October 1964 by David Halberstam Page A

Henry told him that he had to buy some new clothes, that there was a dress code on the team and that one sports coat was not going to get him through the season.
    Tom Metcalf was called in by Yogi Berra and told that he was being sent back to Richmond. Metcalf was sure he had outpitched Pete Mikkelsen, and he became extremely angry. He thought that their competition had been rigged, and that Mikkelsen had had the job from the start. He and Berra exchanged angry words. He asked to be traded, but it was clear that the Yankees had no interest in doing that, that they still saw him as a top prospect. Houk came over to him later that day and apologized, saying that it was Yogi’s decision and Yogi’s team. For a time Metcalf thought of not reporting to Richmond, but he realized that he would be challenging the entire structure of baseball, so he relented. That spring, having apparently learned a lesson in Florida, he began to work on a sinker ball. During one inning he tried to throw a sinker and felt a small, sharp pain in his elbow. When he left the mound, his arm did not hurt that much, but when he went back out to pitch, he bounced the first pitch halfway to home plate to Jake Gibbs, who was catching. Metcalf tried one more pitch and bounced that one too. The next day he had very little feeling in his fingers or in his arm from the elbow down. He had damaged the nerve in his right, or throwing, elbow, and he was done for that year. Though he made one major attempt to come back in 1965, his career was essentially finished, and he never made it back to the major leagues.

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    W HEN A FEW YEARS later, Marvin Miller, the labor negotiator, visited the various baseball camps during spring training for the first time to explain collective bargaining to the various players, he was quickly struck by the fact that the Cardinal camp was different from every other one he visited. The players were more relaxed, more mature, and better integrated, black with white. The friendships among the players seemed to transcend racial lines, and Miller was especially struck by the fact that not only were the players friendly with each other but their families were too. By the summer of 1964, the question of race hung heavily over the nation at large, as young blacks challenged existing segregation statutes in the South, and baseball too was going through its own period of dramatic racial change. It was now seventeen years since Jackie Robinson had broken in with the Dodgers, and had done it so brilliantly that he had not only helped lead Brooklyn to a pennant but had won the Rookie of the Year Award. That there was a great new talent pool of black athletes was hardly a secret among the white players themselves. The names of such great black players as Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, and Judy Johnson had been well known to the many big-league players who had often barnstormed with them after the regular season was over (and who often made more money barnstorming on the all-white major league all-star teams than their colleagues had made playing in the World Series): they knew that the Negro leagues were filled with players who could hit and pitch, and, above all, who had speed. In the years since Robinson’s historic arrival in the big leagues, certain teams had moved quickly to sign up the best black players. It was the equivalent of a bargain-basement sale at Tiffany’s—great players available at discount prices, even as the price of young, untried white players was going up very quickly.
    The talent search was not joined with equal enthusiasm by the two major leagues. In 1954 the Supreme Court of the United States had ruled that white Southern school districts should move with all deliberate speed to integrate; in baseball the National League moved with speed, but the American League moved with deliberation instead of speed. Because the Dodgers soon had Robinson, Roy Campanella, and Don Newcombe in their lineup, there was a ripple effect in the