The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [8]
“Negroes have not been barred from baseball . . . and never have been during the twenty-one years I have served as commissioner,” Landis said. “If Durocher, any other manager, or all of them want to sign one or twenty-five Negroes, it’s all right with me. The business of the commissioner is to interpret the rules of baseball and enforce them.”
LR: I thought that Leo said that earlier, and Landis had just waited and waited until he made him recant and that story came out. By 1942, as I said, there was a shift. Landis, at the Winter Meetings, addressed the issue by telling reporters that there was no rule against integrating, and that is when Paul Robeson made his remarks to the baseball owners, calling for the end of segregation. But Leo told me, a few years earlier, “Hell yes, I would use a colored player in a minute.”
EK: What role do you believe that you had in exposing this conspiracy of silence, this gentleman’s agreement?
LR: The main thing was that we made known the existence of the great Negro players, by featuring players who were good enough to play in the majors. I recall that in 1937 I spoke with Burleigh Grimes, who was the manager of Brooklyn. His team was in seventh place in an eight team league. He said to me, “Well, I could use a little more hitting and pitching . . .” I said to him, “What if you signed Satchell Paige and Josh Gibson?” He acted as if I’d hit him over the head with a two-by-four. He said it would never happen, because teams travel on trains, and spring training takes place in the South. Grimes was a baseball guy, and knew how good those players were. We let everyone know how good those players were, not just baseball people. Of course, Grimes told me not to write what he’d told me in the paper. He wasn’t willing to stick his neck out. Would you have considered him a co-conspiracist?
EK: I’ve asked you about commissioners, league presidents, managers, and other sportswriters. How about the majority of the players? Were they ready to accept integration earlier?
LR: That’s very difficult to answer. One of the things we did was shoot down the idea that most players wouldn’t stand for it. There were players, like Carl Furillo and Bobby Bragen, that went on the record saying that they were against integration. After the war, though, I’d say many were ready. There were players like Pee Wee Reese, coming back from the Pacific, freely admitting to having mixed feelings. Yet, Reese played a positive role in Robinson’s years with the Dodgers.
EK: When Rickey and Robinson integrated baseball, that didn’t put an end to racism, of course. I found an editorial in a mainstream paper from May 16, 1949. Apparently, there had been an argument in a game between Dodgers manager Leo Durocher and a fan. And you must have written that you weren’t going to pre-judge either side, not knowing what precipitated the disagreement. But in this smart-alecky wire service story, it was written, “Rodney forgot that, as a good Communist, he must always assume that in any dispute involving the race angle, the Negro is always right and the White man is always wrong. And the fan involved in this case is a Puerto Rican Negro.”
LR: And what was so wrong about not wanting to pre-judge a fan who heckled a manager? And what was wrong about rooting for the black man?
EK: Nothing, of course. I just wanted to point out what baseball fans were accustomed to reading in the mainstream press at the time you were writing.
LR: The most interesting concept you have brought up is the newspapers of the time.
Newspapers [certainly] had a conspiracy of silence . . . they never told their readers there was a ban. The pretense was that it wasn’t anyone’s fault. There was no ban, but the owners and fans and players would never stand for it . . . so the newspapers never