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Twilight at Harley Field
They wanted a dugout.
But just like last year, they were not going to have one. The school just couldn’t afford to build one. So, once again, they would have to grab the old folding chairs from inside the school, haul them out to the parking lot, and load them into Coach Pennell’s car. That would be their resting place between innings: a line of chairs ten or so yards away from the batter’s box. It was all makeshift. There would be no cover from the rain that could come and go in springtime.
They also wanted new uniforms.
But also like last year, they were told they were not getting any. The players’ shoulders slumped when they were told. A lack of school funds was the reason. As for cleats, the coach directed the players to a store where they could get them as cheap as possible. Some of the returning players would be retrieving their cleats from an earlier season.
Unlike with the basketball team, there was never a worry that too many players would try out for baseball. No matter how many bulletins were posted around the school (“Baseball Tryouts Today Harley Field”), or how many times the announcement went out over the school loudspeaker, Pennell felt fortunate to get fifteen decent players to fill out his roster.
Tiger outfielders, left to right: Harry Williams, Tony Brown, Phil Mackey, Robert Kuthrell. The team’s five-game losing streak concerned everyone.
Actually, it was a stretch to say he was conducting “tryouts,” because Pennell pretty much knew which fifteen players would make the team. There were no dazzling and heralded players who had come up from the junior high ranks in the spring of 1969. So, as baseball practice that season got under way, there were not a lot of expectations. There was just the sound of the bat and the whiz of the ball across the field, and the groans about the chilly March temperatures. Pennell could see he was going to miss the three seniors from last year’s team. Mike Phillips and Will Britford, solid position players, were gone. So was star pitcher Erkie Byrd. Erkie was his real name; teammates always thought it sounded like something from a comic book. He didn’t mind the teasing. Byrd had played multiple positions on the previous year’s team. Off the field he had a quiet, unassuming personality. But on the field he was a demon, hitting and fielding and pitching. There were some around the city—especially aging black men who had seen Negro league baseball games—who thought Byrd had the stuff to make it in the big leagues. But professional baseball scouts didn’t spend a heck of a lot of time in Ohio looking at high school players. They preferred locations such as California, Texas, Arizona, and Florida, where the players could play year-round. Those were the areas that tended to yield the better players. Pennell had at least hoped Byrd was going to go to college. A junior college in Iowa had showed a lot of interest in Byrd. Pennell felt a lot more colleges should have taken a look at him. But Erkie played in the inner city for an impoverished black school that was not known for producing baseball players. Erkie—and he never explained why to his coach—didn’t attend that Iowa junior college. He joined the Marines. By the time Pennell and his team had begun practicing for the 1969 baseball season, Erkie Byrd had been in Vietnam for months, trying to stay alive in the middle of jungle gunfire. There was a lot of chatter about the war coming to a close in the early months of the Nixon administration, but the bombs were still exploding and the bodies still piling up. No one knew who to believe about the war anymore.
There was a rather spooky feeling among the returning players and Pennell when April 4, 1969, popped up on the calendar. They all remembered exactly where they had been on that day, a year earlier, when King was assassinated. They had been on spring break, with a game scheduled for April 5. Pennell reached every player—many phone lines were busy because families were calling other family members, especially those still living in the South—and told them to report to the school immediately. “I made up my mind to cancel everything,” Pennell recalls.
At the beginning of the 1969 high school baseball season, and because of what had happened—and was still happening—around the country, Coach Pennell wanted a black coach on his staff. It was an obvious concession to the times, but it was also a move Pennell had been wanting to make. No time seemed as important as now. He found his new coach in Jim Henderson, a native of Columbus who had attended East High and played baseball for Pennell. Henderson had recently graduated from Kentucky State College. Henderson, like any assistant or head coach of the school, accepted the fact that he would receive only his teacher’s salary and nothing for the extra hours spent coaching. (It wasn’t until several years later that coaches across the city began receiving a little extra income for coaching. For now, they coached for the love of sports.)Pennell realized how lucky he was to have a head coaching job at such a young age. Columbus was a conservative town, and a conservative philosophy dominated the coaching ranks: Head coaches needed experience and mentors, but Pennell had become baseball coach when he was just twenty-six years old. In 1969, of the Jack Gibbs–Bob Hart–Paul Pennell troika, Pennell, at thirty years old, was still the youngest. He certainly deferred to both men, but he had forged his own identity as well.
