The Futility Infielder

Larry Doby passed away on Wednesday. If you don't know who he was, then your history lesson is LONG overdue. Doby broke the American League color barrier a mere three months after Jackie Robinson first played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, debuting for the Cleveland Indians on July 5, 1947. Yet he spent his career in Robinson's shadow despite having to endure the same virulent racism -- segregation, bench-jockeying, cool receptions from certain teammates -- and despite his own outstanding career. "The only difference was that Jackie Robinson got all the publicity," Doby later recounted. "You didn't hear much about what I was going through because the media didn't want to repeat the same story."

A second-baseman for the Negro League Newark Eagles (where he'd been starring since age 18), Doby was signed by visionary Indians owner Bill Veeck. He did poorly in his first taste of major-league action (5-for-32), and with an All-Star (Joe Gordon) manning second, he had nowhere to play. But with the help of the legendary Tris Speaker, he converted to centerfield and became the starter the next season, helping to key the Indians' only World Championship of the past 83 years. Doby hit .301/.384/.490 that season, and had an excellent World Series as well, hitting .318 with one homer. In 1949, he began a string of seven straight All-Star appearances, developing into one of the league's best sluggers. He drove in over 100 runs five times, and led the league in homers twice, including 1954, when he was a major reason the Indians ran up a 111-43 record (alas, the New York Giants swept them in the Series).

Like Robinson, Doby's career ended fairly early. He bounced between the Indians, the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers over his last few seasons, suffering from back and rotator cuff injuries. He was released early in 1959, at age 35. For his career he hit .283/.386/.490 with 253 homers, but those statistics are only a small part of the story. Veeck later recalled in his autobiography (Veeck as in Wreck, as entertainingly brilliant as any baseball book ever penned) that "[H]is inner turmoil was such a constant drain on him that he was never able to realize his full potential. Not to my mind, at any rate. If Lary had come up just a little later, when things were just a little better, he migh very well have become one of the greatest players of all time."

Doby went to play in Japan, and later coached with the Montreal Expos, the Indians, and the White Sox. In 1978, Veeck, then the owner of the White Sox, gave Doby another "second," naming him the game's second black manager (after Frank Robinson) to replace the fired Bob Lemon. He finished the season 37-50 (Lemon did a bit better with his next venture). He later went on to work for Major League Baseball in a variety of front-office positions, and was honored several times, albeit belatedly. The Indians retired his number 14 in 1994, and he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1998.

The New York Times obituary of Doby is here. In Cleveland, Doby's passing is front-page news. Two articles from the Plain Dealer are worth your time, a lengthy historical account and a column by Bill Livingston, who writes:

Larry Doby, who died yesterday, was a 90-day wonder.

The wonder, you see, was that anyone thought much had changed in the three months be tween the start of the 1947 Major League Baseball season, when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in the National League with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and Doby's arrival at old Municipal Stadium on July 3 of that year as the first black player in the American League.

The same racial poison that greeted Robinson was steeping in the hearts and minds of many players and fans in the American League, too. Unlike Robinson, Doby had not gone to UCLA. He had not been the gem of the farm system, carefully nurtured before his big-league debut in Montreal, where the Dodgers' top farm team was located. Race was not the same explosive issue in Quebec that it was in such Southern towns as Washington and St. Louis (home then to the AL's Browns), where Doby would play.

Robinson was the first, and would be remembered through out baseball, with his number (42) retired at every ballpark in the majors on the 50th anniver sary of his rookie season. Doby was the pioneer who did not get primacy of place, but who en dured the same privations of race. Outside Cleveland, he is probably not a household name. More is the shame.

Doby's passing is also front-page news in New Jersey, where he grew up and where he resided up until his death. Jerry Izenberg of the Newark Star-Ledger has a conversation with former Newark Eagles teammate (and fellow Hall of Famer) Monte Irvin, as well as his own loving recollections:

I began to figure it out the night before he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1998. I arranged for the two us to walk through the empty building alone after closing.

It was so quiet we could hear our footsteps. I had been in that building so many times, but now I saw it through the eyes of Larry Doby. We were, I later thought, on a walk-through of his private church on the eve of the day a dream so long denied him would finally become justice affirmed.

He paused repeatedly and conducted his own nonstop soliloquy about the exhibits and the game he loved. His heart smiled at some of those memories. His silence spoke volumes at some of the other ones. I finally understood that night just how much he loved this game and why, with all the heartache, it remained forever a part of his life.

He had paused before a picture of Steve Gromek, a pitcher on Doby's 1948 world championship Indians, leaping into Doby's arms. Larry had hit a home run in that World Series game and Gromek had been the winning pitcher.

"It made most of the front pages," he told me. "It was the first picture of a black and a white man embracing at home plate. America needed that picture and I will always be proud that I could help give it to them."

Larry Doby, second to none at last.