Bill Veeck (22 page)

Veeck signed the twenty-three-year-old Doby to an Indians contract in the presence of numerous reporters on July 5, 1947—eleven weeks after Robinson had come up with the Dodgers—at the Congress Hotel in Chicago. “I walked into his office,” Doby later recalled, “and he got up from the desk and he walked over and he shook my hand and he says, ‘Lawrence,' he says, ‘I'm Bill Veeck.' And I said, ‘Nice to meet you, Mr. Veeck.' So he says, ‘You don't have to call me Mr. Veeck. Call me Bill.' And it stuck with me because it's an old Southern tradition, strictly from respect, that those who
are your elders you say ‘Mister' to. I had never said ‘Mister' to anybody else and got that kind of response…. But as I grew older and as I had contact with him, I recognized what he meant and what it was all about.”
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Following the introduction, Veeck had a heart-to-heart session with Doby to prepare him for the slights and insults he could expect. “He said, ‘Lawrence'—he's the only person who called me Lawrence—‘you are going to be part of history.' Part of history? I had no notions about that. I just wanted to play baseball. I mean, I was young. I didn't quite realize then what all this meant. I saw it simply as an opportunity to get ahead.” Veeck gave Doby a list of dos and don'ts: “No arguing with umpires … no dissertations with opposing players … no associating with female Caucasians,” and above all to act in an appropriate way, as people would be watching.” Then Veeck told Doby something he would always remember: “We're in this together, kid.” That was enough for Doby. He trusted Veeck immediately and forever.
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When Doby was introduced to the Cleveland players that afternoon most of them stood mute, ignoring his existence. “It'd all been arranged before I got there,” Doby recalled, “because when I walked in the door they all were lined up by their lockers.” Louis Jones introduced Doby to Boudreau, who took him down the line to shake hands. Five players refused to extend their hands. “Name-wise, I'm not going to name the names who did it, but the funny thing about it was it didn't bother me at the moment because I don't think I was thinking too much about it. I was so wrapped up in the game itself in terms of being able to play.”
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“Sure there was a lot of grumbling and talk behind my back,” Veeck later recalled, but he saw it more as an economic threat to fringe players than anything else.
¹⁷
“When he went out on the field to warm up along the sidelines, Doby stood alone until second baseman Joe Gordon told him to grab his glove and exchanged throws with him.”

The reaction to the Doby signing was varied. Larry MacPhail of the New York Yankees had no comment, but Rickey observed: “If Doby is a good player, and I understand that he is, the Cleveland club is showing signs that it wants to win.” But there was more to it than that: Rickey had been vindicated. “I don't think there was a happier day in Mr. Rickey's life than when Veeck brought in Doby,” broadcaster Red Barber recalled decades later.
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“I got a call from my mother after I signed Doby,” Veeck told the
Chicago Defender
's Doc Young. “She had told me that she had heard that I had hired a Negro and when I confirmed it, she said ‘Bill I think that is just awful.' I told her, ‘Well, Mother, I don't suppose we agree on some things.'”
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Like Jackie Robinson, Doby had to cope without losing his temper.
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“I couldn't react to [prejudicial] situations from a physical standpoint. My reaction was to hit the ball as far as I could,” he said later. Unlike Robinson, Doby didn't have much preparation. He also got none of the intense and sympathetic media coverage the charismatic Robinson received. “You didn't hear much about what I was going through because the media didn't want to repeat the same story.” He told Wendell Smith one night in 1959 while sitting in his living room, “I heard ‘nigger' so many times in the outfield that I thought it was my middle name.”
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While Robinson's struggle was mostly with other players, not the Brooklyn fans, Doby was confronted by players on other teams as well as by the local population, which was not ready for him. One of the reporters who covered the Indians in 1947, Robert Ames Alden of the
Cleveland Press
, years later recalled a city deeply divided along racial lines, which Veeck's hiring of Doby exacerbated. “I was a junior member of the sports staff, one step up from what would now be called an intern, and I was picking up eight to ten calls a night from white people angry about the integration of the team. Some were quite threatening. Both the
News
and the
Plain Dealer
as well as the radio stations decided not to report these calls.”
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Veeck later estimated that 20,000 angry letters had come into club headquarters protesting the Doby signing. He answered many of them himself, and would later acknowledge that he had put Doby in a difficult situation. “Not only being first in the American League but even more difficult was the fact that he himself had never really been exposed to the virulence that racism took once he had donned an Indians uniform.”
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Pitcher Lou Brissie, whose career also began in 1947 with the Philadelphia Athletics, later told his biographer Ira Berkow that he listened in the dugout as his teammates shouted things at Doby like “ ‘Porter, carry my bags,' or ‘Shoe-shine boy, shine my shoes' and well, the N-word, too. It was terrible.” Brissie, who had been severely wounded in Italy and left for dead, pitched with a large metal brace on his leg and identified with Doby. “He was a kind of underdog, like me,” Brissie told Berkow.
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An unnamed New York Yankee, fearing potential discrimination against white players, echoed the feelings of many players in believing that Veeck had brought Doby to the majors “simply because he was a Negro, and the Cleveland club wants to cash in on the Negro trade. I am not opposed to having Negroes in the majors. But let them go through the same rugged preparation as the white players. Send the Negroes into the minors and let them work their way up.” He then added a warning, “If there is discrimination against the white youngsters there will be trouble.”

