Becoming Mr. October (9780385533126) Read online

  It’s hard for many people to understand what a different place the world was when I was young. And it’s hard for them to understand the ways in which it still hasn’t changed.

  I wasn’t raised in the Deep South. I grew up in Pennsylvania, in a nice town outside Philadelphia called Wyncote. I was in a nice neighborhood; the people were nice. The neighbors were wonderful. But it was 95 percent white. Not far away, across the Mason-Dixon Line, there were regular Ku Klux Klan meetings that went on in Maryland, maybe sixty to eighty miles from my home. There were certain towns down there where you didn’t go.

  Pennsylvania was considered the North. But there were often reminders that color was a social issue, and I was colored. I went to a white school, and being black, you were a second-class citizen. The n-word was overheard from time to time. Socially, in those days, the world was different. You weren’t allowed to (or, it was preferred you didn’t) swim in the community pool in Glenside if you were colored. You weren’t allowed to go to the country club in Elkins Park and play golf, because you were colored!

  The parents of a lot of kids I knew didn’t want me to play with them. I was in Glenside one day and was riding a buddy of mine’s bicycle back to my house. I had been hanging out with him all day, and rather than make me walk the two or three miles back home, he lent me his bike. On the way home, I got maybe a mile, and his step-dad saw me. I can still remember he was driving a ’57 yellow Chevy, with a Continental kit. And when he saw me, he stopped that beautiful car, and then he stopped me. He made me get off his stepson’s bike and walk it back to his house—walk it back!

  How’s that for a memory? I don’t know if I felt embarrassed, small, humiliated … I don’t know how I felt, except bad. I knew exactly what was going on. He did not want a colored kid riding his son’s bicycle, and we were best friends. I know the guy—my friend—to this day. Still a great guy, and one of my longtime elementary school, junior high, high school buddies. I’m sure it broke his heart, just as it broke mine. We were thirteen, fourteen, and we didn’t know what to say. I just felt like the sole of a shoe.

  Call it a petty humiliation, but there was nothing “petty” about it. “Mountainous” would be a better word. Those humiliations become scars. They become wounds—and then they get opened up again, on another day. And then before the scab heals, someone else opens it up. You wind up getting in a fight with someone because of something else you’ve had on your mind for two years.

  And dating—there was a girl in our neighborhood, her name was Helen S. She was cute, and we wanted to be friends. We were, you know, thirteen, fourteen, but her parents wouldn’t allow it. Because I was colored. There was another girl in high school, a few years later, named Sandy H. I had a friend, George Beck, a white guy. He had a ’55 Chevy and I had a ’55 Chevy, so he would pick her up at her house when it was light out. Then, when I drove her home, I’d have to hold the interior light button down with my hand when I dropped her off, so the inside of the car would stay dark and her parents couldn’t see who it was. Then she could get out in the dark and run in the door.

  Meanwhile, things were going on all around us. You know, I was thirteen years old when they held the first sit-in at the Woolworth’s counter in 1960. Negroes weren’t allowed to vote in much of the United States until 1965—we were still physically kept from voting when I was already in college! All that stuff that went on, all the murders in the South, the burning of the churches, the murder of Martin Luther King—that all went on when I was a teenager or in my early twenties.

  It’s hard to get across to some people—what that does to you. Many think of it as ancient history: “Oh, my gosh, that was so terrible. Forty years ago, I can’t believe it! That’s the way it was? My, my, what a terrible thing. That’s really too bad!” is what people would say.

  But my brothers and sisters, the six of us? We were raised in that era. Our youngest is sixty-two, my older sister is seventy-five, my brother is seventy-three. We were raised in that America. So it’s not something that you easily forget. It’s part of who we are. Part of who I am. You don’t just forget! You work at forgiving.

  As a kid, you tend to just accept that that’s how things are. But it still hurts. Growing up, all through my teens, I was raised as a second-class citizen. You’d have to be a psychologist to know all the different ways that impacts someone. I’m just a human being who felt the hurt in mind and heart.

