Before the Machine. Mark J. Schmetzer

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      “When Mr. DeWitt took over the club, I just thought the right thing for him to do would be to at least call up the players, especially the ones who lived in town, and introduce himself, say hello, maybe talk a little with them,” Robinson wrote in his book. “But nothing. I met him by accident one day when I was in the office talking to the switchboard operator. He happened to come out of his office and saw me and introduced himself, the official greeting.”

      Relations grew frostier during contract negotiations. DeWitt was a notoriously soft touch for sob stories and down-on-their-luck ex-players, and he gave everybody in the Cincinnati front office a 10 percent raise immediately upon taking over and gave them another one ten months later. But he wanted Robinson to take a pay cut before the 1961 season, while Robinson wanted to be paid at least as much as he earned in 1960.

      “He said, ‘I hear you don’t hustle all the time,’” Robinson wrote. “I blew up. I said, ‘Have you ever seen me play?’ He said, ‘No, no not really, not over a full season.’

      “Well, until you do, don’t tell me that I don’t always put out on the field. I do.”

      DeWitt pointed out that Robinson seemed to play better when he was angry, and that DeWitt planned to keep Robinson angry throughout the upcoming season.

      “He was going to keep poking me, keep me at the boiling point, he implied, to get the best performance out of me,” Robinson explained. “I left Mr. Bill DeWitt feeling that I had struck bottom in my career, and that there was only one way to go—up. I was wrong.”

      No, that low point was the long night Robinson spent sprawled on the hard bench of a Cincinnati jail cell, with just his jacket for a pillow.

      “The most disturbing thought of all, the one that haunted me all night long, was what the kids would think of me,” he wrote. “So many kids idolize big-league ballplayers. So many of them mold their whole lives around their heroes. What were they going to think? How were they going to react?

      “And then it began to dawn on me that I had a responsibility to the game of baseball. Baseball had been good to me, and I had taken a lot out of it, but what had I given back? I felt a deep responsibility to baseball, especially to the young kids who look up to the players. I felt that I had let them down.

      “For the first time, I began to realize that I wasn’t a kid any more, and that I had better stop acting like one. I knew that I had been wrong, dead wrong, all the way. But looking back, it may have been the best thing that ever happened to me. It matured me, it made me a better man. No, not a better man—a man. Let me put it that way because I don’t think I was a real man before.”

      Robinson’s problems that night had started when the police officers called him a boy while he thought he was a man. By the end of the night, he was acting like one.

      Not that his troubles were over. As he expected, he heard a great deal in spring training early and often about the incident. It started when he reported to camp and found a water pistol in his locker, left there by teammate Ed Bailey.

      “Thanks, Ed, but I can’t use it,” Robinson said, playing along while handing the toy back to Bailey. “I’m on parole.”

      When the Reds traveled to Bradenton, Florida, for an exhibition game against Milwaukee, Hank Aaron and Felix Mantilla serenaded Robinson from the Braves’ dugout, singing, “Lay that pistol down, babe, lay that pistol down.” Milwaukee pitcher Lew Burdette snuck up on Robinson and frisked him, reporting to Braves third baseman Eddie Mathews, “It’s all right, Eddie. He’s clean.”

      Mathews, who’d gotten into a fight with Robinson the previous season, responded with, “Hey, Robby, I’m not fooling around with you this year.”

      St. Louis Cardinals first baseman Bill White called him “John Dillinger.”

      “He’ll probably get a lot of that this year,” one Reds player said.

      The roster wasn’t the only aspect of Reds baseball that underwent something of a makeover between the 1960 and 1961 seasons. The ballpark itself was brightened up with a paint job, the old green being covered up with a couple of coats of white, while additional space had been found on the massive scoreboard in left-center field for the two new American League teams.

      More glaring was the change in the area around Crosley Field, which showed unmistakable signs of the ever-growing dominance of the automobile. For decades, space for parking cars around Crosley had been an afterthought. Most of the fans arrived for games in buses or trolleys or on trains that pulled in a few blocks south of the ballpark at Union Terminal. Most fans could walk back and forth easily, while most of those who drove to the games had to settle for finding parking spots on the narrow, neighborhood streets around the ballpark.

      The unexpected success of the 1956 team, and the relative explosion in attendance, forced Reds management to face the fact that more and more fans were going to be driving cars to games and would need safe places to park. The one, 400-spot lot one block south of the ballpark on Dalton Street wasn’t nearly enough. Powel Crosley started talking with city officials about finding a way to add 5,000 spots around the area, and he wasn’t shy about holding the future of the franchise over the city’s head.

      “There are so many other cities ready to offer a stadium, adequate parking space, and everything of that sort, practically for nothing,” Crosley said. “In this competitive situation, we are entitled to ask for some additional parking space.”

      The Reds, located in one of the smallest markets in major league baseball, always had been a regional team. As the 1950s turned into the 1960s and the development of the interstate highway system made it less time-consuming to drive long distances, license plates from Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia became more common sights in parking lots at Reds games.

      Eventually, on April 28, 1958, the Reds and the city signed an agreement under which the city agreed to build parking lots and Crosley guaranteed that the franchise would remain in Cincinnati for at least five years.

      Beginning in 1959, the city was able to start working out deals with surrounding property owners and clearing lots for parking spaces. Before the 1961 season, one major landmark fell victim to the needs. The Superior Laundry building, located across York Street beyond the left field wall, was demolished. The demolition also meant the loss of the Siebler Suit advertising sign, which guaranteed a new suit for any player who hit the sign with a home run. Reds slugger Wally Post had picked up more than ten Siebler suits through the years, while Willie Mays of the New York/San Francisco Giants had led visiting players with seven.

      The team’s official 1961 yearbook includes a page featuring an aerial view of Crosley Field from the south. The word “parking” is stamped over eleven different lots around the ballpark, adding spaces for a total of 6,000 cars, up from 3,500 available in 1960. The city spent just less than $1,200,000 to buy the properties, clear them, and build the lots.

      “The city-owned parking lots will all be surfaced and have guard rails of some sort around each lot,” the article reports, adding, “New roads, such as the Dayton Expressway, are making it much easier for Reds fans to get to Crosley Field.”

      As added evidence of the automobile’s growing dominance, fans could see, just beyond the center- and right-field walls, the pathway for what eventually would become the Mill Creek Expressway portion of Interstate 75. This was the latest link in the chain of a Hamilton County highway that had been started in 1941 as a four-mile stretch from Hartwell Avenue north to Glendale-Milford СКАЧАТЬ