His heralded debut aside, Doby was having a hard time finding his swing at the plate. “Larry talked to me one night when he first went to Cleveland,” Newark teammate Frazier Robinson later recalled. “He wasn't hitting the ball too well. He was having trouble with breaking pitches. We talked for two or three hours before he went on back to his hotel. He was determined to make good, and it drove him nuts that a Class AAA player named Pendelton was tearing up curve balls. He wondered why he couldn't do that. And I told him, ‘You're taking blind cuts.' It looked to me like he was holding his bat too high and when he'd go to swing at it, he'd have to drop his arms, and that was causing him to take his eye off the ball…. I also thought it might help Larry if he moved off the plate a little.”
²⁴

Doby's struggles continued, and he spent most of the 1947 season on the bench. Manager Lou Boudreau never explained the decision. He was used as a pinch hitter and could not adjust to the role, batting a mere .156 in 32
at-bats. One highlight for Doby was his August debut at Washington's Griffith Stadium, located in a predominantly black neighborhood. However, black fans were directed to sit together along the right-field line in a section known as the right-field Pavilion.
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Doby felt welcome in D.C., a fact that would be reinforced when he later played in right field. “When people say, ‘You played well in Washington,' well, I had a motivation factor there. I had cheerleaders there at Griffith Stadium. I didn't have to worry about name-calling. You got cheers from those people when you walked out onto the field. They'd let you know they appreciated you were there. Give you a little clap when you go out there, and if you hit a home run, they'd acknowledge the fact, tip their hat.”
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As the players got out of their cabs, they were greeted by a small band of pickets carrying signs, including one that read: CLEVELAND HAS A COLORED BASEBALL PLAYER, WHAT ABOUT WASHINGTON? According to Shirley Povich of the
Washington Post
, Doby turned to Gordon and said, “Gee, Joe, I don't want to be a symbol—I just want to be a big league player.”
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On September 11, with the Indians out of the race, Veeck returned to the ranch to take in the Governor's Cup playoff of the Class C Arizona-Texas League. A week later in Tucson, Veeck's station wagon collided with a car driven by Carl Davis. The next morning Veeck did not contest the police charges that he had failed to yield the right of way to the other car and that he was driving without an operator's license. He paid a $10 fine in police court. Three sisters were in the Davis car: Mrs. H. H. Haas, fifty-six, who had fractured her ribs and possibly her pelvis; Mrs. Ann Anderson, forty-one, who had suffered a minor fracture of the spine; and Rachel Davis, forty-six, the driver's wife, who had a possible back fracture.
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The Davises sued Veeck for a total of $85,000, alleging he had been driving at “an excessive rate of speed” before running the stop sign.
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The lawsuit against Veeck for the traffic accident would be dismissed
“with prejudice” on August 4, 1948, the matter having been settled out of court.
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During the 1947 World Series between the Yankees and Dodgers, Veeck established his social headquarters in Toots Shor's restaurant, as did most of the Cleveland writers.
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Shor delighted in insulting his patrons, which pleased Veeck no end.

