I feel like throwing up: Willie Mays is screaming at me. He’s slammed the brakes on, and his sports car is screeching to a halt, and he is throwing me out. I feel nauseated, even though I’m perfectly aware of the fact that the “Say Hey Kid" of yore has famously turned into the Say Hey Asshole of bitter ex-athletes, and even though I’ve been warned to expect an unsettling, possibly random dressing-down. One just doesn’t expect Mays to go to Defcon Five at the mere mention of Ray “Hooks" Dandridge, his Mr. Chips roommate with the minor league Minneapolis Millers in 1951.
A legend in the Jim Crow Negro Leagues, Dandridge had mentored Mays and several other young black men half a century ago as they tried to make the transition up one notch to the majors and the New York Giants, the last stop after their Minneapolis farm team. Tragically, Dandridge, still worthy then of several good years in the major leagues, would be cheated out of even one at-bat in the big time. Still, he had such an effect on the naïve and yet-unspoiled Mays that Willie showed up at Cooperstown in 1987 when Hooks, by then an ancient pensioner, was finally elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Sadly, few had actually seen Dandridge’s magical work in the field and at the plate with segregated teams—long-forgotten clubs with names like the Nashville Elite Giants and Newark Eagles that had operated in the shadows of American sport since the early 1900s. “Ray Dandridge helped me tremendously when I came through Minneapolis," Mays said the day Ray was inducted, uncharacteristically charitable for a superstar never known to speak kindly about other players. “You just can’t overlook those things. Ray was a part of me."
Years later, Mays drives his Porsche with "SAY HEY" vanity license plates through Scottsdale, Arizona, from the San Francisco Giants training camp, where he shows up each spring as a promotional gimmick. This reporter innocently opines, "Too bad the Giants never brought Ray up to the majors, huh? After four years starring in Minneapolis you’d think…"
Mays slams on the brakes. "You saying it’s the Giants fault?" he begins yelling. "You see what it says here on my chest?" He points to the team’s name on the uniform he’s still wearing. "What kind of trouble are you trying to make for me?"
"None, I mean, you saw how great Ray was…"
"You saying it’s my fault Mr. Stoneham never called him up?" Mays harangues, his tires screeching to a stop. "Get out! I’ve changed my mind, I don’t want you around here!"
Though he was only berating a shlumpy reporter, it was a sentiment the late Horace Stoneham, owner of the late New York Giants, might as well have communicated to the great Ray Dandridge, languishing 50 years ago in Minneapolis.
Troy Maxson: We had better pitching in the Negro League. I hit seven home runs off of Satchel Paige! You can’t get no better than that!
Rose (his wife): Times have changed since you played baseball, Troy. That was before the war. They got a lot of colored baseball players now. Jackie Robinson was the first. Folks had to wait.
Bono (Troy’s friend): Troy just come along too early.
Troy: I done seen a hundred niggers play baseball better than Jackie Robinson. Jackie Robinson wasn’t nobody. I’m talking about if you play ball, they ought to have let you play. Don’t care what color you were. Come telling me I come along too early. (Troy takes a long drink from the bottle.)
--"Fences," Act 1, by August Wilson
Ray "Hooks" Dandridge, the greatest third baseman in baseball history, didn’t come along too early. He came along right on time, via Troy Maxson’s Negro League, to show all of white America what becomes a legend most: a starring role in The Show. Ballplayers were already calling the major leagues The Show when the New York Giants signed him in 1949, and sent him to their best team in the minors, the Minneapolis Millers, for what everyone thought would be a brief tune-up.
Shortly, Hooks would no doubt be in the majors for keeps, his specialty hoovering up impossible-to-reach grounders in front of the teeming masses at Manhattan’s Polo Grounds.
Scouts predicted that Dandridge, who convinced the Giants he was 29 though he was 35 and simply in great shape, would dazzle for at least several years with an array of tricks worthy of a baseball Houdini. His most famous antic was to psyche batters by holding onto their groundballs just long enough to let them try to frenetically hustle out a hit—only to arrive at first base a maddening split-second after Dandridge’s throw. A team leader wherever he played, he could also hit for power and batting average.
Dandridge didn’t mind when he was asked to make a whistle-stop in Minneapolis on his way to the Polo Grounds; after all, even the Brooklyn Dodgers had sent Jackie Robinson to the bush leagues for a year before bringing him up to Ebbets Field in 1947 to integrate America’s so-called National Pastime.
But in 1949, when the "color line" had supposedly been broken and Dandridge arrived in Minneapolis, something horrific began happening to the 5’7" slugger. It was a tragedy that author Daniel Okrent (famous as the recurring "man in the red sweater" in Ken Burns’ interminable history of baseball) calls "the saddest of the Negro League stories."
