It’s kind of like a bale of cotton has been on your shoulders and now it’s off.
—LARRY DOBY on news of his election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, thirty-six years after Jackie Robinson, quoted by Hal Bodley, USA Today, March 1998
Bill Veeck thought Doby was art in motion, something rare to behold, and a human being and a ball player who was a model for all.
—GENE BUDIG, Grasping the Ring
Often there is less pain if you do something unpleasant quickly, like stripping off a Band-Aid. Some professional athletes do that; they hang it up (quit) while they are ahead—quickly, often suddenly, experiencing a sharp but short pain. Many more professional athletes do not. They hang around as they age and their physical prowess and skills attenuate. The demise of their career is not a pretty sight. They do not see that even if the window has not closed, the shade is coming down. Larry Doby was one of the latter. His playing career lasted too long. His last years did not add to his legacy.
Following the 1958 season, Cleveland Indians general manager Frank Lane (“Trader Frank,” “Frantic Frank,” “The Wheeler Dealer”) shipped Doby a little bit west and a little bit north, to Detroit, Michigan, in exchange for Detroit Tigers first baseman Tito Francona. By a twist of fate, years later Tito Francona’s son, Terry Francona, also called Tito, became the field manager of the Cleveland Indians—after an extremely successful run as manager of the Boston Red Sox (2004–11).
Doby did not fare well with the Detroit Tigers. While at Cleveland the previous year, he had played in eighty-nine games (247 at bats or ABs); at Detroit Doby appeared in only eighteen contests (55 ABs). He fell from a .283 batting average to .218, from 13 home runs to none, and from 45 RBIs to 4. His skill seemed to have fallen off a cliff.
A funny thing happened, though, on the way to Briggs Stadium, where the Tigers played. Farther west Bill Veeck acquired a controlling interest in the Chicago White Sox, his third Major League team. One of his first moves was to reunite with his old friend Larry Doby. Veeck caused the White Sox to purchase Doby’s contract from the Tigers.
It was not all Veeck. Al Lopez aside, memories of Doby in his previous Chicago incarnation (1956–57) were good. Early Wynn, Hall of Fame pitcher in Chicago from 1957 on, summed up those prior two years: “Doby did good work for the Sox” (24 HR, 102 RBIs in 1956; 14 HR, 79 RBIs and .288 BA in 1957).1
Now the year was 1959, the year of the Go-Go Sox, who wound up winning the American League pennant that year. As stated, Doby was reunited with his friend from Cleveland, Early Wynn, who led the White Sox pitching staff (22-10) and took home the Cy Young Award, judged to be the best pitcher in the major leagues (and also master of the brush back, an inside pitch to move hitters back away from home plate and to intimidate, known by some as “Wynn’s Burma Shave” pitch).
Other White Sox players included Luis “Little Looie” Aparicio, who teamed up with Hall of Famer Nellie Fox as a double play combination. Sherm Lollar, another friend of Doby’s from his earlier stint with the Sox, was behind home plate. Ex-football and Cincinnati Reds star Ted Kluszewski, famous for the cutoff sleeves on his baseball shirts, which showed off his massive biceps, played first base. Bill Veeck chipped in with his usual zany promotions: snake charmers, rock-and-roll bands, exploding scoreboards, and the rest.
As stated, the White Sox won the American League pennant that year, winning ninety-four games and losing sixty. They finished five games ahead of the second-place Cleveland Indians. In the World Series the Go Sox met the Los Angeles Dodgers. They lost four games to two. Doby was not around to see it.
Doby was done in again, for the third time, by his nemesis, Al Lopez, who managed the Sox. Lopez was aided and abetted by general manager Hank Greenberg, whom Veeck had hired after Cleveland had dismissed Greenberg as its general manager. Of Lopez and Greenberg, then, it could be said that “black hearts seldom beat alone.” The three of them (Lopez, Greenberg, and team owner Veeck) met. Injured and thirty-five years old, in 1959 Doby appeared in only twenty-one games for the Sox, seven of those only as a pinch hitter, with fifty-eight at bats. He hit .241, with no home runs and 9 RBIs.
Veeck begged his managers to keep Doby a while longer so that Doby could recover from his damaged shoulder. But Lopez and Greenberg outvoted Veeck 2–1. In one of the hardest things he ever had to do in his baseball management career, Veeck assented to Doby’s demotion. “I hated to do it. I’m just as fond of him today as I was in Cleveland. . . . He’s always had great talent and he’s far from through.”2
The White Sox shipped Doby to their California farm team, the San Diego Padres. Figuratively, Doby forked his fingers into his baseball glove, boarding the plane for the West Coast. It was here, though, in San Diego, that his career finally skidded into the ditch.
