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Yawkey’s tainted legacy: Cooperstown should boot last owner to integrate (Steve Buckley - The Boston Herald)
April 16, 2007 6:34 PM
Copyright The Boston Herald
April 16, 2007
Major League Baseball should be applauded for the manner in which it commemorated the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s major league debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers yesterday.
But the next time the league chooses to celebrate the life and times of Robinson, I have an idea that’s far more symbolic than having a collection of players and coaches wear No. 42 on their backs.
Kick Tom Yawkey out of the Hall of Fame.
Perhaps that’s not an opinion shared by a lot of ex-Red Sox [team stats] players and longtime fans who regard the team’s late owner as a lovable old codger who “saved” baseball in Boston. And, no, I don’t expect MLB to get into the business of ripping plaques off the walls in their hallowed Cooperstown museum.
But can somebody explain why Yawkey was enshrined there in the first place? (The Veterans Committee elected him in 1980, four years after his passing.)
The short answer, naturally, is money: As Glenn Stout and Dick Johnson pointed out in “Red Sox Century,” still the best book ever written on the team: “… Yawkey had been a benefactor of the Hall for years, and his enshrinement was a kind of belated thank you.”
In other words, Yawkey bought his way in.
It seems strange that Robinson is celebrated for breaking baseball’s color line, while the man who did more than anyone to keep that color line in place has a plaque in Cooperstown.
It should never be forgotten that the Red Sox were the last team in baseball with an African-American on their big league roster. When Pumpsie Green pinch ran for Vic Wertz in the top of the eighth inning of the Sox’ 2-1 loss to the Chicago White Sox on July 21, 1959, it was more than 12 years after Robinson played his first game with the Dodgers.
And the shame of it all, as most New England baseball fans know, is that Robinson could have played for the Red Sox. Under pressure from city officials, notably City Councilor Isadore Muchnick, the Red Sox granted a tryout to Robinson and two other Negro League players (Sam Jethroe and Marvin Williams) at Fenway Park [map], on April 16, 1945 - 62 years ago today.
The Red Sox, though, never contacted the players.
The organization has come a long way since.
Dan Duquette, the team’s general manager from 1994-2002, had a solid track record of scouting, signing and developing minority players. And just last week, current GM Theo Epstein became perhaps the first club executive to speak openly of the Sox’ troubled racial history when he referred to “some of the shameful episodes of the past.”
To understand the absurdity of Tom Yawkey being in Cooperstown, consider this: Jacob Ruppert, the New York beermeister who owned the Yankees from 1914 until his death in 1939, is not in the Hall of Fame. This is the same man whose teams won 10 pennants and seven World Series titles. This is the same man who built Yankee Stadium and put the likes of Ed Barrow and Miller Huggins in place to run baseball operations. And this is the same man who wrote the check that liberated Babe Ruth from Boston.
The issue here is not that Ruppert should be in the Hall, but that Yawkey should not be.
Ever read the words on Yawkey’s Hall of Fame plaque? They’re just laughable, including such gems as “Set precedent for AL in 1936 as first to have team travel by plane,” and, “His club won pennants in 1946, 1967 and 1975 - and narrowly missed in 1948, 1949 and 1972.”
Yes, we all know the Yawkeys gave millions to charity. But this is the baseball Hall of Fame, not the philanthropy Hall of Fame. And when travel itineraries and second-place finishes make it on to a Hall of Fame plaque, you know the writers were hurting for material.
Somewhere on that plaque, it should be noted that Yawkey was the last owner to integrate.
Either that, or it should be taken down.
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Posted at 6:34 PM