Gammons: Not long after Jackie Robinson changed the world, Larry Doby changed the American League
By Peter Gammons Jun 30, 2021 49
In mid-April, the day before Major League Baseball celebrated the 74th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking through the grim, historic lines of segregation in what was called “the national pastime,” Larry Doby Jr. and C.C. Sabathia were at Hinchcliffe Stadium in Paterson, N.J. for the project to restore the historic stadium.
They were there with people like Willie Randolph, Harold Reynolds and Omar Minaya, significant figures pushing for awareness of history and civil rights in a sport whose players, 74 years on, are roughly 8 percent Black, a significantly lower percentage than in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Doby-Sabathia relationship was especially significant.
Robinson was one of the most important Americans of the 20th century; when he took the field on that April 15 day it was a year before the U.S. military was integrated, seven years before Brown vs. the Board of Education, 17 years before the Voting Rights Act.
Yet on July 5, relatively few fans will stop to recognize the 74th anniversary of the integration of the American League, when 23-year-old Larry Doby, himself a son of Paterson, pinch hit in the seventh inning of a game at Chicago’s Comiskey Park.
Two days earlier, Bill Veeck, who in 1946 bought the Cleveland Indians, had worked out a deal to acquire Doby, the Newark Eagles’ second baseman. After the first game of an Eagles doubleheader on July 3, Doby was escorted to a train by Louis Jones, who worked for Veeck, and rode to Chicago. Jones did not escort him to the downtown Del Prado, where the Indians stayed; he was taken to the largely black DuSable Hotel on the South Side, near Comiskey Park. It would be the “separate but equal” norm for years, which Doby was compelled to follow, in spring training and in several American League cities.
The next morning, Doby went to the park. “He wasn’t entirely sure (player-manager) Lou Boudreau was expecting him,” says Doby Jr. “But Boudreau walked him around the clubhouse and introduced him to everyone.” Doby Sr. later recalled that as he walked down the line reaching out with his hand, most were cold-fish handshakes; four players refused to shake his hand; two turned their backs on him. When the team went outside, Joe Gordon asked him to play catch, his first real personal connection. Gordon was the star second baseman on his way to Cooperstown; Doby was also a second baseman. In time they became close friends.
Doby pinch hit in the seventh inning and struck out, and for the rest of the season played in 29 games, had 33 plate appearances, and began his transition to the outfield.
Just over a year after Doby’s uneasy introduction to his teammates, the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer featured a picture of Indians pitcher Steve Gromek embracing Doby, after Doby’s third-inning homer off Johnny Sain provided the winning run of a 2-1 victory that put the Indians within one win of a World Series, in front of a Municipal Stadium crowd of 81,897.
Gromek and Doby’s famous embrace. (Getty Images)
The picture, in the words of the New York Times’ Richard Goldstein, “was a signature moment in the integration of Major League Baseball.”
Doby’s home run was the first by a Black player in World Series history. Doby and Satchel Paige soon were the first two Black players to receive World Series rings. Their presence spanned generations of the game’s history in a city that made it possible.
The Dodgers’ Branch Rickey was the most appropriate engineer for the plan, Robinson the fierce, great and monumental man and Brooklyn the right place at the right time. So, too, Veeck was the right American League owner, Doby the right man and Cleveland the right city to change that league — and hence baseball. Both leagues had been integrated, even if it would be years before the Yankees, Phillies, Tigers and Red Sox had a Black player. The New York Times editorialized, back in 1987, “In glorifying those who are first, the second is often forgotten … Larry Doby integrated all those American League ballparks where Jackie Robinson never appeared.”
The Indians hadn’t won the World Series since 1920. They have not won one since that 1948 title. Soon they will relinquish the name “Indians.” But the franchise that Veeck restored was peaking, and did so partly because of its inclusivity; in 1954 Cleveland had the second-highest winning percentage in MLB history (111-43, .721) with as many Black players — four — as many as there were American League teams with a single Black player.
