Charley Pride vs. Casey Stengel

[Edgy MD]

Biographical sketch of the great singer Charley Pride includes this passage, which impugns Casey Stengel by implication, if not by name. (It certainly could have been a minor league manager who gave CP the brushoff.)

By 1960, Pride left semi-professional baseball and the American Negro League to play for a C-team. He also had a chance to try out for the Angels, but he was rejected. Pride tried for the last time to play for the New York Mets. Charley bought six bats and engraved his name in them. He sent the bats along with a telegram to the Mets camp at St. Petersburg. The manager didn�t like Pride because he thought Charley Pride was trying to fit in with the country people. So Charley sent a telegram saying �I�m not a black man singing white man music, I am an American singing American music. I worked out those problem years ago, and everybody else will have to work their way out of it too.� As a result, the manager told the other players if they wanted to see Charley Pride tryout, they would have to take Pride out to a pasture because he wasn�t running a tryout camp. That�s what ended Charley Pride�s baseball career.

A little sauce is added to this tale in that, twenty-four (or so) years later, the Mets drafted Charley's nephew Curtis in the 10th round of the 1986 amateur draft. He would toil for the Mets for a half dozen years before walking away as a minor league free agent, eventually signing with Expos, fashioning an 11-year career, and becoming the first deaf player in the majors since World War II.

What the bottom line adds up to is that, despite ample opportunity over the years, the Mets have never taken the field with Pride.

[fimg=200]http://hottytoddy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Charley-Pride-The-Happiness-Of-524093-300x300.jpg[/fimg] [fimg=300]http://www.tradingcarddb.com/Images/Cards/Baseball/75484/75484-24Fr.jpg[/fimg]

[Frayed Knot]

Never knew of the Pride-Pride relationship.

Safe to say that Casey, along with many of his era, wasn't the most progressive guy in the world.
He supposedly said, upon first taking a look at Elston Howard; 'They finally get me one and they got me the one who can't run'.

What I remember about Curtis was a piece someone did on him shortly after he first made the majors with Montreal. Coming, as it did, during the Mets bleach/firecracker era, the piece went right for the low-hanging fruit with: 'this is the guy the Mets chose NOT to keep', as if Pride's absence was the source of their problems.

[G-Fafif]

Pride would set aside his regrets about his missed chance to play for the new California club with the release a decade later of his biggest hit, "Kiss An Angel Good Morning," implicitly dedicated to Leroy Stanton, an American playing the American game.

But I am having a hard time believing Casey Stengel took time out from his busy schedule of inventing the Mets to pass that much judgment on Charley's fitting-in proclivities.

[Edgy MD]

Frayed Knot wrote: Never knew of the Pride-Pride relationship.

And in full disclosure, though I wondered if I'd maybe heard this before, my only source on that factoid is the IMDB, which has steered me wrong in the past.

G-Fafif wrote: But I am having a hard time believing Casey Stengel took time out from his busy schedule of inventing the Mets to pass that much judgment on Charley's fitting-in proclivities.

The report is rife with ambiguity, at least from the Mets' side � the year, the names, are all carefully dodged. From Pride's side, the bats and the quotes are all vividly detailed.

The year is important, because we fast forward from 1960 to an ambiguous tryout with the Angels to a point in time where Pride is established enough as a singer that the manager knows the nature of his act and considers a tryout to be a publicity stunt, which seems to push this past Casey Stengel's tenure and past the point where his age would no longer allow a workout with the Mets to be a viable audition, as he'd have been sliding into his late 20s by then and away from the game for five years or so.

[G-Fafif]

I thought I recalled his proto-Garth Brooks shtick with the Brewers. Apparently it did occur.

http://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2008/june/charley-pride-turns-70-and-�-galdurnit-�-hes-still-got-something?single=1

