Good morning, it's Friday Sept. 1, 2023, the day of the week when I pass along quotations intended to be inspiring or elucidating. Today's lines come from Danny Murtaugh, who managed the Pittsburgh Pirates five decades ago and who quietly made history on this date in 1971.
That night, without fanfare -- or a single comment -- Murtaugh sent onto the field a major league baseball starting lineup consisting of nine African American and Latino players.
I've written about this historic milestone previously, but didn't quite give Murtaugh the credit he deserved.
On Sept. 1, 1971, the Pittsburgh Pirates hosted arch-rival Philadelphia at Three Rivers Stadium. The Phillies were not in contention that year, while the division-leading Pirates would go on to win the World Series. In the twilight of his brilliant career, Roberto Clemente would still bat third in the Pirates lineup (and hit .341 that season). Slugging leftfielder Willie Stargell, hitting cleanup behind Clemente, would lead the league with 48 home runs.
The camaraderie on the field and in the Pirates clubhouse was tangible. Winning tends to have that effect, but perhaps it's no coincidence that Pittsburgh was the most ethnically diverse team in organized baseball that year.
The racial makeup of the Pirates' starting lineup on Sept. 1 garnered little media attention, which is inconceivable today. For better or worse, America was less "woke" then. The media landscape was different, too. ESPN wouldn't launch for another eight years, so there was no "Baseball Tonight," let alone a dedicated MLB channel. Also, both Pittsburgh daily newspapers were on strike, which restricted coverage. That seems a quaint concept in this era of shrinking or dying newspapers, although the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Pittsburgh Tribune-Review made up for it over the years with various anniversary stories on the 1971 game that foreshadowed so much racial progress.
In the ensuing five decades, African Americans and Latinos have run big city newsrooms and managed major league baseball teams, served as attorney general, secretary of state, secretary of defense -- and been elected president and vice president of the United States.
The goal, as the Rev. Martin Luther King had told his fellow Americans, was a country where everyone would be judged by their individual strengths and virtues -- "the content of their character" was his evocative phrase. And on Sept. 1, 1971, Danny Murtaugh did just that while trying, primarily, to win a baseball game.
That season, two of the Pirates' eight starting position players were white. But third baseman Richie Hebner was injured and was replaced by 23-year-old Dave Cash, then in his first full season in the big leagues. The other white starter, slugging first baseman Bob Robertson, was inexplicably benched that night in favor of Al Oliver, who usually played center field. Going by the book, Murtaugh's strategy was baffling: Phillies pitcher Woodie Fryman was left-handed, as was Oliver, and Oliver didn't hit him well. Robertson hit right-handed, which should have given him the advantage.
But Danny Murtaugh sometimes managed by instinct -- Woodie Fryman had previously played for the Pirates -- and his gut feeling was proven right: Al Oliver doubled off Fryman in the first inning as the Pirates erupted for five runs.
So who was on the mound for the home team? History hinged on it. Most of the Pittsburgh pitchers where white, but Los Angeles-born African American Dock Ellis, one of the two aces on the Pirates' pitching staff, was the starter. Ellis, who would finish the year with a 19-9 won-loss record, had also started the 1971 All-Star Game. On this night, he wouldn't get out of the second inning. Yet a barrier had been broken (and would continue even after Dock Ellis left the game: The Pirates' third pitcher that night was hard-throwing lefty Bob Veale, an African American native of Birmingham, Alabama).
"Hey, we got all brothers over here," Dave Cash recalled Oliver telling him. Gene Clines, who played in center that game, remembers overhearing a batboy saying, "The Homestead Grays are playing tonight," a reference to the iconic Negro League team of the 1930s and 1940s. Standing in center field, Clines thought about that observation and said to himself, "Oh, wow!"
In the immediate aftermath of the entertaining game won by Pittsburgh 10-7, little was made of the landmark lineup.
The Pittsburgh sportswriters surely would have acknowledged it, but they were honoring the picket line. As noted in a Society for Baseball Research story by Joseph Gerard, it escaped notice in the Philadelphia Inquirer altogether and was only noted in passing by Philadelphia Daily News columnist Bill Conlin (who mentioned Murtaugh's "all-soul lineup" with no further amplification).
In his 2017 piece, Gerard did unearth a wire story on the all-Black and Latino lineup that was published in several newspapers around the country. The UPI piece quoted Danny Murtaugh. "When it comes to making out the lineup, I'm colorblind, and my athletes know it," he said. "They don't know it because I told them. They know it because they're familiar with how I operate. The best men in our organization are the ones who are here. And the ones who are here all play, depending on when the circumstances present themselves."
And that's our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