Not because San Diego and the Padres were shabby, in any sense of the word. The Pacific Coast League, in which the Padres played, was regarded by many as a third major league—an exaggeration, albeit a slight one. The Los Angeles Stars, the Los Angeles Angels, the San Francisco Seals, the Portland Beavers, the Seattle Rainiers, the Vancouver Mounties, and the Salt Lake City Bees, along with the Padres, were mainstays of the league, although over the years the lineup of teams changed now and then.
The West Coast weather generally was good; California especially was booming; and the Pacific League teams played an exciting game of West Coast baseball. Still, the Pacific Coast League compared to the major leagues was as checkers compared to chess, or at least it felt that way to an accomplished Major Leaguer like Doby.
At San Diego Doby’s injuries compounded themselves. Doby wore a body-length brace because of a bad back. The brace limited his flexibility. Sliding into third base, Doby was unable to rotate his body because of the brace. He tore ligaments in his ankle. His short stint in San Diego was over.
Nonetheless, Doby was invited to camp for the White Sox 1960 spring training. A small silver lining was that the Sox would no longer put up with discrimination for their African American players. Doby stayed in the hotel with the rest of the players. For Doby it was only the third spring training in a thirteen-year Major League career in which he did not have to live in segregated housing.3
Later still the White Sox took a page from the Dodgers’ playbook. In 1949 the Dodgers acquired land and built Dodger Town in Vero Beach, Florida, so that Jackie Robinson and other black Dodgers players would not have to face discrimination. Twelve years later, tired of negotiating with Tampa, Florida, hotels, the White Sox imitated the Dodgers’ playbook and acquired a hotel in Sarasota, Florida.4
For Doby that spring training and the stay (finally) in an integrated hotel were the end of the line, or nearly so. After a few weeks the White Sox assigned Doby’s contract to the Toronto Maple Leafs of the International League, near where Jackie Robinson had begun his ascent with the Montreal Royals. The Maple Leafs soon released Doby. It was like putting the cloth over the canary’s cage at night. All the noise suddenly stopped. Doby’s prospects for continuing his Major League Baseball career were over.
Or were they? Doby returned to northern New Jersey. His baseball friends Don Newcombe and Roy Campanella owned bars in Newark and in Harlem, respectively. So Doby and his wife, Helyn, bought a bar and liquor store (the Center Field Lounge) in Newark, then much more a thriving city than it has been in recent years. The venture proved to be a financial disappointment, if not a disaster, and the Dobys sold it in 1965.
Meanwhile, Don Newcombe, Doby’s close friend dating from their days as teammates on the Newark Eagles, called Doby. Newcombe was going to Japan as one of the first postwar Americans to play baseball there. He would play for the Chunichi Dragons of Nagoya. Nagoya, Japan’s fourth largest city, lies about two hundred kilometers west of Tokyo. It is a company town, home of Toyota as well as other automobile manufacturers, not then as substantial a presence as today but a presence nonetheless. Doby agreed to go, along with Newcombe, igniting the “foreigner boom” in Japanese baseball.5 Newcombe, his family, and Doby shipped off to the Land of the Rising Sun for the 1962 season.
Doby played first base, Newcombe the outfield. Doby did not hit for average but could still awe the Japanese players and fans with prodigious home runs. Off the field he lived alone in a hotel but spent considerable time with the Newcombe family.
When Doby came home, his playing days finally were over. The canary no longer sang. The cover went back on the canary’s cage for good. The singing days were finished.
The percentage of baseball players who were white fell from 88 percent in the fifties to 64 percent in the sixties. During that same period, the percentage of players who were African American rose from 7.6 percent to 22 percent. The difference, 14 percent, represented Latino and Hispanic players, who increasingly were entering the game.6 Yet there were few black coaches and no black managers at all in baseball.
After he had returned from Japan, Doby wrote to the general manager of every Major League Baseball club inquiring about coaching jobs, to no avail. Then Bowie Kuhn, commissioner of baseball, took Doby and Monte Irvin, another former teammate from Newark Eagles days, to lunch in Manhattan at Toots Shor’s. Kuhn offered Irvin a position as a special assistant to the commissioner. He offered Doby a position as coach with the newest Major League expansion team, the Montreal Expos, whose general manager agreed to go along with Kuhn.
