Читать книгу Summer of Shadows - Jonathan Knight - Страница 13

It was only the first week of April, but the Cleveland Indians were already sick of the New York Giants.

In addition to the anxiety and impatience all baseball players feel as spring training grinds to its welcome conclusion, a big reason the Tribe looked forward to breaking camp and starting the regular season was that it could bid farewell to the Giants for good in 1954. As April dawned, and the Indians and Giants began their winding road home from their training camps in Arizona, they stopped in cities throughout the west and played exhibition games to generally small and disinterested crowds. On April 1, their trains pulled into Houston, where the Giants once again topped the Indians, marking New York’s ninth victory in twelve games against Cleveland that spring. It was the midpoint of a slate of twenty-four preseason contests the teams would play, continuing a tradition begun in 1934. Over that twenty-year period, the teams had played more than 250 exhibition games. Needless to say, by 1954, they knew one another well.

Even without the string of losses to the Giants, it had not been a prosperous camp. The Cleveland offense, not the strength of the team to begin with, was virtually non-existent, while the pitching, the aspect on which the fortunes of the team would sink or swim in 1954, had been inconsistent. The team arrived in Tucson the last week of February filled with expectations. General manager Hank Greenberg, under fire in recent years, brashly predicted the Indians would reach the World Series. “I honestly feel you have the tools to win the pennant,” he would say at a Cleveland Advertising Club luncheon before the season opener. “All you have to do is use them. If you stick together through the long, hard season ahead, I see no reason at all why we can’t have a World’s Series here in October.” To some, Greenberg’s confidence appeared desperate—a smokescreen created by a man who needed a handful of controversial decisions to bear fruit to save his job.

Long before Greenberg became the team’s GM after Bill Veeck sold it in 1949, he was well known to Cleveland fans, primarily as a nemesis. For twelve years, Greenberg had riddled Indians pitching as well as that of every other team in the American League during a Hall of Fame career with the Detroit Tigers. A four-time All-Star and twice named MVP, Greenberg left a legacy as one of the greatest hitters ever to play the game. Yet his real legacy was less about his accomplishments on the baseball field than about his religious affiliation.

Greenberg, born to Russian immigrants, became baseball’s first Jewish star. In an era of world history defined by the Holocaust and Adolf Hitler, the tall, lumbering Greenberg became almost a folk hero to American Jews, representing their own hopes and dreams of what could be accomplished once they overcame the hurdle of anti-Semitism. But with his playing career winding down after the war, Greenberg wasn’t ready to leave baseball. Outspoken and intelligent, Greenberg was full of new ideas and wanted to showcase them as a general manager. He’d considered moving from the diamond to the front office in Detroit but was unceremoniously sold, after a contract dispute. After one final year on the field in Pittsburgh in 1947, Greenberg retired, not knowing what would come next.

A chance encounter at the World Series that October would set the course of the rest of his career. Sitting in the box seats on the first-base line at Yankee Stadium along with many other members of baseball’s royalty, Greenberg happened to be placed beside Bill Veeck, the charismatic showman who had purchased the Indians the year before. As the game ended and the spectators from that section exited by crossing the field to a gate in right field, Greenberg and Veeck, hobbling along on his trademark cane to aid his amputated leg, struck up a conversation. Veeck asked if Greenberg was having dinner at Toots Shor’s, the well-known restaurant on Fifty-First Street that hosted many New York celebrities and athletes. Greenberg said he was, and Veeck invited him to join him there. They met at 7:30 and stayed until the restaurant closed at 4 a.m., talking and debating baseball. Both men could see that they were of the same mind about the game, and after a few more get-togethers during the Series, Veeck invited Greenberg to join the Indians. Greenberg told Veeck he was no longer going to play, but that wasn’t what Cleveland’s owner had in mind. He advised Greenberg that one of the team’s minority owners would soon be looking to sell his share of the team, and with a little maneuvering, Greenberg could wind up with 10 percent of the club. In the meantime, Veeck offered to hire Greenberg as his assistant so he could learn the ropes of the front office. Though at $15,000 a year he would only earn a quarter of what he was paid in his final season as a player, Greenberg saw the opportunity and agreed.

He mostly stood by as a spectator during the Indians’ greatest season in franchise history, as they triumphed in an incredible four-team pennant race and captured their first World Series title in nearly three decades. Along the way, Veeck took Greenberg under his wing and introduced him to baseball’s executive solar system. He also trusted his new assistant as a confidant, often second-guessing Tribe player/manager Lou Boudreau and asking Greenberg if he’d ever consider taking over as manager. Greenberg shrugged off the idea. The following season, Veeck put Greenberg in charge of Cleveland’s vast farm system, a colossal responsibility that Greenberg embraced, quietly laying the parent club’s foundation for the next decade.