The Jet

[GeoPoto]

It was a big deal (Jethroe's sale in 1949 by Branch Rickey to the Boston Braves for $100K+) in other ways, of course, and it’s interesting that more than 10 years earlier, John Quinn’s father Bob Quinn, Sr. had talked with Boston journalist Doc Kountze and envisioned the end of segregation in baseball. Quinn felt it only right that the color line should be breached in Boston, which had fashioned itself the “Cradle of Liberty” at the time of the American Revolution. Quinn knew that major-league owners would have voted him down in 1938, but he did predict the change would happen with the National League Braves (they were the Boston Bees in 1938) before it would happen with the Red Sox.

Jethroe wasn’t the only black player in the Braves organization. Announcing the acquisition, the Boston Herald wrote, “He is the first Negro signed to a Braves contract, though there are several Negroes in the organization.” There was a rumor a few days later that the Braves had also purchased Jackie Robinson. That was quickly denied, but it was clear that Jethroe, more than the also-acquired Bob Addis, had been the Braves’ target in their dealings.

There was some early thought that Rickey had discarded Jethroe; New York writer Joe Williams had dubbed him a “gold-brick…who doesn’t seem to be able to throw at all.” But Rickey himself said, “It might be the biggest mistake I ever made in baseball.”

In any case, come 1950 Sam Jethroe, the first black ballplayer for the Boston Braves, was indeed a 33-year-old rookie in the major leagues. But he had a resume in professional baseball dating back into the 1930s.

Jethroe felt welcome immediately, although things did not always go smoothly as the season wore on. First, though, there was spring training. The Braves trained in Bradenton, Florida, and while perhaps Bostonians would welcome him – a proposition yet to be tested – this was less likely to be the case in those days in Florida.

A year earlier, Jethroe had trained with the Dodgers at Vero Beach in 1949. Though there were communities that were resistant to “race-mixing” in baseball, the Dodgers had been pleased with Robinson’s reception and his being named Rookie of the Year in 1947. The 1948 Dodgers had welcomed future Hall of Famer Roy Campanella, and the Cleveland Indians added Larry Doby, who helped them win the 1948 World Series. In January 1949, several Southern cities that had previously barred black and white ballplayers from playing in the same games actually reached out with invitations to the Dodgers to come and play in their locales during spring training. They included Miami and West Palm Beach in Florida, Atlanta and Macon in Georgia, Greenville in South Carolina, and Houston and San Antonio in Texas. The Dodgers trained at Vero Beach, although at the Naval Training base that was outside the city limits.

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[GeoPoto]

Jethroe played against the Cardinals (March 13) and Yankees (March 21) at St. Petersburg – the first time the color bar had been dropped there — and “caused no stir whatever…produced no reaction except insofar as a small mention in the local Independent. “The St. Petersburg Times did not even mention that Jethroe was a “Negro.” About 300 Negroes were among the 3,157 who came out to the Cardinals game.

There actually had been an incident, but a very quiet one the newspaper apparently had not heard about. Jethroe remembered it years later: “John Quinn met me at the airport and asked me questions about what things might bother me and he told the players about how I felt. One time, at a restaurant in Florida that spring, they refused to serve me and the team said, `Sam, if they don’t serve you, they won’t serve us.’ I told them to go on in, that I wasn’t hungry.”

Right from the start, questions were raised about Jethroe’s defense. Under the headline “$100,000 Jethroe May Be Flop in Outfield,” Bob Ajemian wrote in The Sporting News that while there was no doubt whatsoever about his being faster than anyone in the majors, and that he ought to be able to hit major-league pitching from either side of the plate, he “cannot throw with a major league arm” and “cannot field well enough to hold down a vital center field post satisfactorily.” He didn’t seem to get a good jump on the ball and counted on his speed to enable him to play more deeply than might otherwise be wise; he saw a few balls drop in front of him that a better center fielder may have caught.

Harold Kaese of the Boston Globe agreed. He wrote that “he cannot throw or judge a fly well enough to play center field…This Jethroe looks so fast and his arm looks so weak that it’s even money he can carry the ball in from center field as fast as he can throw it in.”

The Brave's brass was worried. Jethroe himself was a little discouraged and said, “Don’t know but what I ought to pack up and go home, if they really have quit on me.” Bob Holbrook wrote after the 1950 season was over that Jethroe had put together “one of the finest comeback epics in recent years.” How could player mount a comeback when he’d never played in the majors before? That’s because, Holbrook said, Jethroe had been “washed up before he played a game. Writers took one look at him and gasped. He couldn’t throw, he couldn’t hit and he couldn’t field. Fly balls dropped around him so profusely that people were afraid he’d get hit on the head.” Jethroe himself had let one ball drop during a night game, and reportedly joshed, “I lost it in the moon.”

