Beacon Broadside

Jackie Robinson's Red Sox Tryout

Baseball legend Jackie Robinson was born on this day in 1919. In honor of his birthday, we share this excerpt from Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston by sports journalist and author Howard Bryant. Bryant is also the author of The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron. 

Jackie Robinson was already fatalistic about the tryout. He didn’t believe the Red Sox were serious about integration and wasn’t especially thrilled about his own situation. He had only played for the Negro League’s Kansas City Monarchs for a few weeks and was already disappointed by the league’s air of gambling and disorganization, the very type of lowbrow behavior that made white baseball people hesitant about allowing blacks into the big leagues. Robinson was fastidious in his adherence to his own personal code, and seeing the chaos of the Negro leagues only frustrated him further. It was the stereotypes of corruption and anarchy that not only plagued black baseball, thought historian Edmund G. White, but also gave whites a secure excuse to keep blacks out of the major leagues:

When the Negro Leagues had come within the consciousness of those within organized baseball, they had been seen as a reverse mirror image. If Organized baseball was free from gambling and corruption, the Negro Leagues were run by racketeers. If Organized baseball was premised on the roster stability of the reserve clause, the Negro Leagues were the province of contract jumpers. If Organized baseball was structured around the permanent franchise cities and regular schedules, the Negro Leagues were a kaleidoscope of changing franchises and whimsical scheduling. If Organized baseball was a clean, wholesome, upwardly mobile sport, Negro League games were the scenes of rowdy, disorderly, vulgar behavior. By being the opposite of Organized baseball’s idealized image, the Negro Leagues served as their own justification for the exclusion of blacks from the major leagues. They appeared to demonstrate just how “contaminated” major league baseball would become if blacks were allowed to play it.

When Robinson arrived in Boston, the tryout was delayed for two more days in the wake of Franklin Roosevelt’s death. He told Smith of his disappointment during the days of delay. “Listen, Smith, it really burns me up to come fifteen hundred miles for them to give me the runaround.”

Nearly fifty-five years after Cap Anson engineered the removal of the last black major leaguers in the late nineteenth century, the tryout finally took place at Fenway Park at eleven on the morning of April 16, 1945. Two above-average Negro leaguers, Sam Jethroe and Marvin Williams, joined Jackie Robinson. The Red Sox players were white and were mostly minor league pitchers. Starting the season the following day in New York, the big league roster was given the day off by Joe Cronin. The routine was mundane. The players fielded, threw, and took batting practice. Hugh Duffy, the former great Red Sox out- fielder, ran the tryout and took notes on index cards. Cronin sat, according to one account, “stone-faced.” Another depicted Cronin barely watching at all. Muchnick marveled at the hitting ability of Robinson, whose mood apparently darkened. When it ended, he, Williams, and Jethroe received platitudes from Duffy. Joe Cashman of the Boston Record sat with Cronin that day and reported that the manager was impressed with Robinson. He wrote cryptically, with virtually little comprehension, that he could have been witnessing a historic moment. “Before departing, Joe and his coaches spent some 90 minutes in the stands at Fenway surveying three Negro candidates. . . . Why they came from such distant spots to work out for the Red Sox was not learned.” The Boston Globe did not cover the tryout.

Robinson himself was satisfied with his performance, although by the time he left Fenway he was smoldering about what he felt to be a humiliating charade. As the three players departed, Eddie Collins told them they would hear from the Red Sox in the near future. None of them ever heard from the Red Sox again.

Eighteen months later, the Dodgers signed Robinson, who would begin a legendary career a year and half later. Jethroe, at age thirty-three, integrated Boston pro baseball with the Braves in 1950 and would become the National League Rookie of the Year. Williams would stay in the Negro leagues, never again coming so close to the majors.

The remaining details of that morning are completely speculative. Robinson never spoke in real detail about the tryout. Joe Cronin, who next to Collins and was the most powerful member of the Red Sox next to Yawkey, also never offered a complete account about the tryout except to say that he remem- bered that it occurred, although he and Robinson would never speak.

