Ted Williams' Last At Bat
The day baseball's greatest hitter stood up for those who never got a chance to play.
On July 21, 1959—in front of a crowd of 28,534 in Chicago’s Comiskey Park—40-year-old Ted Williams went 0 for 4, as his average dropped to .230, in what would be the worst season of his 19-year career. The Red Sox would lose 2 to 1 that day and end up under .500; the White Sox would go on to lose in the World Series to the Dodgers. To that point, Williams had won two MVPs, six batting titles, been an All Star 15 times, hit .406 in 1941, and lost five seasons of his prime serving in WWII and the Korean War as a U.S. Navy pilot. But it wasn’t until that mid-summer day in 1959 when he met his first Black teammate, a man named Pumpsie Green, who entered the game in the 8th inning as a pinch runner.
The Boston Red Sox were the last team in Major League Baseball to have a Black player, because of the wishes of their owner, Tom Yawkey. In just over 12 years, every team but Boston had rostered at least one Black player—beginning when Jackie Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947. While most historians count the Brown v. Board decision in 1954 as the unofficial beginning of the golden age of the Civil Rights Movement, it could be easily argued that Robinson’s ascension—a year prior to President Truman integrating the military—was the Civil Rights Movement’s true beginning. After the Second World War ended and the American Century began, it was Jackie Robinson who took the first steps toward equality, and he did it with cleats on.
Of lesser import but of significance nonetheless, Robinson was an absolute star. He led the league in steals and won the Rookie of the Year in 1947, no small feat considering the award was voted on by an all-white press. In his third season, he won the National League MVP, and he later helped the team win the 1955 World Series. But Robinson was far from the first good Black player—and Ted Williams knew it. Williams also knew he could have had Robinson as a teammate long before the world heard the name Pumpsie Green. In 1945, after a year of planning, the Red Sox held a tryout for three Negro League players, including Robinson, at Fenway Park. The tryout was closed to the public—and only Red Sox team officials were in the stands. Still, Robinson and the others heard slurs throughout the tryout that only lasted 90 minutes. It was a farce, a spectacle in service of pure humiliation on behalf of Tom Yawkey.
Seven years after Pumpsie Green’s debut in 1959, Ted Williams was inducted to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. This was 1966—the summer after the Watts riots in Los Angeles, the summer Ronald Reagan rode a wave of resentment to the Governor’s mansion in California, the summer Dr. King brought his message north to Chicago and began to see cracks in his movement. That day in Cooperstown, Williams was the only player inducted—the other inductee was longtime manager, Casey Stengel. When Williams got up to speak, the sun shining brightly on his tan face, his deep John Wayne-drawl booming, he looked out on a sea of white faces, including Tom Yawkey’s. In just a three-minute speech, Ted Williams stepped up to the plate for his last, most important at bat. He told the crowd that “baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel, not just to be as good as someone else, but to be better than someone else… This is the nature of man and the name of the game, and I've always been a very lucky guy to have worn a baseball uniform, to have struck out or hit a tape major home run.” Then, looking down at his notes, with an American flag swaying in the Summer breeze next to him on the stage, Williams said that, “I hope that someday the names of Satchell Page and Josh Gibson in some way can be added as a symbol, the great Negro players that are not here, only because they were not given a chance.” The crowd sat silent.
Here was Ted Williams—then and even now known as the most talented and most accomplished player ever to pick up a bat and step into a batter’s box—invoking only two players in his Hall of Fame induction, Satchell Paige and Josh Gibson, two of the greatest Black players ever to put on a uniform. Here was the last man to hit over .400, who did so in 1941 against only white pitchers, acknowledging baseball’s need to reckon with its past, a past that so echoed that of its country. Satchell Paige had been perhaps the greatest pitcher in the Negro League’s history, and only had the chance to play at the Major League level for a few seasons beginning in 1948 when he was 41. Even then, Paige was an All Star in 1952 and 1953, when he was 45 and 46. Gibson, who died at 35 four months before Jackie Robinson debuted, never got that chance despite being known as perhaps an even better hitter than Williams—“the Black Babe Ruth.” In the “What If” parlor game of history, one can imagine what a batting title race would have looked like between those two.
Tomorrow is June 19—Juneteenth—a day which marks the date in which the last word of Emancipation reached the suddenly-formerly enslaved South. The next day—June 20, 2024—Major League Baseball will further seek to reckon with its past that Ted Williams took on in 1966 when the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals play a game at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, the same stadium that used to be home to the Birmingham Black Barons. Both teams through the years have had some of the greatest Black American baseball players on their rosters: Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, and Ozzie Smith for the Cardinals come to mind—along with two famous Giants named Willie Mays and Barry Bonds. From the late 1960s through the late 1990s, Major League Baseball’s rate of Black American players hovered around 15%, about relative to that of the general American population. However, in the last two decades that rate had steadily declined. Today, there are just a handful of Black American players on a given team. As Major League Baseball tries to address this reality—beyond its recent decision to count Negro League statistics—perhaps its officials should recall Ted Williams’ words and remember that to play baseball, at any level, and especially at the highest level, it starts with being given a chance. A chance to feel the seams of a real ball for the first time, a chance to swing a bat that isn’t cracked, and a chance to believe that baseball could be meaningful to you, just as you could be meaningful to baseball.
Sources:
https://sabr.org/bioproj/topic/baseball-demographics-1947-2016/
https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/w/willite01.shtml
https://www.history.com/topics/sports/negro-league-baseball
https://www.mlb.com/news/ted-williams-hall-of-fame-speech-honored-negro-league-players