Pumpsie Green

July 21, Comiskey Park, Chicago- Twelve years, three months, and six days after Jackie Robinson played his first game for Brooklyn, utility infielder Elijah "Pumpsie" Green made his debut with the Boston Red Sox as a pinch runner.

The Red Sox have the dubious distinction of being the last team in Major League Baseball to integrate. Not that they didn't have their chances; the team had a tryout for Jackie Robinson in 1945 and a few years later another for Willie Mays. They passed on both superstar players.

One might attribute the team’s reluctance to integrate on Boston itself, a city with a checkered reputation when it comes to race. However the crosstown Braves were one of the first MLB teams to integrate, signing Sam Jethroe in 1950. Some place the blame for the Red Sox dragging their heels squarely on the shoulders of long time team owner Tom Yawkey. Yawkey apologists say perhaps it was his manager Joe Cronin, or his GM Eddie Collins, both long time veterans of the racially restricted major leagues, or perhaps the team’s farm system which was comprised primarily of clubs that played in the South.

In a Sports Illustrated article published in 1965, staff writer Jack Mann wrote an article about the years of Red Sox futility. Mann got an interview with Yawkey for the piece. Interspersed with questions about the topic at hand, Mann got to the subject of race. Yawkey asserted that the team was only concerned about finding good ballplayers and there were simply no black players available who were good enough to make the team. Here’s a snippet of the wisdon of Yawkey from that article:

They blame me... and I’m not even a Southerner. I’m from Detroit....I have no feeling against colored people, I employ a lot of them in the South. (where he spent his winters) But they are clannish, and when that story got around that we didn't want Negroes they all decided to sign with some other club. Actually, we scouted them right along, but we didn’t want one because he was a Negro. We wanted a ballplayer.

This may or may not be the smoking gun pinning the team’s institutional racism upon the man at the top. But it does give the reader a good idea of where he was coming from. Either that or he and his staff were just remarkably inept at scouting talent.

Pumpsie Green had a five year major league career with a lifetime .246 batting average and a respectable .357 on base percentage. His may not be a household name but he will go down in history as the man who completed the painful process of integrating the Major Leagues.

Mr. Green retired after many years of teaching and coaching baseball. He lived in California with his wife of 50 plus years, Marie until his passing last year at the age of 85.

Here is a tribute to him that aired after his death: