sign in sign up
<<
Home , Bill Veeck, Bob Feller, Larry Doby, Luke Appling, Pat Seerey, Satchel Paige

INTRODUCTION

There had seemingly never been a better night for in than on August 20, 1948. The hometown Indians, a hard-luck franchise that hadn’t sniffed the postseason in more than a quarter-century, sat atop the standings in the with six weeks left in the regular season. It’d been more than a week since the team had lost a game. Each of the Indians’ last three wins had been a shutout, putting them one shy of the American League record for consecutive scoreless contests. Even though experience had conditioned fans not to set their expectations too high when it came to the Indians, there was a budding sense all around northern Ohio that this summer would play out differently, that the neck-and-neck pennant race finally would break their way, that the club’s cobbled-together roster of underdogs and oddly shaped pieces that resembled no other’s somehow would power them past the more conventional lineups fielded by the Yankees and Red Sox. In the fevered hours before game time on that muggy Friday evening, swarms of cars and pedestrians clogged the streets and walkways leading to the Indians’ mammoth stadium on the southern shore of Lake Erie. Inside, according to the , fans “sat, stood, stooped, crouched, and literally hung from the railings,” spilling into whatever empty spaces they could find. More than 78,000 spectators turned out, a new attendance record for a night game in . Everywhere around them, the changes sweeping through in the wake of World War II would’ve been evident. Beyond the fences in left field were more than twenty green-and-white-striped tents, inside of which hundreds of mayors from across Ohio were being feted by the Indians’ front office. Festively attired musicians blew their horns while parading through the stands. A vaudeville act and a fireworks show were soon to start. Most significantly, warming up to start for the Indians that night was Leroy “Satchel” Paige, the lone Black on the lone integrated club in the American League, someone who was incongruously both a major-league rookie and a baseball legend. The entirety of the scene—the raucous pregame entertainment, the integrated roster, the fan-friendly stadium flooding over with spectators—was enough to stop members of the opposing White Sox on the steps of the visitors’ dugout. “Baseball sure has changed,” muttered White Sox Aaron Robinson while scanning the field in disbelief. At the forefront of this postwar sports revolution was , the most eccentric and forward-thinking executive of his era. Only thirty-two years old when he’d purchased the Indians in 1946, nursing a leg injury he’d suffered while serving in the South Pacific, Veeck wasted no time in turning Indians games into the hottest ticket in baseball. Fireworks exploded, outlandish gate prizes were dispersed, contortionists clowned around on the sidelines, and Veeck, his head bare and his sports shirt unbuttoned at the neck, limped through the stands, shaking hands and gabbing with fans on how to make home games even more entertaining. Unbound by decorum and convention, disdainful of prejudices and formalities, Veeck was, as Cleveland sportswriter proclaimed, “a phe-nomenon the like of which hasn’t been seen since some ancient Roman hawked the first ticket of admission to the Colosseum.” While attendance exploded across the major leagues in the latter half of the as returning servicemen eased back into American life at the ballpark, in Cleveland Veeck’s irresistible mix of winning baseball and diverting sideshows would smash audience records across the board. Some days, Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, a ballpark so enormous that one writer claimed “the customers at the end of each foul line need radios to follow the games,” seemed too cramped. To show his gratitude to the Indians fans who had been turning out in jaw-dropping numbers throughout the summer of 1948, Veeck invited hundreds of mayors from every corner of the state, from the biggest cities to the smallest towns, to serve as stand-ins for their citizens on the night of August 20. In the tents that he’d erected between the bleachers and the left-field fences, Veeck threw them a pregame garden party, complete with linen-covered tables, potted plants, a four-tier cake topped with , and roving entertainment by clowns, troubadours, and vaudeville performers. Traditionally, during a game when the symbolic eyes of the entire state were on the home team, efforts would have been made to ensure that , the longtime of the pitching staff, started for the Indians. Ever since he’d crashed the majors cold as a seventeen- year-old fireballer straight out of the cornfields, Feller had resonated among wide swathes of white America. He possessed the uncanny ability to embody whatever the public craved at a particular moment: homespun values during the Depression, selfless patriotism during the Second World War, entrepreneurial drive during the postwar consumer boom. In his years since returning home from the war, where he’d served aboard a naval battleship, Feller had dedicated himself as much to striking out batters on the field as to cashing in on his name and persona off it, setting the template for the athlete as businessman. By 1948, however, Feller had begun to falter, both on the mound and in fan affection. Not only was he uncharacteristically struggling to tally more wins than losses, but he found himself overshadowed for the first time since donning a major-league uniform by another pitcher on his own team, the same one he’d squared off against over the past dozen years on the off-season barnstorming trail. Instead of Feller, it was who strolled to the mound for the Indians at game time. Over more than twenty seasons in the Negro Leagues, Paige had built himself into a cultural icon whose pitching lore crossed racial lines during an era when he himself couldn’t. By the time Major League Baseball took its first tentative steps toward integration, Paige was already easing into his forties, a generation removed from the Black players being scouted as pioneers. It was partly through his duels with Feller on the off-season barnstorming circuit, where cobbled-together squads of major-and minor-league players often faced off against their counterparts in the Negro Leagues, that Paige would exhibit his undiminished mastery over batters, no matter their race. For three consecutive Octobers after the war, Paige and Feller, the premier Black and white of their time, would duel against each other, likely never imagining that they’d soon join forces in Cleveland. In , Veeck had shocked the sporting world by bringing Paige to Cleveland to bolster the Indians’ pitching ranks during the stretch of a pennant race destined to go down to the