Thirty-four years later, Cronin would discuss the tryout; he explained the Red Sox position as well as the game’s:

I remember the tryout very well. But after it, we told them our only farm club available was in Louisville, Kentucky, and we didn’t think they’d be interested in going there because of the racial feelings at the time. Besides, this was after the season had started and 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.

It was a great mistake by us. He [Robinson] turned out to be a great player. But no feeling existed about it. We just accepted things the way they were. I recall talking to some players and they felt that they didn’t want us to break up their league. We all thought because of the times, it was good to have separate leagues.

Clif Keane would give the day its historical significance. A reporter for the Globe, Keane said he heard a person yell from the stands during the tryout. The words—“Get those niggers off the field”—were never attributed to one person, but they have haunted the Red Sox as much as Pinky Higgins’ proclamation a decade and a half later. Numerous Red Sox officials, from Joe Cronin to Eddie Collins to Tom Yawkey himself, have been credited with the taunt, if it was ever said at all. Keane has always believed it was Yawkey.

What cannot be disputed about the events of that April day are the final results and the consequences that followed. It was an episode from which the reputation and perception of the franchise have never recovered.

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Fenway at 100: Howard Bryant on the Red Sox and race

It is not a requirement that you be a Red Sox fan to work at Beacon Press, but it let's just say that it helps. There are many Fenway faithful around our offices, and we are fans who must live with the complicated, not always admirable, history of our favorite team. And, ten years ago, we published a great book that addressed the team's history of racism.

The author of Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston is Howard Bryant, a native Bostonian who has since gone on to become a senior writer at ESPN and correspondent for National Public Radio. Shut Out won Spitball Magazine's Casey Jones Award for best baseball book of 2002, and he has also written two other acclaimed books on baseball: Juicing the Game and The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron. When his book on Hank Aaron was released in 2010, we interviewed Bryant in the Beacon offices about his life as a baseball fan. We share that interview today in honor of Fenway Park's 100th birthday. 

Fenway seemed to be a pretty hostile place to non-white fans.

When I was a kid in the 1970s, the adults, the black adults in Dorchester, never went to Fenway Park. When we were kids, we never went to Fenway Park. And this was in the 1970s, when the Red Sox were really, really good. They were a great team--they went to the World Series in 1975. And yet, I'd never been to a baseball game.

And it wasn't until my family moved to Plymouth, fifty miles south of Boston, where you're in a predominantly white community, where the Red Sox were actually part of the family. Where you would go to games as part of your summer vacation. And I remember, when I got older, asking my aunts and uncles, why didn't they go to Fenway Park. And they told me--it was because it was a hostile place. And I remember one uncle, my Uncle Charles said to me one day, "Why would I go somewhere where I know I'm gonna get beaten up?" And that was quite a comment to me.

And today, under John Henry and Larry Lucchino and Tom Werner, I think they're cognizant of that. And I think today, when you go to a Red Sox game, that feeling of hostility is not there. I think that you have--you don't have great diversity because at very few sporting venues across the country are you going to have great diversity. But, at least when you walk in there as an African-American or as a woman or as any minority group, I don't think that you're going to go into a place where you don't feel comfortable. I think the Red Sox are trying very, very hard to make Boston baseball belong to everyone.

Do you want to talk about the fan bases about Red Sox vs. Yankees? How do you feel the Red Sox legacy affects the fan base? 

I'm sure it will be pretty embarrassing, and my friends probably not want to hear this, but they already know it because they lived it with me. When I was a kid, growing up in Boston and later in Plymouth on the South Shore, I was a Yankee fan. I will say it, it is true. And the reason was because, even today, as a journalist it's the same thing, I never rooted for teams as much as I rooted for players, and my favorite player was Dave Winfield. And the reason that I liked Dave Winfield was because as a young, African-American boy, I really was in need of role models. Of seeing someone confident, and Winfield was such a confident player. He looked like he never bowed his head to anybody. And he swung the bat with such confidence, he played in the field and he did so many things that you wanted to emulate.