  People ask you, “How did you feel about that?” and you almost want to say to them, “How do you think I felt?” I’d want to start swearing or something, because it’s hard to find the words, it’s not comfortable even to think about that again. You just want to get away from it emotionally. Invariably, though, something happens to remind you of the ugliness.

  My father used to tell us, “If you ever get in a race, if you ever get in a contest, make sure that you’re clearly the winner. Make sure that there’s no photo finish. Because if there’s a photo finish, you won’t win the race.”

  So now it’s 1966, and here I was, I had won going away. Danny Murtaugh said it. A white guy, been around baseball all his life, a great judge of talent. He said I was head and shoulders above the rest. And then the Mets drafted Steve Chilcott. I don’t want to disrespect Steve Chilcott, he got hurt. I’m sure he was a good ballplayer and a good guy.

  But that wasn’t why he was drafted first. He was drafted first because I was dating a “white” girl.

  I suppose I was surprised and I wasn’t surprised when I heard that from Bobby Winkles. The ironic thing was, the Mexican girl I was dating, her uncle—his name was Ferdie—told Frank Kush that he didn’t want me dating his niece.

  I married Juanita in the end. It didn’t work out; we were only married for about a year and a half. But it wasn’t because she was this much Mexican or I was that much black. It was because I wasn’t a good husband. I wasn’t from an institution of successful marriage, my parents were separated by the time I was six. I never knew much about marriage, never lived in the environment of marriage. I wish I had—at least I think so.

  If the Mets had only been willing to wait, or sign me because of my ability, I would have played with Seaver—and later maybe Strawberry and Gooden. That would’ve been fun. But what it came down to was, I wasn’t going to New York yet. I was going to Kansas City.

  2

  BIRMINGHAM

  THE GREAT THING about Bobby Winkles was, as soon as he broke it to me that I wasn’t going to be the number one draft pick because the New York Mets disapproved of my dating habits, he also told me, “But there’s a guy, Bob Zuk, who’s a scout with the Kansas City A’s, and he loves you. He signed Willie Stargell a few years ago, and he’s gonna recommend that the A’s draft you with their first pick.”

  The A’s had that pick because they’d been the last-place team in the American League in 1965. The next year, the last-place team in the league was the Yankees, and they had the very first pick in the draft. I knew that Tom Greenwade, the great scout who signed Mickey Mantle and Bobby Murcer and a lot of other players for the Yankees, was looking at me, and he liked what he saw. Never mind the Mets. Who knows, if I’d stayed in college another year, I might’ve come to the Yankees ten years before I did.

  But whoever drafted me, Bobby Winkles told me, “I’d recommend that you sign and leave college. It’s gonna be a lot of fun. And the money, Reggie, I’m sure will help your family.”

  Which was a very fatherly thing for him to do. His teams were always contenders for the national title. He won the title in 1965, 1967, and 1969 as it was, and who knows, if I’d stayed, maybe he would’ve won five in a row. But he was looking out for me first!

  I went ahead and signed with the Kansas City Athletics. Or rather, I signed with Charlie Finley, the A’s owner. That was the best part of all.

  He was a special character. I flew into Chicago with my dad (also my agent!), and we went directly to Mr. Finley’s office there, at the insurance company he had on Michigan Avenue. I can stil
l remember the address: 310 South Michigan Avenue.

  Finley could be a funny-looking guy, with those little Bear Bryant hats and those loud jackets he always wore. (He was from Birmingham.) But he was very impressive when I first saw him, sitting at a big desk in his big, mahogany office. The biggest office I’d ever been in before was the principal’s office. You could look out the window from the twenty-something floor, and you could see out over Lake Michigan. To me, it felt like I could see the North Pole, or maybe California.

  Finley sent his secretary, Rebecca, who was very nice as well as very attractive, out for lunch, and she brought back this amazing meal, oysters, and shrimp, and crabs. I remember he cleared his desk of all its papers and put the seafood right on it, in a very large plate. Then he mixed up this sauce himself, Tabasco sauce with ketchup and vinegar, touch of mayonnaise, and we ate the cracked crabs, and the oysters, and the shrimp right there with his special sauce. We drank whatever we wanted, water, soda, tea, lemonade. Charlie rolled up his sleeves and ate with us. My dad and I were in heaven.

