If Larry had come up just a little later, when things were a little better, he might very well have become one of the greatest players of all time.
—BILL VEECK, Veeck as in Wreck
[Bill Veeck] saw Larry Doby as a potential Joe DiMaggio, and he always wondered what Doby could have done had he not been under all the pressure, if he had just come along ten years later.
—TERRY PLUTO, Our Tribe
Whitey Ford, the Yankee pitching great, remembered Larry Doby as “one of the most formidable hitters he ever faced.”1 In 1952 Total Baseball rated Mickey Mantle as the player with the second highest rating (4.8) in the American League. Who did the magazine rank first? Larry Doby of the Cleveland Indians.2 In 1954 Mantle ranked fourth—again behind the leader, Larry Doby, who led the American League in home runs (32) and RBIs (126) that year.3 Although admittedly biased, a Cleveland teammate, Bob Feller, rated Doby as “one of the greatest stars of [his] time.”4
Doby was not without recognition in his lifetime, especially later in his life, when nostalgia caused baseball fans and writers to look back at the days when integration of baseball first began. For a short time, mostly in the late 1990s, fans and historians also began to look beyond the achievements of Jackie Robinson to those of other pioneers such as Doby. In that time Doby received honorary degrees from four universities: Long Island University (1996) where he had played basketball; Montclair State University (1987) in his home city; Fairfield University (1997), a Jesuit University in Connecticut; and Princeton University (1997) in his home state.
Doby received other honors including the following:
Induction in the Cleveland Indians Hall of Fame
Permanent retirement of Cleveland uniform number 14
Induction into the Chicago White Sox Hall of Fame
Dedication of the Patterson, New Jersey, post office as “Larry Doby Post Office”
Congressional Larry Doby medal authorized (S 1519, 100th CONG., 1st Sess. [1987]) (twenty-two senator sponsors) and cast
Induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame (1998)
Installation and dedication of a larger-than-life-size statue of Larry Doby outside Cleveland’s Progressive Field (joining statues of Bob Feller and Jim Thome) (July 25, 2015)
The Hall of Fame induction seems to have been the high point. Since that time, Larry Doby and his achievements have slipped in and out of view, often relegated to the backwater formed behind the continued celebration of Jackie Robinson and his achievements.
In a similar way, Duke Snider, the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers great, and his achievements were eclipsed as well, playing as he did in the shadows cast by Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, and Mickey Mantle. “It was his fate to be overlooked. He was the perfect hero for an underdog borough [Brooklyn].”5 Doby was eclipsed even more. The extent might be illustrated by author James Hirsch’s 2010 denomination of Willie Mays in 1951 as the first black five-tool player.6 Larry Doby, a true five-tool player if ever there was one, had preceded Mays by several years. But Larry Doby has been forgotten by baseball historians and authors such as Hirsch.7
My thesis here is that Doby and his achievements may have been insufficiently recognized and lauded not only because other players, often playing for higher-profile teams, overshadowed Doby but also because his achievements occurred during the final days of radio baseball coverage. Moreover, his best days came before the dawn of serious television coverage. Doby thus fell into the crevice between radio and the then-new medium of television. The waning days of radio coincided with the immense postwar popularity of baseball, both in itself and as a symbol, indeed the paradigm, of a return to normalcy after the cataclysmic struggles of World War II.
David Halberstam writes in The Summer of ’49:
It was [Joe] DiMaggio’s good fortune to play in an era when his better qualities, both athletic and personal, were amplified, and his lesser qualities simply did not exist. If he did something magnificent on the field, he was not on Johnny Carson the next night, awkward and unsure of himself, mumbling his answers as a modern athlete might. Rather, he had Mel Allen [and Jackie Robinson had Red Barber] to speak for him. It was the perfect combination: his deeds amplified by Mel Allen’s [or Red Barber’s] voice.8
In 1947, when Doby broke in, the DuMont Broadcasting Network, which no longer exists, carried the World Series on television for the first time. The broadcast was carried by five stations, reaching an audience of 3 million—in a nation whose population numbered 170 million. By 1948 the number of television sets still numbered only seventy-two thousand, and there were just twenty-eight broadcast stations in the entire country. By contrast sixteen hundred radio stations broadcast every day.9
This modest inroad by television was in a nation that was still baseball nuts. Professional football, which today has become America’s sport, then was only “a minor league ticket.”10 Baseball reigned supreme. Yet the demise of radio was on the horizon, although only a few could clearly see that. Television’s coverage of baseball began to expand. In the early fifties the baseball television audience grew greatly, from 3 million to over 10 million in just a few years. Television coverage, though, was different than radio coverage, especially for athletes such as Doby. “In the beginning, television seemed to bring [players] greater fame, but in time it became clearer that the fame was not so much greater than quicker” and more ephemeral.11 Television coverage evaporated sooner. Part of the reason may have been the overkill to which television was then and still is prone. “It is no coincidence that Joe DiMaggio’s fame has been so long lasting, and that he was the last hero of the radio era.”12
Doby came into his own under the clouds created by Joe DiMaggio and other heroes of baseball’s postwar radio days. The new medium, television, was then advancing beyond baby steps to a walk. When television coverage finally did hit something resembling full stride, the coverage was different, more ephemeral, and seemingly unaware of the profound historical developments reshaping the baseball world in which Larry Doby played a central role.13
If Larry Doby fell into the cracks between the world in which radio coverage of baseball dominated and the one in which television coverage came to the fore, why did Jackie Robinson not fall into a similar crevice? The answer is multifaceted. First of all, Robinson was the first African American to break the color barrier in Major League Baseball, while Doby was the second. Second, Robinson played in the epicenter of the baseball world, New York, while Doby played in distant Cleveland. Third, history has recorded Robinson as a great and superior athlete, although that is not completely true. By any objective standard, Doby was the better baseball player, except as a base runner, an area in which Robinson not only excelled but had no peers.
