Doby became a force in center field, both with his glove and his powerful bat.
—TERRY PLUTO, Our Tribe
Larry never, ever told me who were those guys who would not shake his hand . . . He was never negative. He was always positive.
—JOE MORGAN, quoted in Moore, Larry Doby
Doby was “second but second to none.”1 “Larry Doby did it all—a pioneer, an All Star, a coach, a manager, an executive and Hall of Famer . . . an excellent husband and father. His story is an inspiration for all who have followed him.”2 Lou Brissie, a white pitcher from South Carolina who was a teammate of Doby’s for a time, characterized Doby as the ballplayer “he admired more as an athlete and as a man” than any other.3 Again, broadcaster Mel Allen listed the power hitters of that era as Mickey Mantle, Ralph Kiner, Duke Snider, and Larry Doby.4
Many a baseball player’s life story turns out to be what is derisively termed a “box-score biography,” a sycophantic replay, game by game and season by season. The reader may find many superlatives describing Larry Doby in this book, but in writing it I’ve tried to avoid the box-score, easily digested sports biography.
That said, let’s pick up again with Doby’s 1952 season with Indians, when he hit .276 but with 32 home runs and 104 RBIs. His average dipped to a low point in 1953, to .263, but he hit 29 home runs and batted in 102 runs. He also set an American League fielding record: 158 consecutive games and 421 chances without an error.5
Then came 1954, when the Indians won the American League pennant, setting a record of 111 wins in the regular 154 game season. Doby led the league in both home runs (32) and RBIs (126). He finished second to Yogi Berra in AL MVP voting.
Larry Doby had numbers and on-field achievements in the middle years of his career as well as at the beginning. Before we return to that subject, however, in the 1950s Doby encountered off-field difficulties, in particular with the Cleveland Indians front office after Bill Veeck had left and Hank Greenberg had assumed the reins. It is to that subject that we first turn.
Greenberg’s biographers, the latest of whom has received accolades for his work, call Greenberg the “greatest Jewish baseball player of all times.”6 The biographer waxes even more superlative a few pages later, calling Greenberg simply “the greatest Jewish ballplayer—nay, athlete—of all time.”7
Hank Greenberg was a very great baseball player, the “Jewish Babe Ruth.” In the thirteen years he played, in a career interrupted by four years in military service in World War II, Greenberg batted .313 with 379 home runs, all but one year with the Detroit Tigers. He finished his career with the Pittsburgh Pirates, traded after a nitpicking dispute with despotic Detroit owner Walter Briggs Jr.
In late 1946 Greenberg’s picture had appeared in Sporting News: the photograph was of Greenberg holding up a Yankee jersey. The caption read “Hint’s He’d Like to End Career in a Yankee Uniform.” After seeing the photo, Briggs traded Greenberg to Pittsburgh on the spot, despite Greenberg having hit forty-four HRs, winning the American League HR title for 1946. What made Briggs’s action especially rash was that the picture dated from the war years, 1943 specifically, and was not at all of recent vintage. While home on leave from the military, Greenberg had worked out at Yankee Stadium wearing a borrowed Yankee shirt.8
Greenberg was tall (6 feet 3 inches), intelligent, and articulate, with bold movie-star good looks. He hit for both average and power. But the “greatest Jewish ball player—nay, athlete-of all time”?9 Ask Sandy Koufax that. Or what about Ryan Braun or Ken Holtzman or Shawn Green? Many of my Jewish friends could name Jewish All-Star teams that have at least a few members who could give Hank Greenberg a run for his money. Be that as it may, and Greenberg was a great player, he was a mean-spirited, stingy baseball executive.