Somehow, Dandridge’s putative layover here became a sentence of life without parole; the Millers’ bandbox stadium on 32nd and Nicollet his inescapable Devil’s Island. For the last four useful years of his career, as forgettable players black and white, passed through Minneapolis on their way to the Giants, Dandridge—one rung away—was never promoted to the big time.
It didn’t matter that during those years in Minneapolis he posted the prodigious statistics everyone had expected, that he thrilled fans with his vaunted fielding and batting talents, that he was named the American Association’s Rookie of the Year, and its Most Valuable Player, and that he led Minneapolis to the league championship. It didn’t matter what authorities like Monte Irvin thought. "I’ve seen every third baseman, including Brooks Robinson and Graig Nettles," says Irvin, a Hall of Famer who was Dandridge’s teammate for one season on the Millers, and a longtime executive in the baseball commissioner’s office. "And Ray was the best ever."
None of it ever mattered, even when Irvin begged the Giants to bring his mentor up, believing to this day that they would have won the pennant in 1950 had they listened to his pleas. Dandridge would still have to ask a friend to be put on the guest list to see a game at the Polo Grounds.
Ray Dandridge didn’t get his shot for a combination of pathetic reasons including institutionalized racism in baseball that made the symbol of Jackie Robinson’s integration a joke; parochialism in Minneapolis over a popular gate attraction; and Horace Stoneham, the degenerate alcoholic and seemingly insane owner of the New York Giants who refused to either bring Dandridge up, or trade him to a team that would, where Ray could show him up.
Cleveland Indians czar Bill Veeck, father of St. Paul Saints co-owner Mike Veeck, twice tried to sign Dandridge after he’d fled the Negro Leagues. He never succeeded. "Horace Stoneham has only two occupations in life," the late Veeck wrote in his autobiography. "He owns the Giants and he drinks….he has nothing else going for him."
When the Philadelphia Phillies came to Stoneham in the early 50s to bargain for Dandridge and immediately bring him to the majors, the Giants’ owner rebuffed them. "By the end of his time in Minneapolis, Ray didn’t even want the years he deserved in the major leagues, all he wanted was one at-bat," says his widow Heneritta, living now in Palm Bay, Florida.
"After he wouldn’t trade him," Mrs. Dandridge continues, "Ray told Stoneham, ‘I just want to put my foot in the batter’s box. Just bring me up for one day, even for a cup of coffee.’ Stoneham told him no, that he was the best drawing card they had in Minneapolis. Every time Ray would run into Stoneham after he retired, at an All Star game or at some baseball function, he’d ask him the same question: ‘Couldn’t you have given me one at-bat when I was so close?’ He always gave Ray the same answer: ‘We needed you in Minneapolis.’"
Indeed, for his four-year imprisonment here, Dandridge was the fans’ and his teammates’ favorite player, the Millers’ soul and spirit. "He really was the heart of that team," remembers Tom Briere, the retired longtime sportswriter for the Minneapolis Tribune.
Right up to his death in 1992, Dandridge remained the proud, dignified, and uncomplaining Miller. "Ray didn’t like to talk about it much, but I knew it broke his heart in a way that never really healed," says his widow. "You really had to know him to understand how bad he got hurt by the way he was treated. I remember one night, it must have been the 1970s, Satchel Paige came to visit, and they stayed up all night talking in the basement. Every time I came down to check on them, I heard the words, ‘Minneapolis, Minneapolis.’"
After leaving baseball, the father of three worked for the rest of his career as a recreation director in Newark, New Jersey, then retired peacefully to be at home with his wife. As fascination with the Negro Leagues grew in the 1980s, he earned extra income by signing autographs at baseball card shows.
In 1988, I went to one of those shows at an Armenian Temple in Brooklyn. I brought along a baseball card of Dandridge from a newly printed set of Negro League stars that showed him with team Veracruz of the integrated Mexican League, where he played in 1947 and 1948 (when Bill Veeck was already on his tail to come north and immediately play for the Cleveland Indians). Though fans weren’t supposed to talk to the players, Dandridge was exchanging kind pleasantries with everybody in line, and as he looked at my card, I asked him if he regretted going to Mexico those years—when he could have signed with Veeck and avoided the nightmare of Horace Stoneham. "No," he said, through ancient eyes that bore no hint of bitterness. "There was still Jim Crow up there, while in Mexico I could go to any beach or restaurant or hotel with my family that I wanted."