Paul Pennell was born in Columbus in 1939 on the city’s West Side, where racial clashes were most quick to erupt because of the mix of blacks and ethnic whites who had settled there at the turn of the century. Pennell’s parents forbade Paul, his friends, or any visiting neighborhood adults or kids to use racial epithets. Paul desperately wanted to play sports in high school, but his father, Sam, wouldn’t allow it. It was a blue-collar neighborhood, and kids who could work after school did so, to add funds to the family kitty. “I can’t recall anyone in our neighborhood who had a college education,” Pennell recalls. The fact that he loved sports and missed out on participating in high school only made him more eager to find some way into the world of coaching.
In 1957, Pennell enrolled at Ohio State University as a freshman. He rode the city bus back and forth from the West Side to the campus on the city’s North Side. There was a lot of talk that fall—and a lot of images on the TV screen—of the Little Rock, Arkansas, school integration crisis. The Pennells followed the reports closely. “I remember my father rejoicing when Eisenhower sent in federal troops and made them enforce the law of the land,” says Pennell.
As his graduation day neared, Pennell, an education major, didn’t have a job lined up. He was worried. “Every Tuesday morning I’d call the board of education,” he recalls. Finally, there was the offer to join the faculty of East High, where he was assigned to teach biology and driver’s education.
One of Paul Pennell’s passions growing up was baseball. He played and then coached various Little League teams on the West Side. He spent a lot of time around American Legion teams, made up of teenage boys with better-than-average skills who played during summers. A lot of the Legion teams were in the suburbs and in the rural, all-white towns that abutted Columbus.
Soon after joining East High, Pennell got the sole assistant basketball coaching position under Bob Hart. In 1963, John Rawn, the school’s baseball coach, stepped down. No one was clamoring for the job. Because baseball was the forgotten sport of the school, young Pennell was handed the position. In those early years, Pennell’s Tigers lost plenty of games. “The first couple years we got the mess kicked out of us,” says Bobby Humphries, a member of Pennell’s 1966 team.
But slowly things began to change. Pennell wanted the players on his teams to bond, and he wanted them to know they could trust him. America was afire; white coaches were looked on by some blacks with suspicion. Pennell and his wife, Sharon, didn’t have any children. The players added a certain light to their lives. They would invite them to their home for backyard barbecues. For many of the players it was the first time they had been inside the home of a white family. “He didn’t just coach us,” recalls Humphries. “He mentored us.” Then there was Pennell’s way of introducing his baseball players to white baseball players during games and scrimmages. “In American Legion, he brought white players to play us,” says Humphries. “He was letting us know we could play with anyone. We had played Little League against all-black teams.”
Within three years of taking the job, Pennell had shown evidence of turning the team around. But still, they were playing on a subpar field, without a dugout. And it remained as difficult as ever to get anyone from the community—save for a very few stalwart souls—interested in the baseball team.
But Pennell realized something about his baseball players: They seemed to possess genuine talent. He had no idea about the history of the peculiar Little League team that had formed and shaped them on the segregated side of the city.
Before Paul Pennell had ever laid eyes on the Tiger baseball players warming up before him at the start of the 1969 season, those players had been dreaming of baseball for a long time. They had been helped in those dreams by four Columbus men: Gilbert Dodley, Garland Boffman, Ed Littlejohn, and Nate “Frog” Lawson. They were all self-taught Negro baseball coaches in their segregated America. They were determined not to allow Columbus—or its environs—to dim the baseball dreams of certain little black boys. Their god was Jackie Robinson.
Coach Paul Pennell told his players to ignore the fact that they were attracting no Tiger fans to their away games.
They were blue-collar workers, good and dependable men who loved baseball. Sometimes, in the local watering holes over on Mount Vernon Avenue, the four men would get to regaling each other with stories about exactly which park it was that they had seen Jackie Robinson play in. Stories got tangled as the booze was consumed, but still, there were enough facts and moments laid out for nearby listeners to believe that the men had been there, that they had seen a great many unforgettable moments unfold in the Negro leagues. And when black sportswriter Hiram Tanner would join them the conversations would really take off because Tanner had actually played in the professional Negro leagues!
