Alvin Dark and the Persistence of Racial Stereotypes

It was inevitable that Alvin Dark obituaries after he passed away on November 13 would include the controversy provoked by a pair of Long Island (New York) Newsday columns in the midst of the 1964 pennant race in which, as manager of the competing San Francisco Giants, he was quoted as saying that "Negro and Spanish-speaking players on this team ... are just not able to perform up to the white players when it comes to mental alertness." Coming at a time when black and Latin players were among the very best in the game, and as integration was being consolidated in the major leagues with increasing numbers of minority players making big league rosters as core regulars on their teams, Dark's comments were a reminder that major league baseball was still grappling with the race issue.

Alvin Dark and the Persistence of Racial Stereotypes

Dark's ill-fated remarks were made to Stan Isaacs, a respected sports columnist who was out West on assignment (meaning he was not there to cover the Mets), on July 22 after the Giants had lost seven of nine games. The Giants were playing badly and Dark clearly felt his team could have been, indeed should have been, maybe two or three games up in the standings instead of in second place, one game behind the Phillies. He specifically singled out Puerto Rican-born Orlando Cepeda and Dominican-born Jesus Alou for "dumb" base-running mistakes. Giants regulars who were "Negro and Spanish-speaking players on this team" also included shortstop Jose Pagan from Puerto Rico and pitching ace Juan Marichal from the Dominican Republic, not to mention Willie Mays, Willie McCovey and 1964 rookie sensation Jim Ray Hart (who missed out on NL Rookie of the Year honors only because Philadelphia's Dick--then known as "Richie"--Allen was even more sensational).

Aside from the public relations firestorm Dark, as quoted by Isaacs, created for the Giants, the team's Latin players in particular were incensed by their manager's opinions of them, which primarily concerned their baseball work ethic. Said Dark: "You can't get Negro and Spanish players to have the pride in their team that you can get from white players." ... "You can't make them subordinate themselves to the best interests of the team." ... "They [their mistakes] are not the kind of things a manager can correct--missed signs and such--but they are inabilities to cope with game situations when they come up." And he topped it off by saying, "I only know what I've seen on this team and other baseball teams."

Dark's remarks were disturbing on several levels. As the manager, and one who emphasized the importance of the team over the individual, he singled out a particular subset of players for criticism, which was not only inappropriate but foolish because the Giants' best players were blacks and Latinos and now he seriously undermined their faith in his leadership. Dark quickly tried to backtrack, claiming he was misquoted and that his remarks were presented out of context by Isaacs.

Even if Dark had not really meant what he said, but rather was venting because his whole team was playing below their collective potential, he nonetheless betrayed prejudices that, at their most benign, were reflected in persistent casual racial and ethnic stereotypes that were not unusual in America at the time. While certainly insensitive and ill-informed, the racial and ethnic stereotypes held by many in America's overwhelmingly majority-white population were not necessarily mean spirited (it was not, for example, unusual for stereotypes to be played for comic effect on television shows during the 1960s), but they were revealing of widely-held perceptions in a still largely-segregated society about specific minorities that many quite likely believed contained seeds of truth. In the absence of a more integrated society than there was at the time, and when it was still popular to see the United States as a great "melting pot" where all citizens of whatever background assimilate into the dominant culture (although this concept was beginning to unravel in the 1960s), there was little understanding of cultural differences and the perspectives of minorities, and little effort was made to understand them. Nor was there much doubt that the dominant white-majority culture offered the best that was possible in America.

In major league baseball, despite their no longer being any doubt that blacks could play--and star--at the major league level, black players continued to be dogged by racial stereotypes whose characteristics were rarely impugned on white players who failed to meet expectations. What was particularly insidious about these stereotypes was that they repeated the same arguments about the "personal characteristics" (if you will) attributed to blacks that major league owners had used nearly twenty years before to justify their opposition to the integration of organized (white) baseball. And these stereotypes were brought into the cultural realm when it came to Latin players from Caribbean basin nations as they became more prevalent on big league rosters.

According to James S. Hirsch in his 2010 authorized biography of Willie Mays, it was Mays who quelled a clubhouse rebellion by convincing his black and Latin teammates not to give up on Dark because they were in the heat of a pennant race. Mays forcefully argued that regardless of what they thought about Al Dark, a managerial change in mid-season would derail their pennant prospects. As it was, Isaacs' columns hit the news in the San Francisco area in early August, when the Giants were hanging on to second place, close behind the front-running Phillies. Whether Dark's opinion of them depressed the pennant-chase drive of the Giants' black and Latin players is unknowable, particularly because of the month-long loss of Marichal--who was 15-5 through July--with back problems, but the team lost six in a row in mid-August, after which they were in third place, 8-1/2 games behind and fading fast.

That the Giants got back into the pennant race was only because the Phillies' monumental collapse in September breathed unexpected life into their prospects. Notwithstanding that in 1962 he had led the Giants to their first pennant since moving to San Francisco in only his second year as manager, Alvin Dark was unable to recover from his controversial remarks, not to mention an outside-of-baseball lifestyle that was equally controversial as far as Giants' owner Horace Stoneham was concerned, and was fired when the season was over. Dark went on to manage the Kansas City Athletics, Cleveland Indians, Oakland Athletics--who he skippered to two division titles in 1974 and 1975 and one World Series championship (1974) in his two years there--and finally the San Diego Padres before the sands of time ran out on his dugout years. (He later served in the front offices of both Chicago teams.)

Although he might best be remembered today for his career as a manager, let's not forget that from the late 1940s into the mid-1950s, Alvin Dark was one of baseball's premier shortstops--along with Phil Rizzuto of the Yankees and Pee Wee Reese of the Dodgers. He was an indispensable player on three pennant-winning teams: the 1948 Boston Braves in his rookie season, in which his .322 batting average helped earn him Rookie of the Year honors; the 1951 New York Giants, the team that Bobby Thomson made famous; and the 1954 Giants that Willie Mays made famous with arguably the catch of the century that helped spark a four-game sweep in the World Series of the favored 111-win Cleveland Indians.

The following is a link to The New York Times obituary on Alvin Dark: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/sports/baseball/alvin-dark-giants-shortstop-and-manager-dies-at-92.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Aw%2C%7B%221%22%3A%22RI%3A8%22%7D

Thinking About That "Dynasty" Word

As soon as they won their third World Series in five years, the word "dynasty" was bandied about when considering this San Francisco Giants team's place in history. But what does that even mean? This Insight, one of occasional articles intended to be provocative in thinking about how we think about baseball, frames the "dynasty" issue in the context of great teams, great franchises and whether the modern 21st century game changes how we should think about dynasties.

Thinking About That "Dynasty" Word

No sooner did Pablo Sandoval squeeze the last out than Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight site proclaimed, "The San Francisco Giants are now a Dynasty," and used an algorithm developed by Bill James to substantiate the point. (http://fivethirtyeight.com/liveblog/world-series-game-7-live-blog/?#livepress-update-19763487) A Reuters release called the Giants "a different kind of Major League Baseball dynasty," the "best at juggling budget and talent" in an age of parity." (http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2014/10/30/sports/baseball/30reuters-baseball-worldseries-dynasty.html?ref=baseball)   World Series MVP Madison Bumgarner said at the Giants' victory parade back home in San Francisco, "Like they've been saying, this is a dynasty." Even before Game 6, New York Times national baseball writer Tyler Kepner titled a column, "Unconventional Dynasty in the Making" and asked "Are they really a dynasty?" (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/29/sports/baseball/world-series-2014-sf-giants-have-the-trappings-of-a-dynasty.html). Kepner goes on to say, "The term connotes a higher level of team achievement, but is open to interpretation." Let's take it from there.

Until arguably the mid-1990s with the advent of three divisions in each league, the introduction of a "wild card" team for post-season playoffs and the resulting two rounds of playoffs in each league to determine a pennant winner, a particular team's winning accomplishments seems a suitable baseline standard for beginning a discussion about dynasties. These can be measured in the number of first-place finishes--whether in the unitary league format that prevailed until the second-wave expansion to twelve teams in each league in 1969 or division titles since then--pennants and World Series won over a period of at least five years. While acknowledging that very few teams not named the Yankees would win even as many as three championships in any five-year period, I would suggest that for any team to be considered a "dynasty" based on this standard, it should not have had a losing season in any year of its five-year dynasty-qualifying run and in fact have been competitive all five years.

On top of that, the extent to which a team dominates its era, not merely in championship achievements but in overpowering the competition, should be factored into the "dynasty" equation. Some combination of number of years with 100 or more victories, winning pennant races by large margins, being among the top two teams in scoring or fewest runs allowed can be important considerations when considering which teams are dynasties. The 1906-10 Chicago Cubs with four pennants in five years, three won by decisive margins of at least ten games, four times winning at least 100 games (including in 1909, the one year they did not win the pennant); the 1936-42 Yankees from Joe DiMaggio's rookie season until he went off to war, averaging over 100 wins a year, with six pennants in seven years all won by at least nine games, and leading the league in scoring six times and in fewest runs allowed six times; and the 1972-76 Cincinnati Reds, with four division titles--three by margins of at least 10 games--three pennants and two championship rings are three of the best examples of team dynasties.

Each of these teams was also identifiable with a core group of players for all or most of their run: Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance and Three-Finger Brown (the Cubs); DiMaggio, Bill Dickey, Joe Gordon, Charlie Keller, Red Rolfe, Red Ruffing, Lefty Gomez and Johnny Murphy (the Yankees); Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan and Tony Perez (the Big Red Machine).

Aside from dynastic teams identifiable by a core group of players for a specific period of time, there are four franchises that were "dynasties" over a period of at least two decades by virtue of sustained success. Most obvious are the New York Yankees, beginning in 1921 (when they won the American League pennant for the first time) pretty much to the present day with really only two non-dynastic spells therein--from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s and from the early-1980s until the mid-1990s. The Yankee dynasty seamlessly transitioned from the Ruth and Gehrig, to the DiMaggio, to the Mantle eras famously winning 29 pennants and 20 World Series in 44 years between 1921 and 1964. The most recent iteration of the Yankee dynasty lasted from 1995 to at least 2007, bearing the names of Jeter, Posada, Pettitte and Rivera, with 13 consecutive postseason appearances. (The Yankees won nine consecutive AL East titles during these years.).

The three other franchise dynasties were the New York Giants with 10 pennants but only 3 World Series championships in 21 years from 1904 to 1924; the St. Louis Cardinals with 9 pennants and 6 World Series championships in 21 years between 1926 and 1946; and the Brooklyn-to-Los Angeles Dodgers with 13 pennants (6 in Brooklyn) but only 4 World Series triumphs (3 in L.A.) in 32 years between 1947 and 1978.

That 21-year Cardinal dynasty just mentioned is particularly interesting because they won with no team by itself worthy of being called a "dynasty" for any five-year period, with the possible exception of the 1942-46 Cards that won four pennants in five years, two of which however were when major league rosters were depleted because of ballplayers suiting up for Uncle Sam in the Second World War, which took a far greater toll on arch-rival Brooklyn than St. Louis. Even when St. Louis went to three World Series and won two in five years between 1930 and 1934, the Cardinals finished fifth and sixth in an eight-team league in the two years they did not win the pennant. Branch Rickey kept the Cardinals competitive with the vast number of minor league affiliates under St. Louis control and shrewd trading according to the principle of better to trade a star player approaching his career pivot point of decline a year too soon than a year too late.

With an additional round of playoffs, the wild card era should change how we think about dynasties. Division winners now have to navigate a five-game series and then a seven-game series to get to the World Series. Short series can be fickle, making winning division titles in long 162-game seasons a more true test of how good a team really is than the number of championship rings.

The Atlanta Braves from 1991 to 2005 won an unprecedented 14 consecutive division titles that included six 100-win seasons, eight time finishing first by a blowout margin of at least 8 games, and nine times having the best record in the National League ... but those accomplishments seem somehow diminished because they went to only five World Series and won only one. It should be noted that two of their five pennants were before MLB's three-division / wild card structure came into being when they had only to survive a seven-game League Championship Series to compete in the World Series, and that they were eliminated in the five-game Division Series first round in five of their last six consecutive seasons as division champions. And this was a team that not only dominated the league, but included a significant number of historically great players--Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, Chipper Jones and Andruw Jones--at the peak of their careers.

The New York Yankees from 1996 to 2001 are the only team in the current three divisions / wild card era that can claim a "dynasty" by the traditional dynastic standards of winning pennants and World Series. They survived two American League playoff rounds to make it to five World Series in six years (including four in a row from '98 to '01) and won four championships. Throw in 2003, and it's six pennants and four World Series triumphs in eight years. Since then, even the Jeter-Rivera variant of the Yankee dynasty, having been eliminated in the opening Division Series round in four of their last eight post-season appearances (although they did win it all in 2009), has been snakebit by the number of postseason series now required to be won for baseball's championship.

By winning their third Series in five years, the San Francisco Giants accomplished something not done by any team since the 1996-2001 Yankees. There is no question about that Yankee team being a dynasty, not to mention an extension in the nearing-a-century-long dynasty of the Yankee franchise. But the 2010-14 Giants won their division only twice in five years (remember, they were a wild card this year), only once by as many as eight games (in 2012); never won more than 94 games on the season; never had the best record in the league (they were second-best in 2010); followed their 2010 and 2012 championships with disappointing noncompetitive seasons; and have only the third best record in the National League (after the Cardinals and the Braves) over the last five years.

Whatever can and should be said about the Giants and their accomplishments, they have not dominated the National League in the way one would expect of a dynasty--not in any of the last five years. As has been noted by various experts, however, General Manager Brian Sabean's record in making high-impact trades (such as for Hunter Pence) and bringing in journeymen players to fill sudden holes has kept the Giants in the competitive mix, capable of recovering quickly from disappointing years. They maybe are not quite a dynasty given their actual record over the last five years--not yet, anyway, and certainly not by traditional definitions--but the way the game has evolved and the difficulty of sustaining a winning team, today's San Francisco Giants may be the team that redefines how we consider the concept of "dynasties."