Pioneer in Baseball Integration Dies of Cancer

PHOENIX (AP) -- Joe Black's rendezvous with fame was nearly 50 years ago. By the time he lost his battle with cancer, he was remembered as much for his generous nature as for being the first black man to win a World Series game. ``He was a contemporary of Jackie Robinson, and he saw what he went through,'' Arizona Diamondbacks general manger Joe Garagiola Jr. said of Black, who died Friday in nearby Scottsdale. He was 78.

``He went through many things himself,'' Garagiola said. ``But this was a man with no bitterness or hate in his heart. He was a big man, but there was no room in him for that.''

Black was an Army veteran and a Brooklyn Dodgers rookie when he beat the New York Yankees 4-2 in Game 1 of the 1952 World Series.

Although he pitched five more years, Black never approached the accomplishments of his first season, when he went 15-4, had 15 saves and won the National League Rookie of the Year award. Working out of the bullpen, the right-hander had a 2.15 ERA in 142 innings -- eight short of having enough to win the title.

He started two more games in the Series because the Dodgers were strapped for pitching and lost both.

The next spring, manager Chuck Dressen urged Black to add some pitches. He tried, but lost control of his fastball and curve in the process and was never as effective again.

After four seasons with Brooklyn, Black was traded to Cincinnati. He also played for Washington, compiling a 30-12 career record in six years.

``He was a Dodger, but he was a giant of a man,'' former NL president Len Coleman said. ``He was the greatest friend, and his loss leaves the world a lot more empty.''

Black reached the majors five years after the Dodgers brought up Robinson to break baseball's color barrier.

He roomed with Robinson and shared his experiences in a world where pro-segregation feelings still seethed. The memory made Black an activist -- he worked for a pension plan for Negro League players and led the fight to include those who played before 1947, which included himself. Black had a 45-28 record with the Baltimore Elite Giants, helping them win two Negro League championships in seven years from 1944-50.

``Joe was a doer,'' said former Dodgers pitcher Don Newcombe, who knew Black as a teen-ager. ``He wanted to get things done, and he knew how it was to be a black baseball player. I think he made his mind up that he was going to make change and be involved in change.''

After his playing career, Black became an executive with Greyhound in Phoenix. He remained in touch with baseball as a consultant for the commissioner's office and a board director of the Baseball Assistance Team, offering guidance for young players and working for the Diamondbacks in community relations.

``He was an unofficial ambassador for baseball, period,'' said Montreal manager Frank Robinson, who visited Black this spring when the Expos were in Phoenix. ``He was willing to talk to kids about the pitfalls of life.''

A native of Plainfield, N.J., Black graduated from Morgan State in 1950 and later received an honorary doctorate from Shaw University. He wrote a syndicated column, ``By The Way,'' for Ebony magazine and an autobiography, ``Ain't Nobody Better Than You.''

He's survived by son Joseph ``Chico'' Black and a daughter, Martha.

Funeral arrangements were incomplete, but his son said Black would be cremated, with a memorial service in New Jersey.

A favourite story about Joe Black: When the Cincinnati Reds' bench decided to try a little race baiting, singing a chorus of "Old Black Joe" as he took the mound, he said nothing - but sent the next seven straight Red hitters he faced on their asses with tight fastballs. In another game, after a Giants' pitcher (believe it or not, it wasn't Sal Maglie) had nailed a Dodger too many, Black threw a knockdown pitch that dropped the batter so fast it's still said his cap was still in the air when the ball flew past the falling hitter. (Many years later, Dwight Gooden of the Mets dropped his high-school buddy Floyd Youmans similarly; Youmans had thrown at a few too many Mets, so The Doctor decided to remind his old buddy about proper etiquette - and threw a rising fastball that dropped Youmans even faster, with his helmet not yet falling as the ball went past.)

Roger Kahn, in The Boys of Summer, describes how Dodger manager Charley Dressen managed to wreck Black after that magnificent rookie season:

...Dressen said...that he had another scoop. "Kid, I'm gonna make Joe Black into a helluva pitcher."

"He is a helluva pitcher."

Dressen made an impatient gesture. "Needs more stuff. I'm gonna show him a change and a screwball and a big curve. There's your story."

I found Black in the barracks writing a letter. "Yeah," Joe said. "The day I got here, he didn't even say hello. Right off he said he was going to show me a big curve, but look." Black extended his right hand. The index and middle fingers angled downward. "Tendons that lift them aren't right. I was born that way. It does something to my grip. That quick little curve I throw is the only curve I can throw. I tell Number 7 (Dressen) and now he says I got to throw a fork ball. You know. Throw the ball shoved up between the fingers. It gives you a kind of change."

"Can you?"

"Man says I got to, I got to..."

...In April...in Washington, D.C., Charley Dressen canceled plans to remake Joe Black, pitcher. "I told him," Charley said, after an exhibition game with the Senators, "to pitch like he did last year."

"But what about the screwball and the fork ball and the change-up?"

"He don't throw none of them any good."

The classic flaw of Dodger management - manipulating pitchers toward ruin - gaped again...A man needs touch, concentration, poise, confidence, as well as strength, if he is to be a great pitcher, and Joe Black was a great pitcher in 1952. To all these elements Dressen added doubt, like a solvent of lye. The saddest spectacle of the 1953 season was watching Joe Black recede...The man remained warm, perceptive and fiercely determined to do well. But now his fast balls moved to the center of the plate and became high doubles, and the small, sharp curve, breaking at belt level, was driven on a long, low line...in the autumn of 1953, Joe Black, last year's proud gladiator, pitched one inning during the World Series. It was the last inning of an already lost game. He allowed a run.