It was important to Dodley, Boffman, Littlejohn, and Lawson that the young black boys of segregated Columbus have a baseball league to play in, and they delighted in their 1953 founding and coaching of the Peers Club team. When the weather turned warm that year in Columbus, the Peers Club coaches could be found at Maryland Park, the East Side park where blacks congregated. It was also the park where the Columbus Royals, the all-black semi-pro team in town, played their games. The Royals were sponsored by a local gambler who loved baseball, and the team was made up of black players in their twenties. Peers Club players would watch the Royals play with wide-eyed excitement. If you were black and cared anything about baseball in Columbus, you had to get over to Maryland Park on Saturday afternoons. It wasn’t that whites were forbidden to come; they just never did, because they were quite comfortable on their side of town in their own parks.
The Little League team was called the Peers Club because, although baseball was the anchor, the coaches wanted the boys to feel they were part of a special and unique club. They were little boys, peers for each other. The country was segregated, and that reality already assigned them to a certain club. But baseball made them all happy, the coaches as well as the players. “We had about a five-mile radius,” remembers Dave Cole, a member of the Peers Club team in 1960, referring to the distance the team traveled for games. “If you went outside that radius in the city, you’d feel tensions. You knew there were white people who didn’t want you around. So you’d pick your spots.” Jim Henderson—the East High assistant baseball coach—had also been a Peers Club player. His mother, a maid, fretted that he might get hurt. “We went and played the white teams,” he recalled decades later. “We smoked them.”
To start a Little League team, you need uniforms. Team identity is manifest in those uniforms. So the Peers Club coaches fanned out up and down Mount Vernon Avenue. Each assigned himself a set of particular businesses—bars, clothing stores, drugstores, record shops—to go into and solicit. And when the players took to the field at Maryland Park, fans saw names on the back of their uniforms that were quite familiar: William McNabb Funeral Home, Tyler Drugs, Swan Cleaners, Tunie’s Sunoco Gas Station. It was, of course, rather common advertising for the local businesses. But it was also how black America operated—on self-reliance and fortitude.
Peers Club players had a reverence for the coaches. “We listened to them like their word was gospel,” Dave Cole says. “They kept us on the straight and narrow.” Cole has never forgotten Coach Frog Lawson’s constant admonition when he was playing the infield: “Cole, keep your butt down!”
After games, the coaches, who, needless to say, were never paid a dime, would sometimes just stand and marvel at the boys, how they came together as a team, year in and year out. And sometimes Ed Littlejohn—especially if the team had just had an unusually close victory—would yell for everyone to get into the cars. They were going over to the Dairy Queen to get ice cream! Once there, the young players—proud in their dusty uniforms, sitting in the shade out there on Sunbury Road with their ice cream cones, talking about Willie Mays or all the stories they’d heard about Jackie Robinson, or the game they had just won (“I can’t remember losing many games,” says David Cole)—would get to feeling that there was nothing better in the whole wide world than being a Peers Club baseball player. With their rumps planted on their battered gloves and their dripping ice cream cones in hand and the day rolling to a sweet close around them, they never felt happier, or safer.
In 1961, when twelve-year-old Eddie Ratleff arrived in Columbus from Bellefontaine, Ohio, with his family, he was intent on finding a Little League baseball team to play on. Growing up in Bellefontaine, he had been close to his grandfather, Richard Artis, who had played baseball and followed the Negro leagues very closely. He was a rabid Jackie Robinson fan. Artis taught Eddie Ratleff the rudiments of the game. “Baseball was my first love,” says Eddie Rat.
