The best book I’ve ever read,”I Had a Hammer” by Hank Aaron, contains a couple of paragraphs about something worth pointing out to those in need of a lesson in black history: the best team Aaron ever played on never stepped foot on a Major League Field.
That’s because it was an all-star team of all black players, containing three members of the 500 home run club and the first black player in the American League. This, of course, was in a day when baseball players didn’t make more money than Fortune 500 executives and when, long before the Red Sox dished out $20 million to Manny, players’ salaries were directly related to the color of their skin.
It’s a team that should remind all of us that February is an important month in sports for two reasons. It’s the month Spring Training begins, but it’s also black history month.
The team was headlined by Aaron, Willie Mays and Ernie Banks, but also included Lary Doby, the first black player in the American League and a former AL Most Valuable Player with the Cleveland Indians.
The significance of that team is worth noting as we celebrate the forty-fourth black history month and as we approach the sixtieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s first game, which will take place during the 2007 season.
That barnstorming team didn’t boycott buses in Montgomery or march on Washington with Dr. King, but what its players did, while playing for their respective big league teams, was bring the Civil Rights Movement into ballparks throughout the country, and over the radio waves, into the homes of Americans who read the sports page before the front page of their daily newspapers.
It can’t be overlooked that one reason the Baby Boomers grew up more open-minded and tolerant than their parents’ generation is that 12-year-old kids in New York grew up idolizing Mays because he could hit a ball a mile and because he could run a mile to track one down, regardless of what color his skin was.
In the ’50s and more so in the ’60s, the color of a player’s socks meant a hell of a lot more to most people in baseball than the color of his skin. This was the case with almost every owner in the game, but not for one of them: the Red Sox’ Tom Yawkey, who did more to deprive the Sox of winning than any Curse did, and who probably doesn’t deserve to have a street named after him.
Yawkey intentionally botched a chance to sign Robinson before Branch Rickey and the Dodgers did, and didn’t integrate the Olde Towne Team until 1958, when the Sox called Pumpsie Green up from the minors. It wasn’t until the ’70s and Jim Rice when the Sox finally caught up with the rest of baseball and made common sense decisions to acquire the best players in the game.
But what was happening while they caught up? The interesting thing is that as god-awful as the Red Sox were in the ’50s and ’60s, they would have been a lot worse if they had had the misfortune of playing in the National League, where black players dominated the most.
Here in New England, we pride ourselves on being the most knowledgeable fans in the game; fans whose knowledge of history helps them to better understand and analyze every minute of every sporting event.
Yankee fans, whose great teams in the ’60s were captained by a black catcher named Elston Howard, are exempt from this particular lesson, but here’s a trivia question for the Sox fans out there who pride themselves on knowing exactly who got what hit to drive in who in what inning of every game. The answers are relatively easy to get for baseball junkies: name the player who: a) scored the tying run in Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS; b) drove in the winning run in that game and in the next one; c) recorded the final out in Game 7 of that series, d) won Game 3 of the World Series and e) won the World Series MVP award.
If you’re a devout Sox fan, you already know the answers, but here they are: a) Dave Roberts; b) David Ortiz; c) Pokie Reese; d) Pedro Martinez; and e) Manny Ramirez. You already knew all that.
But just think, as the pitchers and catchers start to take their equipment out of their bags and we begin to scrutinize every pitch thrown from until October, that 60 years ago, none of those guys would have been allowed to play in the big leagues. Now though, thanks to the work that Hammerin Hank’ and his barnstorming teammates did a generation ago, they’re not black baseball players. They’re just baseball players.
And they’re damn good ones at that.
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