“He (Jackie Robinson) was first,” Doby later said in Jet Magazine, “but the crap I took was just as bad. Nobody said, ‘we’re gonna be nice to the second Black.” In 1997, when the All-Star Game was played in Cleveland, Robinson’s 50th anniversary was duly celebrated, Doby’s 50th anniversary treated more as a local story.
Doby Jr. was born 12 years later after his father’s debut, but he understands much about one of his father’s lasting traits, what Fay Vincent called “dignity.” He knows his father was taunted, that an opposing infielder spat on him. But Larry Doby, pioneer, always told his son that he “never was booed” during his time in Cleveland, a bustling, industrial boomtown with a diverse history, an important stop on the Underground Railroad — code-named “Station Hope” — because Ohio was contiguous to two large slave states (Virginia and Kentucky) and only 250 miles from Canada.
Sabathia arrived in Cleveland in 2001, when he was a 20-year-old from California. He pitched eight years for the Indians, and while he pitched longer and won more games for the Yankees en route to tying Bob Gibson as the second-winningest Black pitcher (behind Ferguson Jenkins), he still feels “Cleveland is a part of me. I used to hear a lot of stories about what Larry Doby meant and shared the pride the city had in his breaking the barrier. I got to know Bob Feller, and loved to hear his stories about playing with Satchel Paige, and barnstorming with him.”
Sabathia is a part of the tradition that Doby Sr. began when he walked into that Comiskey Park clubhouse 74 years ago. He has been a kind, socially active leader for years, was a major voice in baseball as players engaged with the Black Lives Matter movement, and is a key figure now in retirement in the Players Alliance, which has emerged as an important force of service and conscience. His son Carsten is not only an exceptional high school baseball player but such an exemplary student that he has been actively recruited by Harvard, among many other colleges.
“While Jackie obviously is one of the most important figures in history, I hope people realize what others like Larry Doby have done,” says Sabathia. “I want people to understand that I am proud of my time in Cleveland.”
That city was the home of Jesse Owens. In 1975, it was home to the first Black manager, Frank Robinson. It is the effective home of LeBron James, whose I Promise program in Akron is an American model. The first of five times Cleveland was honored as an “All-American City” by the National Civic League was 1949, months after Veeck, Doby, Paige, Gordon, Bob Lemon and the Indians became the first integrated team to win the World Series.
Not only did Doby not get booed in Cleveland when he and Paige changed the American League, but the 2.62 million fans they drew in 1948 held up as the all-time single-season attendance record for 14 years. The Yankees did not pass 2.62 million until 1980.
In that 1947 rookie season there were numerous racist incidents. One teammate refused to loan Doby his first base mitt when Doby needed work there. He heard the racist catcalls from the stands in many cities. His son asked him about what he faced, and Larry Jr. says “he didn’t like to talk about them. He’d say, ‘today is today, there is no need to re-live some of the past,’” says Junior.
Doby was born in South Carolina and attended segregated schools as a child. His father drowned when he was young, and when he was 14, he moved to Paterson, New Jersey. He was an extraordinary athlete at Paterson’s Eastside High School, but when his team won the state football championship and was invited to play in Florida, the promoters would not allow Doby to come. The Eastside players voted to forgo the trip.
Like Robinson, Doby experienced bigotry and discrimination during his military service in World War II. Jackie was disciplined for refusing to sit at the back of a military bus. After moving on to the Negro Leagues, Doby was drafted into the Navy and was sent to the Great Lakes Naval Station in Chicago. When he got off the bus, the black and white troops were immediately separated. Jackie and Larry were prepared to fight for their country, but the military remained mired in Jim Crow.
When Doby returned home, he joined the Newark Eagles in 1946, along with Monte Irvin. They won the Negro League World Series over Paige and the vaunted Kansas City Monarchs.