wire. The blowback had been swift and ferocious, with certain members of the traditionalist baseball establishment accusing Veeck of making a mockery of the sport by signing someone of Paige’s advanced age. It didn’t take long for Paige to silence his doubters. During his first month with the Indians, he’d surrendered a mere seven runs over thirty-eight and a third . His initial three starts in the majors attracted more than 200,000 fans, which led sportswriter Ed McAuley of the Cleveland News to dub Paige “the greatest drawing card in the .” That much was clear to Veeck as he gazed out from the press box at Municipal Stadium on August 20 to a packed house of fans who could barely contain their excitement at watching Paige ply his trade. “This thing has gone beyond me,” he mumbled in wonder. When reporters asked him how the Indians had managed to shatter the nighttime attendance record while playing the White Sox, the last-place team in the American League, Veeck didn’t hesitate in asserting: “It’s Paige. The guy is spectacular.” For all the widespread publicity his first month in the majors had generated, Paige hadn’t been the player whom Veeck had chosen to integrate the Indians. Starting in center field that evening was , a hard-hitting, soft-spoken former infielder who just now was finding his footing on the Indians. In , eleven weeks after had debuted on the Brooklyn Dodgers, snapping the color line that had segregated Major League Baseball since the late nineteenth century, Veeck had signed Doby, a twenty-three-year-old rising star on the of the Negro , and rushed him onto the Indians’ roster. Unlike Robinson, whose pit stop in the minor leagues had eased his transition to the Dodgers, Doby would journey literally overnight from the Negro to the major leagues, suiting up for the Eagles one day and then the Indians the next. The second Black player in the majors, Doby found himself wholly unprepared for the trials that awaited him. For the remainder of the 1947 season, he’d barely made a mark amid clubhouse dissension, scant playing time, and persistent racial abuse. Critics of integration labeled him a bust, proof positive of the unpreparedness of players from the Negro Leagues. Doby’s subsequent turnaround in 1948, from dejected benchwarmer to indispensable catalyst of the Indians’ improbable charge to the pennant, was shaping up to be one of the most meaningful sports stories of the postwar era. Together, on August 20, Paige and Doby would almost single-handedly propel the Indians to victory. Right from the start, Paige came out cool and in control, needing just eleven pitches—only two of which missed the strike zone—to send down White Sox batters in the opening frame. On the mound he resembled, in one columnist’s eyes, “the most serious of workmen, a fine old craftsman calling upon the artistry, the control and the cunning which some 30 years of pitching have given him.” The jubilant masses never broke his concentration. Paige pitched around a leadoff single in the second , then retired the side again in the third, this time on a mere nine pitches. He’d wade into trouble an inning later, when he walked White Sox Tony Lupien at the start of the fourth, then surrendered a single to . Doby, however, was there to bail him out. Fielding Appling’s single on a dead run in center field, Doby rifled a throw to third that beat the sliding Lupien to the bag by inches. Having snuffed out the White Sox rally with his arm in the top half of the inning, Doby would boost Paige’s odds of winning with his bat in the bottom half. With two on and two out, Doby drilled the second pitch he saw into center for a single, driving in the game’s lone run. Only once more would the White Sox mount an offensive attack. Leading off the seventh inning, White Sox slugger lofted a soaring fly to center off Paige that looked certain to clear the fence. Breaking back on contact, Doby raced to the wall, stretched his glove high over his head, and made a leaping grab that robbed Seerey of a game-tying . Paige would take it from there, not allowing a single batter to reach base in the final three innings. The game ended in less than two hours with a 1-0 win for Paige, who threw just ninety-two pitches while going the distance. It was a victory that was as much his as it was Doby’s. “This was undoubtedly the first time in major league history,” one columnist wrote afterward, “that two Negroes have combined their talents so effectively to produce an important victory, the one pitching and the other by his hitting and fielding.” During a nail-biting pennant race in which every game mattered, Paige and Doby salvaged one that might have sunk the franchise in any other season. Paige would later call it the biggest start of his decades-long career. An editorial in Cleveland’s largest newspaper, , dubbed the contest a “triumph of racial tolerance.” It is perhaps inevitable that the second team in Major League Baseball to integrate in the twentieth century would be overshadowed by the first. Many decades later, the popular narrative about baseball integration often doubles as one about the Brooklyn Dodgers and Jackie Robinson, whose gutsy play and trailblazing path in the face of rank bigotry would rightfully secure him a permanent place in the nation’s collective imagination, one that has since swollen to mythic proportions. But there was another meaningful and dramatic narrative unfolding at the same time in Cleveland, where the hometown Indians would whip fans across northern Ohio into a state of delirium during the summer of 1948, the season after the franchise had desegregated its roster. This is the story of how that team came to be as told through four of its key participants: Bill Veeck, Bob Feller, Satchel Paige, and Larry Doby. These men, two white and two Black, diverged in temperament, background, and outlook. Each in his own way represented a different facet of the emerging integration saga that had just begun to play out across professional baseball. Their unlikely union would elevate new athletic idols and lead to the reevaluation of old ones, would remake sports as a business and the individual athlete as a brand, and would help puncture long-standing stereotypes that so much of white America harbored toward Black ballplayers. As the backbone of a team that epitomized the postwar American spirit in all its hopes and contradictions, Veeck, Feller, Paige, and Doby would captivate the nation during their thrilling run to the in 1948, all the while shining a light forward for a country on the verge of a civil rights revolution.

EXCERPTED FROM OUR TEAM COPYRIGHT © 2021 BY LUKE EPPLIN. EXCERPTED BY PERMISSION OF FLATIRON BOOKS, A DIVISION OF MACMILLAN PUBLISHERS. NO PART OF THIS EXCERPT MAY BE REPRODUCED OR REPRINTED WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER.