Jethroe played against the Cardinals (March 13) and Yankees (March 21) at St. Petersburg – the first time the color bar had been dropped there — and “caused no stir whatever…produced no reaction except insofar as a small mention in the local Independent. “The St. Petersburg Times did not even mention that Jethroe was a “Negro.” About 300 Negroes were among the 3,157 who came out to the Cardinals game.
There actually had been an incident, but a very quiet one the newspaper apparently had not heard about. Jethroe remembered it years later: “John Quinn met me at the airport and asked me questions about what things might bother me and he told the players about how I felt. One time, at a restaurant in Florida that spring, they refused to serve me and the team said, `Sam, if they don’t serve you, they won’t serve us.’ I told them to go on in, that I wasn’t hungry.”
Right from the start, questions were raised about Jethroe’s defense. Under the headline “$100,000 Jethroe May Be Flop in Outfield,” Bob Ajemian wrote in The Sporting News that while there was no doubt whatsoever about his being faster than anyone in the majors, and that he ought to be able to hit major-league pitching from either side of the plate, he “cannot throw with a major league arm” and “cannot field well enough to hold down a vital center field post satisfactorily.” He didn’t seem to get a good jump on the ball and counted on his speed to enable him to play more deeply than might otherwise be wise; he saw a few balls drop in front of him that a better center fielder may have caught.
Harold Kaese of the Boston Globe agreed. He wrote that “he cannot throw or judge a fly well enough to play center field…This Jethroe looks so fast and his arm looks so weak that it’s even money he can carry the ball in from center field as fast as he can throw it in.”
The Brave's brass was worried. Jethroe himself was a little discouraged and said, “Don’t know but what I ought to pack up and go home, if they really have quit on me.” Bob Holbrook wrote after the 1950 season was over that Jethroe had put together “one of the finest comeback epics in recent years.” How could player mount a comeback when he’d never played in the majors before? That’s because, Holbrook said, Jethroe had been “washed up before he played a game. Writers took one look at him and gasped. He couldn’t throw, he couldn’t hit and he couldn’t field. Fly balls dropped around him so profusely that people were afraid he’d get hit on the head.” Jethroe himself had let one ball drop during a night game, and reportedly joshed, “I lost it in the moon.”
He “isn’t living up to his pre-training camp raves,” wrote Frank Santos of the Boston Chronicle, an African American newspaper, “finding it rather hard to adjust himself to the so-called big league.” But Santos added that Jethroe had recently begun to find himself. Manager Billy Southworth stuck with Jethroe, counseling patience. And Santos seemed to have little doubt that Jethroe would get a good reception in Boston, writing, “One thing is certain, that the hometown fans of the Boston Braves will be rooting for him.”
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