In 1947, after his playing career had ended, by chance Greenberg met up with the Indians’ Bill Veeck in New York. The two closed Toots Shor’s, the bar-restaurant that was the haunt of professional athletes, at four o’clock in the morning, kept up talking baseball, and, more specifically, baseball management. Having completed his one year playing for the Pirates, Greenberg ended his career with over $300,000 in savings, or $3.25 million in 2014 dollars, a rarity for Major League stars, of that or any other day.10
After their late-night dialogue, Greenberg and Veeck continued their conversation. Veeck, who by that time owned the Cleveland Indians, knew of a minority Indians shareholder who wished to sell. Veeck convinced Greenberg to invest $100,000 in the Cleveland ball club. The share deal fell through, but Greenberg moved to Cleveland anyway. Veeck made Greenberg an assistant to the president (Veeck himself) and later director of the Cleveland farm system.11 When a divorce settlement forced Veeck to sell the team in 1950, new owner Ellis Ryan named Hank Greenberg general manager of the Cleveland Indians, a position Greenberg held for eight years.12
“Larry Doby was a special case. He was the second black player in Major League baseball, the first in the American League. He had nothing but talent. . . . As far as being a ballplayer, he sure could play,” Greenberg wrote in his autobiography.13
On Doby, Greenberg continues: “Larry was obsessed with the idea that he wasn’t getting the publicity that Jackie Robinson was getting. I tried to explain to him that Jackie was with Brooklyn and he was in Cleveland, and it was like night and day. Playing in Cleveland, Larry could never get the same degree of publicity Jackie Robinson received in New York. Larry was bitter about it throughout his career.”14
Maybe Doby had reason to be grouchy. After the 1951 season, in which Doby had hit .295 and 20 HR, Greenberg focused on Doby’s 1950 production (.326, 25 HR, and 102 RBIs). He insisted on a 25 percent cut in Doby’s pay (from $25,000 in 1951 to $19,000 in 1952).15 When Doby refused to take the salary cut, Greenberg told him to take it or not play. Doby would not be welcome at the Indians spring training camp that year, Greenberg continued. Indians spring training, however, was a venue where Doby was not completely welcome anyway, forced as he was to live in segregated housing, even long after he had become a star.
Until the 1970s and “free agency,” every Major League baseball player’s contract contained a reserve clause. Because of the infamous reserve clause, the Cleveland Indians and general manager Hank Greenberg owned Larry Doby. Doby, as well as other Major League players, could do nothing unless the club owning their contract traded or released them. The clubs had the players not only “over a barrel” but in virtual slavery. So Doby accepted the cut in pay and reported to spring training. In 1952,he went on to hit 32 HRs, leading the American League, and 104 RBIs. But the post–1951 season salary negotiation with Greenberg was a midpoint in a deteriorating relationship.
Greenberg also ended star third baseman Al Rosen’s career. In the 1950 season, “Hebrew Hammer” Rosen had hit 37 home runs and drove in 116 RBIs. In 1953 Rosen had 43 HRs, 145 RBIs, and a .326 BA. Also, in 1953 Rosen was the American League MVP. After his Hall of Fame season, Rosen went to Greenberg’s office to negotiate a raise, hopefully for the 1954 season. Greenberg did not congratulate Rosen, as Rosen had expected. Instead Greenberg pulled out the little green book in which he kept the statistics from his own playing days. He compared his fourth Major League year to Rosen’s.16 In his fourth Major League year, Greenberg had hit three fewer home runs but had outpaced Rosen in every other category: batting average (.337 to .326); runs scored (137 to 115); total bases (397 to 367).
“He reduced me to ashes. I was absolutely devastated,” Rosen recalled. Instead of a raise to $50,000, Rosen settled for $37,500. Forever thereafter Rosen nursed a grudge against Greenberg. Rosen finally quit baseball in 1956, after only a ten-year career, bound as he was to the Cleveland Indians and to Hank Greenberg by the reserve clause. He begged Greenberg to pay him or trade him. Greenberg replied that he would do neither: “If he doesn’t play for me he doesn’t play for anybody,” Greenberg told the press.17 In other words, Rosen could either take what Greenberg offered or quit baseball. In 1955, after Rosen had a subpar year, hitting .244 but with 21 homers and 81 RBIs, Greenberg slashed his salary 20 percent. After the 1957 season, Greenberg offered Rosen $27,500, the same as his rookie salary, when Rosen asked for $50,000.