He “isn’t living up to his pre-training camp raves,” wrote Frank Santos of the Boston Chronicle, an African American newspaper, “finding it rather hard to adjust himself to the so-called big league.” But Santos added that Jethroe had recently begun to find himself. Manager Billy Southworth stuck with Jethroe, counseling patience. And Santos seemed to have little doubt that Jethroe would get a good reception in Boston, writing, “One thing is certain, that the hometown fans of the Boston Braves will be rooting for him.”

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[GeoPoto]

(Frank) Santos (of the Boston Chronicle) was right; Jethroe was quite a hit with fans from the start. Once they saw him run, they were even more convinced. Holbrook wrote, “Jethroe’s box-office appeal amazed even the Braves’ front office who knew they had acquired a good outfielder but never guessed the staid Boston fans would adopt him as their favorite National League player and murmur with excitement every time he reached base.”

Staid, but also racist? Jethroe was eager to play in Boston, “but I was also anxious because I knew when I arrived there, more was required for me to do than a white player,” Jethroe told Larry Whiteside. He hadn’t been able to board with the team in St. Petersburg, nor in the team hotels in Chicago and St. Louis, and he didn’t have a roommate his whole first year with the Braves in Boston. “In Chicago, my first time in,” he told Marvin Pave of the Boston Globe, “I stayed at a black hotel, but the next time in, our traveling secretary, Duffy Lewis, had me stay in the team hotel with him. Our third time in, I had a room of my own.” In Boston, Jethroe stayed at the Kenmore Hotel, not far from Braves Field.

“I was lucky,” Jethroe recalled. “Everywhere I went I seemed to have the fans on my side. They kidded me about my fielding but I didn’t have rabbit ears. The fans could say what they wanted. T he only confrontations I had were on the playing field.”

While the Red Sox took more than nine years before they fielded a black ballplayer, Jethroe seems to have been almost unreservedly welcomed in Boston. And yet, the Braves certainly hadn’t signed Jethroe because of his race. In 1950, the “non-white” population of Boston was just 5.3% of the city’s overall population. The African-American population itself was an even 5.0%. To be sure, was growing; in 1940 it had been 3.1%, and in 1960 it was 9.1%. Still, this was not in any way a constituency to which either the Braves or Red Sox needed to cater.

Nonetheless, one might think that the signing of a black ballplayer would have been a major story in Boston at the time. It was not. Instead, the focus on Jethroe over the months through spring training was on his speed. The Boston press made little of his race. An online search of the Boston Herald, Boston Globe, and Springfield Union from October 1, 1949 to April 17, 1950 – the day before Jethroe’s debut – turns up 230 stories that mention “Sam Jethroe” but only 30 that mention both “Sam Jethroe” and “Negro,” the term used then the way “African American” is used today. To their credit, more than 86% of the stories made no reference at all to his race, and some of those that did were matter-of-factual, such as the Globe‘s listing of Jethroe’s prior clubs, which included the “Cleveland Buckeyes of the Negro American League.”

It could be argued that sportswriters simply shied away from mentioning “social issues” and restricted their coverage to play on the field. However, the online search also included columnists and opinionated men such as Dave Egan of the Boston Record, who had long pushed for desegregation of Boston baseball. Egan had written back in 1945 that Boston was “freedom’s holy soil” and that “someday, the bigots of baseball will die, and men of good-will will take their places…on that day, baseball can call itself the national sport.”

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[GeoPoto]

Boston’s African-American newspaper, the Boston Chronicle, reported Jethroe’s signing, but also with little fanfare. When he signed his Braves contract with GM John Quinn in New York, the Chronicle noted that “the speedy Negro outfielder had just played in the Little World Series in Indianapolis before coming to New York.” About all Jethroe himself had to say was, “I’ll let the records do the talking. I just played in the Little World Series, now I hope to get into the big one.”

Before the traditional preseason “City Series” games against the Red Sox, the Boston Post – never referring once to his race – wrote, “Jethroe received more press interviews yesterday than all of the other Braves players combined. Sam is easy and natural with all members of the fourth estate.”

After the first exhibition game against the Red Sox, Gerry Hern of the Post acknowledged race in a single clause. Braves fans, he wrote, “have waited a long time to make a personal appraisal of Sam Jethroe, the first colored player ever to wear a Boston uniform, and Dick Donovan, the 25-year-old Wollaston resident, who earned his letter yesterday. Sam was slightly terrific in his Boston debutante party. There were no flowers, but he slashed a couple of singles that took the strain off the Braves followers, who have not been accustomed to seeing a Braves outfielder who could hit, throw and run.” The novelty of Jethroe’s darker skin color was apparently on no more than a par with the novelty of a Brave from the nearby Wollaston neighborhood of Quincy, Massachusetts.

