America: Boom, Bust, and Baseball Guide: Everybody’s Game, Making the National Pastime Truly National
JAN 27, 2010
Josh Gibson is said to have hit over 800 career home runs; one of them was so high and deep that it disappeared into the clouds. The next day, the same two teams were playing in a different city. A baseball fell out of the sky, right smack into an outfielder’s glove. The umpire yelled: “You’re out, Gibson! Yesterday!”
Josh Gibson is said to have hit over 800 career home runs; one of them was so high and deep that it disappeared into the clouds. The next day, the same two teams were playing in a different city. A baseball fell out of the sky, right smack into an outfielder’s glove. The umpire yelled: “You’re out, Gibson! Yesterday!”
He was called “the black Babe Ruth” during his 1930-1946 ball-playing career, though many baseball fans have insisted Babe Ruth was actually “the white Josh Gibson.” But there is no Josh Gibson rookie card. Like his fellow ballplayers in the segregated Negro Leagues, Gibson’s deeds live only in the memories of those who saw him play. America’s national pastime was not yet everybody’s game.
Following the end of World War II, the perception of race changed enormously. The hypocrisy of fighting a racist regime abroad while practicing segregation at home became apparent, particularly when victory belonged to both black and white soldiers. One protester’s sign at Yankee stadium read: “If we are able to stop bullets, why not balls?” As a cultural symbol of America, baseball fell under the scrutiny of the newly galvanized civil rights movement. Blacks had been barred from playing major league baseball since the 1880s, and within a decade the establishment of the Negro Leagues officially turned the national pastime into a segregated institution.
In 1945, a city councillor named Isadore Muchnick gave the Boston Red Sox the chance to be the first integrated team in baseball. At the time, the Sox needed a permit to play on Sundays. This permit required a unanimous vote from the Boston City Council. Muchnick threatened to withhold his ballot unless the club agreed to consider some promising Negro League ballplayers. Tom Yawkey, the owner of the Red Sox, conceded-losing Sunday doubleheaders would deal a severe financial blow to the clubhouse. The first major league tryouts for black players were held at Fenway Park on April 16, 1945. One of the hopefuls was a young army lieutenant named Jackie Robinson.
Robinson was skeptical as he entered Fenway Park. Nine months prior, he narrowly avoided a court-martial when he refused to move to the back of an army bus. He knew there were two challenges to face at Fenway Park: one in the diamond and one in the clubhouse. The first was easy for the talented young athlete; the second would prove impossible. Years later, Joe Cronin, then manager of the Red Sox, reflected on the tryout:
“We didn’t sign players off tryouts in those days to play in the big leagues. I was in no position to offer them a job….The general manager did the hiring and there was an unwritten rule at that time against hiring black players. I was just the manager. Robinson turned out to be a great player. But no feeling existed about it. We just accepted things the way they were.”
Some say Cronin and Eddie Collins, the general manager, were not even watching. Others say a Red Sox official yelled a racial epithet at Robinson as he left the field. Eighteen months later, the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson, and together they made history. Robinson wasn’t the only one who got away. The Red Sox farm team in Birmingham, the Barons, caught wind that the local Negro League team was fielding a superstar. Larry Woodall, a scout, flew down from Boston to check out a supposed dynamo. After three days of rain, Woodall lost his patience and departed. The center fielder he left back in Birmingham, Willie Mays, turned out to be one of the greatest players of all time.
One by one, all of the other major league teams were integrating. By 1957, the Red Sox and Boston had acquired a reputation for hostility to blacks. This was in dramatic contrast to the nineteenth century, when Boston had led the abolitionist movement and the emergence of a small black middle class in the Beacon Hill neighborhood gave emancipated slaves around the country hope for a new, comfortable life in Boston. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, the struggle for a foothold turned fierce for two marginalized groups: African-Americans and the immigrant Irish population. Boston’s Yankee ruling class-the abolitionist zealots-was toppled in 1905, when the first Irish mayor of Boston was elected. The antagonism between black and Irish Bostonians became institutional.
In 1959, the Red Sox clubhouse experienced a changing of the guard when Eddie Collins passed away and Joe Cronin left the Red Sox to become president of the American League. The path was clear for change to come to Fenway Park. That change came in the form of a utility infielder named Elijah “Pumpsie” Green. When Green stepped up to the plate at Fenway for the first time on July 21, 1959, the Red Sox became the last team to integrate. Jackie Robinson was already three years retired. Green recalled the day.
“I went and got my bat, and on my way up to home plate, the whole stands, blacks and whites, they stand up and give me a standing ovation. A standing ovation, my first time up! And the umpire said, ‘Good luck, Pumpsie.’ That was it…that was some kind of breaking in.”
Green’s transition to the major leagues was not easy. He was a good player, but not a superstar like Robinson or Mays. He experienced segregation at Sox spring training in Florida, where he was housed seventeen miles away from the rest of the team in the closest hotel that accepted blacks.
Green was also excluded from team bonding, as no bar in the area would serve him. Even on an integrated team, Green was often left out at pre-game warm-ups. One player, however, made a point to warm up with Green before every game-Ted Williams.
Green’s entrance into Fenway signaled that the national pastime was now officially national. Managers nationwide were beginning to make decisions based on good baseball, not prejudice, a shift Ted Williams expressed in his Hall of Fame induction speech in 1966:
“Baseball gives every American a chance to excel. Not just to be as good as anybody else, but to be better. This is the name of the game. I hope some day Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson will be voted into the Hall of Fame as symbols of the great Negro players who are not here only because they weren’t given the chance.”
SOURCES:
Bryant, Howard, Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002.
Ostler, Scott. “Green looks back on breaking barrier 50 years ago.” San Francisco Chronicle 21 July 2009. Online. Riley, Dan, ed. The Red Sox Reader. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991
Baseball. Dir: Ken Burns. Florentine Films, 1994.
“The Boston Red Sox and Racism.” Juan Williams. Morning Edition. National Public Radio. 11 October 2002. Online.
“Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball.” Bob Edwards. Morning Edition. National Public Radio. 10 October 2002. Online.
“Ted Williams, Hall of Famer.” mlb.com. 29 September 2009. Online.