As a new kid in Columbus, Eddie began asking around about local baseball teams. Someone told him about the Peers Club. He grabbed his glove and started out for the park, a couple of miles from his East Side home. Barbara, his mother, was sure to remind him to be careful, not to get lost, and to mind his manners. It was lovely summertime, and with his glove under his arm, he felt giddy and happy. Because he was confident of his own skills, Eddie was eager to see if this Peers Club Little League team was any good. As he approached the park, he saw a group of boys his age range who were playing. It made him feel good just to see them. They caught sight of him as he got closer; his height drew prolonged stares. He asked who he had to see to try out for the team. The boys pointed to one of the coaches, Mr. Littlejohn. Young Eddie made his way to the coach and started talking a little about himself, that he had just moved to the neighborhood, that he had played Little League in his hometown. Mr. Littlejohn cut the conversation short: “We don’t have any more uniforms.” Eddie was immediately dejected. But since he had walked all the way to the park, he decided to stick around and watch the practice. Just as it was ending, Eddie pulled aside a player and asked if he would catch some pitches for him. The player agreed. Eddie planted himself on a makeshift mound and started throwing pitches. Pitch after pitch after pitch. And he got stronger with each pitch. Some other players gathered around, watching wide-eyed. Eddie kept firing. Mr. Littlejohn came over to see what the commotion was about. The other coaches, Mr. Dodley, Mr. Boffman, and Mr. Frog (even he chuckled at his nickname), soon joined him. Littlejohn tried following Ratleff’s thrown balls with his eyes, but the balls were coming out of young Eddie’s hand so fast he could only hear them landing in the catcher’s glove. The kid had a wicked fastball. Littlejohn began exchanging glances with his fellow coaches. No one knew who this kid was. Soon Mr. Littlejohn made his way toward young Eddie. “We just found another uniform.”
Eddie Rat had found a team. It was almost as if he had been dropped into a kind of secret society—black kids, Little Leaguers. It was a scene unlike in Bellefontaine, where he was one of the few blacks playing on a white team.
In their own way, the Peers Club coaches were establishing a pipeline. They lifted these players on to their next hill to climb: junior high baseball. And these players—Garnett Davis, Leroy Crozier, Norris Smith, Tony Brown, Dave Cole, Eddie Ratleff, Lee Hawkins, Erkie Byrd among them—would never forget them. They’d never forget how their afternoon games would bring out the black community, and how sometimes after the games they’d be treated to grilled hot dogs, or be taken to get ice cream, or just sit in the shade talking about their heroes—Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays and Larry Doby—and how they were hoping they might get a new glove or baseball bat for their next birthday.
There were three all-black junior high schools on the East Side of the city. Some Peers Club players would be off to Monroe Junior High, others to Franklin, and still others to Champion. Tom Brown, in 1961, was named the baseball coach at Champion Junior High. And when the Peers Club players got to him, Brown was always grateful. They’d need more coaching and seasoning, of course, but he appreciated that they knew the rudiments of the game.
Brown was a native of Dayton, Ohio. When he was a kid, his dad had taken him to see the Cincinnati Reds play against the Brooklyn Dodgers—featuring Jackie Robinson. “I read every article about him,” Brown says of Robinson. “When I read he had gone to UCLA, I said to myself, ‘Damn, I gotta go to college.’ ” After excelling in both basketball and baseball in high school, Brown went to the historically black Central State University. There he became a small-college All-American in baseball. (He had also been a senior in 1958, when Martin Luther King Jr. addressed his graduating class.) After college, Brown signed with the Chicago White Sox, but he never made it up to the big leagues. He moved to Columbus and began teaching, first elementary school, then junior high.
When Tom Brown received the first group of Peers Club baseball players at Champion Junior High, he looked forward to coaching them. “We always stayed in the locker room the first two weeks of practice,” Brown remembers. That was his ritual: he talked to the players about the mental aspects of baseball, and about society at large.
When Eddie Ratleff arrived at Champion in the fall of 1963, Brown had already heard plenty about him. And Ratleff did not disappoint. “Ratleff could throw smoke,” remembers Brown. “And he could hit.” Across three seasons at Champion Junior High, Eddie Rat threw five no-hitters. At the same time, at Franklin Junior High, onetime Peers Club player Garnett Davis was making a name for himself in the City League with his hitting and all-around skills as a catcher.
At Champion, the players found it easy to put their faith in Brown because he had a pedigree as a player. Sometimes Brown would take players to the downtown stadium in Columbus when a Negro league team was in town. If they needed a local player, Brown would gladly don a uniform; the kids got a kick out of watching him out on the field. But Brown, for all the joy of coaching baseball, would not shy away from what was roiling America—the continued struggle over race. “The white cheerleaders were often warned not to come over to Champion Junior High,” he says, blaming it on stereotype and the school’s East Side location.
The better players fully intended to play high school baseball. They were the ones who stayed late in Maryland Park participating in their made-up home run derbies; they were the ones who sat watching the black players on the Columbus Royals play back-to-back games so they could learn as much as they could. Baseball was inside them. They loved rubbing their mom’s Royal Crown hair grease in the center of their baseball gloves to soften them; they loved racing out of their housing project apartments with their cheap baseball cleats flung over their shoulders. They loved being introduced to American Legion baseball. By the time they got finished with Peers Club and junior high baseball, they were ready for Paul Pennell, the East High Tigers’ baseball coach.