Meanwhile, Greenberg paid aging slugger Ralph Kiner, to whom Greenberg had been a mentor the year he played for the Pirates, $40,000 when Kiner hit .243 and 18 HRs and 54 RBIs. Greenberg paid an aging Bob Feller, then entering the twilight of his career, the highest salary on the team. Perhaps smarting from the favoritism Greenberg showed certain players, Rosen said that “he would rather retire than play on [Greenberg’s] terms.”18 Eventually, Rosen could take Greenberg no longer. He quit baseball prematurely and went on to a successful career heading front offices of the Yankees, the Houston Astros, and the San Francisco Giants.19 Greenberg journeyed on, building his reputation for “contract lowballing . . . not new to baseball but Hank Greenberg [was] . . . a master at it.”20
In his autobiography, Greenberg claims to be nonplussed by Rosen’s departure from baseball: “We got into a beef and so he [Rosen] quit. He still blames me but I can’t help that.”21 Years later, Greenberg told his son Stephen “that he went out of his way to make things easier for Al Rosen.”22
Along the way, during his term as Indians’ GM, which lasted until after the 1957 season, Greenberg took further potshots at Doby. In his autobiography, Greenberg states, “Doby was a grouchy person and was not popular with the team, the fans or the media. . . . Doby was as belligerent with his black teammates as he was with everyone else. In fact, I always thought Larry resented the other black players.”23 As chapter 15 chronicles, the Cleveland sportswriter fraternity seems to have ganged up on Doby late in Doby’s Cleveland career. How much of that originated in Greenberg’s negative attitudes and words, which germinated much earlier, is unknown, or in the words of Donald Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, is a “known unknowable.”
Greenberg and his biographers make great claims for Greenberg as the champion of those who find themselves victims of discrimination. Biographers hail Greenberg’s “determination in the front office to promote desegregation.”24 Greenberg himself describes his efforts as bordering on the heroic or even saintly.
When the Lord Biltmore Hotel in Baltimore refused registration for the five black players on the 1955 Cleveland team, GM Greenberg asserts: “I said to Spud Goldstein, our traveling secretary, ‘This is not going on any longer. In 1956 we are going to write every hotel before the season opens and tell them we will not send our team there unless everyone on the team is accepted and treated as a guest with the same equal rights.’”25 Very noble until you consider that this was in 1955. Greenberg had been general manager since 1950. In those intervening years, on road trips Larry Doby had been segregated from his teammates. He had endured discrimination since 1947 when he first broke into the major leagues. Even as late as 1955, hotels in St. Louis, Baltimore, and Washington did not allow blacks as guests.26 Under Greenberg as well, at spring training the Indians still stayed at the Santa Rita Hotel in Tucson, Arizona. Well into the 1950s the hotel discriminated, not allowing blacks. Doby, his wife, and his children had to find a black family to house them. As reported elsewhere, the Santa Rita would not even let Helyn Doby and her baby Christina use a hotel drinking fountain when the baby was choking. Later, when it did permit “integration,” the Santa Rita insisted that black players not sit in the lobby or use the main staircase.
Hank Greenberg was the Indians’ general manager when all of this occurred. He did not suddenly have the responsibility bestowed on him in 1955. It is more than a bit hypocritical of Greenberg, great player that he was, and of his biographers, to present him as the champion of the oppressed, an exemplar of “broad-mindedness and compassion in race relations.”27 Greenberg could not have been much of a voice for the downtrodden, when discrimination went on right under his nose for seven or eight years and he did nothing about it.
So it is not surprising that Doby may have seemed “grouchy” or “belligerent” when he had to deal with Greenberg. Greenberg was a miser in salary and similar dealings. He was no champion, let alone martyr, for African American baseball players either. In other words, this “emperor” had no clothes. Hank Greenberg’s words, and the words of his sycophantic biographer, have to be taken with not one or two but a dozen or more grains of salt. They simply do not match up with any other baseball figure’s words and observations about Larry Doby.
