FORMER JAYS MANAGER A HUMAN HISTORY BOOK ON AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS
Born in 1944, Gaston has seen change in his lifetime, but ‘a lot of things haven’t changed’
Cito Gaston and Willie Crawford were driving around Los Angeles one night, Gaston then playing for the San Diego Padres, Crawford a young star with the Dodgers, when they heard the police siren and saw the lights flashing behind them.
“We got stopped and immediately we both got out of the car,” Gaston said Tuesday.
Two Black men. More than six feet tall. In the 200-pound range. Athletic builds.
“Willie was driving and he reached for his driver’s licence. And right away, two cops pulled guns on us. They didn’t know who we were. They didn’t care.
“I was saying ‘Willie, calm down, don’t do anything stupid.’ There wasn’t anything violent. We were just two friends, two ballplayers, out for a drive.
“They pulled guns on us and all these years later that sticks with you. You don’t forget that. You never forget that, how dangerous that could have been.”
It was the late 1960s.
“That happened a lot back then. I guess it still happens a lot.”
Cito Gaston is almost a human history book of American civil rights. He was born in 1944. He had parents who stressed to him that Blacks and whites were not equal in America. His dad was in the army: He never knew if he was fighting for America or if America was fighting against him.
“My parents were very aware about the way things were,” said Gaston. “They told us, if we did things the white kids did, we’d get in trouble and they wouldn’t.
They used to tell us, ‘Stay alive and stay out of jail.’ We were cautious being out at night, they said stay away from walking through parks at night, putting yourself in a position that could be dangerous.
“Our parents educated us to stay out of trouble.”
Gaston has lived something of a charmed life in baseball. His first big league roommate was Hank Aaron. In the Atlanta organization, he played on a Texas League championship team that included Bobby Cox, who hired him for his first big league coaching job. He played with Joe Torre and Felipe Alou and Willie Stargell and Jim Fregosi and Phil Niekro and hitting masters Charlie Lau and Walt Hriniak and Rico Carty and he adds “don’t forget Bob Uecker. I always tell people I played with Bob Uecker.”
“The problems in America are the same I grew up with, except I’m allowed to go into any restaurant now and allowed to use public bathrooms and allowed to drink out of water fountains and allowed to stay in hotels — and none of that was happening when I played. So you think progress has been made and then you see what’s going on.
“A lot has changed over the years but you look around right now, and it hasn’t changed as much as I think it has. I like what I see of the marching. I like that Black people and white people are marching together, that makes me optimistic. We’ve seen a lot in the last weeks. We’ve seen too much police violence. You can’t say what’s happening is unbelievable anymore because it’s believable and we’re seeing it.
“A lot of things haven’t changed. And we have to take better care of (African-americans). We have to educate them. We need to change our approach because it’s not working. It has to come from the top and no one seems to care about that. I understand the police. I understand they have a hard job. They have to change, too.
“Some of the killings the last few years in this country are outrageous. We saw the one in Minnesota. I saw one from Texas where a guy was running away from police and they shot him in the back. He was unarmed. We can’t keep doing this.”
Gaston managed parts of 13 seasons with the Blue Jays including the back-to-back World Series wins in 1992 and 1993. Only once since then has another team won two championships in a row. That was
Joe Torre’s stacked New York Yankees lineup. They did it three times in a row. Since then, nobody. Gaston managed only one big league team, the Jays, on two different occasions. Still, he is the only Black man to win a World Series as a manager.
He never managed again in the big leagues after Toronto.
There are only two African-american managers in Major League Baseball today.
“That doesn’t upset me and it doesn’t surprise me,” said Gaston. “How many Latino managers are there? There should be more of those. If you look, it’s become way more about Latin kids playing the game than Black Americans.”
He came to the major leagues when Aaron and Willie Mays and Frank Robinson and Willie Mccovey and Lou Brock were among the bigger stars in American sport. Today the best players in baseball — Mookie Betts aside — are Mike Trout and Christian Yelich and Cody Bellinger, all of them white. None of them nationally identifiable.
“I think there should be more (Blacks) but I don’t think enough of them are playing the game. They’re looking at other sports. I understand that.”
He then goes back to America and its problems.
“I don’t know what will happen when the marching stops,” said Gaston, 76. “Hopefully, there will be change. Hopefully.”