Two-Bass Hit: Baseball and New York, 1945–1960

Abstract

As a youngster, Art Rust, Jr., one of New York's first prominent black sportscasters, lived on St. Nicholas Avenue, a stone's throw equally from Minton's and Monroe's, the after-hours clubs where Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk created bebop, and the Polo Grounds, home of the New York Giants. Rust remembered the day in the 1930s when “Billy the Cop,” just off duty, told Rust's father that Giant manager Bill Terry, the last National League player to hit over 400, complained to the precinct commander. Terry didn't want any “nigger cops” patrolling the Polo Grounds, at least not near the executive entrances. Almost twenty years later, in the early 1950s, George Weiss, the general manager of the New York Yankees, a team whose Ruthian dominance prevailed in the Stadium, built with intentional perversity within eyesight of the Polo Grounds just across the East River in the South Bronx, responded to charges that the Yankees had failed to sign black players. In private, Weiss said, “I will never allow a black man to wear a Yankee uniform. Boxholders from Westchester don't want that sort of crowd. They would be offended to have to sit with niggers.” Publicly, in the spring of 1952, he responded that the team had been looking long and hard for a black player, “good enough to make the Yankees.” Weiss's accuser, Jackie Robinson, then entering his sixth season with the Brooklyn Dodgers, rejoined, “Bullshit.”