Book Excerpt: Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball
Chapter 16: A New and Strange World
With the Guardians in Los Angeles to play the Dodgers Friday through Sunday at Chavez Ravine, this seemed like a good time to present and recommend “Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball,” by Luke Epplin (Macmillan, 2021, Hardcover $14.97, Kindle $2,99).
The chapter I have chosen to excerpt is Chapter 16: A New and Strange World. For context, I asked Mr. Epplin to introduce the chapter, which begins on page 161 of the volume. Here is that introduction:
Chapter 16 of my book, Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball, opens on July 1, 1947, with a phone call between Bill Veeck, the owner of the Cleveland Indians, and Effa Manley, the co-owner of the Newark Eagles. A year earlier, in 1946, Bill Veeck, a thirty-two-year-old World War II veteran and former owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, had purchased the Indians and immediately went about transforming the game-day experience. He shot off fireworks, hired clowns as coaches, and amused crowds with bands, circus acts, and outlandish promotional giveaways. But Veeck also took a more radical step.
Alongside Louis Jones, the Indians newly hired assistant director of publicity and the first Black executive in Major League Baseball, Veeck set in motion a secretive plan to integrate the Indians roster mere weeks after Jackie Robinson had made his debut on the Brooklyn Dodgers. Unlike Robinson, who spent a year in baseball’s minor leagues, the player whom Veeck chose would be rushed directly to the majors, with no pit stops in between. After scouring the Negro Leagues, Veeck trained his sights on one player who was demolishing Negro League pitching like no one else.
In 1947, Larry Doby was a twenty-three-year-old second baseman for the Newark Eagles in the midst of a breakout season. He’d been a four-letter high school athlete in Paterson, New Jersey, whose raw talent had caught the eye of Abe and Effa Manley, a husband-wife duo who jointly ran the Newark Eagles, a powerhouse franchise in the Negro National League. Through the Manleys’ careful nurturing, Doby blossomed into a star, one who steered the Eagles to their first Negro League World Series championship in 1946.
But as integration came to professional baseball, Effa Manley sensed danger for her franchise. Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, had poached one of her players, Don Newcombe, without offering any compensation to the Eagles owners. Effa Manley railed against these raids, so when Bill Veeck called to inquire about Larry Doby, Effa Manley made sure to let Veeck know that she expected a fair price for her prized prospect.
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Excerpt: Chapter 16: A New and Strange World:
On July 1, 1947, the phone rang in the Eagles’ team office in Newark. Days earlier, Abe Manley had warned his wife that the owner of the Cleveland Indians might call at any time, so it was hardly a surprise to Effa when she found herself in conversation with Bill Veeck.
Never one to indulge in small talk, Veeck cut right to the chase, asking Manley how much she expected in a deal for Larry Doby. This was a welcome question for someone who’d been so outspoken about the need for Negro League owners to be compensated for finding and cultivating their players. Veeck, for his part, had already told sports-writer Cleveland Jackson that, unlike Branch Rickey, he hoped to sign Black players through standard procedures, not by means of raids.
Before Manley could respond, Veeck put forth an offer of $10,000. Manley fell silent. In her estimation, it was an insultingly low sum, and, true to form, she let him know as much. “Mr. Veeck, you know if Larry Doby were white and a free agent, you’d give him $100,000 to sign with you merely as a bonus.” She paused to collect herself, then acknowledged that she had limited leverage in these negotiations. While holding firm on $10,000, Veeck promised to wire an additional $5,000 if Doby stuck with the Indians for more than thirty days. Before agreeing, Manley phoned her husband for his approval. Abe, upon hearing the figure, had the same knee-jerk reaction. “Oh, Effa, we can’t let Doby go for that small amount of money. Besides, that would wreck our entire ball club. What about the morale of our other players when they hear that we’ve sold Doby to the major leagues?” Ultimately, mindful of the criticism that would blow their way should they let money block Doby’s path, the Manleys chose to accept the offer.
That same day, the Eagles squared off against the Philadelphia Stars in Trenton. It was just another game for Doby, who knocked in three runs on as many hits, sparking his team to a 6-4 victory. He knew nothing of what had transpired between Veeck and the Manleys.
Rumors swirled regardless. The following evening, on July 2, the two clubs played again in Wilmington, Delaware. After the Stars beat the Eagles with a walk-off sacrifice fly, reporters chased down Doby and asked if they could expect to see him in an Indians uniform soon. “It may be,” he answered uncertainly, “but I don’t know until I get back to Newark.”