Also from The Boys of Summer, this regarding Black's high school pitching career:

In April of Black's senior year, the (high school) coach asked about plans. Joe said he expected to become a ballplayer. He was team captain. The coach nodded and said something about a college scholarship, but Joe meant that he wanted to be a ball player in the major leagues. That May, a big league scout, who doubled as local umpire, offered contracts to three Plainfield schoolboys. Black was puzzled. "Hey," he said to the scout, "how come you sign up all these guys and don't sign me?"

The scout blinked. "Colored guys don't play baseball."

What? You crazy? You've seen me playing for three years."

"I mean Organised Baseball."

"This is organised. We got a coach and uniforms."

"I mean, there's no coloured in the Big Leagues."

Joe felt that something had struck the back of his neck. There was no pain, only shock. The private hope on which his life was built stood stripped, and not merely as boyish fantasy but as stupid boyish fantasy...

That night, he took his scrapbook from a drawer and studied it. Every face, Gehrig, Ott, Waner, Derringer, the others, all were white. Without tears, Joe began to shred the book in his big hands. But before he did, he carefully clipped a picture of Hank Greenberg, crashing out a long home run. He could not bear both, to have the dream dead and to have nothing, nothing at all to show from the scrapbook from his boyhood.

...No other career on the (Brooklyn Dodgers) was both so brilliant and so brief. I can still see Black trudging in from the bullpen, in foul territory, beside the right-field corner of Ebbets Field. He wore number 49 and he approached with all deliberate speed, holding a jacket in one hand, reaching the mound, exchanging a sentence with Dressen, who was half his size, taking a ritual pat on the flank from the pitcher he replaced, and, with evident confidence and a certain impatience, going to work.

When that magnificent rookie season was finished, Black sent a bottle of Scotch to each of the beat writers who covered the Dodgers, a way to thank them for writing as they did about him during the year. "The brand," Kahn noted, "was important to him: Black and White."

And, this, from Joe Black himself, years before anyone had ever heard of "ebonics":

What is our language? "Fo'teen" for fourteen. "Pohleeze" for police. "Raht back" for right back. "We is going." To me any man, white or black, who says whites must learn our language, is insulting. What he's saying is that every other ethnic group can migrate to America and master English but we, who were born here and whose families have all lived here for more than a century, don't have the ability to speak proper English. Wear a dashiki or an African hairdo, but in the name of common sense learn the English language. It is your own.

I can think of only too many alleged black leaders today who could have stood to hear a little of Joe Black's kind of common sense.

To the end of his life, Joe Black was grateful just to have had the chance to play in the majors at all. And considering the way his own manager ruined him following that striking rookie season, that tells you an awful lot about him.

I wish that he might have been available to Dwight Gooden in 1986. This isn't generally remembered, considering what happened to Gooden later on, but in spring of 1986, Mets pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre did almost the same thing to Gooden that Dressen did to Black - tell a pitcher who had just dominated the league and bore more poise already than most of the pitchers he was going up against that, in effect, it wasn't good enough, that he just had to have more in the repertoire. So Stottlemyre convinced Gooden to begin integrating a changeup. Now, remember 1986. Gooden fell back all around and the newly integrated changeup was pulling something off that famed fast ball and that elegant curve ball. (Another comparison: Sudden Sam McDowell. McDowell was fool enough to think for himself that he needed more than just his own deadly fast ball and snapping curve ball, and guess what - as would happen to Gooden in 1986 and happened to Black in 1953, the hitters were praying for that changeup.) Gooden had enough natural talent that he still ended up as almost the best pitcher of the 1980s, but he wasn't even close to his 1984-85 form ever again.

And who is to say that Gooden's confidence wasn't shot enough that he was only too open to seeking comfort in shadowy places, as in short enough order he did? You take a kid who was way younger than Black was, shoot his confidence out of the water, and you're playing with fire - you're playing with turning a poised kid into what Thomas Boswell called "a deer frozen in the headlights watching his own parade go by". This was a kid who knew what he was doing on the mound and did not seem like a kid when he pitched (or when he wasn't pitching, for that matter; the stories abounded, not just in New York, about his surety and maturity). Taking Dwight Gooden in spring 1986 and telling him in effect that he just wasn't quite there was something like what you could imagine it to have been if someone had taken Juan Marichal aside after his breakout season (1963) and told him, in effect, that he just wasn't quite there. (And don't think there wouldn't have been coaches around the leagues who wouldn't have told Marichal that that animated windup and Rockette-high leg kick just could not be if he expected to stay successful!). He didn't need to be a rocket scientist to know he was going from the best pitcher in baseball to just another pitcher in almost as fast a time as he'd become the best pitcher in the first place. And when you've just made yourself the toast of the game and now you've been told effectively that you weren't good enough even so, you'd have to be something close to an android to just shake it off when you're going out there and the mojo isn't working the way it used to work any more.

It's too simple to say it in hindsight, but what a difference it might have made if someone in the Mets' organisation had had the prescience to get hold of Joe Black and get him to work with Gooden and pound some sense into the Mets. Maybe we'd be talking about Gooden the prospective Hall of Famer, instead of Gooden the might-have-been.

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