WKSU Our Team Excerpt

INTRODUCTION There had seemingly never been a better night for baseball in Cleveland 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 American League 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 Kinally 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 Kielded by the New York Yankees and Boston 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 Associated Press, fans “sat, stood, stooped, crouched, and literally hung from the railings,” spilling into whatever empty spaces they could Kind. More than 78,000 spectators turned out, a new attendance record for a night game in Major League Baseball. Everywhere around them, the changes sweeping through professional baseball in the wake of World War II would’ve been evident. Beyond the fences in left Kield 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 ofKice. Festively attired musicians blew their horns while parading through the stands. A vaudeville act and a Kireworks show were soon to start. Most signiKicantly, warming up to start for the Indians that night was Leroy “Satchel” Paige, the lone Black pitcher 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 Klooding over with spectators—was enough to stop members of the opposing Chicago White Sox on the steps of the visitors’ dugout. “Baseball sure has changed,” muttered White Sox catcher Aaron Robinson while scanning the Kield in disbelief. At the forefront of this postwar sports revolution was Bill Veeck, 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 PaciKic, 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 Gordon Cobbledick proclaimed, “a phe-nomenon the like of which hasn’t been seen since some ancient Roman hawked the Kirst ticket of admission to the Colosseum.” While attendance exploded across the major leagues in the latter half of the 1940s 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-Kield fences, Veeck threw them a pregame garden party, complete with linen-covered tables, potted plants, a four-tier cake topped with baseballs, 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 Bob Feller, the longtime ace of the pitching staff, started for the Indians. Ever since he’d crashed the majors cold as a seventeen- year-old Kireballer straight out of the Iowa cornKields, 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, selKless 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 Kield 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 Kirst 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 Satchel Paige 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 Kirst 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 pitchers of their time, would duel against each other, likely never imagining that they’d soon join forces in Cleveland. In July 1948, Veeck had shocked the sporting world by bringing Paige to Cleveland to bolster the Indians’ pitching ranks during the stretch run 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 Kirst month with the Indians, he’d surrendered a mere seven runs over thirty-eight and a third innings. 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 history of baseball.” 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 Kirst month in the majors had generated, Paige hadn’t been the player whom Veeck had chosen to integrate the Indians. Starting in center Kield that evening was Larry Doby, a hard-hitting, soft-spoken former inKielder who just now was Kinding his footing on the Indians. In July 1947, eleven weeks after Jackie Robinson 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 Newark Eagles of the Negro National League, 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.

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