And then, the black stars on the Red Sox always seemed so burdened. They always seemed as if they didn't feel so comfortable. They were always brooding in some ways. Oil Can Boyd had a very difficult time here. Jim Rice, naturally, had a difficult time in Boston. And Ellis Burks had a difficult time in Boston. And so, there were players that you really wanted to root for, and I rooted for all those guys, but they just never seemed happy. Winfield seemed happy, and I said, "That's my guy." So I ended up rooting for the Yankees.

I think that that is changing slightly, but not much, because the Red Sox haven't really developed African-American players since. So you don't have that evolution in terms of African-American players, but you have it with the Latino players. David Ortiz, for example, is as ebullient and fun-loving and wonderful a character as the city's ever had. Ditto for Pedro Martinez, and the same, in his own, wacky way for Manny Ramirez. So, you have that person of color who enjoys playing here, but it's been very specific to the African-American experience that the black player did not have as good, as comfortable an experience playing in Boston. So I'd like to say that that part of it is changing, but I haven't seen much evidence of it.

In Boston today, do you still see some of the racial issues that you talk about in Shut Out?

I think one of the amazing things about the city of Boston is its history, its evolution, and I think one of the things that I really enjoyed about doing that project was taking the time to look at the different issues in the city and see how they would play out over time. The book came out in 2002, and in the years since, so much has changed in Boston, both in the Red Sox and their ownership, and the fact that they've won two championships since then. And also, in the city itself. I think Boston has become much more of a money city. I'm not sure that this is all a good thing. I think on the one hand, as a native Bostonian, I liked the diversity of the city and I like the rough edges of the city even if, sometimes, those rough edges stung, they hurt. I think that today, because you have to earn so much money to make ends meet in Boston, that the city has lost a little bit of that ethnic flavor that made it so special. On the one hand, this is a good thing, because it's a much more tolerant city, it's a much more diverse city, it's got much better food. And I think that it makes for a more inclusive city. On the other hand, it can be bad because Boston is not the Boston that we knew before. Boston is not the same city that I remember growing up and that my dad remembers growing up. The neighborhoods have lost a little bit of that specialness that made the North End the North End, or South Boston... or Roxbury... but the one thing we do know is that the city is going to constantly be changing. Some of it's going to be for the better, and, on balance, I think it's a better place than it's ever been.

Black History Month: African-American Sports History

At our offices here in Boston, many of us are thinking about the Super Bowl... well... obsessively. So we thought it would be a nice kickoff to Black History Month to highlight a few Beacon's books that discuss the history of African-Americans in sports.

Showdown: JFK and the Integration of the Washington Redskins by Thomas G. Smith Buy from Beacon Press | Independent Bookstore | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell's 

In 1961-as America crackled with racial tension-the Washington Redskins stood alone as the only professional football team without a black player on its roster. In fact, during the entire twenty-five-year history of the franchise, no African American had ever played for George Preston Marshall, the Redskins' cantankerous principal owner. With slicked-down white hair and angular facial features, the nattily attired, sixty-four-year-old NFL team owner already had a well-deserved reputation for flamboyance, showmanship, and erratic behavior. And like other Southern-born segregationists, Marshall stood firm against race-mixing. "We'll start signing Negroes," he once boasted, "when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites." But that was about to change.

Opposing Marshall was Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, whose determination that the Redskins-or "Paleskins," as he called them-reflect John F. Kennedy's New Frontier ideals led to one of the most high-profile contests to spill beyond the sports pages. Realizing that racial justice and gridiron success had the potential either to dovetail or take an ugly turn, civil rights advocates and sports fans alike anxiously turned their eyes toward the nation's capital. There was always the possibility that Marshall-one of the NFL's most influential and dominating founding fathers-might defy demands from the Kennedy administration to desegregate his lily-white team. When further pressured to desegregate by the press, Marshall remained defiant, declaring that no one, including the White House, could tell him how to run his business.

In Showdown, sports historian Thomas G. Smith captures this striking moment, one that held sweeping implications not only for one team's racist policy but also for a sharply segregated city and for the nation as a whole. Part sports history, part civil rights story, this compelling and untold narrative serves as a powerful lens onto racism in sport, illustrating how, in microcosm, the fight to desegregate the Redskins was part of a wider struggle against racial injustice in America.

