The Great Wall Of Boston

It would seem that a man with nine-figure holdings in lumber and minerals would have learned to be cold and hard. "I can be," Yawkey says, "but I'd rather not. I'd rather trade a man than cut his pay. I'm aware of what Mr. Rickey said, and I guess he must be right."

Branch Rickey said it was wiser to get rid of a player a year too soon than a year too late, when his value has diminished. Yawkey, waiting with players until they establish their incompetence, has been repeatedly stuck with them for a year or two while finding some place to unload them. Five such players for two years each amount to 10 years' worth of inferiority, for which Yawkey has paid handsomely.

"I guess that has happened too often," Yawkey concedes. "We have made a lot of mistakes around here. It could have been managed better, and it's my fault it wasn't. The trouble is, I like to think of my people as associates, rather then employees."

Yawkey hastens to add that he did not consider the players themselves to be associates, and the reason for his exception articulates his paternal benevolence toward his athletes: "Players are the most helpless people in the world. If you told them to go to San Francisco by themselves, they might wind up in Mexico City. I guess we could have really used a resident s.o.b. in the organization," Yawkey concludes. "There hasn't been one since Eddie, and he wasn't really." Eddie Collins, who sold Yawkey the idea of buying and "bailing out" the depressed Red Sox of 1933, was general manager until his death in 1951.

Yawkey disputes the popular notion that his competent players "always" get pay raises. Frank Malzone, the senior man and an eight-time All-Star, has not always, Yawkey emphasizes. "Not the last two years," says Malzone, who is 35 and a lifetime .278 hitter up to this season. "But once you get past $30,000 you can't expect it. They pay about the same as other clubs, except they don't cut anybody. And maybe we do better with bonuses and things."

Resolutely rewarding mediocrity, Yawkey has seen black ink six times in his first 32 years in Boston, and it is no disillusion to him that the blind loyalty of New England fans has been less visible at the turnstiles since 1960. "The only way to do better," he says, "is to win. They shake your hand and wish you well at Rotary meetings, but they don't show up. All they care about—I don't give a damn what anybody says—is the won-lost record."

One way to win is to have the best players. The Red Sox did in 1946, but coincidentally that was the year Jackie Robinson—who had been tried in Fenway Park and found wanting—played his first year in organized (white) baseball. In the parade of Larry Dobys and Roy Campanellas and Elston Howards that followed, the Red Sox brought up the rear. Brooks Lawrence had pitched and won for five years in such pseudo-southern cities as St. Louis and Cincinnati before Pumpsie Green became the Red Sox' first Negro big leaguer in 1959.

It is easy now for Bostonian critics, seeking a policy man behind such a self-defeating pattern, to point fingers at Mike Higgins, an unreconstructed Texan with classically Confederate views on Negroes, but it is too easy. Higgins. who did not become field manager until 1955 and did not take a desk in the front office until late 1962, could hardly have been the Caucasian in the woodpile.

"They blame me," Yawkey says, "and I'm not even a Southerner. I'm from Detroit." Yawkey remains on his South Carolina fief until May because Boston weather before then is too much for his sensitive sinuses. "I have no feeling against colored people," he says. "I employ a lot of them in the South. But they arc clannish, and when that story got around that we didn't want Negroes they all decided to sign with some other club. Actually, we scouted them right along, but we didn't want one because he was a Negro. We wanted a ballplayer."

The first Negro the Red Sox scouted was Piper Davis, a second baseman, and in September 1949 they bought him conditionally from, the Birmingham Black Barons. Piper got as far as Scranton in the Eastern League, but he was returned to the Barons in May 1950, when it was decided his talents did not merit the balance of the payment. Inasmuch as Davis wrote no great record anywhere else, there is no evidence that the Red Sox' evaluation of him was in error.