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Pumpsie Green signed his 1959 contract in Scottsdale on February 25, suited up in a Red Sox uniform, and immediately took part in his first workout. Roger Birtwell’s Boston Globe story began, “The Boston Red Sox – in spring training, at least – today broke the color line.” After the workout, however, Green had to travel alone to the Frontier Motel, in Phoenix, some 17 miles out of town. He’d been turned away at the team hotel, the Safari. “Negroes are not permitted to live in Scottsdale,” Birtwell explained.
The Red Sox began to dissemble. Publicity director Jack Malaney denied that the reason was racism, trying to convince disbelieving writers that the Safari had simply run out of rooms what with all the tourists in town.
Green lived an isolated existence, separated from his teammates. It was a pathetic situation. Boston Globe writer Milton Gross depicted the imposed isolation: “From night to morning, the first Negro player to be brought to spring training by the Boston Red Sox ceases to be a member of the team he hopes to make as a shortstop.” Segregation, wrote Gross, “comes in a man’s heart, residing there like a burrowing worm. It comes when a man wakes alone, eats alone, goes to the movies every night alone because there’s nothing more for him to do and then, in Pumpsie Green’s own words, ‘I get a sandwich and a glass of milk and a book and I read myself to sleep.’”
The Giants, integrated since 1949, had their entire team housed in the Adams Hotel in Phoenix, and Pumpsie eventually took a room at the Giants’ hotel. Some of the Boston press came down pretty hard on the Red Sox. Green was becoming a symbol, cast in a role he would never have chosen for himself. As Howard Bryant later observed, “Pumpsie Green was not by nature a trailblazer.”
Green blazed through early spring training, though his hitting tailed off after the first couple of weeks. He was considered the top rookie in camp, both in a poll of 11 Boston sportswriters and as selected by The Sporting News.
Manager Mike Higgins’ attitude was unclear. For public consumption, he would tell sportswriter Bob Holbrook that Green was “a fine young ballplayer. He can help us.” Columnist Al Hirshberg wrote that Higgins showed no sign of prejudice during spring training in 1959. But this was the same Higgins who, a little earlier in the 1950s, had supposedly told the same Hirshberg, “There’ll be no niggers on this ballclub as long as I have anything to say about it.” There was a growing presumption that Pumpsie had made the team. As the spring season evolved, Green’s hitting tailed off and some shortcomings on defense cropped up.
Pumpsie broke camp with the team and played four exhibition dates against the Chicago Cubs in Texas as both teams headed for their respective openers. Green traveled separately. The Cubs had selected hotels that were integrated; the Red Sox had failed to do so – Green’s luggage was transferred to the Cubs plane and he had a Cubs roommate throughout the games – in effect, living with the opposition.
When he was around the Boston ballclub, though, Bill Cunningham wrote, “There is definitely no feeling against Green among the Red Sox. He is not ignored. The other players kid pleasantly with him and he kids back. Furthermore, you need to hear the Green philosophy to realize how foolish any issue making attempts are. …‘I’m no martyr, no flag carrier. I’m just trying to make the ballclub, that’s all. I’m not trying to prove anything but that.’”
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