coaches, and scouts thought were in the best interests of the organization. Any time you allow the press to run your organization, you’re in trouble. I’m not going to say we didn’t read the papers. But generally, we didn’t pay attention to the press unless they wrote something outrageous or blatantly inaccurate.”
Whether or not they consciously stirred controversy, the Philadelphia press was partially responsible for the negative attitude and behavior of the fans after 1964. The chipmunk writers’ constant emphasis on racial division within the Phillies clubhouse became a self-fulfilling prophecy by 1968, as Allen’s rebellious behavior to force a trade fragmented the team.
© 2002 The Penn State University