It would really disturb me if I went into a locker room and found a black player who didn’t know what players like Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby and Don Newcombe did forty or fifty years ago.
—HENRY AARON, introduction to Robinson’s I Never Had It Made
The 2013 film 42 is the most recent Jackie Robinson movie, one of several made over the years. “It is worth the wait,” said Sports Illustrated’s review of the film.1 In addition to feature-length films, there have been three made-for-TV movies, one Broadway play, and fifty-plus book-length biographies of Jackie Robinson, who played second and third base for the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1947 to 1957.
Robinson’s pathbreaking accomplishments are memorialized in other ways. Every April all Major League Baseball players wear number 42 in honor of his achievements, something they have done since the inaugural Jackie Robinson Day in 2004. Robinson was a six time All-Star, elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962, the first year in which he was eligible.
Robinson was the first African American to play Major League Baseball in the modern era, breaking into the big leagues on April 15, 1947. In a country where both overt and latent racism were still nearly universal, he endured taunts, epithets, vituperation, hostility, and death threats along with threatened and real acts of physical intimidation. He put up with it all, initially alone, with aplomb and dignity while achieving Hall of Fame numbers, batting .311 lifetime, with 127 home runs. He carried himself with class and dignity, but after two years of relative silence, he became an articulate, sometimes angry spokesperson for integration not only in baseball but also in the larger society.
Larry Doby, center fielder for the Cleveland Indians, was the second African American to break the color line, just eleven weeks after Robinson, on July 5, 1947. Doby too endured taunts, second-class-citizen status, hostility, avalanches of bottles and cans thrown onto the field, and other acts of physical intimidation. He was not allowed in many of the hotels in which the Indians stayed, including, until 1954, the lodgings for each year’s Indians’ spring training, in Tucson, Arizona. In certain southern cities, where the Indians would play a number of preseason exhibition games, cab drivers would not permit Doby to ride in their “whites only” taxis. At times Doby was forced to walk to the ballpark where the Indians were to play. Once he was there, on several occasions ushers and turnstile operators denied him admission to the park because he was black. Some ushers tried to bar him from the park even when Doby was in his Cleveland Indians uniform.
In contrast to knowing about Jackie Robinson, virtually no young—black or white—baseball players or fans know who Larry Doby was. So, too, the middle-aged are ignorant of what a great player and good man Doby was, let alone what he endured in integrating the other conference of Major League Baseball, the American League. The books on Jackie Robinson continue to come forth with one appearing even as this Doby book was being written.2 Meanwhile, the memory of Larry Doby and what he accomplished is forgotten, or at least has faded away, much like an iceberg drifting into more temperate waters and melting to nothing.
Writing of the great Chicago Cub, Ernie Banks, Rich Cohen, a supposedly knowledgeable Sports Illustrated baseball writer, asserts that “along with [Hank] Aaron and Willie Mays, Banks forms a triumvirate of African-American pioneers who came up in the aftermath of Jackie Robinson, who were counseled by Jackie and rode his break through weird old racist America.”3 Not a glimmer about Larry Doby, a true pioneer, or about other African Americans like Don Newcombe, Luke Easter, and Monte Irvin who followed Doby into the big leagues, preceding Mays and Aaron. Only a subset of a subset, a handful of the eldest baseball fans, remember who Doby was, what he accomplished, or how good a baseball player he was.4
Doby batted .286 in nine seasons with the Cleveland Indians (.283 overall, in a fourteen-year career), with 253 home runs. He was a seven-time All-Star (Robinson was six-timer), elected to the Hall of Fame as well—but only in 1998, and only then by the Veterans’ Committee (rather than by the Baseball Writers of America), many years after Doby had become eligible. He twice led the Indians to the American League pennant (1948 and 1954).
