Luke Easter played for the Padres
in the PCL in 1948.
By Ed PiperI'm reading the recently-released book, Larry Doby in Black and White: The Story of a Baseball Pioneer, about the first Black player in the American League, the same season (1947) that Jackie Robinson broke the color line in the National League for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Doby, a high-average and home run hitter in the Negro Leagues as a second baseman, didn't have any allies on the Cleveland Indians the way Robinson had with the Dodgers in Pee Wee Reese and others. The contrast in the behavior of the managers foretold how things would go: manager Leo Durocher of Brooklyn called a clubhouse meeting before the season, and told his team, "Jackie Robinson is going to be your teammate, and if you don't like it, then step forward and we'll ship you out" to another team, words to that effect.
Unfortunately, in Doby's case, Bill Veeck, the maverick owner of Cleveland, was totally on board with integrating major league baseball. But his manager, Lou Boudreau, an all-star shortstop who also filled out the lineup card, hadn't been brought into the situation. He announced to the team that Doby had joined them, but he didn't do him any favors or try to lighten the way.
Five players shook Doby's hand, including Joe Gordon, but over half the team refused to shake hands with him. Two others turned their backs and walked away.
More pertinent to this blog entry, the book, well-written and researched by Jerry Izenberg, discusses Luke Easter's coming to the Indians in 1949. Easter played for the Padres in the PCL the season before to prepare him for the majors, and in San Diego the big power-hitting first baseman didn't have to deal with the racist Jim Crow rules of the South.
The major league team roomed Doby with Easter--this was after Cleveland won the 1948 American League title following Doby's rough debut in '47, and manager-shortstop Boudreau was named the league MVP--when Luke came up from San Diego. Luke could hit, and he hit homers. He banged out 31 of them.
Just one thing sabotaged his future with the franchise, situated in a city that wasn't eager to integrate, just as the team wasn't. Easter had a white girl friend, and a few unsympathetic white teammates and similarly unsupportive white local sports-writing press made a big deal out of this.
Easter was demoted from the big club, and his career never fully blossomed. He never again had a season like his 31-homer year. He died tragically in a robbery when two men gunned him down for the cash he was carrying 30 years later.
These pioneers had a hell of a time making a way in a sport that resisted change. I mentioned the book to a campus supervisor at a middle school I subbed at Friday (May 17). He commiserated, saying, "Sometimes we don't appreciate what the earlier folks had to go through."
What saved Larry Doby was his wife, Helyn, who was a rock and who had to be the CEO of the family during the baseball season, when Larry would be away for six months or more each year. Helyn had the view that all people are made by God and should be respected. When two of their five kids acted up, she put the pair in Catholic school, where the Catholic nuns weren't afraid to discipline them. Their eldest daughter mentions this, and that her mom had a loving but iron hand in keeping them on the right path.
Larry Doby didn't smoke, drink, swear, or go out. His own mother, Etta, insisted when she signed for him to play for the Newark Eagles in the Negro Leagues prior to all of this, that Abe and Effa Manley, the club owners, had to house her son each night after games. Or, barring this, he had to travel home to Paterson, New Jersey, to sleep for the night. He was only 18 when they signed him--prior to his graduation from high school--as a slugging second baseman/outfielder. (He played under an assumed name, so that he could accept a basketball scholarship to Long Island University. But that is another story.)
