It was in early 1945 that Jethroe took part in the tryout at Fenway Park. The pressure was growing on what was then known as “Organized Baseball” to desegregate, particularly because soldiers who had come back from putting their lives on the line for the country during World War II found a color bar still preventing them from playing professional baseball other than in the Negro leagues. Boston City Councilor Isadore Muchnick threatened to pull the special permit that the City of Boston accorded the Red Sox which enabled them to play baseball on one of the most lucrative days of the week – Sundays. The Sox wanted to hold onto Sunday baseball and so agreed to hold a tryout for a select three Negro Leaguers brought to Boston by Pittsburgh Courier sportswriter Wendell Smith. Jethroe, Marvin Williams, and Jackie Robinson suited up at Fenway on April 16, 1945 and worked out for coach Hugh Duffy. Red Sox manager Joe Cronin was present as well. Robinson later said of Jethroe, “He looked like a gazelle in the outfield.”
Duffy said he was impressed, but none of the three ever heard from the Red Sox again. Rather than becoming the first major-league team to integrate, the Red Sox ending up being the last – in 1959. Jethroe recalled that the Red Sox “said we had all the potential but it wasn’t the right time.” Cronin later said he told the players that since Boston’s top farm club was in Louisville, “we didn’t think they’d be interested in going there because of the racial feelings at the time.” But he also admitted, “We all thought because of the times, it was good to have separate leagues.”
Jackie Robinson was indeed bitter about the incident, at least when he spoke about it later. But as for Jethroe the Boston Globe’s Larry Whiteside wrote, “Unlike Robinson, he took life as it came.” Though they’d been told that the time wasn’t right (Muchnick said he never heard that explanation), Jethroe allowed, “The Sox were nice. I mean they didn’t take us to dinner or anything, but they were all right. It was just a workout.” He hadn’t gotten too upset, he said, because the three figured nothing was going to come of it anyway. As to the idea they might have actually been signed and brought into Organized Baseball, “I don’t think it ever dawned on any of us.” He also told Herald reporter Gerry Callahan that he’d heard no racial slurs on the field that day.
Jethroe may have been a bit more candid shortly afterward with some of his Buckeyes teammates. Willie Grace says that Jethroe told him “…‘What a joke that so-called tryout was.’ He said you just knew it was a farce” and that Cronin, although he was there, was “up in the stands with his back turned most of the time.”
Tryout over, Jethroe reported to Cleveland, put his Buckeyes uniform back on and once more led the league, this time with a .393 batting average. The Buckeyes also won the Negro World Series that year, sweeping the Homestead Grays.
Was Jethroe disappointed, or angry, that the Red Sox had turned him away? “No, I never thought about it,” he told Marazzi. “When I played in the Negro Leagues, I enjoyed it. I loved to play ball and baseball was fun then. I played against Don Newcombe, Monte Irvin, Henry Thompson, ‘Double Duty’ Radcliffe, Gentry Jessup, and many others.”
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