No Honor in Red Sox Anniversary

The following are excerpts from an article at ESPN.com by Howard Bryant which I thought was very interesting.

On July 21, 1959, the Boston Red Sox manager sent in Elijah "Pumpsie" Green in to run for another player. That game 50 years ago yesterday, allowed Green to become the first African-American to play for the Red Sox. Boston was the last team in the major leagues to field a black player, 12 years after Jackie Robinson. During past anniversaries -- the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's debut in 1947, for example -- the Red Sox have flown Green and his wife to Boston, chartered them a limousine and feted them as important elements of the team's and city's history. Green has been honored as a pioneer, as a critical first, and he has thrown out the ceremonial first pitch at Fenway Park to the cheers of a newer, younger Red Sox Nation. As the decades pile up and institutional memory fades due to death and time, the story of the integration of the Red Sox could very well be transformed into a moment of triumph, worthy of commemoration.

What’s milestone is there to celebrate? That the Red Sox put off integrating for as long as possible? To celebrate that occasion is to do something corporations -- and do not forget that baseball is a corporation -- do very well: They are experts at scrubbing history, at massaging a negative into a positive. Through no fault of his own, Pumpsie Green represents a moment in Red Sox and Boston history that should be acknowledged soberly and apologetically out of respect for him, but not as a celebration.

Unlike Jackie Robinson, neither Green nor the Red Sox exhibited any special courage that July day in 1959. In fact, the sequence of events that led to Green’s playing that day was decidedly antiheroic. A year earlier, the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination sent a letter to club executives asking them to explain how the Red Sox did not employ a single African-American in any capacity -- centerfielder or secretary, groundskeeper or accountant, usher or janitor. Even Boston's hockey team, the Bruins, integrated before the Red Sox.

In the mid-1950s Hall of Fame outfielder Billy Williams thought he was headed for Boston. As Williams recalls it, the Red Sox were interested … until they weren't. "Yaz and I were the two best left-handed hitters going," Williams told me this past spring. "We used to joke about it. Imagine what that Wall would've looked like with the two of us hitting one after the other."

There is the sad case of Lorenzo "Piper" Davis, who in 1950 became the first Black player in the history of the Boston organization. Davis was 26, played for the team's Scranton affiliate, led the team in average, home runs, RBIs and stolen bases, and then was unceremoniously cut from the team and sent home to Birmingham, Alabama, without train fare.

In 1949, the Red Sox scouted Willie Mays. Mays recalled hearing that after a few days of inclement weather in Birmingham, the scout, Larry Woodall, told fellow scouts, "I'm not going to waste my time waiting on a bunch of n-----s." Willie Mays once told me. "To be honest, I really thought I was going to Boston. But for that [Tom] Yawkey. Everyone knew he was a racist. He didn't want me."

And of course, there was the original sin: Jackie Robinson's humiliating 1945 tryout with Boston that ended with Robinson and the Red Sox -- manager Joe Cronin, in particular -- as lifelong enemies. The Red Sox were not serious about signing Robinson; by the time he retired following the 1956 season, the Sox still hadn't integrated.

This is the real truth about July 21, 1959. It cannot be changed. When your organization is less interested in Willie Mays than a spell of bad weather, you get Pumpsie Green. When you have the jump on Billy Williams and he gets away, you get Pumpsie Green. When your top baseball man patronizes Jackie Robinson, you get Pumpsie Green. When you're one of the richest teams in the game and fail to capitalize for more than a decade on a pool of the most talented, available and economically desirable ballplayers in the history of the game, you get Pumpsie Green. When the state's corporate watchdog sues your organization not once but twice for discriminatory hiring practices, you get Pumpsie Green.

Not long after he arrived in Boston, in a phone conversation, Jackie Robinson told Green that Green's road would be equally -- if not more -- difficult than Robinson's, for the simple reason that the Dodgers had wanted Robinson to succeed while the Red Sox desperately avoided integration until completely surrounded by the forces of change.

The dynamic of Red Sox have dramatically changed. Boston -- whether in sports or in everyday life – still has trouble overcoming the images of its intolerance. Race has become a much less bitter subject. In terms of black players, the Red Sox are far less diverse than even 10 years ago. The hostilities have calmed, but the patterns have not. Former centerfielder Coco Crisp is the only full-time, everyday African American player they have employed since 2002, but the team is more universally regarded, by all races than ever.

This is not a date of something that 50 years later can or should be retrofitted for a different time -- a better time, certainly -- to satisfy a newer, softer narrative.

Howard Bryant is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He is the author of "Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston" and "Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball."