MLB history: The 10 pioneers who integrated baseball
10 pioneers left an indelible mark on MLB history; just 1 remains
Ten Men. Ten baseball players. Individually they were great. Collectively they changed the face of the National Pastime, rewrote MLB history … and by extension, of America itself.
Now, with the death Friday of Hank Aaron, only one remains to tell their tale.
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In the first decade following World War II, these Ten men — Blacks and Black Latinos — ensured with their talent that the long-delayed integration of American professional sport would succeed.
Flowing from the vestigial Negro Leagues to the American and National leagues between 1947-56, they emphatically answered in the affirmative the lingering question of whether athletic ability was unconscious of skin color.
Without their exceptional demonstration of ability, it’s possible that integration – both in baseball and in life generally – might have been delayed. Today, nine of the Ten Men are immortalized in Cooperstown.
In chronological order the Ten Men — all pioneers — were Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, Roy Campanella, Minnie Minoso, Monte Irvin, Willie Mays, Ernie Banks, Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente, and Frank Robinson.
Jackie Robinson, of course, made the initial breakthrough. Appearing in the Brooklyn Dodgers lineup on opening day of the 1947 season, he had come out of World War II to put in one season with the Kansas City Monarchs pf the Negro American League in 1945.
With the Monarchs, Robinson batted .365/.426/.577 in 116 plate appearances, according to Seamheads.com, a site acknowledged by MLB as having the most complete database of Negro Leagues statistics.
But those 116 were sufficient to persuade Dodger general manager Branch Rickey of Robinson’s ability. Once established in Brooklyn, Robinson was an immediate sensation.
Piling up eight hits in his first five, sometimes turbulent, games, he survived an occasionally bitter reaction to his presence on the field from both opponents and fans to help the Dodgers win the National League pennant.
For his .297 average and league-leading 29 steals, Robinson received the inaugural Rookie Of The Year award.
MLB history: Following in Jackie Robinson’s footsteps
In July 1947, Larry Doby integrated the American League. Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck signed him out of Newark of the Negro National League, where Doby had hit .333 as a 22-year-old in 1946.
Doby needed the second half of 1947 to adapt to the pressures he faced that rookie season. But he blossomed in 1948. Batting .301 as the Indians’ regular center fielder, he contributed 14 home runs and 66 RBI to Cleveland’s first pennant since 1920. In that October’s World Series, he hit .318 against the Boston Braves with two extra base hits and two RBI.
Roy Campanella joined Robinson with the Dodgers on opening day of 1948. A Negro League veteran who debuted at age 15 in 1937, Campanella had batted .393 for Philadelphia and Baltimore of the Negro National League in 1944.
Signed by Rickey prior to the 1947 season, he followed Robinson to Montreal in 1947, split time between the Dodgers and St. Paul in 1948 and became established as the club’s regular backstop in 1949.
An All-Star selection that first full season when he batted .287 with 22 home runs, Campanella helped Brooklyn secure that season’s pennant. He won the first of his three Most Valuable Player awards in 1951, adding the 1953 and 1955 awards before a crippling auto crash forced his retirement at the end of the 1957 season.
MLB history: The first Black Latino
Black Americans were not the only group liberated from the game’s sociological restrictions by Jackie Robinson’s arrival. The same unofficial rules had prevented dark-skinned Latinos from playing, although their lighter-skinned cousins had been deemed acceptable for decades.
That changed with Veeck’s signing of Orestes ‘Minnie’ Minoso to a Cleveland Indians contract prior to the 1949 season. A three-year member of the Negro League’s New York Cubans, the native of Cuba took longer to develop. Batting only .181 in just 20 at bats for Cleveland, he was shipped to the Chicago White Sox in 1951.
But as the first dark-skinned player to appear on the field in the nation’s second largest city, Minoso thrived in Chicago. He batted .324 for the Sox, finished second in Rookie of the Year voting and fourth in the MVP race and solidified what would become a 17-season career as an outfielder.
Minoso, who died in 2015, is the only true pioneer of the integration movement not yet enshrined in Cooperstown, although he still draws support when the appropriate veterans committee meets to consider figures from his era.
With Hank Thompson, Monte Irvin co-integrated the New York Giants in July 1949. His arrival was in part occasioned by the success Robinson, Campanella and pitcher Don Newcombe were by that time having across town in Brooklyn.
A long-time veteran star with Newark of the Negro National League, Irvin had hit .370 in 1946 when Newark won the pennant and .300 in 1947.
Already 30 when he debuted, Irvin played eight seasons for the Giants and had a role in both their 1951 and 1954 pennants. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1973 largely for his Negro League play.
MLB history: The next wave
As a group, the Ten Men truly made their presence felt in the early 1950s.
Willie Mays followed Monte Irvin by two years, signed as a teenager after playing half a season in 1948 for the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League. A .477 hitter during a brief apprenticeship with Minneapolis in 1951, Mays started slowly for the New York Giants.
In early June he was batting just .138 with a single home run and wondering whether he was up to the challenge.
But Giants’ manager Leo Durocher stuck with Mays, who paid off his manager’s faith. He finished the season at .274 with 20 home runs, won the Rookie of the Year award and helped New York to the National League pennant. In 1954 Mays became a World Series hero and one of the game’s recognized stars.
Ernie Banks came to Chicago’s North Side in September 1953 following a brief apprenticeship with the Kansas City Monarchs and military service. It was technically a package deal, second baseman Gene Baker joining Banks in co-integrating the Chicago Cubs. But there was never a doubt who the star was.
Second in 1954 Rookie of the Year voting, he hit 44 home runs in 1955 and won back-to-back MVPs in 1958 and 1959.
Hank Aaron, who played briefly with the Negro League’s Indianapolis Clowns, did not technically integrate the Boston Braves when he signed following the 1952 season. Sam Jethroe had done that in 1950.
But Jethroe never quite reached the stardom that had been forecast for him. Aaron demonstrated his brilliance with a starring role in Jacksonville, Fla., in 1953, batting .362 and driving in 135 runs.
His genius under the demanding conditions in that Deep South city compelled the Braves to promote him in 1954, a year after the club moved to Milwaukee.
MLB history: Roberto and Frank
Roberto Clemente buttressed Minnie Minoso’s presence when he debuted for the Pittsburgh Pirates as the National League’s first prominent black Latino on opening day of 1955.
He had signed with Branch Rickey’s Dodgers in 1954, so when Rickey left Brooklyn for Pittsburgh that winter he knew all about Clemente’s potential. He selected Clemente in the Rule V Draft, installed him immediately as the Pirates’ right fielder and got 3,000 hits, a 1966 MVP and a two-time World Series star for his diligence.
Alone among the Integration Era greats, Clemente and Frank Robinson avoided having to spend part of their prime seasons in Negro or Cuban League ball. Signed as a 17-year-old fresh out of high school, Robinson debuted on April 17, 1956, playing left field and getting a double and single.
Robinson did not technically integrate the Cincinnati Reds – Chuck Harmon had done that two seasons earlier – but he was the team’s first minority regular and the first to rise to any level of prominence.
He won the 1961 Most Valuable Player Award in leading the Reds to that season’s pennant. Traded to the Baltimore Orioles prior to the 1966 season, he did the same thing there, in the process becoming the first MVP of both leagues.
Ten Men. Ten baseball greats. Ten seminal figures in the integration of baseball, and by extension, of America.
Next. Josh Gibson, career batting average leader. dark
Hank Aaron’s death leaves us with only Mays to honor among those Ten Men.