Pennell could not give them a dugout. Or new uniforms. Still, he told his wife, Sharon, season after season, these boys cared about baseball—even if no one else at the school did—and he owed them the best of his coaching ability.
For the past two seasons, the East High baseball team had had winning seasons. A year earlier—the 1967–68 season—they shared a City League title, although they were beaten in the district tournament. Some of the old-timers in the city—those who had followed Peers Club players into maturity—thought if there ever was an East High team that had the gifts to advance and make some noise in the state tourney, it was the Erkie Byrd team. Pennell bemoaned that that team hadn’t gone further with the trio of Byrd, Mike Phillips, and Will Britford. He wasn’t alone in wondering if the death of Martin Luther King Jr. that spring had troubled the psyche and equilibrium of the team and the individual players.
The Tiger baseballers assembled for the 1969 season consisted of Richard Twitty, first base; Kenny Mizell, second base; Garnett Davis, catcher; Roger Neighbors, shortstop; Norris Smith, center fielder–pitcher; Robert Kuthrell, right fielder; Phil Mackey, left fielder. Pitching duties fell to Eddie Rat and Smith, a southpaw. Pennell had already told himself that his nonstarters—Tony Brown, Ray Scott, Larry Mann, Harry Williams, Ron Harris, and Ernie Locke—would likely get good playing time because of the sheer individual talent the players who had left a season earlier took with them. There were three players from the state championship basketball team—Kenny Mizelle, Larry Mann, and Eddie Rat—who were now on the baseball roster. Pennell was impressed with the players who had successfully moved from varsity basketball to varsity baseball. The two sports required vastly different skill sets. Basketball was constant eruption and movement; so much of baseball was a stuttering time clock characterized by stillness, followed by lightning bolts of action.
When area high school baseball coaches gathered to talk before the start of the baseball season, a handful of city and county teams drew praise. Among those mentioned were Whitehall, Walnut Ridge, West, Brookhaven, Whetstone, London, Watterson, Grove City, and East High. A lot of the praise for East was owing to its two star players, Eddie Ratleff and Garnett Davis. None of the other inner-city teams, however, made anyone’s list when it came to discussions of potential winning teams. The last team in the city to successfully navigate the tournament and win the state baseball crown was Columbus North High School. And that was way back in 1940—nearly three decades ago.
Paul Pennell knew he lacked the resources that other high school teams took for granted—fan and booster support, facilities—so he was constantly thinking and imagining ways to make his inner-city baseball team better. The summer before the 1969 baseball season opened, Pennell took the Tiger baseball team to Bainbridge, Ohio, site of Ted “Big Klu” Kluszewski’s Baseball Camp. Pennell had met Big Klu while working summer baseball camps in earlier years. Kluszewski had played Major League Baseball from 1947 to 1961, spending most of his career with the Cincinnati Reds, where he had twice been named an All-Star. The kids at the camp went through exercises and drills during the day, and at night played a game against other campers. Pennell knew the camp would benefit his players beyond baseball. “It exposed our kids to other types of kids, and other types of coaching,” he says.
East High’s baseball team opened the 1969 season on April 1 against Bishop Hartley High. Hartley’s coaches conceded their team was in a rebuilding year and that their squad was laden with underclassmen. The weather was cool and the game tight. East’s fleet-footed Norris Smith scored two runs; four other Tigers scored a run each. It took every one of those Tiger scores for the team to achieve a successful beginning to the season, as they defeated Hartley by a single run, 6–5.
Next up on the docket was a match against Reynoldsburg High. The suburban schools—better financed, with better facilities—had always worried Pennell. It was another close game, but Reynoldsburg beat the Tigers, 8–7. Pennell began to truly bemoan the lack of depth at the pitching position. (It is a maxim of baseball coaches that you win games with good hitting and two or three gifted pitchers on your team.) Pennell had another concern as well. In this early stretch of the season, the game against Reynoldsburg was not on the official schedule. It was kind of a shadow game. Suburban schools had sufficient money to send their baseball teams to Florida to play several pre-season games before the official season got under way. Thus, when the season officially started in Columbus, those teams had a head start on the inner-city schools. “Sometimes we played games and didn’t report them,” says Coach Pennell. “Playing games was important. We were limited to the number of games we were supposed to play—as opposed to the suburban schools.”
