When Cleveland baseball mattered
Here’s a brain-buster worthy of Final Jeopardy: The first integrated Major League Baseball team to win a World Series championship featured a one-legged owner, a fading fireballer, and two former Negro League all-stars.
Who are the 1948 Cleveland Indians? This historically underappreciated team and its earthshaking season are the subject of Luke Epplin’s rollicking first book, “Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series that Changed Baseball.” Epplin amps up the contemporary relevance by leaning hard into the integration angle. That’s probably smarter than playing up the fact that the Indians haven’t won a World Series since 1948, making their 72- year championship drought the longest in the majors.
So how did Epplin, a New York-based writer who grew up near St. Louis, come to write a book about Cleveland? In a New York Times interview, Epplin said it started with his paternal grandfather, who was a fan of the St. Louis Browns baseball team. The Browns were once owned by Bill Veeck, a swashbuckling sports promoter who lost most of his right leg from a World War II injury. Veeck was famous — or, depending on your sense of decorum, notorious — for staging some of baseball’s most outrageous promotional stunts. In 1951, he inserted a 3-foot-7 pinch-hitter into a Browns game, and later bragged, “He was, by golly, the best darn midget who ever played big-league ball.’’ He also blew up the playing field and incited a riot with his “Disco Demolition Night’’ at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in 1979.
While researching Veeck for an article, Epplin discovered that the flamboyant showman, who died in 1986, had not only once owned the Cleveland Indians, but had guided them to their greatest single season. Under Veeck’s audacious sway, the ’48 Indians not only won the American League pennant, they broke multiple team and league attendance records and infuriated both major-league and Negro League team owners.
“Our Town’’ centers on Veeck and the three hall-of-fame players he united for the Indians’ improbable championship run: Bob Feller, the hard-throwing Iowa farm boy who broke into the majors at 17 but whose career was in decline; Larry Doby, a speedy 23-year-old center fielder whom Veeck purchased from the Newark Eagles of the Negro National League in July 1947, making him the second Black player in the majors; and Satchel Paige, the Negro leagues’ brightest star who, at age 41, was signed as an insurance policy against Feller’s decline. “Our Town’’ unfolds with alternating chapters on each man.
If Veeck comes across as fearless and progressive, Mr. Feller ranks as the most complex. He was a pitching prodigy who walked away from the game at the peak of his career to serve in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Following the war, he staged grueling barnstorming tours in the off-season to recoup some of his lost income. The tours frequently featured pitching matchups against Paige, not necessarily because Feller was racially enlightened, but because he realized it was good box office. Fans, both Black and white, turned out in droves to see baseball’s Great White Hope square off against the Negro leagues’ biggest gate attraction.
Paige’s participation helped line his pockets, but it didn’t stop Mr. Feller from consistently dismissing the talent of Black players. Even after watching Doby hit a team-leading .318 in the 1948 World Series, Feller told Ebony magazine, “there are few Negro players who can make the grade’’ in the majors.
The most poignant figure is Doby. Jumping directly from the Negro National League to the American League, he was wholly unprepared for the wrath about to befall him. His new teammates shunned him, and one player quit the team — briefly — when Doby took his starting job.
Doby’s stellar play during the Indians’ pennant drive earned him the begrudging respect of his teammates. A black-andwhite photo of Indians pitcher Steve Gromek hugging Doby after Game 4 of the World Series is one of the most iconic images in baseball history.
The Indians’ dominating performance raised hope that it might serve as a catalyst for broader social integration. In the World Series’ immediate aftermath, that seemed possible. Nearly a quarter-million Clevelanders jammed downtown to celebrate the Indians’ victory, and the city’s largest Black newspaper exclaimed, “For the first time in American League history the Indians are OUR team.’’
Alas, the promise faded faster than a Lake Erie summer. There was no rush by other owners to sign Black ballplayers, and the 1949 season began as 1948’s had ended, with the Indians and Brooklyn Dodgers as the majors’ only integrated teams. When Doby returned to Paterson, N.J., after the World Series to buy a new home, he struck out: Nobody would sell to him.
“The promise of 1948 wasn’t kept,” Epplin writes.