This morning I read a riveting account by baseball historian Frederic Frommer about Larry Doby's beginnings as a professional baseball player. It seems that three months after World War II ended, Doby was still stationed with the U.S. Navy in the Pacific. On a small island near Guam, a fellow sailor named Mickey Vernon heard a radio account that intrigued him: the Brooklyn Dodgers had signed Jackie Robinson to a minor league contract.
"There's your opportunity," Vernon told his friend.
Mickey Vernon was more than an enlightened (white) Navy man. He was the slugging first baseman for the Washington Senators, and he wrote a letter to Senators owner Clark Griffith lauding Doby's talent.
Griffith wasn't smart enough to take the advice of the best player on his team, so Doby went back to the Negro Leagues where he put up eye-opening numbers similar to Mickey Vernon's in 1946. One man who didn't miss the opportunity, however, was Bill Veeck, owner of the franchise then called the Cleveland Indians. And on this date in 1947, Larry Doby became the second black player to play in the previously all-white major leagues.
In 1948, Doby's first full season in Cleveland, he showed he belonged, hitting .301 with 23 doubles, nine triples, and 14 home runs. Through the rest of his career, Doby would average nearly 30 homers a game, knock in 100 runs five times, make seven All-Star teams, become the second black manager in the big leagues, and be enshrined in Cooperstown.
As for the owner who didn't see Doby's potential, he didn't sign a black player in 1954 -- one of the last to do so. Griffith's antediluvian political views apparently played a role in this inexplicable decision. "I will not sign a Negro for the Washington club merely to satisfy subversive persons," he told The Sporting News. "I would welcome a Negro on the Senators if he rated the distinction -- if he belonged among major league players."
One sees why the team was so awful. Clark Griffith was not only a racist, but a fool.
So let's give the last word to a better baseball executive, and a man with a vastly more astute understanding of the American Identity. By the time Larry Doby passed away on June 18, 2003, George W. Bush had traded his owner's box in the Texas Rangers stadium for the governor's mansion in Austin and then the White House.
"Larry Doby was a good and honorable man, and a tremendous athlete and manager," President Bush said that day. "He had a profound influence on the game of baseball."
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