That night, the Eagles’ bus cut north through New Jersey. It was 5:30 in the morning on July 3 when Doby finally stumbled home to his Paterson residence and plopped into bed.
The ringing of the phone interrupted his much-needed sleep. Doby peeked at a nearby clock: a few minutes before seven. Irritated, he fumbled for the receiver. On the other end was Effa Manley. “Larry,” she reportedly said, “you have been bought by the Cleveland Indians of the American League and you are to join the team in Chicago on Sunday.”
Doby was speechless. Hanging up, he shuffled to the center of the bedroom, where he gazed at himself in a mirror. Except for a sock he’d absentmindedly pulled on, Doby, according to sportswriter Sam Lacy, “wore nothing more than what he had on when the family doctor slapped him.”
He stood naked before the journey ahead of him.
As the press raced to Paterson to interview Doby, Veeck assembled his own group of reporters in Cleveland to announce the signing. The quotes that circulated in newspapers over the following days laid out Veeck’s personal take on the milestone. “I don’t think any man who has the ability should be barred from major league baseball on account of his color,” Veeck declared. “The entrance of Negroes into both major leagues is not only inevitable it is here.” It was his belief that the war had “advanced us in regard to racial tolerance . . .
I probably will catch hell for a while, but it is my hope it will work out.” Amid these high-minded ideals, Veeck offered another, more pragmatic reason for nabbing Doby: “[Jackie] Robinson has proved to be a real big leaguer, so I wanted to get the best of the available Negro boys while the grabbing was good. Why wait?
Originally, Veeck had intended for Doby to make his debut in Cleveland, but now that the word was out, he instructed Louis Jones to escort the Eagles star from Newark to Chicago, where the Indians would face the White Sox in a weekend series starting on July 5. In the meantime, Veeck convened an Indians team meeting. Aware of grumblings among some players, he didn’t mince words, telling the Indians in no uncertain terms that Doby was going to be a star some day, so either they shut their mouths and go along with his plan, or they spend the rest of their careers on farm clubs.
Publicly, Boudreau supported the move. He issued a statement calling the acquisition “a routine baseball purchase,” promising to give Doby every chance to “prove that he has the ability to make good with us.” Privately, however, Boudreau harbored deep skepticism. He’d begged Veeck for help in the outfield, which Doby, a second baseman, presumably couldn’t provide. Besides, Joe Gordon, Veeck’s major off-season acquisition, had just been voted the starting second baseman in the upcoming All-Star Game, so there was little chance that Boudreau would bench a newly invigorated Gordon to give Doby playing time at second. It led the Indians manager to wonder if signing Doby was just another means of drawing fans during a season in which the Indians once again would fall well short of the postseason. Boudreau was fighting for his managerial life as it was. His contract ran out at the end of the season; there was no guarantee another would be extended. He had three months to turn around a team that by then had sunk to fifth place and would now be dealing with something as novel and sensitive as integration.
On Independence Day, a boisterous holiday crowd, more than 4,000 strong, turned out for the afternoon doubleheader at Newark’s Ruppert Stadium. Doby’s mother, Etta, and his wife, Helyn, milled about the stands, as did Louis Jones, who’d ridden an overnight train from Cleveland.
Because the Newark Bears, the white minor-league affiliate of the New York Yankees, had decided to dress at Ruppert Stadium before departing for their own afternoon doubleheader in Jersey City, the Eagles players were forced to suit up elsewhere, then ride the team bus to their home turf. Soon after Doby stepped off the bus, photographers swarmed him. Stiff and uneasy, he squeezed the handle of his bat so tightly while posing that “his knuckles seemed to pop.” Later, during fielding drills, Eagles manager Biz Mackey slapped one grounder after another his way. Racked with emotion, Doby booted some, bobbled others.
Before the opening pitch, Eagles players and civic leaders gathered at home plate for an impromptu ceremony. The gifts they presented to Doby were practical and heartfelt: a shaving kit, a travel case, a check for fifty dollars. Amid sustained applause, the public-address announcer reminded the crowd of an upcoming anti- lynching meeting in Newark.
The opening game was a runaway for the Eagles, punctuated by a moon-shot home run that Doby launched into the left-field stands in the sixth inning. It would have been a fitting farewell had he not followed it up by fumbling a ground ball in the eighth, then another in the ninth. Effa Manley had seen enough. “Larry’s so nervous he’s not himself,” she reportedly muttered. “He has a train to make, so I’m sending word for him to get dressed.”