  He was a hard man to figure sometimes, Charlie Finley. Thinking about it now, quite frankly he might’ve had us eat like that in his office because he didn’t know of a good restaurant that would seat my dad and me. This was still 1966, after all. Or maybe he just wanted to put on a show, which he always liked to do. We had a great time.

  We were in his office for three or four hours, talking about baseball and about finishing my college education. He volunteered to manage my signing bonus and guaranteed to make me money, and he was true to his word. He invested $37,500 of my bonus, and he got it all back to me, with profit. He also put aside $12,000 for me to go back to college. I did for a couple of semesters, even though I never quite graduated, ending up twelve to fifteen hours short of graduation. I was an education major, with a minor in biology. I was a good student, sat up front, never missed class. It got to be too much once I became a professional ballplayer.

  I should have taken the few remaining courses and graduated. I have since connected with Arizona State University to finish the remaining courses I need online. Once I do, I’m going to finally go to graduation.

  After the meeting in his office, Charlie flew us over to his house, in La Porte, Indiana. We flew across Lake Michigan in a private plane. I thought, “Wow!” I had never been in anyone’s private plane before. He had this whole compound in La Porte. There were lots of different buildings and houses. We met his wife, Shirley, and his kids, five or six kids; they were a great family. He had animals, too; it was something of a working farm.

  The next day my dad and I had breakfast with Charlie and his family. Boy, that was a treat. We had eggs and bacon, sausage and ham, pancakes, waffles, and fruit—I remember eating cantaloupe à la mode. I’d never seen so much food in my life, and I ate until I was about to burst.

  We talked about the contract for maybe thirty minutes to an hour. It was so much money that we started out happy and only got happier as the talks went on. I was going to sign, and I was excited. I couldn’t really relate to that much money, nor could my dad. We just knew our bills would be paid. Finally.

  The next day I signed the contract. My dad wanted to make sure we slept on it, just to show we weren’t going to do this without considering it—though it was hard to sleep after all that food. To this day, I like to think about things overnight before I pull the trigger.

  In the end, Charlie gave me a signing bonus of $95,000. That was more money than I’d ever heard of. I mean, this was at a time when the best players in the game, men like Willie Mays and Henry Aaron and Mickey Mantle, still made about $100,000 a year. That was big money. My father must’ve had about $1,000 to his name at the time, including what he kept in his mattress.

  I gave part of that bonus money to my mom, and some of it went to my brother who was going to college. Gave some of it to my dad and paid off all of his and Mom’s bills.

  To clinch the deal, Charlie Finley offered me a new car. We all know I love cars. It took me about a month to make that decision. I finally settled on a new four-speed Pontiac, 421 cubic inches, 375 horsepower, burgundy with a black hat—a vinyl top. It was the first new car I’d ever owned. My dad didn’t even have a new car. Nobody I was friends with had a new car. But now I had one. I was in high cotton.

  I went back to my dad’s house in Wyncote for a few days, and then I went down to my mother’s in Baltimore to help her out, give her some money. Then, on June 13 or 14, I went out to report to Lewiston, Idaho, to play for the Lewiston Broncs in the Northwest League.

  I was there two weeks. It was a short-season, Single-A league, mostly for college and high school rookies just out of school. I stayed in the Lewis-Clark Hotel. I hit a home run in one of my first games in Lewiston. I remember hitting two home runs in a night game in Yakima, Washington, while it was snowing. In June!

  Then I got beaned, and the A’s minor-league manager, Bill Posedel, took me to the hospital in Lewiston. They said they wouldn’t admit me because I was colored—in Idaho! Bill Posedel was a great guy; we were friendly for many years before he passed. Bill got on the phone to Charlie Finley, and Charlie said, “Get Reggie out of there. Get him to Modesto, in the California League.”

  So all of a sudden there I was in California. And it was there that it felt like my professional career really began. It was in Modesto, for me, that it all came together—that the great A’s dynasty was born.