“Smith has written a thoughtful and engaging book that details the racial integration of one of professional football’s most storied franchises. With great insight and passion, he explains how African American athletes finally cracked the color barrier to play for the Washington Redskins amid the turmoil of the civil rights movement and the nation’s quest for equality on and off the playing field.”—David K. Wiggins, author of Glory Bound: Black Athletes in a White America

Listen to an interview with the author of Showdown on Weekend All Things Considered.

Read Chapter 5: The Washington Whiteskins on Scribd.  

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Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game by Rob Ruck Preorder the Paperback (release date 2/21/12) or buy the hardcover

After peaking at 27 percent of all major leaguers in 1975, African Americans now make up less than one-tenth--a decline unimaginable in other men's pro sports. The number of Latin Americans, by contrast, has exploded to over one-quarter of all major leaguers and roughly half of those playing in the minors. Award-winning historian Rob Ruck not only explains the catalyst for this sea change; he also breaks down the consequences that cut across society. Integration cost black and Caribbean societies control over their own sporting lives, changing the meaning of the sport, but not always for the better. While it channeled black and Latino athletes into major league baseball, integration did little for the communities they left behind.

By looking at this history from the vantage point of black America and the Caribbean, a more complex story comes into focus, one largely missing from traditional narratives of baseball's history. Raceball unveils a fresh and stunning truth: baseball has never been stronger as a business, never weaker as a game.

“One of our greatest historians of sport has given us a gift for the ages: a history of baseball that captures its multicultural dynamics in original and profoundly illuminating ways. Synthesizing a lifetime of pathbreaking research, Raceball presents a brilliant new account—in black, white, and brown—of what can no longer be regarded as merely the national game.”—Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship

Read Chapter 2: Blackball's Heyday on Scribd.

Listen to an interview with the author of Raceball on NPR's Only a Game.

Watch Rob Ruck talking about Raceball on YouTube.

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Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston by Howard Bryant

WINNER OF SPITBALL MAGAZINE'S 2002 CASEY AWARD FOR BEST BASEBALL BOOK OF THE YEAR "An essential read." -John Henry, principal owner of the Boston Red Sox

With a new introduction by celebrated baseball writer Roger Kahn and a new afterword by the author, updating John Henry's first year of ownership after nearly six decades of the Yawkey dynasty, the legacy of the late Will McDonough, and the author's return to his native Boston after a seventeen-year absence, Shut Out has reopened the discussion of baseball, race, and Boston with a new candor.

"One of the best baseball books I have ever read, and in fact one of the best non-fiction books I have read in years. To simply call it a baseball book is to do it a disservice, in that people interested in American history, race relations in America, and simply human nature might not read it, which would be their loss." 
—Lisa Winston, USA Today's Sports Weekly

Watch Howard Bryant talk about Shutout on YouTube.

A Reason to Vote Along Racial Lines (In the All-Star Game, At Least)

Rebecca Alpert is Associate Professor of Religion and Women’s Studies at Temple University and the author of Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball (Oxford University Press, 2011). This post originally appeared on the Oxford University Press blog. 

Growing up as a baseball fan in the 1950s and 60s, I could not wait until the All-Star game rolled around every July. (Imagine my delight during the years when there was a second game in August!) Back then, fans didn’t choose the players, so I would eagerly anticipate the announcement of the teams in the newspapers. Then I would rummage through my baseball card collection to pull out the All-Stars and admire their accomplishments. Watching the game on television was thrilling to me, no matter the outcome. If I was in summer camp, my mother would dutifully send me the newspaper clippings and box scores. My parents were avid baseball fans, but this exhibition game meant nothing to them. I am not really sure why it appealed to me, then or now. Taking my son to the game when it took place in Philadelphia in 1996 was a peak moment. For me it is an annual ritual on my sacred calendar, a holy day to celebrate like the birthdays of family and friends, Thanksgiving, Passover.