Because the baseball season—eight weeks, April through May—was far shorter than the basketball season, the games were squeezed into a tight schedule. There was no time for excuses. Ratleff started out pitching game three against Zanesville, but the competition was called because of the weather. There also was no time for Tiger players to lament the fact that hardly anyone ever came to their baseball games. There was always the issue of transportation, and the games started right after school let out: Parents who had jobs were still at work. Mothers had to be home to prepare dinner. The only time the coeds trekked over to Harley Field was during football season. “It was hard for the girls to come over to Harley Field and watch us play,” says Eddie Rat. “Girls don’t go for baseball guys. They go for basketball, football, and track.” Ratleff had been on the varsity baseball team three straight years now. “I never heard a girl say, ‘I watched you play baseball yesterday.’ ”
Every now and then a few winos would make their way down Mount Vernon Avenue, which led directly to Harley Field, and loll about watching the team. Some inebriated soul would always seem to corral another, and then there’d be two groggy figures leaning on the fence, watching the boys hit and round the bases. A teacher or two from the school would sometimes drop by, showing support. Principal Jack Gibbs was busy as ever at the school—especially with college decisions being made by students and with graduation in the near future—but he swung by Harley Field when he could. Even the April winds, or just a few raindrops, would shoo the scant onlookers away.
The Tigers played Linden-McKinley—their longtime basketball nemesis—and spanked them, 12–5. Norris Smith, small in stature and with a skinny build, pitched a complete seven-inning game—the standard number of innings in high school—throwing plenty of nasty curve balls. Richard Twitty and Robert Kuttrell each knocked in two runs. The team was showing flashes of power, which pleased Pennell and Assistant Coach Jim Henderson.
Pennell realized that there needed to be a player or two beyond Ratleff and Smith to take on pitching duties throughout the season. He figured such a player would emerge in the course of games and practices, but this early in the season, no one had. Many players were envious of the two pitchers. It wasn’t because of the stature they held; it was because of the shiny Tiger baseball jackets they wore. Everyone would have liked a jacket, but the team simply could not afford to get one for every player. On a team that couldn’t afford a dugout, or a team bus, a shiny jacket for each of the star pitchers was the only form of pampering.
Even though the 1969 season had been under way only a couple weeks, there was a lot of chatter about Northland High’s team around town because they were undefeated in their first five games and were considered quite dangerous. Mike Kincaid, the Northland pitcher, had recently produced a 12-strikeout win against South High. Coach Pennell was delighted his Tigers would not have to face Northland until very late in the season.
Doc Simpson, who was doing his student teaching at East High in the 1968–69 school year—and whose uncle, Harry “Suitcase” Simpson, had been a Negro league and American League baseball player—was impressed with the talent on East High’s baseball team. He knew that as the only all-black high school baseball team in the city, they faced specific challenges. “I had never seen black guys play baseball like that,” he recalled. “Eddie could throw the ball eighty miles an hour. And Kenny Mizelle, at second base, was just a cold-blooded player.”
Although it was rare, some of the white suburban schools had a black basketball player or two. But the suburban baseball teams remained, for the most part, all-white. A game that City League watchers were excited about was the upcoming East High versus Whetstone matchup. Whetstone, an all-white suburban school, had perhaps the finest and best outfitted high school baseball field in the city. They also had some highly touted players in pitcher Dwight Reinstettle, shortstop Steve Mirise, and Don Shields, their left fielder.
In the matchup between the two schools, the coaches of each team sent their marquee pitchers—Ratleff for East High, Reinstettle for Whetstone—to the mound. Ratleff remembered Whetstone from a year earlier: “They were really good.” Fred Nocera, the Whetstone coach, was telling the local media he was disappointed his team had to come up against the Tigers so early in the season. Nocera wished they had played some more games. Pennell felt the complaint was just a ruse.
When they played games away from their home diamond, it would have been understandable if the Tiger players were disappointed by the fan turnout, which oftentimes approached a scant half dozen or so, and those were often volunteer faculty drivers. But the lack of fan support did not stop the momentum of the Tiger bats: the Whetstone pitcher, Reinstettle, gave up eleven hits in seven innings. Garnett Davis and Eddie Rat each smacked two hits, but Ratleff’s fastball was bewildering to the Whetstone players. East departed the prettiest baseball facility in the city in a good state of mind, because of their pretty 6–1 victory.