I know all this because I�m a fan. My parents introduced me to his music when I was a kid. I also know Pride�s accomplishments because I�m standing next to him on a practice field at the Texas Rangers� spring training facility in Surprise, Arizona, and Pride, outfitted in a full Rangers uniform, is telling it to me�again. He gave me the same speech two weeks ago on the phone, while he was at the airport waiting to board a flight to Ireland. At this point in his life, Pride is his own biographer, telling his story because no one else will. But on this glorious February morning, he�s just a ballplayer, same as he was when he left the cotton fields of Sledge, Mississippi, as a teenager, bound for the Negro Leagues and later, he imagined, history. It didn�t work out that way. The pitcher and switch-hitting outfielder made it as far as spring training with the expansion Los Angeles Angels in 1961. "But at least I got there," he says. "I didn�t stay, but galdurnit, I had something." These days, he contents himself with yearly stops at spring training. Pride began doing this in the early 1970s with the Milwaukee Brewers, on the recommendation of singer Roy Clark, who used to train with the Baltimore Orioles. A couple of years later, the Rangers invited him to start working out with their squad instead, and three decades later, he still makes the trip every February. This is his vacation, but he says, "I work my can off." He�ll spend the next week or two mostly on his own, then a couple of weeks mixing it up with the team. For a long time, Pride could have passed for a player. Now, though he�s tall and fit, albeit a bit thicker in the middle than he used to be, someone�s more likely to mistake him for manager Ron Washington. And in Surprise, the players are still respectful to a fault, but his presence isn�t as big of a deal as it once was. A couple of the black players have gravitated to Pride, trading shoulder bumps with him to and from the clubhouse. Kevin Mench stops to talk to him, but he�s been around forever. Michael Young, the dutiful face of the franchise, slows down for a moment to ask Pride about his morning workout. That�s about it. Pride is older than most of their fathers. He�s older than many of their grandfathers.

[G-Fafif]

Em-dashes in URL make above link a little screwy. Google Charley Pride Brewers for full article.

[MFS62]

The fact that the MFYs were the next-to-last major league team to integrate was maybe the primary reason I couldn't root for them when my team left Brooklyn.

Later

[Edgy MD]

It's been discussed before, but they weren't the next-to-last team to integrate. The Tigers were.

[dinosaur jesus]

That story makes no damn sense. Charley Pride was 26 and hadn't played professional baseball since 1960--seven innings pitched in class C. He might have thought of himself as a singer by then, but he hadn't recorded anything. There was no reason Casey or anyone else in the organization would ever have heard of him, let alone had an opinion about his music. (His first record was released in 1966, and it was another two years before his record label let on that he was black.) And why in the world would he send six monogrammed bats ahead of him? That's some serious bravado. (His baseball nickname was Turkey, which might be a clue.) It's also just begging to be written off as a nut.

I assume there's a real story there, but it got garbled somewhere along the line. It would be interesting to know what really happened.

[Edgy MD]

Yeah, no, like I said before, the account just doesn't add up. It may have happened, but it's hard to accept that it quite happened as described.

And in fairness, I'm the one who dragged Casey's name into it. The article doesn't mention who the "Mets manager" who stonewalled him was.

Also worth noting: it was about five decades ago, and Pride has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I share this article not as a definitive chunk of history, but as a curious chapter lacking in clear facts, that maybe we can bring some further facts to.

But mercy, I don't know how much of it is meant in the recount, or how much of it was originally meant (if this quote has any veracity at all), but there's some serious malice one can infer from "they would have to take Pride out to a pasture."

[MFS62]

Edgy MD wrote: It's been discussed before, but they weren't the next-to-last team to integrate. The Tigers were.

Just curious, who was the Tiger and how much sooner was he added than Elston Howard?
Whether they were last, next to last or somewhat earlier, they were still too late for me.

Later

[Edgy MD]

You got that backwards. The Tiger was added later.

Player	Team	Date
William Edward White	Providence Grays, NL	June 21, 1879
Moses Fleetwood Walker	Toledo Blue Stockings, AA	May 1, 1884
Jackie Robinson	Brooklyn Dodgers, NL	15-Apr-47
Larry Doby	Cleveland Indians, AL	5-Jul-47
Hank Thompson	St. Louis Browns, AL	17-Jul-47
Monte Irvin	New York Giants, NL	8-Jul-49
Hank Thompson	New York Giants, NL	8-Jul-49
Sam Jethroe	Boston Braves, NL	18-Apr-50
Minnie Mi�oso	Chicago White Sox, AL	1-May-51
Bob Trice	Philadelphia Athletics, AL	13-Sep-53
Ernie Banks	Chicago Cubs, NL	17-Sep-53
Curt Roberts	Pittsburgh Pirates, NL	13-Apr-54
Tom Alston	St. Louis Cardinals, NL	13-Apr-54
Nino Escalera	Cincinnati Reds, NL	17-Apr-54
Chuck Harmon	Cincinnati Reds, NL	17-Apr-54
Carlos Paula	Washington Senators, AL	6-Sep-54
Elston Howard	New York Yankees, AL	14-Apr-55
John Kennedy	Philadelphia Phillies, NL	22-Apr-57
Ozzie Virgil, Sr.	Detroit Tigers, AL	6-Jun-58
Pumpsie Green	Boston Red Sox, AL	21-Jul-59

There's some controversy over who the first African-American to debut for the Pirates was.

[G-Fafif]

Pride knocked off Stengel in an upset and plays Georgia Southern Saturday.

[MFS62]

Thanks Edgy.

Later