  Guys look back and tend to think about the bad parts of being a minor leaguer. The low pay, all the long bus rides, the lousy fields. Not me. I was making $500 a month, $3 a day meal money on the road—and I felt I was in the penthouse! That was a great year. We were good—no, we were great. We had fun and we were young.

  I shared a room at the team hotel with this older pitcher, Stan Jones. He was twenty-six—and I thought that was old. I thought he was ancient—I used to ask him when he was going to be getting his pension. He had all the stories, you know, and he showed me around. It was all fun. All the clothes I had were new because I didn’t have anything as a kid. I bought three, four pairs of pants, four or five new shirts, a couple of sweaters, and a sport coat. My share of the hotel room was all of $3 a day, I think. We ate just around the corner, at this chain restaurant called the Hofbrau. They served good food, and it was cheap. You could get a whole meal, sauerkraut, mashed potatoes, turkey and gravy, and dessert, for a couple bucks. We’d eat there pretty much every day, then we’d go over to the ballpark, which was nearby as well.

  The Modesto Reds, that was our name, even though we were an A’s farm team. We were monsters. We destroyed teams. We went 88–53, won the league by eleven games. I had twenty-one homers, drove in sixty runs in a little over two hundred at-bats, and just missed hitting .300, finished at .299. But we were all good.

  We had twelve future major leaguers on that team. Guys like Tony LaRussa, who’s going to be a Hall of Fame manager, Syd O’Brien, who played some third base for the Red Sox, Ossie Blanco, Skip Lockwood, who became a closer for the Mets. The manager was Gus Niarhos, the old Yankees catcher, who knew how to win and make it fun. He loved his job, the kids, the game, and life. Gus has always been a good memory for me.

  But most of all, we had the core of the dynasty the A’s were going to eventually have in Oakland. We had two future Hall of Famers, myself and Rollie Fingers, who would become the best relief pitcher in the game until the great Mariano happened along. Rollie was still a starter then, and a good one. He used to come pick me up in his car and take me to the park every day. We had Joe Rudi, who was to be an all-star left fielder; he hit twenty-four home runs that year. And we had Dave Duncan—big, tall, blond-haired guy from California, who would be our catcher.

  I remember, the first time I met him, Duncan had his own bonus car: a white Corvette with a red interior. I was like, “Wow!” He was the catcher that year and missed four weeks with a broken hand but still managed to hit forty-six home runs. Rudi broke his hand, too, he missed time as well, but h
e came right back. That’s how good we were; that’s how tough we were, even as kids.

  After that season, we were all moving up another level or two, to Double- or Triple-A. I reported to spring training the next March in Waycross, Georgia—Deep South!—where I had to live in a barracks ten to twelve miles outside town.

  That’s right. That was what moving up meant for us in 1967. You had a great year, you got promoted … but being black, you had to go live in an old army barracks for your own safety.

  They had most of the A’s black minor-league players there—maybe fifteen, twenty of us at the peak. We ate right there in the barracks. The team told us, “You guys shouldn’t go into town at night. Not so safe.” It was just like one of those old southern towns, with the signs saying, “We Don’t Serve Niggers.” At the time, it was a Jim Crow town. We didn’t test that much, and to be honest, I don’t remember ever going into town. It was 1967, man.

  But we were young; we had a good time. We had a black-and-white TV we all would watch. We’d get back from the park, eat, tell stories a little bit, eat again, tell some more stories, and go to sleep. We went to bed most nights at ten o’clock. It was isolated, but it was our home, and we liked it.

  We were playing ball, eating for free. Being black back then—the other things were just part of the deal. We did the things we could do, didn’t complain about the things we couldn’t do, and looked for our opportunities. We stayed together and supported each other—and nobody from the team, at least, treated us as anything less than equal.

  Charlie Finley looked out for his players. There were some white owners and general managers like that, then and later—men like Finley, like George Steinbrenner—who helped their players along. It was paternal in the best sense of the word. Sometimes it felt like they were plantation owners, because they had the right to trade you at their whim. I had heard about the O’Malley family and August Busch caring about their black players back then, and there were others who looked out for your welfare, who made sure the players came first.