The Sunday Funnies

This month's tale from Kirby Higbe's "The High Hard One," talking about the Dodgers under manager Leo Durocher:

Under Durocher, we could get the signs of all the clubs except the Cardinals and the Boston Braves. The Braves didn't use them. When Casey Stengel, then the manager, wanted to bunt, he would holler, "Bunt." And he would holler for the hit and run and take, too. Leo asked Stengel if he had any signs. "No," Casey said. "If I did, the only players who would get them anyway would be your team."

The Sunday Funnies

Another tale from Kirby Higbe's "The High Hard One":

Toward the end of the 1942 season, when the Cardinals were closing in on us, this guy got a chorus girl and sent her to Philadelphia, where the Cardinals were playing while we were battling Cincinnati in Brooklyn. There was hardly no way the the Phillies could beat the Cardinals, especially when one of their aces was pitching. So this girl was told to get a date with one of the Cardinal pitchers the night before he was going to pitch, and she did. Next day he shut the Phillies out on two hits.

When the girl came back, she was told she'd done a lousy job.

"A lousy job! He drank two quarts of liquor and I guarantee he didn't sleep a wink all night."

The Cardinals were coming to Brooklyn next, and the girl was given another chance.

The pitcher was due to pitch the second game, and she made a date with him.  She called in the morning and said she had been with him all night and she was dead tired and didn't see how he could be good for anything that day. But he shut us out on three hits and beat us 2-0.

That looked like pretty good medicine for a pitcher, and I asked why they didn't try it out on me.

The Sunday Funnies

Kirby Higbe — one of the heavies in last spring's Jackie Robinson movie, "42" — published his memoirs in the 1960s. Here's one of his stories, which happens to feature Clyde Sukeforth, who also figures in "42" as the scout-coach who brings Robinson to Branch Rickey and teaches Robinson to play first base. Higbe is pitching for Moline in the Three-I League, working his way to the majors:

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I was throwing against Clinton, Iowa, one night, and throwing hard. I had struck out 13 in five innings. Clyde Sukeforth, their manager, was telling his hitters to get up there and hit. He said, "I can hit Higbe with one eye closed." In the sixth inning his catcher got in an argument with the plate umpire, and before Clyde could get between them, the catcher was thrown out of the game. So old Clyde, a fine catcher, had to come in to catch. His players said, "Here's your chance, Skip. Close one eye and let's see you hit him." Clyde came up in the seventh with a man on second and two out. I got two quick strikes on him. His boys kept hollering, "Skip, close one eye!" I threw him a high hard one. As he ducked out of the way, the ball hit his bat and went over the third baseman for a base hit.

Clyde said, "Boys, I told you I could hit him with one eye closed."

One of them said, "You done better than that, Clyde, you hit him with both eyes closed."

"42" and The High Hard One

"42," the Jackie Robinson movie, is still playing in Mankato. This surprises me; when I went, on its opening night in mid-April, there weren't two dozen people in the theater and I figured the majority of them were high school or college baseball players. That's not much of a target audience.

And yet, here we are six weeks later, and the movie's still hanging around.

The outline of the Robinson saga is no secret: Branch Rickey, the Mahatma of the Brooklyn Dodgers, decides to challenge the unofficial color barrier and selects Robinson as the pioneer. Robinson breaks through the opposition and the pressure and becomes a star. It's one significant step in the civil rights movement.

Much of the movie is set around Robinson vs. the racist villains. Some of the villains — such as the southern sheriff seen ordering Robinson off the field in an exhibition game — are anonymous. Many of them — including some of Robinson's fellow Dodgers — are not.

Let me point out that the movie is not always in agreement with the historical record. Eddie Stanky, for example. Stanky is depicted in the movie as at worst ambivalent about Robinson, unwilling to go in on the petition to keep Robinson off the team. In reality, he was firmly opposed to Robinson, and told Robinson so to his face. (It is also true that, as shown in the movie, Stanky came to Robinson's defense during the Ben Chapman incident.)

I had no issue with the depictions of Kirby Higbe and Dixie Walker, two southern-bred Dodgers seen in the film as firmly opposed to Robinson's presence. That is accurate. Walker, years later, would acknowledge that he was wrong and regret his opposition.

Then there's Higbe, a South Carolinian whose opposition to Robinson got him traded a couple weeks into the season.

Some 20 years after Robinson's debut — 1967, still in the midst of the civil rights debate; Martin Luther King Jr. had not yet been assassinated — Higbe's memoirs were published. The High Hard One is a fascinating work, clearly in Higbe's voice but also heavily ghostwritten by Martin Quigley. I had read excerpts from it before, but not the work in its entirety until the past week, when my wife found a copy for me. It is in turns hilarious and heartwrenching, bitter and sweet, full of pride and regrets.

The chapter on Robinson is deeply conflicted, marked with a notable obtuseness to the realities of black life in the South and the evils of segregation, and by a stubborn refusal to admit being on the wrong side:

If I could have looked ahead and seen all the change that was coming, I think I still would have done what I did. I was brought up a Southerner, and I was brought up to stand by what you said and believed in even if you were the last one standing there.

And on the other hand, a few paragraphs later:

Jackie proved himself a big-league ballplayer, and there is no politics that can help a man on the field ... If it had been any other player than Jackie Robinson — say, one with less talent and hustle — the color line would not have been broken quite so cleanly or easily. His job was to be the first Negro ballplayer in the major leagues and to show the way for the others. He wanted that more than anything else, and he got the job done.

I don't think "easily" is an accurate word, but, again, Higbe had little difficulty overlooking the abuse and threats that shadowed Robinson in particular and blacks in general.

Higbe, who died in 1985 at the age of 70, had a strong right arm and a grade-school education. He was ill-prepared for the change Jackie Robinson represented. I can sympathize with Higbe's dilemma in 1947 without agreeing with the stance he took.