Veeck had been owner of the Triple-A Milwaukee Brewers, and as far back as 1942 he proposed that baseball integrate, an idea that initially went nowhere. He looked into buying the Phillies, and to a lesser extent the Boston Braves, and made it clear that he would sign star players out of the Negro leagues. Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis would not allow Veeck into the owners club; Landis’ history of racism is the reason his name has now been removed from the World Series Trophy. In 1946, Veeck purchased the Indians. At that time, the Indians had no radio rights playing in a league with the Yankees, whose broadcast revenues dwarfed all teams outside of New York.
Cleveland, according to the 1950 census, was the seventh-largest city in the U.S., smaller than Baltimore or Detroit, larger than Washington or Boston. Veeck immediately got a radio deal. He stopped playing half the Indians’ games in League Park, with its 22,000 seats, and played all games in Municipal Stadium, which could seat more than 80,000.
All through that 1946 season, Branch Rickey was helping Robinson prepare to break the barrier. In April 1945, Happy Chandler replaced Landis as Commissioner; Chandler not only did not oppose integration, he later was willing to take owner, fan, politician and player abuse for accepting Robinson. Seven weeks after Robinson’s debut, Veeck brought Doby to the team and integrated the American League, regardless of objections, and understanding that immediate excellence would be difficult.
The vitriol came from all corners, including those who wanted to disparage Doby’s playing ability. Rogers Hornsby saw Doby play one game, and said, “Bill Veeck did the Negro race no favor when he signed Larry Doby to a Cleveland contract. If Veeck wanted to demonstrate that the Negro has no place in major-league baseball, he could have used no subtler means to establish the point. If (Doby) were white, he wouldn’t be considered good enough to play with a semi-pro club.”
Doby hit .156 that half-season of 1947. He and Robinson did talk to one another. Jackie was Rookie of the Year, and the other National League teams, other than the Phillies, integrated soon after. Of the first seven National League Rookies of the Year, six were Black. From 1947 through 1965, NL rookies of the year included Willie Mays, Frank Robinson, Orlando Cepeda, Willie McCovey, Billy Williams and Dick Allen. In 1966, the American League finally had its first Black Rookie of the Year, Chicago’s Tommy Agee.
Hornsby, and many others, were blinded by the lack of light. Doby’s preparation for the major leagues was a one-day train ride to Chicago. With a winter to train and find his bearings and a spring training culminating in a monster home run, Doby was ready for 1948. On July 7, virtually one year from Doby’s signing, Paige was signed by Veeck at the age of 42. Of course, there were skeptics. Sporting News publisher C.C. Johnson Spink wrote “Veeck has gone too far in his quest for publicity. If Paige were white, he wouldn’t have drawn a thought from Veeck.”
Well, on the morning of Oct. 4, 1948, the Indians found themselves tied with the Boston Red Sox and had to go to Fenway Park to play a 155th game. Fortunately for the Indians, Boston manager Joe McCarthy pitched 37-year-old swingman Denny Galehouse against 20-game winner Gene Bearden. Boudreau homered in the first inning, and the Indians breezed to an 8-3 win and prepared to play the Braves in the World Series. Galehouse pitched two more innings in the major leagues in 1949, and was released.
That Indians team was very good. It had a run differential of 272, best of any team in the 154-game era. Cleveland that year had six future Hall of Famers — Feller, Lemon, Boudreau, Gordon, Doby, and Paige. But, more important, in the New York Era, Veeck found a way to beat the Yankees, and the signings of Doby and Paige were what made it possible.
First, consider that from 1947 through 1959, the Yankees only failed to get to the World Series twice, each time because of Cleveland, in 1948 and 1954. The Yankees won 103 games in ’54 and finished eight games behind the Indians.
Second, consider the power of New York. The Cardinals beat Boston in the 1946 and 1967 World Series. In between, either the Yankees, Giants or Dodgers won pennants and played in the World Series, whether the franchises called the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Los Angeles or San Francisco home.
If Spink later missed it, Paige was 6-1, with a 2.48 ERA for those ’48 Indians. His first start, July 21, drew 66,245 fans. In other starts he drew 68,248, 72,464, 73,484 and, on Aug. 20, when he threw a crucial three-hit shutout, 78,382.