It would be more poignant to say that no books have been written about Doby, but there has been one, by Joseph Moore of Montclair State University in New Jersey.5 The Cleveland Indians succeeded in having a street near Jacobs Field, the Indians’ home park, renamed Larry Doby Way.6 Finally, in July 2015 the Indians dedicated a statue of Doby outside Cleveland’s Progressive Field, following past dedications of similar statues of Bob Feller and Jim Thome. The U.S. Postal Service issued a series of four commemorative stamps, honoring four baseball greats: Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Willie Stargell, and Larry Doby.7
But there have been no movies. Neither Major League Baseball nor the American League observes a “Larry Doby Day.” When in 1997 Major League Baseball required all teams to retire number 42 permanently, in honor of the long-since-deceased Robinson, neither baseball nor the news media mentioned Doby’s name, let alone his achievements. Nor did the baseball powers require teams to retire the number 14, which Doby had worn. At that time, in 1998, Doby was still alive, living in Montclair, New Jersey, and busy with his children and grandchildren. On a relative basis, as compared to Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby and his baseball career have slipped into obscurity.
Why? Part of the reason, of course, is that Robinson was the first. The second of anything receives but a fraction of the attention the first receives. One calloused sports writer expressed it graphically: “Second place finishers in America are suckers. . . . Those who don’t come first or don’t do things a certain way get lost. They disappear.”8 More eloquently, the New York Times wrote, “In glorifying those who are first the second is often forgotten. Doby integrated all those ballparks where Jackie Robinson never appeared. And he did it with class and clout.”9
Yet it is undeniable: the second always labors and lives in the shadow of the first. Doby himself reflected, with a trace of bitterness, “Jackie got all the publicity for putting up with [the racial taunts and slurs]. But it was the same thing I had to deal with. The crap I took was just as bad. Nobody said ‘We’re gonna be nice to the second Black.’”10
Other factors mask Larry Doby’s achievements, accounting for his relatively modest historical stature. He played in the shadow of Mickey Mantle, the incomparable center fielder of the New York Yankees, who broke into the major leagues in 1951, and who was also blond haired, blue eyed, and white. In 1952 Doby hit 32 home runs, driving in 104 runs. “Looking back on Mantle’s 1952 season [23 home runs and 87 RBIs], Total Baseball had a total player rating [for Mantle] of 4.8,” second in the American League.11 Who was first? Larry Doby of the Cleveland Indians. Even today books and retrospectives hail Mantle as one of the greatest baseball players of all time, while Larry Doby is largely is forgotten.
In 1951 another center fielder, said by many to have been the best all-around player of all time, broke into Major League Baseball. In that year Willie Mays donned a New York Giants uniform. To a degree Mays and the shadow he cast also serve to mask Larry Doby’s achievement in integrating the American League and in playing thirteen years of Major League Baseball.
Doby also played the core of his career for a team perceived as a perennial also-ran. Even though the Cleveland Indians won the American League championship twice (1948 and 1954) and the World Series once (1948), the dominant theme of that era was of the Indians finishing second, sometimes third, behind the New York Yankees. The Yankees won American League pennants in seven of the nine years in which Doby played for Cleveland, winning six of the seven World Series in those years. Also in contrast with Cleveland, the Dodgers, for whom Jackie Robinson played, were perennial contenders or at least viewed that way. They won National League pennants in six of the years in which Jackie Robinson played, compared to two American League pennants for Cleveland and Larry Doby.
Cleveland, too, is not New York. Today Ohio would be classified, somewhat dismissively, as one of the “flyover” states. New York, of course, is on the coast and considered by many New Yorkers to be the center of not only the country but also the universe. Along with certain West Coast teams (the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants), the Yankees are also known as one of the “pretty boy” teams in baseball.
One last shadow that both over time and back then obscured Larry Doby and his achievements was Satchel Paige, or perhaps, more accurately, the legend of Satchel, which is more than somewhat different than Paige himself. To some Paige was a clown, a buffoon, a Stepin Fetchit character who sat in a rocking chair in the bullpen and encouraged the belief that he had been born in the nineteenth century. To many others Satchel Paige was “one of the greatest pitchers of any hue in baseball history,” with a career that spanned forty years.12
Paige and his legend cast a particularly long shadow over Doby and his achievements because Bill Veeck, owner of the Cleveland Indians at the time, signed Satchel Paige to a Major League contract in July 1948. For much of 1948, 1949, and beyond, the aura—and antics—of Satchel Paige aura overshadowed Doby.
The purpose of this book is not so much to chronicle Larry Doby’s life and baseball career, although certain chapters attempt a fresh look at those things. Rather, the true inspiration behind the book, and the animus that drives it, is the desire to explore just why Larry Doby remains so obscure or, if not obscure, so much in the shadows.13