Knowing just how quick the calendar pages turned during the eight-week season, Coach Pennell tried his best to keep his team primed and ready. During rainouts, Pennell’s Tigers idled on their home field like shadows, in case the skies cleared. Before a contest against dangerous Mohawk High, they managed to sneak in two “unofficial” games against Newark Catholic High School, winning a game, 14–1, and losing another, 4–3. Pennell and his assistant coach, Henderson, took note of the shortcomings in the Tiger baseball team, which were to be expected this early in the season. They needed better defense and better hitting. The coaches were reluctant to appear too optimistic about just how good the Tigers could actually be.
It was widely acknowledged that Mohawk High’s pitcher, Fred Saunders, a junior, and East High’s Eddie Rat were the two best black pitchers in the city. Both were phenomenally gifted athletes, both had been groomed on the Peers Club team, and both players had completed celebrated three-year varsity basketball careers at their respective schools. Both of them were tall and rangy, and they both threw with power. “Ratleff had a harder curve than mine,” Saunders recalled years later. “I had speed and control.” Unfortunately, the two would not face each other in a game, because in an earlier contest Saunders had hurt his throwing arm. Charles Trimble, a southpaw, was announced as the Mohawk pitcher. Saunders would play first base, just as Ratleff usually did when he wasn’t pitching.
Like Eddie Rat, Fred Saunders had fallen in love with baseball as a little kid. And when the Columbus Jets, the minor league team of the Pittsburgh Pirates, were in town, he’d beg his older sister to take him to the stadium. Not only would she take him, she befriended and then started dating Willie Stargell, who would, in time, become a genuine star of the Pirates. It was quite a thing for a kid to be able to tell other kids that he had spent time with Willie Stargell away from the baseball field.
As the Mohawk High Indians watched the Tigers warm up, they saw Eddie Rat on the mound. To those who followed Mohawk, they could be forgiven if they thought Eddie Ratleff—first basketball, now baseball—was haunting their dreams. The visiting Mohawk players heard the slap of the ball as Ratleff was warming up. He was so tall that his unwinding motion resembled a praying mantis suddenly erupting into motion. Through the first four innings not a single Mohawk player reached base or got a hit off Eddie Rat. Pennell and Henderson just nodded to each other and left him alone between innings. No one dares mention anything when a player is in such a groove, lest things get jinxed. Eddie Rat did quietly confide to others that his arm was feeling mighty good. Saunders watched Eddie Rat fan his teammates one by one, and he grew frustrated. “Dudes on my team just couldn’t hit” Eddie Rat, Saunders later recalled of the game. (In his sophomore season, Eddie Rat had thrown a no-hitter against South High. So he well knew the sensation of such a building moment.) No matter which Mohawk player entered the batter’s box, he left the same way, the victim of a strikeout. Meanwhile, Eddie Rat was also busy collecting a couple hits. East stretched a 1–0 lead into a 3–0 lead. Going into the final innings, tension mounted. When the final pitches whizzed into the glove of catcher Garnett Davis—who had called a beautiful game—Eddie Rat, a cool figure always, couldn’t help shaking his head and pumping his fists. The final score: 4–0. He had authored the second no-hitter of his high school career, and his first perfect game, striking out twenty-one Mohawk batters. His teammates rushed him, jumping in the air, whistling, whooping, hollering; Pennell couldn’t wait to report the win to the local reporters who hadn’t bothered to come to the game. The Tigers knew, however, that there was nothing they could do about their anemic and nearly invisible fan following.
Often after big East High basketball victories, the basketball players could hear noise and lots of honking horns on Mount Vernon Avenue and throughout their East Side neighborhood. That was not something the baseball players experienced. When they got home, they shared the news with anyone in earshot. Eddie Ratleff particularly enjoyed sharing the news with his mother.
The day after the victory over Mohawk, there was no one in the hallways of East High saluting the Tiger baseball players. “No one talked about us,” says Eddie Rat. Every now and then Bob Hart would come out to a baseball game to show his support for Pennell, his assistant basketball coach, and his former players Kenny Mizelle, Larry Mann, and Eddie Rat. He didn’t always stick around for the entire game because, as a single dad, he had to get home and check up on his three daughters.