Well, for starters, Greenberg drove excessive, almost savagely hard, bargains with Doby as well as with others on the Indians team, such as All-Star third baseman Al Rosen. Meanwhile, he paid $40,000 per year to pitcher Bob Feller, not at the end of his career but when he was well past the peak. Greenberg had played against Feller, which may be one possible reason he was generous toward Feller while being stingy toward Doby and Rosen. Greenberg was generous toward friends such as Feller and Ralph Kiner.
Following the 1955 season, Greenberg traded Doby away “to the White Sox for two unmemorable players,” outfielder Jim Busby and shortstop Chico Carrasquel.28 Before that, in 1951, he peddled away the great Cuban player Minnie Minoso in “a questionable trade.”29 In fact, Greenberg traded Minoso whenever he was in a position to do so, that is, three times. Both Minoso and Doby were black.
Greenberg’s view of Doby as jealous of Jackie Robinson also seems wide of the mark. Of course, Doby undoubtedly was jealous to a degree, but he and Robinson were friends. As Steve Jacobson observes, “[Doby] didn’t get all the credit he deserved for living so gracefully in centerfield and everyplace else. Jackie Robinson was first. . . . Doby rarely let on how difficult it had been to be second. He rarely revealed his disappointment at being overlooked.”30 Then, too, “Doby survived against greater odds and obstacles than those facing Jackie Robinson. Most of us don’t know that,” writes Terry Pluto. “Most of us know that Larry Doby was the second African American to play major league baseball. Because he was second, it was supposed to be easier.”31 Doby himself said, “I understand what Jackie went through. Do you think it was any different 11 weeks later [against different teams, in different cities, in the more racist of the two major leagues]?”32
The historical depictions of Doby contradict Greenberg. “Dignity was how he conducted his life,” Steve Jacobson concludes in his book Carrying Jackie’s Torch.33 Joe Morgan, Ken Singleton, Dusty Baker, Bill White, Yogi Berra, Bill Veeck, and scores of other baseball players, coaches, and executives who knew Doby have only praise for him as a dignified, intelligent, but reserved man who was always generous with friendship and advice. Doby was a pallbearer at Abe Manley’s funeral in 1952.34 Twenty years later he was a pallbearer at Jackie Robinson’s funeral. The overwhelming weight of the evidence is against Hank Greenberg’s assessments of Larry Doby.
In 1954 Bobby Avila, the Indians second baseman, won the American League batting championship, hitting .341. Third baseman Al Rosen hit .300, with 24 home runs and 102 RBIs. Larry Doby led the Indians and the American League in two important categories: he hit 32 home runs and had 126 RBIs.35
The Indians also had one of the best, if not the best, pitching rotations of all time.36 The four starters (Bob Lemon, 23-7; Early Wynn, 23-11; Mike Garcia, 19-8; and Bob Feller, 13-3) won 78 games in 91 starts, losing only 29. Three of those pitchers (Lemon, Wynn, and Feller) were elected to the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown. Over the span of 1949–55, the “Big Four” won 479 games, losing only 282.37 In naming the five toughest pitchers he ever faced, Ted Williams listed two of the three Indians Hall of Fame pitchers, Bob Feller and Bob Lemon.38
The Indians won 111 games in 1954, setting an American League record that stood until 1998, when the Yankees won 114 games—albeit in a 162 rather than 154 game season. In 1954 the Indians also bested the Yankees, who won 103 games but still finished second. Later that sequence of events led to the famous Casey Stengel line, “We had a splendid season, but Senor [Al Lopez] beat me and you could look it up.”39 In 1949 Al Lopez, of course, had succeeded Lou Boudreau as the Indians’ manager.
