A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred by George Will Page B

the South Side of Saturnino Orestes Armas Arrieta Minoso. Minnie Minoso, as he was known, was a Cuban who integrated Chicago baseball two years before Banks got to Wrigley Field. Banks came from the Monarchs in September 1953. Second baseman Gene Baker, also an African American, came to the Cubs three dayslater. They signed Baker partly because he was a gifted player, but also because in those days players slept two to a room on the road and it was assumed that a black player had to have a black roommate.
    At that time there was, it is important to remember, uneasiness all around. When Banks had left the army, Abe Saperstein, the owner of the Harlem Globetrotters, had asked him to play with the team in a game.Banks said that when Saperstein invited him to sit down and talk about the opportunity, “I’d never sat down next to a white man, and I wasn’t sure what to do.” Different African Americans had different coping strategies for navigating the changing social terrain. Frank Robinson, arriving in the big leagues with the Cincinnati Reds shortly after Banks came to the Cubs, brought a prickly ferocity that served him well. Banks’s unshakable, even preternatural, amiability served him even better.
    Banks’s signature words as a professional athlete were: “It’s a beautiful day, let’s play two!” But when he was a child in Dallas, his father had to bribe him with pocket change to get him to play catch. At Booker T. Washington High School in that city’s segregated school system, Banks was a football, basketball, soccer, and track star. In that time and place, however, athletic proficiency was not, for an African American, a reliable ticket to a professional career. So at age seventeen, Banks began playing baseball with an African American barnstorming team that paid him fifteen dollars a game. One of the greatest black players, Cool Papa Bell, spotted Banks and signed him for theMonarchs. Banks returned to them after being drafted into two years of service in the army, and in the summer of 1953, when Banks was twenty-two, the Cubs signed him and soon brought him to the North Side.
    He had 35 at bats in 10 games, with 11 hits, 2 of them home runs. In 1954, he played in all 154 games and hit 19 home runs. Then came one of the most remarkable six years of slugging in major league history. His home run totals were:
1955 44
1956 28
1957 43
1958 47
1959 45
1960 41
    His major league contemporaries in the second half of the 1950s included future Hall of Famers Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Frank Robinson, and Duke Snider. Snider hit more home runs in the 1950s than anyone else in either league. In the second half of the decade, however, Banks hit more home runs than any of them. In 1955, the year he hit a record five grand slams, he switched to a lighter, thin-handled bat and changed the idea of what a shortstop could do at the plate.
    Since the 1917 retirement of the Pirates’ Honus Wagner, the greatest shortstop in baseball history, potent hitters had rarely played that position. Before Banks, no NationalLeague shortstop had hit even 25 home runs in a season. The NL shortstop home run record was 23, by the Giants’ Alvin Dark in 1953. Only one American League shortstop, Vern Stephens of the Red Sox, a right-handed hitter taking aim at Fenway Park’s Green Monster wall down the short (310 feet) left-field foul line, had hit more: 29 in 1948, 39 in 1949, and 30 in 1950.
    Then along came Banks, who, like Henry Aaron ninety miles north, used extraordinarily strong wrists to whip a light, thin-handled bat through the strike zone. “His wrists,”said a teammate, “go right up to his armpits.” Although in 1961 Banks would be moved to first base and would play more games at that position than at shortstop, he blazed the path for slugging shortstops like Cal Ripken and Alex Rodriguez. What is especially remarkable is that Banks did this when it did not make much sense for pitchers to