Doby spent five years as a coach for the Expos, much of that time as a batting instructor and first base coach under manager Gene Mauch. Players applauded Doby’s laid-back coaching style. He did not approach players; he waited for them to seek his help. And help he did. Expo players credited Doby’s instruction with increasing their batting average as much as twenty-five points.7
At the beginning of those five years, in 1969, Doby did service as a roving instructor at lower-level Expos farm clubs such as Class A at Palm Beach, Florida, and Rookie League, at Bradenton, Florida. In 1970 Doby moved up to higher-level Minor League teams (class AA Quebec City and class AAA Memphis). In 1971 he joined the big league club permanently.
Mauch and Doby had a special relationship in part because Mauch, who had been a player for the Dodgers, had witnessed firsthand what Doby and Robinson had gone through: “You have to be some kind of a special person to go through what Larry and Jackie went through. I’m not sure there’s a player in the game today that could handle it.”8
After the 1973 season, Cleveland Indians general manager Phil Segui sought permission from Montreal to talk with Doby. Cleveland ended up hiring Doby as a coach for the 1974 season. Doby left Montreal very reluctantly. “I was very happy working for Gene Mauch. I didn’t just pick up and leave, believe me,” he stated. But Doby knew that Cleveland’s manager, Ken Aspromonte, was on probation, so to speak.
During his stint as a coach for the Indians, Doby’s hope was to learn enough about the Cleveland players and the teams in the American League so that he might be first in line to get the Cleveland job. He would thus become the first African American Major League manager.9
Doby’s competition for the Cleveland job, a rival who came seemingly from nowhere, was Frank Robinson. Former American League president (1996–2000) Gene Budig recited, with approval, that “there are those, in growing numbers, who argue that [Frank] Robinson was among the greatest ever to don a major league uniform. George Brett believes that [as others do].”10 In twenty-one seasons, mostly with the Cincinnati Reds and the Baltimore Orioles, Frank Robinson batted .294, with 586 home runs. He led the Orioles to three consecutive American League pennants (1969–71), with a World Series championship in 1971. Robinson was the only individual to win the Most Valuable Player Award in both the National and the American League.11
Frank Robinson went on to manage five Major League teams (Indians, Giants, Orioles, Expos, and Nationals, as well as managing in the minor leagues). As a manager his record of 1,065 wins and 1,176 losses (47.5 percent) was not as stellar as it had been as a player.12
Robinson “also broke the color barrier in 1975 when he was named player-manager of the Cleveland Indians,” his first managing job.13 “The press played up the significance of the achievement,” comparing it to Jackie Robinson’s breakthrough in 1947.14
Yet no matter how diplomatic and self-effacing Robinson may have been in his subsequent managing career, his first promotion to Major League manager was not as gracious as it could have been. One of Robinson’s first acts, in October 1974, was to fire his principal competitor for the Cleveland manager’s position, Larry Doby, who had been an Indians coach. To top that Robinson went public with criticism of Doby, possibly to neutralize adverse press and fan reaction to his shabby treatment of Doby. Doby was immensely popular in Cleveland, having, among other things, led the Indians to the 1948 and 1954 World Series.
Robinson publicly accused Doby of having undermined Ken Aspromonte, Robinson’s predecessor as manager. Never mind that Aspromonte himself did not agree. Robinson said further that Doby had captained or encouraged a cabal, especially among the black players, who would support Doby’s aspirations and also Aspromonte’s demotion.15 “The Indians were a racially divided team, with Aspromonte and Doby on opposite sides,” Robinson repeated shortly after firing Doby.16
It got even worse. Robinson claimed, “Shortly after I joined the Indians . . . I realized that the ball club was in trouble. The dugout was virtually segregated. On one side was Ken Aspromonte, with all the white players. On the other side was Larry Doby, a black coach, with all the black players. Any ball club that’s split along racial lines like that is in real trouble.”17 Finally, Robinson twisted the knife: “I didn’t keep any of Aspromonte’s coaches because I wanted to clear the air. In particular, I did not keep Larry Doby because he had shown me that he wasn’t loyal to the manager. Doby wanted to be the first black manager but splitting the team racially wasn’t the way to do it.”18
Both black and white players (Oscar Gamble, Gaylord Perry, Jack Brohamer) disagreed with Robinson: “We didn’t think we had a split.”19 Cleveland general manager Phil Segui spoke to the press: “I don’t think we had a split.” Segui also spoke for dismissed manager Ken Aspromonte: “Ken never said anything about disloyalty to me.”20 Ted Bonda, Indians executive vice president, voiced his view: “No, I don’t think so,” in answer to a question of whether the Indian players might have been divided along racial lines.21
Realizing that he had been bested, Doby was gracious: “The best thing I can do for Robinson is to wish him luck.”22 Once again out of baseball, Doby returned home to Montclair, New Jersey, and his family. Doby and Robinson never spoke to each other again.23 In subsequent years, the few times they shared a dais together, they were like two pitchers of ice water on a conference table.