The next two seasons, Doby made the All-Star team, the first of six midsummer appearances. In the 1950 All-Star Game, Doby started in center field between Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams. Many years later, when Williams was inducted into the Hall of Fame, he insisted that Negro League stars should be enshrined in Cooperstown.
Doby was runner-up for MVP in 1954. Half the American League teams — the Yankees, Senators, Tigers and Red Sox — still hadn’t integrated entering that season. Even in the 1950s, in his prime, Doby still endured taunting and racial threats, and faced the prospect of physical harm on the field as well. As columnist Sam Lacy of the Baltimore Afro-American wrote in 1952, “Statistics show that eight colored players in the two major leagues were hit by pitches a total of 68 times during the 1951 season, an average of 8 ½ per man. No other player was hit as many as eight times in the season.”
But Doby grew close to many of his teammates, some of whom would not stand for any ill-treatment of him.
During a spring training in Tuscon in the early fifties, Doby and star third baseman Al Rosen hailed a cab after a game. The cab driver told Rosen, “I can take you, but I can’t take him.”
Rosen said, “what if I told you I’m Jewish?”
The cabbie replied, “then I can’t take you, either.”
Rosen got out of the cab, approached the cabbie, punched him in the nose and said, “I don’t think I want to ride in this cab, anyway.”
As time wore on, acceptance and respect became widespread. After he retired in 1959, in Cleveland, there was talk that Doby would become baseball’s first Black manager, but Indians management in 1975 decided to make Frank Robinson that pioneer. Come 1978, Veeck was in his third year owning the White Sox, and when he fired Bob Lemon, he replaced him with Doby.
In a corresponding move, the White Sox brought their Double-A manager up to be on Doby’s coaching staff. His name? Tony La Russa. “He was a great man,” La Russa reflected earlier this year. “He was competitive, and he had a proud, confident streak to him. He clearly was a man who stood for something. He was really good to and for me at that point of my career. He communicated really well with the players, he communicated generously with me. He’d take me to dinner, we talked about a lot of things, and I was fortunate to learn how much there was to the person. I think about people who should be in the Hall of Fame or who they were and what they left others, and I think of Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby and Felipe Alou.”
The Doby White Sox fared no better than the Lemon White Sox, except that after being fired, Lemon replaced Billy Martin with the Yankees. Lemon’s Yankees beat the Red Sox in their 163rd game and went on to win the 1978 World Series.
Doby worked one additional year in the Chicago front office after being replaced as manager; then Veeck sold the team to the Jerry Reinsdorf-Eddie Einhorn group, and Doby left. He worked in basketball, in the private sector and as a special assistant to American League President Gene Budig in 1995. In 1993, he was elected to the Hall of Fame.
Jackie Robinson changed baseball, he changed America. But so did Larry Doby, and he did it with just a train ride to the American League and little idea who those new Indians teammates were when he walked around the Comiskey Park visiting clubhouse that July 5, 1947.
This coming July 5, I will look toward a picture of Larry Doby on a wall and raise a glass to his face, and his heart. I will prop “Veeck as in Wreck” up on a table, and toast it. I will play Michael Stanley’s “This Is My Town” and think about Doby and Herb Score, Lemon and Sabathia. As a kid who grew up hearing New Englanders ask “where were you when you heard Denny Galehouse was starting?”
I shall raise a glass that he did, and that the 1948 Indians beat the Red Sox and changed baseball, 12 years before the Red Sox finally gave in to the notion that all men are created equal.
The Cleveland Indians play in St. Petersburg that night, hopefully with all their players wearing 14. Perhaps every player in both leagues should wear 14 that day. But all of us who care about the game can remember Doby, and when I see Carsten Sabathia preparing for the Area Code Games this summer, I’ll think that he, like so many others, is standing in a line started by Larry Doby.
(Photo of Larry Doby Jr. with the statue of his father outside Cleveland’s Progressive Field: Frank Jansky / Icon Sportswire / Corbis / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