He signed the card, smiled, and handed it back to me, instead of giving it to the show handlers who were supposed to keep the fans from personal contact. He didn’t mention that he’d also been a national hero in Mexico, that there were political candidates south of the border who actually sought Ray’s endorsement and put his picture on their campaign brochures. Meanwhile back in the states, Bill Veeck was receiving 20,000 obscene letters for signing Larry Doby in his stead.
Close friends knew Ray’s one real goal was always to reach the major leagues. One he confided in was Buck O’Neil, long-time Negro Leaguer and the wonderful presence who finally got the attention he deserved in Ken Burns’ documentary. When it came to not being called up, "Ray was very upset " he says. "I just wish Ray had been in another team’s farm chain. You had to be in the right place at the right time. Yeah, you had to be on time."
Unlike August Wilson’s Troy Maxson, who heaped scorn on any player who made it to the majors from the Negro Leagues, especially Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron, Ray seemed to have contempt for only one player the Giants passed over him. "It was that fellow from Jersey City," Mrs. Dandridge says, referring to Hank Thompson, who was elevated to the majors from a lower New York minor league team.
For reasons unknown outside Stoneham’s pickled brain, while proud and amiable Ray excelled as a Miller, ex-Negro Leaguer Thompson, the baddest ass in baseball (and not a very good player, either) could do no wrong as a Giant. In the late forties, Thompson shot a man dead in a bar, then left for Giants spring training. "I killed a man, and the next day I was playing ball like nothing had happened," he later said.
"With the help of the Giants, the murder charge against Thompson was dismissed, the killing ruled a justifiable homicide," writes Dan Gutman in Baseball Babylon. His troubles continued and his batting average continued to drop; Thompson became a playing alcoholic. In time, he was arrested for armed robbery, assault, and carrying a concealed weapon. Even after all that, "Horace Stoneham and baseball commissioner Ford Frick pulled some strings, and Thompson was released on probation," Gutman relates.
Making matters worse, it was conclusively proven that major league teams colluded after Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers to promote only one African American a year, at most. Still, Willie Mays or Monte Irvin sitting in the Giants’ dugout is one thing; Hank Thompson sitting in Ray Dandridge’s seat is perverse. "Some said ‘[Ray] was too old," according to pre-eminent Negro League historian Larry Lester, "while others whispered, ‘There are too many.’"
Despite being buried alive, Ray only let his anguish out publicly once. "Ray was too proud to let them know they’d hurt him so," says his widow. "Except for the day they inducted him into the Hall of Fame, in 1987."
In 1971, the men who run "organized baseball" and the National Baseball Hall of Fame, under pressure from civil rights groups, began inducting a trickle of Negro League greats. Most, like Dandridge, had never donned a major league uniform. Still, the Hall put the Negro Leaguers’ plaques in a separate gallery from the "real" major leaguers, a not-so-subtle symbol of the back of the bus that you didn’t have to be Rosa Parks to understand.
Finally, after more public outcry that seemed to leave the dithering Commissioner of Baseball at the time, Bowie Kuhn, still clueless as to what all the fuss was about, the Negro Leaguers were able to take their place next to the likes of Babe Ruth (who, incidentally, was routinely heckled by bench jockeys on opposing teams as "Nig," because of his supposed black physiognomy).
Until 1971, the Negro Leagues had existed virtually unknown to white America, despite the wonderous talents of the likes of James "Cool Papa" Bell, who stole so many bases he was called "the black Ty Cobb"; Josh Gibson, whose power led to his knighting as "the black Babe Ruth"; and Hooks Dandridge, whose comically bowed legs, it was said, made it possible for any train to pass beneath him, but no ground balls.
To whites, the only well-known Negro Leaguer was the peerless, ageless Satchel Paige. Paige was the first African American elected to the Hall of Fame for his work in the Negro Leagues. Seventeen years later, Dandridge finally got the same call. "Ray was in failing health," says Mrs. Dandridge, "and I remember him holding his plaque and reading it in the seconds before he gave his speech."
His plaque begins, "Raymond Emmett Dandridge, Negro and Mexican Leagues, 1933-1948. Flashy but smooth third baseman defensively, a brilliant fielder with powerful arm, offensively a spray hitter with outstanding bat control…"
The only hint of what should have been comes in the last phrase of the nine-line write-up: "American Association MVP in 1950 playing for Minneapolis Millers."
"Ray politely thanked the Hall of Fame for letting him in while he was still alive," Mrs. Dandridge remembers. "I recall him saying, ‘Thank you for letting me smell the roses.’ And then he paused and said, ‘But did you have to wait so long?’"
Was he talking about the Hall letting him in after so many years? "Yes," says Mrs. Dandridge. And then she pauses. "But he was talking more about Minneapolis."