Why did Robinson go so much out of his way to single out and belittle Doby? Among other things, the comments he made and the attitude he evinced seemed out of character for him. Organizational behavior and business psychologists describe one type of stereotypical role they frequently encounter. They label it the “queen bee syndrome.”24 “Once some [managers] get a taste of power, they may be afraid to delegate or share it. . . . They stay aloof” and become judgmental of those who aspire to similar status.25
The first woman or the first minority-group member to reach a certain management level or the inner circle, within a work group, a division, a subsidiary, or the entire organization relishes not only being the first but also in being the only and staying that way. The queen bee is the first one up in the tree house. He or she pulls the rope ladder up after him or her. Queen bees can further cement their position as “the only” within the inner circle by “putting down,” publicly denigrating, or placing in a false light any other pretenders for the loftier position they have attained. In his first steps as the new Cleveland Indians manager and the first black baseball manager overall, Frank Robinson, it seems, may well have illustrated the queen bee phenomenon.
In 1975, after the Cleveland dustup, Doby returned to the Montreal Expos. He worked with hitters at Montreal farm clubs in Quebec City and in West Palm Beach. For the second time the Expos organization promoted Doby to the Major League team for the 1976 season. There he developed a special relationship with Andre Dawson (Hall of Fame, 2010), who called Doby “a keen, quiet individual.” Dawson elucidated: “I’m a quiet individual and around Larry I would open up more.”26
In 1977 Bill Veeck acquired a controlling interest in the Chicago White Sox, for the second time. He hired the All-Star pitcher from his Cleveland days, Bob Lemon, as the Sox’s field manager. Together Veeck and Lemon asked Doby to come over from Montreal to be a coach with the White Sox.
Veeck’s second tenure as owner of the White Sox and Doby’s return to Chicago were complicated, and perhaps done in, by the arrival in baseball of free agency. Unable to come to contract renewal terms with the California Angels, pitcher Andy Messersmith had gone to arbitration. In the process he had become the “reserve clause’s conqueror,” convincing arbitrator Peter Seitz to void the reserve clause that would have bound Messersmith to the Angels for the 1977 season.27 The age of free agency in baseball had begun. The era of larger and larger salaries, sale of player services to the highest bidder, and the demise of any notion of loyalty to a particular team or city had arrived.
Prior to the 1978 season, then, the White Sox lost six star players to free agency, among them Richie Zisk and Oscar Gamble.28 Veeck had neither the personal wealth nor access to financial resources sufficient to replace the players whom the Sox had lost with anything near their equivalents. Once the season began, the Sox began losing games with regularity.
Bik Veeck fired manager Bob Lemon at the end of June 1978. He replaced him as manager with Larry Doby. Doby thus became the second African American again: second as a player in 1947 and second as a Major League manager in 1978, both times second to a Robinson. It was bittersweet for Doby. Bob Lemon was one of several Indians who in 1947 had welcomed Doby to the Cleveland club. They had remained friends. Doby remarked, “I was surprised and somewhat saddened. Bob Lemon and I have been friends since 1947.”29
Following Veeck’s announcement of the new manager, Doby and Lemon had a long talk. “Don’t feel saddened. We’re still friends and these things happen in baseball,” Lemon cautioned Doby. Lemon, of course, went on to skipper the New York Yankees to a World Series championship, the first of several with Lemon at the Yankees helm. Doby took the extraordinary step of having Lemon speak to the team the following day, delivering a short farewell address. Doby then announced to the press: “I don’t necessarily intend to run a ‘tighter’ ship. Let’s call it a different ship.”30
Doby and the different ship did not have a good start. Over the first six weeks of Doby’s tenure, the team lost thirty and won only thirteen games.31 But then, evidently, Doby succeeded in turning the ship around. Down the stretch, the Sox won twenty-four games while losing only twenty. Shortly after the 1978 season had ended, though, Bill Veeck fired Larry Doby as manager. In Doby’s place Veeck hired the popular Don Kessinger, a former University of Mississippi basketball player who had spent twelve years (1964–76) as shortstop for the Chicago Cubs, on Chicago’s North Side.