The Indians journeyed to the Polo Grounds to play the World Series against the New York Giants, the National League champions. “If the Indians’ 1954 season looked too good to be true, that’s what it turned out to be—in the World Series they were swept by the New York Giants (who had won 14 fewer games during the regular season) in four games.”40
It was said of the Giants’ Dusty Rhodes that “he was supposed to be an outfielder but he was not on speaking terms with his glove.”41 Some baseball players are like bees: one sting and then they die. Dusty Rhodes was such a player. Seemingly, Rhodes could have swept the Indians all by himself. In Game One of the 1954 World Series, Rhodes pinch hit, launching a home run in the tenth inning, with two men on, giving the Giants a 5–2 win. The game also featured “the catch” by Willie Mays of Indians first baseman Vic Wertz’s four-hundred-foot line drive (see chapter 14). In Game Two Rhodes hit safely off Early Wynn and played defense. The Giants won 3–1. In Game Three Rhodes drove in two more runs. The Giants won 6–2. In Game Four Bob Lemon pitched again for the Indians, on three days’ rest. He was shellacked with the Giants winning the game, 7–4, and the World Series.
Cleveland Manager Al Lopez was roundly criticized for not starting Bob Feller or otherwise using him at all in the Series. Lopez responded that Feller was “an old man,” implying that he was all washed up. “He wasn’t that good of a pitcher anymore.”42 But the record shows otherwise. Feller had gone 13-3 during the 1954 regular season, with a 3.09 ERA. Overall, in the 1954 World Series, Dusty Rhodes had 4 hits in 6 at bats, with 2 home runs and 7 RBIs.43
Many other excuses were given for the Indians spectacular no-show. Doby, the Indians’ star, had an injured hamstring as well as a shoulder he had jammed sliding into a base, and he hit an anemic .154. The vaunted big three had inexplicably high ERAs: Lemon 6.75, Wynn 3.86, and Garcia 5.40.44 Rosen had an injured hand. It was the latter, however, who gave the most cogent explanation of the Indians’ flop: “It was a letdown, pure and simple. All year, people kept waiting for us to fold and the Yankees to catch us. We always [had been] the bridesmaids, and we were sick of it. The 1954 Indians drove themselves to beat the Yankees and, when we did it, it was like winning the World Series.”45 There was also Mays’s spectacular catch, Lopez’s failure to use his pitching staff effectively, Dusty Rhodes’s improbable hitting streak, and the Indians’ injuries. “You can talk about how we didn’t get a break, and we didn’t,” Rosen concluded. “In the end, I just think the tank was empty. We had nothing left.”46
In the Series, confirming Rosen’s assessment, Doby had “nothing in the tank.” He got only 2 hits in 16 ABs, for a .125 batting average. Moreover, the Indians’ colossal World Series flop obscured Doby’s splendid regular-season performance and more. The 1954 Cleveland Indians World Series performance stands as one of the biggest disappointments in all baseball history, unless of course you are a Giants fan.
Lopez had always been Doby’s nemesis. In 1947 Doby and Lopez played together on the Indians, Doby as a rookie and Lopez in the twilight of his career. Lopez made remarks about Doby that could be interpreted as racist (see chapter 17).
In 1950 Al Lopez succeeded Lou Boudreau as manager of the Indians. In this role Lopez alternated between hot and cold on Doby. In 1952, a year in which Doby led the league in home runs (32) and drove in 104, Lopez benched him.47 Yet in the following year, Lopez spoke glowingly to the media, saying that Doby was his offense and that Doby “carried the team.”48
After the debacle of the 1954 World Series, as manager of the American League’s pennant winner, Lopez was entitled to be manager of the American League side in the summer classic. Doby was on the 1955 All-Star team. Yet Doby was one of the few All-Stars whom Lopez did not play. Lopez left his own player on the bench, a seemingly intentional slap in the face.49 Despite the slight, in 1955 Doby had another good year. He hit .295 with 26 home runs and 75 RBIs. Nonetheless, after the season concluded, Lopez and general manager Hank Greenberg traded Doby to the Chicago White Sox. Lopez’s parting shot was that “he had just gotten rid of 100 strikeouts,” a number typical of power hitters such as Doby (see chapter 17) and a fact of which supposed baseball expert Al Lopez seemed to be unaware.50 Shep Jackson, a newspaper columnist, lamented the trade, calling Doby “the heart and soul of the team.”51
Lopez then “dissed” Doby even further. To quiet Cleveland baseball fans, irate at the trade of their star player, Lopez predicted that the players received in return for Doby would outhit the former Cleveland center fielder. Together Chico Carrasquel and Jim Busby hit 19 home runs and drove in 98 runs for the Indians. Alone, in 1956 for the White Sox, Doby hit 24 HRS and batted in 102 runs.52 He had proven Al Lopez wrong.