But by the 1960s Jackie Robinson, then as now very much a public figure, had become “increasingly bitter.” “His efforts in banking, public relations, insurance, real estate and broadcasting met with limited success.”14 His son and namesake, Jackie Jr., developed a drug dependency. Jackie Jr. later died in an auto accident on Connecticut’s Merritt Parkway. Jackie Robinson publicly criticized other African American sports stars such as Willie Mays for their lack of overt involvement in the civil rights movement, coming close to calling them out publicly as “Uncle Toms” (see chapter 14).
Half a generation later, another baseball star, Reggie Jackson, commented that “character flaws bring comparison and attention to all colors.”15 Whether flaws or character traits, or a bit of both, Jackie Robinson’s outspoken and constant presence in the limelight kept alive his heroic accomplishment of 1947 and his exploits on the baseball field in the years that followed.
Could it be that Larry Doby has been lost in the shuffle because he had fewer, if any, character flaws (if flaw is the right word), or burrs under his saddle? After Doby left baseball, he settled into a life with his wife and five children in a New Jersey suburb that might seem humdrum compared with Robinson’s. He was a quieter, more reserved person to begin with. And as we have seen, even when active as a player, Doby never had the visibility of Jackie Robinson or many other players.
As a tribute to the wisdom of integration, soon after they broke in, four of the first five blacks to play Major League Baseball became All-Stars. Jackie Robinson, Don Newcombe, and Roy Campanella represented the National League and Larry Doby the American in the 1949 classic. The presence of those African American stars should have acted as a powerful recruiting sergeant for the integration of baseball. It did in the National League; it did not in the American, in which all the clubs, save Cleveland, continued their exclusionary ways. Larry Doby was, and for a number of years afterward continued to be, the American League’s only African American All-Star.16
Of the eleven blacks who entered Major League Baseball in the beginning years of integration, 1947–50, Larry Doby was the last to hang up his spikes. He had survived them all, including Robinson, Newcombe, and Campanella.17 He was the only one of the eleven to play in the American League.
Doby’s achievements include the following:
First black player in the American League
Seven-time All-Star
Star of the 1948 World Series
First black to hit a home run in the World Series (1948)
First player to be on championship teams both in the Negro League (Newark) and in the Majors (Cleveland)
First black player to win a Major League home run title (1952), which he repeated two years later (1954)
First black player to win a runs-batted-in title (American League, 1954)
Second African American manager in major league baseball (Chicago White Sox 1978)18
Years after Doby’s playing days were over, Bill Veeck “wondered in print what Doby might have become if he had come to baseball when black players were more common and hostility less common, if he had come along when he had a black confidant on the team instead of spending so much of his early time alone. Veeck wondered what Doby might have been if he didn’t feel he had to bear the burden of being a trailblazer.” Always an astute judge of baseball talent, as noted earlier, Veeck concluded, “If Larry had come up just a little later, when things were a little better, he might very well have become one of the greatest players of all time.”19 In his obituary of Larry Doby, former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent gave a more subjective appraisal: “In an age in which we struggle to identify true heroes, Larry Doby is one of mine. His decency, quiet courage, remarkable achievements, and lasting contribution to racial progress are permanent legacies. Well done, old friend. May you rest in peace.”20
We are “in an age in which fame and celebrity are regularly confused with accomplishment.”21 Today fame and notoriety often precede accomplishment, if indeed ever there is any true accomplishment to follow. With Larry Doby, it has been the other way round. Doby’s achievements on the playing field and his paramount achievement in beginning the integration of the American League constitute monumental accomplishments. They have not been accompanied by anything remotely resembling proportionate recognition. In some small part, this book attempts to add to recognition of Doby’s accomplishment and to dispel, perhaps, the large void that has persisted in American baseball history.