Low on funds, with his health failing, and with White Sox attendance continuing to fall, Veeck adopted sort of a whack-the-mole approach to managing the White Sox. Veeck truly had faith in Larry Doby, but the press had characterized Doby’s hiring as “little more than a play for increased black attendance.”32 The newspaper criticism contained more than a kernel of truth. The White Sox home, Comiskey Park, was on Chicago’s South Side, proximate to many of the city’s oldest and most established African American neighborhoods. The increased attendance, however, never materialized following Doby’s promotion to manager.
Desperate to increase gate receipts, Veeck switched horses. He hoped that Kessinger’s hiring would bring white fans from Chicago’s North Side and suburbs. Veeck’s new ploy to raise ticket sales by the hiring of Kessinger worked no better than had his aborted plan in promoting Doby. Veeck was contrite: “I took a man [Doby] away from doing what he does best—instructing hitters—and asked him to manage. I don’t deny that [Kessinger’s] popularity in Chicago was a factor in his hiring.”33
Doby appeared to harbor no hard feeling, although he must have felt them. He went back to permanently living out of a suitcase, visiting the towns and cities where the White Sox had farm teams (Appleton, Wisconsin; Des Moines, Iowa; Memphis, Tennessee). Once again he was a roving hitting instructor for a Major League team.
After a season of roving, Doby was fifty-six years old. He had been in organized baseball for thirty-four years, since 1946. He went back to Montclair, his wife, Helyn, and his five children in New Jersey.
During the 1980s, Doby became the director of community relations for the NBA New Jersey (now Brooklyn) Nets. He always compared Nets’ owner Joe Taub to Bill Veeck, finding them very much alike. Doby roamed the state and surrounding areas, giving speeches, handing out awards, and promoting the Nets.
In 1996 Gene Budig, former president of West Virginia University and former chancellor of the University of Kansas, became president of the American League. He hired Larry Doby and former St. Louis pitching great Bob Gibson as his “on-field assistants.” In that capacity Doby visited many Major League teams and ballparks. He also had the ear of President Budig, who later called Doby “an American Original.”34 “Both [Doby and Gibson] had strong views on matters of substance and no reluctance to express those views. They rarely disagreed on baseball matters such as player discipline.”35
In the 1990s “many old-timers believe[d] the blinding focus on [Jackie] Robinson had delayed Doby’s entry into the Hall of Fame.” Among others Yankees great Yogi Berra and Red Sox great Ted Williams were on the Veterans Committee, which finally picked Doby for induction in 1998, thirty-six years after Jackie Robinson and seven years after Bill Veeck. In particular “Ted Williams was apologetic that it took so do long . . . believing that [Doby] was the ultimate gentleman, a distinct credit to the game, and ‘one helluva ball player.’”36
At Doby’s induction ceremony, Ted Williams, Yogi Berra, Joe Morgan, and others “went out of their way to underscore the greatness of Doby, on and off the playing field.”37 Berra said, “Truth is, he was a wonderful guy and an exceptional ballplayer. All his years, on and off the field all he meant was goodness and hope.”38 Bob Lemon “said that in case of war he would want Doby in his foxhole.”39 Pitching great Joe Black, an African American teammate of Jackie Robinson in Brooklyn, called Doby “a gentle soul who wanted nothing taken away from Robinson.”40 Doby himself told AL president Budig, who attended the 1998 induction ceremony, “that he and Robinson had the same goals—winning and opening the doors of opportunity for other deserving minority athletes.”41 So it finally happened. Earlier Doby had told Murray Chase of the New York Times, “I can’t quite believe it. My whole working life was in baseball. Baseball was great to me and to my family.”42
Doby’s plaque at Cooperstown reads:
Exceptional athletic prowess and a staunch constitution led to a successful playing career after integrating the American League in 1947. A seven-time All-Star who batted .283 with 253 home runs and 970 RBI in 14 major league seasons. The power-hitting center field paced the A.L. in home runs twice and collected 100 RBI five times whole leading the Indians to pennants in 1948 and 1954. Appointed manager of the White Sox in 1978. The second African-American to lead a major league club. Played four seasons with Newark in the Negro National League. Following baseball career worked as a scout and major league baseball executive.43
Larry Doby fought a long battle against kidney and then colon cancer. He died on June 18, 2003. His wife of fifty-two years, Helyn, had predeceased him in 2001. A flood of eulogies followed. Many greats of baseball attended his funeral at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Montclair, New Jersey. Baseball commissioner Bud Selig summed up the feelings of those who had attended and of the baseball world: “He was a force for good everywhere.”44