When I began to do research on the roles Jews played in black baseball a few years ago, I was delighted to find out that the Negro Leagues had their own all-star game (called the East-West game and held in Chicago every year) that was the centerpiece of the black baseball season. From its inception in 1933 the East-West game provided an opportunity for all the men of African descent who could surely have been in the majors if not for the color line to showcase their talent in a very public way. This knowledge permitted me to justify my obsession with the All-Star game; now not only a guilty pleasure but also a potential vehicle for a political message.

Imagine my despair when I learned last year that the 2011 All-Star game would really be a vehicle for another kind of political message. Despite serious protests this year’s game will be taking place in Arizona, home of the infamous SB 1070, the bill that would permit law enforcement officials to request documentation from anyone who might appear to be an illegal immigrant. Almost one-third of those on major league rosters are now Latino. Doesn’t the baseball establishment understand that this Arizona law is demeaning to people of Latin American ancestry? Don’t they see the connections to the embarrassing color line that forced black Americans to be second class citizens in baseball for so many years? Why wouldn’t they want to move the game to another venue to support their players who could be subject to this humiliating (and possibly unconstitutional) law?

Immigration rights groups have called for a boycott, and I have signed their petitions, but the game is surely not being moved. How could I possibly observe my annual ritual this summer? While wondering whether I should even participate in the voting for the starting line-ups, it occurred to me that voting held the answer to my dilemma. What if, like the East-West game, all the starting players were from one racial/ethnic group, only in this case Latino? Wouldn’t that send a message to Arizona and Major League Baseball? So that’s what I intend to do with my 25 votes. And I encourage you to do the same.

It’s easy. Just go to the ballot and vote for your local team (in my case Placido Polanco , Carlos Ruiz, and Raul Ibañez of the Phillies), future Hall of Famers (like Vladimir Guerrero, David Ortiz, Albert Pujols, or Alex Rodriguez), perennial stars (Carlos Beltran, Bobby Abreu, Alfonso Soriano, Melky Cabrera, Aramis Ramirez, Adrian Beltre, Miguel Tejada, Jorge Posada) or this year’s standouts (Placido Polanco again, José Bautista, Adrian Gonzalez, José Reyes, Miguel Cabrera, Gaby Sanchez, Maicer Izturis, Alberto Callaspo, Yadier Molina, Martin Prado, Starlin Castro, Jhonny Peralta, Yunel Escobar, Jonathan Herrera, Asdrubal Cabrera, Emilio Bonifacio, Orlando Cabrera, Robinson Cano) or 2010 World Series heroes (Elvis Andrus, Nelson Cruz, Freddy Sanchez, Pablo Sandoval).

Don’t wait—vote early (you have until June 30) and often (25 times on the internet and whenever you’re at the ball park) and send a message to the majors that the All-Star game should showcase not only our best players but also our best values.

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game. Read an excerpt of Raceball on Scribd. 

Jackie Robinson’s MLB Debut, and Black Baseball’s Death Knell

On April 15, 1947, Brooklyn Dodgers rookie Jackie Robinson stepped to the plate as a Major League ballplayer for first time. But Robinson had already played on year in the first MLB affiliate team to be break the color barrier, the Montreal Royals (the Brooklyn Dodgers' International League team), and the effect of integration on the Negro Leagues had begun to be felt. In this excerpt from Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game, author Rob Ruck looks at the beginning of the end for the Negro Leagues.

To find out more about the people in the book, watch our Raceball Playlist on YouTube. 

As the 1946 season began, the degree to which integration would savage the Negro Leagues was not yet apparent. Robinson's appeal, however, was. More than fifty-one thousand tickets were sold for his minor league debut in Jersey City, twice the number that could squeeze into the ballpark. After Robinson homered in his second at-bat, Wendell Smith wrote: "Our hearts beat just a little faster and the thrill ran through us like champagne bubbles." For his colleague Joe Bostic, the game meant that baseball had taken up "the cudgel for Democracy."