One evening during the Series Veeck quietly led reporters into a corner one by one to get their reaction, off the record, to the idea of trading Boudreau to the St. Louis Browns. Veeck maintained that he liked Boudreau and considered him one of the two or three best players in the game—he had led the Indians to a fourth-place finish in 1947, their 80–74 record a twelve-game improvement over 1946—but he thought he could improve the team by trading him for three other players who would shore up the Indians weakest positions.

This would have left Veeck without a manager. Al Lopez was in New York for the World Series shopping around for a job as a coach or minor-league manager. The two met and Lopez was offered the job if, as Veeck put it, “things didn't pan out” with Boudreau for the coming season.

For a couple of days the Cleveland reporters mulled the trade privately. Then a one-sentence mention of Boudreau's possible shift to the Browns appeared deep in a Chicago sports column, and the Cleveland writers decided to report the story the next morning. Even though by this time the trade was dead, primarily because Bill DeWitt of the Browns had demanded that the Indians underwrite Boudreau's salary, Veeck chose not to make this fact public, thereby setting off an explosion of emotion in Cleveland.

“To say that the story broke is simply ducking the issue,” reported Franklin Lewis of the
Cleveland Press
. “The story broke through every front door in Cleveland. As an observer said at the time, ‘It smashed and splintered and shook the community by its civic heels until all hell popped loose.'”
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In the sixth inning of the fifth game of the Series, Veeck left his box seat at Ebbets Field and headed for the airport to return to Cleveland. The first fan he talked to in the mob awaiting him at the airport said, “Mr. Veeck, if
you trade Boudreau my two boys will grow up to hate you.” Boudreau had been with the club since 1938 and was immensely popular with fans, who felt he could lead the team to a pennant. The Cleveland papers printed ballots on which fans could vote on the trade, and a huge majority rejected it. Letters arrived by the thousands.

To the great relief of the fans, Veeck soon conceded that public opinion had won, and Boudreau remained in place. “This was pure Veeck,” Bob August of the
Cleveland Press
wrote later. “In his playful way, Veeck could make Machiavelli look like a scout leader.” Realizing how angry he had made the fans, Veeck spent the rest of the night going from bar to bar apologizing and assuring one and all that Boudreau's job was safe. The non-trade inspired a legendary Veeckism: “The best trades are the ones you don't make.”
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The Doby signing, however, looked like a blunder after the season ended. His record inspired bigots and skeptics. “If Doby were white,” sniffed Rogers Hornsby, looking at Doby's numbers, “he wouldn't be considered good enough to play semi-pro.”

After the last game of the season, Doby was sitting at his locker, wondering if that was the end of the experiment, when coach Bill McKechnie came over to him and asked whether he had ever played the outfield. No, Doby said, always infield, in high school, college, the Negro leagues, wherever he played. McKechnie then told him that Joe Gordon was their long-term second baseman. “When you go home this winter get a book and learn how to play the outfield,” which Doby dutifully did.
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Doby rumors were rife. Bob Hunter of the
Los Angeles Examiner
reported that Veeck had made efforts to “unload” Doby to the Pacific Coast League but got no takers. The rap was that Doby, as well as the two black players signed by the St. Louis Browns, Hank Thompson and Willard Brown, were nothing but “sandlot performers.” Veeck refused to comment.