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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.