RIP, Pumpsie Green

The first black player on the Red Sox, the last team to integrate -- a dozen years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line.

Pumpsie Green, 1st black player on Red Sox, dies at 85 - The Boston Globe

His appearance on the roster had followed picketing at Fenway Park. In spring training that year, Mr. Green hit .400 and was hailed by some reporters as the “camp rookie of the year.”

But to questions about whether Mr. Green would make the team, owner Tom Yawkey said: “The Red Sox will bring up a Negro when he meets our standards.”

 

Willie Mays wasn't to their "standards" so.....

 

How can they do obit on Green and not mention when he and Gene Conley left the team bus in New York? Green was awol for a day while Conley vanished for three days and was eventually found trying to board a plane for Israel?

 

Say what, now?

 

Quick version: Conley got pounded by the yanks. Bus gets stuck in traffic. Conley and Green get off the bus (to find a bathroom, they claim, likely they went to a bar because Conley was in a bad mood). They come back and bus is nowhere to be seen. Then they go drinking, which they confirm. Green wakes up the next day and hightails it back to Boston. Conley decides to keep on drinking. At some point, he turns on the news and learns he has been declared missing. He finds that amusing and spends the next day or so alternating between Toots Shor and the Waldorf. He then decides he wants to go to Israel and gets a cab to Idlewild. With no luggage or pass port, he is recognized as the missing ball player at the terminal.

 

What year was this?

 

I believe 1962 or 1963. Green was exiled to the Mets and Conley might have retired.

 

Walter Briggs was just as much a bigot as Yawkey. It took until 1958 for them to add light-skinned Dominican Ozzie Virgil.

I knew there was a Yawkey connection to the Tigers but hadn't researched it until this thread. William C. Yawkey was a Michigan lumber tycoon who planned to buy the Tigers in 1903, but died before the transaction was completed. His son, William H. Yawkey, served as owner for five years but had little interest in the team, selling his shares to Frank Navin in 1908.

Yawkey died from the Spanish flu in 1919, which meant his $40 million inheritance went to nephew Tom, who couldn't touch it until he turned 30. He bought the Red Sox for $1.5 million four days before his 30th birthday.