Negro League attendance held its own in 1946, but that would be black baseball's last decent season. After an abrupt but short postwar downturn, the consumer demand that had been pent up because of enforced wartime saving launched the U.S. economy on a skyward trajectory. The major leagues took terrific advantage of the economic bounce and sold a record 18.5 million tickets that season. A few black clubs, particularly the Newark Eagles and the Kansas City Monarchs, also drew well thanks to the strong economy. In May, Branch Rickey signed another black player, Roy Partlow. Because the pitcher had actually signed a contract with his Negro League team, the Philadelphia Stars, Rickey paid the team $1,000. Partlow's signing represented the first time that a major league club compensated a Negro League team for a player. Still, there were cautionary signs; black teams that played within the International League's footprint found that swarms of their fans were traveling to Newark, Jersey City, and Baltimore to watch Jackie Robinson play whenever the Montreal Royals came to one of these towns.

Owners on both sides of the color line fretted as Major League Baseball's large-scale integration became more and more likely. While black owners saw impending financial doom, white ones had a more amorphous set of fears. Never known for their foresight, major league executives formed a committee that reported back to the owners in the summer of 1946 on a series of problems, including what they called the "race question." The internal document, whose existence several owners later denied, drew a dire portrait. Its authors complained that their game was besieged by "political and social-minded drum beaters" with an agenda that would damage both MLB and the Negro Leagues. While allowing that every boy "should have a fair chance in baseball" regardless of his race, the report concluded that no African Americans were ready for the majors. Furthermore, it argued that integration would jeopardize a $2-million-a-year black business that employed thousands and would cost major league teams rental and concession fees. Most noxiously, the report expressed the concern that large crowds of black fans at major league games in New York and Chicago, where four of the sixteen major league teams played, could "threaten the value" of these clubs by scaring off white fans.

The next year began badly for black baseball. Josh Gibson, perhaps its best player ever, died in January 1947 at the age of thirty-five; the cause of his death would never be definitively determined. Misfortune continued that spring when bad weather forced many games to be canceled, sinking struggling teams deeper into the red. But it was Jackie Robinson's debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15 that sounded black baseball's death knell. Black fans went gaga over Robinson, taking Jackie Robinson Special trains to see him play. The Dodgers' attendance rose by over three hundred thousand on the road, black attendance at Ebbets Field quadrupled, and all but one National League club set a single-game attendance record that summer when playing Brooklyn. "Jackie's nimble, Jackie's quick, Jackie makes the turnstiles click," the Courier's Wendell Smith wrote. But Negro League baseball hemorrhaged as a result. "After Jackie," Buck Leonard sighed, "we couldn't draw flies."

In July, Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck signed Newark Eagles outfielder Larry Doby to a contract with his team, and Robinson was no longer the sole African American in the majors. Three other Negro Leaguers—outfielders Hank Thompson and Willard Brown, and pitcher Dan Bankhead—arrived later that season. In each case, the player's Negro League team was compensated. The sale of players to major league organizations recouped some of the losses that the Negro League clubs were facing, but without formal affiliation with Major League Baseball, their long-term prospects were bleak.

Those prospects became even bleaker after the season ended. In December 1947, with their options narrowing, the Negro Leagues applied for membership in the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues. Their request to become a minor league was denied on the pretext that Negro League territories overlapped with preexisting territorial rights of current members. The handwriting was on the wall; black clubs would not be accepted into white baseball's fraternity.

Negro League attendance continued to plummet in 1948, as radio and limited television broadcasts of Dodgers games further siphoned away crowds. It didn't help that coverage of Robinson and a handful of other black major leaguers in the black press overshadowed that of the Negro Leagues as a whole. The Newark Eagles, who had drawn 120,000 fans in 1946, attracted only 35,000 in 1948. Negro League games at Yankee Stadium pulled in a third as many fans as they had in 1946, and the Eagles and the Homestead Grays lost money for a second consecutive season. The Eagles, Grays, and the New York Black Yankees left the NNL following the 1948 season; the three remaining NNL clubs joined the NAL, but that league wasn't viable either. The storied Homestead Grays barnstormed for a few more years, then shut down for good.