The Braves won that first game in the series, 4-1, and the Red Sox came back and won the second, 3-1, at Fenway. It was Jethroe’s first time playing in the park he’d tried out in five years earlier . Batting in the bottom of the eighth with the Braves ahead, 1-0, Ted Williams slammed a three-run homer into the right-field bullpen. Jethroe, unfamiliar with the park and anxious to catch the ball, slammed hard into the bullpen wall, in vain. The Herald noted he was “courageous and speedy” but didn’t see the need to remind readers of his darker hue. He was just another ballplayer – covered exactly the way one might wish. He was “Switching Sammy, getting plenty of encouragement from the 7,049 spectators.” But there was no mention of his race.

The Globe’s game story noted that Jethroe had singled in the first run. It commented on his speed at one point and observed that “Like many another big leaguer, Jethroe is superstitious…He kicks third base to and from the outfield.” His similarity to the other players was thus noted; there was nothing in the way of noting his difference.

The next day, in picking both the 1950 Braves and Red Sox to win the pennants in their respective leagues, the Globe‘s Harold Kaese noted race, in passing: “Sam Jethroe, Boston’s first Negro player, will display his phenomenal speed of foot by (1) scoring from first on a tap to the pitcher; (2) stealing more bases than the rest of the Braves and Birdie Tebbetts put together; and (3) dashing to the plate in time to catch his own throw from DEEP centerfield.”

There was no mention at all of Jethroe’s race in Clif Keane’s lengthy feature on Jethroe’s very first game, which ran the morning of that game in Boston.

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[GeoPoto]

The Braves opened the regular season in the Polo Grounds, where they beat the Giants, 11-4. Jethroe went 2-for-4 with an eighth-inning homer in his first game.

When it came time for Jethroe’s Braves Field debut, the Boston Traveler suggested that “Sam Jethroe’s debut in a championship game vies for attention at the Braves opener with the return of Eddie Waitkus to major-league action.” It was Waitkus’s first day back (he was playing for the Phillies) after being shot by Ruth Steinhagen in Chicago the prior July.

In the home opener, attended by the governor of Massachusetts (who threw out the first ball), the governors of Rhode Island and New Hampshire, and numerous other celebrities, Jethroe singled but his play barely rated mention in the papers. The game wound up a 2-2 tie, called due to rain in the last half of the eighth inning.

A few days later when the Brooklyn Dodgers came to town, Leslie Jones shot a photo for the Herald that depicted “five Negroes…advancing the cause of their race in baseball” — Jethroe with Dodgers Dan Bankhead, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, and Jackie Robinson.

Jethroe knocked out nine hits in his first seven games in Boston. On May 6 in Cincinnati, he singled twice batting left-handed and tripled and singled batting righty.

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[Harliduck]

Wish we had more threads like this...thanks George!! Hope it continues...

[GeoPoto]

In May, Jethroe was one of the three Boston Braves outfielders invited to a “brotherhood” dinner of the Massachusetts Council of Catholics, Protestants and Jews. Sid Gordon was the Jew, Willard Marshall the Protestant, and Sam Jethroe the Catholic. Sam always wore a St. Christopher’s medal.

Almost the only newspaper story that looked at him other than as just another player was a Boston Globe feature by Ernie Roberts that ran in July, “Jethroe, Hero of Thousands at Park, Goes Unrecognized on Boston Streets.” According to that story, he lived on Columbus Avenue with a young couple who had invited him.

In Boston, Jethroe kept to himself. “I stayed pretty close to home. The High Hat Club on Mass. Avenue was my favorite spot. I didn’t go around to many white places – bars, movies, etc. But I met a lot of nice people. One of them was Archbishop Cushing. He would call up to make sure I got to church.”

Jethroe had had a little trouble on the road as mentioned earlier, but it was only when visiting his native St. Louis that he could not stay at the team hotel, the Chase. And at St. Louis’ segregated ballpark, Sam’s father was forced to sit in the “Negro section” of seats.

For the most part, Jethroe roomed alone on the road. Lewis, Luis Olmo, and Earl Torgeson were his closest friends on the team. He did get some razzing at parks around the league but said it didn’t bother him. “I don’t have rabbit ears; I don’t hear a thing. This is a country of free speech. Why not let the fans get their money’s worth?” he smiled.

Here is Sam appearing for the first time in a Boston uniform during spring training 1950. Providing moral support are his manager Billy Southworth and coach John Cooney:

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