October 1964 by David Halberstam Page B

National League. The Dodgers’ crosstown rivals, the Giants, had to move quickly in self-defense, and as both teams were adding speed and power, so other National League teams were forced to move as well. At first, they scouted the Negro league games, and then, as the younger players there were signed up, they began looking for ever younger players from the Deep South. Soon the Milwaukee Braves followed with Bill Bruton and Henry Aaron playing in the outfield, which led to the joke “What’s black and catches flies?” The answer was the Braves’ outfield. Hank Aaron did not think it very funny.
    In the American League the tone was set by the New York Yankees. The Yankees were a dominating team, and their ownership in those critical years was, to be blunt, racist. They were winning and winning consistently without black players, about whom the ownership believed many of the existing stereotypes: that blacks were lazy and would not play well under pressure. George Weiss did not even want white rabble at his ball park, he told reporters. He wanted his fans to be from the white middle class, and he most emphatically did not want black fans who came to cheer black players. That, in his mind, would surely drive away his treasured white middle-class customers. In 1945, Weiss had stolen away one of Branch Rickey’s best scouts, the famed Tom Greenwade, a man who worked the Ozarks and the Southwest. It was Greenwade who signed Mantle for the Yankees, but it was less well known that he also had done the vital day-to-day scouting of Jackie Robinson when Rickey was making up his mind as to which black player would be the first to break the color line. Because of that, Greenwade knew as much or more about the available black talent as any white scout in the country, but Weiss was not interested. “Now, Tom,” he told Greenwade in their first meeting working together, “I don’t want you sneaking around down any back alleys and signing any niggers. We don’t want them.” That was that. Greenwade thought it bizarre. He was being tipped on such great young prospects as Ernie Banks, but was unable to move on them because of his marching orders. The Yankees, he later lamented to his son Bunch, lost an important decade by not going after black talent, and he told the story of Weiss setting limits on him with considerable bitterness and regarded it as the great regret of his career. Ironically, Mantle’s greatness increased the arrogance of the front office, for his exceptional speed and power convinced the Yankees that they did not need to change. He helped bring them an additional decade of dominance, and in so doing, he helped create the attitude among their executives that would lead to their eventual decline. As most of the other American League teams followed suit, the National League gradually began to pull away as superior, with better teams and more exciting younger players.
    By 1964 the National League had virtually all the best young black players, and it was therefore a league with more speed and power; its best young players flashed their speed on the base paths with increasing aggressiveness. The American League tended to rely on sluggers who were slow of foot (Mantle and Maris were exceptions), and tended toward a more cautious game, its managers by and large waiting for the big inning. The difference between the leagues was dramatic. After the 1963 season, Sandy Koufax, who had dominated the league as well as the Yankees during the World Series, was the National League’s Most Valuable Player. The selection followed a decade in which nine of the previous ten winners were black, and in the one instance that a white player won—Dick Groat of the Pirates in 1960—it could as easily have been his teammate Roberto Clemente (who was enraged by Groat’s selection and was convinced that he had lost because he was Puerto Rican and therefore had encountered an additional layer of prejudice). The black winners were Roy