As the second game got under way, Doby stepped sopping wet from the showers into a scrum of program-waving kids who’d snuck into the clubhouse for autographs. In between scribbling his name, he buttoned his gray sports shirt to the throat and slipped on a tan jacket with a folded handkerchief in the front pocket. Then he set off with a group of friends and family for Newark’s Penn Station.
While Louis Jones bustled about the terminal, Doby took a seat on a wooden bench, flanked by Helyn and his mother. He spoke faintly to the assembled reporters, almost in a whisper, clasping and unclasping his hands all the while. At one point Doby turned to Helyn and murmured: “I feel—well, more than nervous. I feel almost like I was going into a new and strange world.”
Four years before, when he was reporting for the Navy, Doby had waited at the same station for an overnight train to the same city. That journey had exposed him to racial prejudice like he’d never known before. And now here he was again, on the brink of another passage to somewhere far away and foreign. In the eyes of New York Amsterdam News columnist Dan Burley, Doby appeared in those moments before boarding the train stunned by “the strangeness of his position and deeply afflicted by the role he was so unexpectedly called upon to play he seemed like a boy going off forever from all the things that had been familiar to him.”
Away from the phone calls and photographers, Doby slept soundly for the first time in days. It was a quarter to eleven the next morning when the train screeched to a halt in Chicago’s Union Station. Menacing gray clouds hung low over the steely skyline. In mere hours the Indians would square off against the White Sox. Doby hadn’t even signed a contract yet. There was little time to waste.
A taxi whisked Doby and Jones to the Congress Hotel. There, Doby came face-to-face with the man who’d brought him to Chicago. As Doby would later tell interviewer William J. Marshall, the Indians owner stuck out his hand in greeting and said, “Lawrence, I’m Bill Veeck.”
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Veeck,” Doby responded.
Immediately Veeck shot back, “You don’t have to call me Mr. Veeck. Call me Bill.”
Doby was dumbfounded. Like any Black man who’d grown up in the South, he’d learned to refer to white elders by their last names, if not out of respect then out of fear of retaliation. But everything about Veeck was different: how he called Doby by his full name, how he sported an open-necked collared shirt with holes in the sleeves to such an historic occasion, how he looked his new recruit directly in the eyes with discernible sincerity.
Soon, they were speeding south toward Comiskey Park. From the taxi and in the hallways of the ballpark, Veeck gave Doby a rushed version of the directives Branch Rickey had laid out for Jackie Robinson: no arguing with umpires, not even to contest balls and strikes; no fighting or mouthing off to opposing players; and no associating with white women in the stands. Veeck concluded with a promise that stuck with the rookie through the turbulent times ahead: “We’re in this together, kid.”
The reassurance helped. “It made me relax a lot,” Doby later stated. In a cramped office at Comiskey Park, Doby signed the contract laid out before him while seemingly “half the news photographers in the Midwest” smashed together to snap pictures. Unlike the upbeat Veeck, Doby wore the apprehensive look of a human test subject. According to one reporter, “His voice was so low during an attempt at [an] interview that it was scarcely audible.” At one point, trying to ease the tension, Veeck patted Doby on the back and said, “Just remember you’re only another baseball player.”
When the press conference ended, Jones and Marsh Samuel, the Indians publicity director, guided Doby down into the clubhouse, where the Indians players, fully suited up, sat in front of their lockers, waiting. Gordon Cobbledick later claimed that as soon as Doby appeared, “an electric tension charged the steaming air. The wordless hostility seemed to crackle and spark. No one spoke a tentative ‘Hello.’ No one said, ‘Relax, kid, you’re all tightened up.’” Some cast their gazes to the floor, others watched as Doby threaded his way through the stuffy room, not making eye contact with anyone. “Not even the scuffle of a solitary spike on the bottom of a shoe broke the horrible, tomblike muteness,” Franklin Lewis wrote.
Boudreau instructed Doby to change into the uniform that trainer Lefty Weisman had set aside for him. Then Doby huddled with his new manager for a quick rundown of the team signs, just enough to get him through the afternoon game. As seemingly bewildered as everyone else, Boudreau peppered Doby with a series of elementary questions: What positions could he play? Where did he think he could help the Indians? What style of baseball did they play in the Negro Leagues? Afterward, he escorted Doby around the clubhouse, introducing him to his lined-up teammates. Some, like Joe Gordon, Bob Lemon, and Jim Hegan, gripped Doby’s hand in welcome; others barely clasped it at all. A few refused to shake his hand altogether.
