THE BASEBALL ISSUE : The Year of the Mexican Baseball Wars : FICTION : THE VERACRUZ BLUES, <i> By Mark Winegardner (Viking; $22.95; 251 pp.)</i>
Imagine a scenario in which a multimillionaire Mexican businessman comes north and begins throwing money around like confetti, eventually luring dozens of the world’s best baseball players to Mexico. Now imagine that the commissioner of major league baseball responds by banning anyone who participates in a Mexican League game from playing in the United States, a threat the Mexicans answer by calling out their army to stop fleeing infielders and catchers.
As fanciful as that might sound, that’s the true part of Mark Winegardner’s fact-based baseball novel, “The Veracruz Blues.” The fictional part is a lot easier to believe. That’s because it consists mainly of several encounters with a drunken Ernest Hemingway; cameo appearances by Mario Moreno, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Babe Ruth; a narrative by a sportswriter of questionable moral character; and illicit liaisons between a sitting Mexican president and a drop-dead gorgeous actress known as “La Dona.”
Mix both parts together in the style of E.L. Doctorow and you wind up with a wonderfully entertaining and enlightening look at Mexican baseball’s temporada de oro, the golden season that changed the face of professional baseball forever.
1946 was a time of pain and dislocation in the United States: Nearly unprecedented labor unrest welcomed the nation’s victorious warriors home from World War II while inflation soared and racial tensions sparked riots in the North and lynchings in the South. Into the maelstrom stepped Jorge Pasquel, an ostentatious Mexican businessman who, like some of his countrymen, had made a fortune during the war. As commissioner of Mexico’s summer baseball league, Pasquel had already staged a number of raids against Negro League franchises, signing the likes of Willie Wells, Ray Dandridge, Satchel Paige and Cuban-born Martin Dihigo, the only player to be elected to the baseball hall of fame in four countries. But those strikes had gone largely unnoticed by major league baseball, which was glad to have the black players go and still considered the Mexican League a third-rate circuit at best.
“We were heroes in Mexico, while in the United States, everything I did was regulated by color,” Wells told a Pittsburgh reporter shortly after he jumped from the Negro League’s Newark Eagles to Veracruz, which represented Pasquel’s home town in the Mexican League. “I [was] not faced with the racial problem. In Mexico, I [was] a man.”
But after the armistice, Pasquel began pursuing the top major league stars as well. He eventually signed 18 players, including Cardinal pitchers Max Lanier and Freddie Martin, Dodgers Mickey Owen and Luis Olmo, Giant pitcher Sal Maglie and a colorful outfielder by the name of Danny Gardella, all of whom were promptly banned from returning to the majors. In Mexico they joined an eight-team league full of blacks and dark-skinned Cubans, players banned in the segregated major leagues. For many of the big-league veterans, it marked the first time they had ever played on an integrated team.
Winegardner, born a generation after the events he describes, tells his story through a series of flashbacks and interviews related by Frank Bullinger Jr.--one of the book’s few truly fictional characters--who began the season as a St. Louis sportswriter in search of a scoop and ended it on Pasquel’s payroll as the league’s press secretary. The storytelling slips from past tense to present tense--and from fact to fiction--and back again in a seamless style that allows Winegardner, like the slick-fielding Dandridge, to cover a lot of ground without making an error.
The author is at his best when he turns the book over to players like Dandridge and Theolic “Fireball” Smith, stars who were denied their rightful place in the annals of the game by the bigoted caretakers of major league baseball’s early years. Here they are finally given a chance to speak, and even if the interviews are fictional, the statistics are real. Dandridge, for instance, really was the best third baseman in history, and Winegardner, whose researching skills prove impressive on numerous occasions, strays from his story to make that point. For that, if for nothing else, this book deserves an honored place alongside “The Natural,” “Bang the Drum Slowly” and other classic baseball novels.
But Winegardner’s first novel is at its worst when the author allows his characters to slip into dialect. Gardella, for example, can intelligently discuss Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique in one paragraph, then fail to conjugate a verb correctly (“The reason we was. . . .”) in the next. And the black players come off even worse.
Despite Pasquel’s high hopes, the shine quickly faded from the Mexican League’s golden season. Lanier, for example, who was to be paid $20,000 in 1946, recently admitted he never received a paycheck that season. And when he returned to Mexico the following spring, his reported salary had been cut in half. Other players quickly came back to the United States, where they learned that club owners had established a minimum salary and a pension plan to entice major leaguers to stay home. Moreover, the Mexican League’s success with integrated teams may also have played a part in the major leagues’ decision to end its prohibition against blacks; in 1947 the Brooklyn Dodgers promoted Jackie Robinson to their big-league roster.
Winegardner mentions some of these developments in his novel. But they were just the beginning; the reverberations caused by Pasquel’s threat to major league baseball eventually found their way into the U.S. justice system. Gardella, who worked as a hospital orderly after returning to the U.S., took major league baseball to court in an attempt to overturn its ban on Mexican League veterans and, in February 1949, his antitrust suit won a surprise appellate court victory and the blacklist was quickly ended in an out-of-court settlement. The court’s ruling staggered club owners and irrevocably altered the balance of power in professional baseball. Suddenly emboldened, the players formed a union and, after decades of legal challenges, saw the courts strike down baseball’s controversial reserve clause, ushering in the era of free agency that made players with a 10th of Dandridge’s talent into millionaires.
Nevertheless, the experience left some players bitter. Lanier, who lost his best years to the blacklist, remained critical of Pasquel long after he retired. “The Mexican League could have worked,” he told a Florida sportswriter, “if they kept their promises.” (In fact, the Mexican Summer League continues, beset with troubles, its rosters filled with washed-up American players and inexperienced Mexicans.)
The next no-talent player who signs a multimillion-dollar free-agency contract is likely to view Pasquel’s legacy a bit differently, however. That’s because he’ll be mining the gold Pasquel planted in Mexico’s long-forgotten temporada de oro.