Interestingly, segregation offered some protection for black teams in the South, where minor league baseball remained all white. The Kansas City Monarchs, located outside major league territory, also remained profitable, in part due to player sales. But the number of players who could be sold to major league teams was dwindling and by selling their best or most promising players, black baseball was mortgaging its future. At the same time, more black prospects were entering organized baseball directly from high school, sandlot, or college ball, bypassing the Negro Leagues altogether. Nor could black teams continue to make up for diminished crowds at league contests by playing what had often been lucrative games with white independent clubs. Even white independent baseball was withering under the onslaught of television and suburbanization.

For many African Americans, the erosion of segregation in baseball, if not its total disappearance, had weakened the Negro Leagues' reason for being. Separate black institutions were now perceived as less worthy, even backward, at a time when African Americans were moving forward into white institutions. Moreover, integration had freed the relatively captive audience that the Negro Leagues and other black businesses had relied upon for lifeblood.

Most major league teams, despite Brooklyn's success, were in no rush to follow suit. Although Jackie Robinson first took the field as a Dodger on April 15, 1947, only six of sixteen clubs had fielded black players by 1952. All of them, however, would integrate their minor league systems by August 1953. Former Negro Leaguers Roy Campanella, Willie Mays, Ernie Banks, Henry Aaron, Monte Irvin, Ray Dandridge, and Satchel Paige were now the property of major league organizations. In July 1959, the Boston Red Sox reluctantly became the final team to integrate when, amid a wave of political pressure, they called up infielder Pumpsie Green from the minor leagues.

By then, the Negro National League had been history for a decade, disbanding after the 1948 season. The league's inability to defend itself against Jorge Pasquel and the Mexican League in 1940 had foreshadowed its helplessness to withstand a much more powerful predator less than a decade later. Little was said about its disbandment. The black press, with its attention newly riveted on MLB, had all but dropped the Negro Leagues. After the Homestead Grays beat the Birmingham Black Barons to win the 1948 Negro League World Series—the last ever played—the Pittsburgh Courier devoted just two paragraphs to the victory, which was buried by coverage of black major leaguers.

Amid mounting financial losses, black teams were unable to reconstruct themselves in ways that would return them to profitability or persuade the major leagues to accept them as affiliates—not that the latter ever seriously considered that outcome. The Negro American League limped along during the 1950s with an ever-changing roster of teams. Clubs barnstormed, clowned, cut rosters, instituted salary caps, and promised to elevate their standards of organization. But none of these efforts stopped the bleeding of talent, fans, and dollars to the major leagues. Black baseball became a pallid shadow of its former self, soon to become a thing of the past. Few seemed to mind: everybody was watching Jackie Robinson anyway.

Baseball Season Begins!

Baseball's opening day was yesterday (and it's safe to say that the Beacon Press staff as a whole is unimpressed with the start to the season). Although the Red Sox may be off to an inauspicious start, we'll take this opportunity to share an excerpt of the recently published Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game by Rob Ruck.

The colliding histories of black and Latin ballplayers in the major leagues have traditionally been told as a story of their shameful segregation and redemptive integration. Jackie Robinson jumped baseball's color line to much fanfare, but integration was painful as well as triumphal. It gutted the once-vibrant Negro Leagues and often subjected Latin players to Jim Crow racism. Today, Major League Baseball tightens its grasp around the Caribbean's burgeoning baseball academies, while at home it embraces, and exploits, the legacy of the Negro Leagues.

After peaking at 27 percent of all major leaguers in 1975, African Americans now make up less than one-tenth-a decline unimaginable in other men's pro sports. The number of Latin Americans, by contrast, has exploded to over a quarter of all major leaguers and roughly half of those playing in the minors. Award-winning historian Rob Ruck not only explains the catalyst for this sea change; he also breaks down the consequences that cut across society. Integration cost black and Caribbean societies control over their own sporting lives, changing the meaning of the sport, but not always for the better. While it channeled black and Latino athletes into major league baseball, integration did little for the communities they left behind.

By looking at this history from the vantage point of black America and the Caribbean, a more complex story comes into focus, one largely missing from traditional narratives of baseball's history. Raceball unveils a fresh and stunning truth: baseball has never been stronger as a business, never weaker as a game.

Author photo by Tom Altany.

Listen to Rob Ruck on NPR's Weekend All Things Considered or on WBUR's Only a Game.

Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game, Excerpt