There was little time to dwell on the frosty reception. The game would start soon, and the players hustled onto the diamond, where groundskeepers were rolling up the tarpaulin blanketing the soggy infield. Doby was the last to emerge, and the spectators, a significant portion of whom were Black, began applauding upon their first glimpse of him. “With each step the chorus swelled until, as [Doby] approached the first base dugout, it had attained the proportions of an ovation,” Cobbledick reported. With batting practice canceled because of the rain, Indians players instead doubled up to toss baseballs back and forth. Doby waited for a partner. One minute passed, then another. No one glanced his way.
Over the past three hours, he’d met scores of people, shaken dozens of hands, and had his picture snapped hundreds of times. Now, Doby stood before 15,000 fans in a major-league ballpark, yet he felt all alone. The humiliation was swift and public, much as his introduction to military life had been years earlier. Both were new, devastating experiences for him, ones Doby couldn’t put into perspective in the moment. All he could process was the pain.
Finally, after several minutes Joe Gordon tossed Doby a baseball. A while later, he took infield practice alongside Gordon at second base, appearing “stiff and not sure of himself on ground balls” to some reporters. Boudreau watched him intently during these drills. He hadn’t penciled the newly arrived rookie into the starting lineup that afternoon, instead waiting to see if an opportunity might arise over the course of the game.
It was another lackluster effort from the Indians, who scratched out three hits over six innings while falling behind 5-1. Then, in the seventh, the stirrings of a rally started. The first two Indians batters walked, the next grounded out to the shortstop. Bryan Stephens, a pitcher with one career major-league hit to his name, was due up next. Realizing a change was needed for the Indians to have any shot at victory, Boudreau hollered for Doby to grab a bat.
Once again, the crowd cheered as Doby emerged from the dugout. “It took but a few short minutes [for Doby] to walk up to that plate,” wrote Cleveland Jackson. “But for 13 million American Negroes that simple action was the successful climax of a long uphill fight whose annals are like the saga of the race.” As Doby assumed his usual stiff stance, his teeth were chattering. “I didn’t hear a sound,” he later recalled. “It was like I was dreaming.”
Earl Harrist, a husky reliever from rural Louisiana, hurled his first pitch over the plate, and Doby, swinging with everything he had, lunged fruitlessly at the ball. Harrist then tried to sneak a similar offering past him, but this time Doby connected, drilling a line drive that streaked “like a bullet” past the third-base umpire, landing mere inches outside the foul line. Harrist was officially on notice: Doby may have been green and nervous, but he was no pushover. Cautiously, Harrist tossed the next two pitches low. With the count even, he pressed his luck with another fastball, and Doby, eager to make contact, swung straight through it.
Despite the strikeout, it was far from a disastrous debut. His swing was wild and his plate discipline suspect, but the foul, so close to being a stand-up double, hinted at his potential.
After the game, the Indians players decamped for the Del Prado Hotel—all except Doby. He and Jones were driven to separate accommodations at the DuSable Hotel, a storied Black institution on the city’s South Side. Having not eaten since breakfast on the train, Doby joined Jones and sportswriters Cleveland Jackson and Fay Young for dinner at the nearby Palm Tavern, another Black establishment.
Afterward, Doby reflected on his first day in the majors. He told interviewer William J. Marshall years later that the Indians players who’d refused to shake his hand in the clubhouse “didn’t bother me at the moment because I don’t think I was thinking too much about it. I was somewhat wrapped up in the game itself in terms of being able to play.” It was only once he returned to his hotel and sat there by himself that “it dawned on me that that kind of situation had happened.”
For two years Doby had spent numerous summer nights on the road with his Eagles teammates, taking the edge off whatever miscues and strikeouts had occurred during that day’s game through their companionship. But there were no players to talk to that evening, no one to help him process everything that he’d been through over the past twenty-four hours.
The lights went out across Chicago. Larry Doby was alone.
EXCERPTED FROM OUR TEAM. COPYRIGHT © 2021 BY LUKE EPPLIN. EXCERPTED BY PERMISSION OF FLATIRON BOOKS, A DIVISION OF MACMILLAN PUBLISHERS. NO PART OF THIS EXCERPT MAY BE REPRODUCED OR REPRINTED WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER.
About the author:
Luke Epplin is the author of Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball. His writing has appeared in such publications as The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Slate, and The Daily Beast. Born and raised in rural Illinois, Luke now lives in New York City.
Howard Cole has been writing about baseball on the Internet since Y2K. Follow him on Twitter. Follow OBHC on Twitter here. Be friends with Howard on Facebook.
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I was so happy to snag an autographed edition on my last trip to Brooklyn.