If only students had come out to Harley Field, they would have seen something spectacular: Kenny Mizelle fiercely scooping up hard-hit ground balls; Robert Kuthrell positioning himself perfectly under every fly ball hit to him; catcher Garnett Davis keeping Eddie Rat poised; Paul Pennell making all the right strategic moves and substitutions. They would have seen a baseball team that was extraordinarily steady under pressure.
When Paul Pennell glanced at the schedule going forward, he saw that there were some tough games looming. Marion-Franklin, Walnut Ridge, and Upper Arlington had long been fielding competitive teams. So had West High and South High. He was always worrying about the risk of leaning on the arm of Ratleff. Although the team sat atop the City League with two other teams, they also had two non-league losses that clearly exposed some of their deficiencies. There was also something else that Pennell could not possibly have felt as sharply as the players did. “Everywhere we went,” Mizelle remembers, “the white boys called us all kinds of names.”
The players had been preached to from parents and coaches that the names they were sometimes called at away games—“nigger,” “coon,” “darkie,” “monkey”—sometimes by students in the stands, mostly by neighborhood ruffians who came to the games—were just names, and they had to rise above it all. Sometimes a white umpire, upon hearing the vicious language—none of the players could remember ever seeing a black umpire—would stop play and walk toward the name-callers, and that would be enough to stop the ugly language.
The Tigers had one simple antidote when they were in hostile all-white territory: Eddie Rat would start throwing his patented fastball just a little bit harder. And a little bit closer to the batter. Eddie had turned into a six-foot-six menace on the mound. When his teammates asked Eddie if he was making some kind of statement, he’d just grin. “The white boys were actually scared of Eddie,” says second baseman Kenny Mizelle. “He threw the heat.”
It was not lost on East High principal Jack Gibbs that all the new civil rights laws that had been passed were recent enough to still unleash deep resentment among a good many people. Only a few months before the beginning of the 1969 baseball season, the nation had passed the Fair Housing Act. The 1965 Voting Rights Act had been signed only four years prior, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act had been on the books for only five years. The narrative of America, when it came to race, had been as triumphant as it had been cruel. Blood was everywhere, both drying up and gushing anew. No one expected a single white neighborhood to be integrated overnight. America, in 1969, looked just as segregated as it had a decade before. Tiger players Garnett Davis and Tony Brown wanted one immediate change: They wanted the faculty members of East High to start talking more and teaching more about modern black heroes.
While it was certainly true that the most dramatic and horrifying moments of the civil rights movement had unfolded in the American South, there had been enough spasms of northern rioting to keep the whole of America on notice. And what the whole of America so often missed was the quiet tapestry of the movement, continuously alive in the conversations of black men. They missed Claude Willis, a local educator in Columbus—brother of NFL pioneer Bill Willis—jawboning with Amos Lynch, newspaper publisher, about some black kid who got straight As and was deserving of a write-up in the newspaper because that might help the kid to get a scholarship. And they missed John Combs, the managing editor of the newspaper, pulling out his pipe and striking a match and talking about some black politician up in Cleveland who was making noise and might be running for higher office. And Hiram Tanner, the veteran sports editor, pulling out a chair and telling everyone about this kid, Eddie Ratleff, and how great he was playing down the street at East High School, and that they just had to get out and see him.
The Tigers were a baseball team, sure enough. But they were also a group of boys in the throes of an America that had begun throwing harder and less gentle punches in the quest for equality. Campus protesters were rising up. But those punches were thrown alongside those who were counterpunching with their own aims of maintaining the status quo. The Nixon administration’s constant espousing of the new law and order caused many blacks a great deal of worry. Jack Gibbs talked to his wife, Ruth, about the police, about the wider powers they suddenly seemed to possess. Sometimes he’d go to school board meetings just to remind the board how well his school was doing. He would look directly at some of the white board members and yet again invite them to a game, to come visit the school. His basketball players had made it through basketball season without getting into trouble with the police, which he considered a minor miracle. But with baseball season in progress, when there were more opportunities for the players to be outside where a confrontation might well take place, his concerns only grew. He constantly reminded the players not to lose their cool, even as rebellion was brewing and cresting all around them.