Doby liked being in Chicago, playing for manager Marty Marion. He recalled, “In Chicago, I was treated very, very well. I met good people in the community here, and that changed the disappointment I had felt as I left Cleveland. I had teammates that were great—Sherm Lollar, Nellie Fox, Dick Donovan, Jim Rivera, Luis Aparicio, Walt Droppo and [Minnie] Minoso.”53
Lopez though had the last laugh. In the 1956-57, the Chicago White Sox hired Al Lopez away from Cleveland to be their field manager, replacing Marty Marion. Doby had his nemesis back as his boss once again.
In 1957, for the White Sox, Doby put up another decent year, hitting .288 with fourteen home runs, but in only 119 games. Lopez benched Doby for several skeins of games. Then after the season Lopez engineered a trade of Doby for the second time. Doby was at his home in New Jersey, in the bathroom shaving. His oldest child, Christina, was watching television. When she saw on the sports report that the Chicago White Sox had traded Larry Doby to the Baltimore Orioles, she ran in to tell her father that he had been traded.54 Doby’s manager of eight years and former teammate, Al Lopez, had not even bothered with a heads-up telephone call to Doby. Doby should have “seen the razor blade in the apple” when Lopez came over from Cleveland, but he had not.
In an article published in Jet, Doby told his interviewer, “I can’t have any respect for a man [Lopez] who lacks respect for a man because he is a minority and acts as if we’re always wrong and they’re always right. I don’t care to play for him.” Doby told “Doc Young [of Jet] that Lopez’s racism had affected his play [in 1958] with the White Sox.”55
Almost like a chapter in Alice in Wonderland, everything was turned upside down. For Doby it could not have been worse, traded again, this time to a franchise (formerly the St. Louis Browns) only a few years removed from being relocated. Instead it got better, for a time anyway.
Doby’s stop in Baltimore proved to be less than even a cup of coffee, as brief Major League player appearances are known. Doby never played a game for the Orioles. In March 1958 Baltimore general manager Paul Richards, who had insisted that Doby would be his new center fielder, traded Doby and pitcher Don Ferrarese to Cleveland for outfielder Gene Woodling, infielder Dick Williams, and pitcher Bud Daley.56
Larry Doby had come full circle to where his Major League career had begun. Things were looking up. Lopez and Greenberg were gone. Doby had many friends in Cleveland and knew his way around the town, but one factor, Frank Lane as the new general manager, loomed large over all the rest.
In 1958 Frank Lane had succeeded Hank Greenberg as general manager of the Indians, beginning one of the more bizarre episodes in baseball, at least insofar as general manager episodes go. Lane was known as “Trader Frank,” “Frantic Frank,” “The Wheeler Dealer,” and by many similar names. In 1958–59 alone, as Indians GM Lane made sixty-four trades involving 140 Major League players.57 Clevelanders know Lane as the man who traded away Roger Maris. Lane banished Maris, a promising young player, to Kansas City, where a year later the Athletics traded him to the Yankees. With the Yankees, Maris went on, of course, to break Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record.
In 1959 Lane also traded away the heartthrob movie-star-handsome slugging Rocky Colavito, a Cleveland outfielder who had hit forty-one and then forty-two home runs in the two preceding years (1957 and 1958).58
Lane had bought Doby back. Lane and manager Bobby Bragan planned an outfield of Minnie Minoso (also traded several times by Lopez), Larry Doby, and Rocky Colavito (soon to be gone, traded away). Plagued by injuries, Doby played only 119 games for the 1958 Indians, hitting a respectable .283, with 13 home runs. With Frantic Frank at the controls, however, Doby’s numbers put him on the trading block once more.