It’s time MLB celebrates Larry Doby Day, too

[ValKehl]

Larry Doby's first American League appearance was on today's date in 1947. This piece is from today's Washington Post. I would have merely posted the link to it, but I think the Post has a firewall.

It’s time MLB celebrates Larry Doby Day, too

Opinion by Luke Epplin
July 4, 2021 at 8:00 a.m. EDT

Luke Epplin is the author of “Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball.”

Late in the afternoon on Independence Day of 1947, Larry Doby was waiting inside Newark’s Penn Station for an overnight journey that would alter the course of baseball history. Doby was 23, a soft-spoken, hard-hitting infielder with limited experience but unlimited potential. Only hours earlier, he’d played in his final game for the Newark Eagles, the reigning champions of baseball’s Negro Leagues. The following afternoon, on July 5, Doby would join the Cleveland Indians as the first Black player in the American League and the second overall in Major League Baseball that century, a mere 11 weeks after Jackie Robinson first took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Every April 15 since 2004, Major League Baseball has celebrated Jackie Robinson Day. It’s time it started celebrating Larry Doby Day, too.

Doby’s first season was nothing like the older Robinson’s rookie-of-the-year debut. That made his road, in some ways, harder. Doby floundered on the Indians amid clubhouse dissension, limited playing time and persistent racial abuse. He logged just five hits for a measly .156 batting average. Skeptics of baseball integration dubbed Doby a bust, proof of the unpreparedness of players from the Negro Leagues. Largely because of that, Doby’s subsequent turnaround in 1948, from benchwarmer to catalyst of Cleveland’s last World Series championship club, became one of the most meaningful stories of baseball’s postwar era.

It’s a story that, nearly three-quarters of a century later, has mostly faded from memory. While it’s inevitable that the second Black player would be overshadowed by the first, decisions made by Major League Baseball about how to commemorate its pioneering players have accelerated that tendency.

In 1997, 50 years after Robinson’s debut on the Dodgers, his uniform number 42 was retired across Major League Baseball. Years later, players from every MLB franchise would wear 42 in celebration of Jackie Robinson Day, a now-annual occasion to pay rightful tribute to baseball’s foremost pioneer. More and more, the popular narrative about integration doubles as one about Robinson. Focusing so singularly on one player, however, has had the unintended effect of obscuring those who followed in Robinson’s footsteps, many of whose narratives differed significantly from his own.

Establishing a similar leaguewide celebration to commemorate Doby’s breakthrough would go a long way toward conveying a richer public understanding about the desegregation of Major League Baseball.

The burdens Doby faced were no less severe than Robinson’s. “Jackie got all the publicity for putting up with [racial abuse],” Doby told Jet magazine in 1978. “But it was the same thing I had to deal with. He was first, but the crap I took was just as bad. Nobody said, ‘We’re gonna be nice to the second Black.’”

In other ways, Robinson and Doby’s narratives diverged. Upon signing Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodgers sent him to the minor leagues in 1946 to ease his transition. Doby, in contrast, journeyed literally overnight from the Negro Leagues to the majors, suiting up for the Newark Eagles one day, the Cleveland Indians the next. Unlike Robinson, who’d spurred the Dodgers to within one game of a World Series championship in 1947, Doby was relegated to pinch-hitting duties, which rendered him unable to settle into a groove.

Not even expected to make the Indians roster in 1948, Doby battled his way into the starting lineup in spring training. Amid a tight four-way pennant race, Doby buoyed the team all season long with a slew of timely hits. He wound up batting .301. “Without Doby,” Indians manager Lou Boudreau said in September, “we would not be fighting for the pennant. We probably would have been in fourth place.” In the World Series, Doby paced the Indians’ offensive attack, leading his team with a .318 batting average.

After the Indians became the first integrated team to win a championship, Ebony magazine proclaimed that while Robinson had “pioneered in the majors garnering honors as ‘Rookie of the Year,’ probably Doby has been an even more important factor in sending club owners into the chase for Negro talent.” More than shattering stereotypes, his turnaround from one season to the next demonstrated unequivocally, as Ebony concluded, “that a Negro player, given the right opportunity, encouragement and direction, can attain baseball heights.”

This point was underscored by the numerous pioneering players who trailed in Doby’s wake. Joining Doby for the Indians championship run in 1948 was pitcher Satchel Paige, the aging legend who won six crucial games that summer. From 1949 to 1953, five players who’d started their careers in the Negro Leagues — Don Newcombe, Sam Jethroe, Willie Mays, Joe Black and Jim Gilliam — would win Rookie of the Year in the National League. Roy Campanella of the Dodgers and Monte Irvin of the New York Giants became the backbones of championship clubs.

Robinson’s story is worth honoring, but so are the stories of those who came after, and there’s no better way of doing so than by honoring Doby annually on the day of his historic breakthrough.