Doby stood alone when he changed A.L.

Why is it no surprise that the 60th anniversary of Larry Doby’s breaking the American League color barrier has come and gone, with neither Major League Baseball in general nor the American League in particular taking proper note of the milestone?

He has been dead four years now, and in the A.L. social set only the Cleveland Indians seem to remember. They are the team with which he made history and the team that will honor that memory next month by having everyone on its roster, including the manager and coaches, wear his No. 14 for a game against the New York Yankees.

Somehow baseball historians seem to act as though it all ended on the day Jackie Robinson came up the dugout steps at Ebbets Field, taking baseball’s first grudging steps toward entry into the real 20th century.

But, of course, it wasn’t over.

There was another league, and much to its horror, the American League had no way to avoid what a magnificent entrepreneur, baseball genius and rare man of honor named Bill Veeck brought to its table. And it sure as hell fought it. Just 11 weeks after Jackie’s debut, Veeck signed Doby fresh from the Newark Eagles of the Negro National League for his Cleveland Indians. Both Larry and Jackie immediately suffered through parallel seasons of indignities, branded with isolation, loneliness, racism and verbal abuse. Death threats were their shared burden.

So Doby was simply No. 2, riding easily in Robinson’s wake.

Like hell he was.

Within a year the Brooklyn Dodgers had signed four black players. Other National League owners had slowly begun to understand that a player is a player is a player. And the Dodgers – nearly all of them – were Jackie’s team.

But over in the “other” league, except for the nearly bankrupt St. Louis Browns, the resentment of both owners and players stiffened and morphed into a determined wall of hate – one that would last far beyond Jackie’s strides in the National League. Consider this American League and its elitist, racist attitude:

The Philadelphia Athletics didn’t field a black player until 1953. Four years after Doby’s arrival, Detroit and Washington also had none, and the only black the Chicago White Sox had was Minnie Minoso, a Latin-American. The Yankees didn’t put a black player on the field until 1955 – no surprise because George Weiss, the team’s general manager, had already been quoted as saying “no box-holder from Westchester would ever sit next to a black man” (although he compressed the last two words into a single one-word slur). And 11 years after Larry’s debut, the league’s Boston Red Sox had yet to put an African-American on the field.

As for this last, the time lag held no surprises. In 1947, when Doby broke in, it was Tom Yawkey, the owner of the Red Sox, who had said, “Anyone who says I won’t hire blacks is a liar. I have about 100 working on my farm down south.”

The Philadelphia Athletics hired a racist fan and sat him where he could shout obscenities at Doby. An infielder on that same team spit tobacco juice into Doby’s face. In Washington, he had to walk down the street wearing his uniform because the clubhouse was denied to him. In St. Louis in 1948, a year after this “social experiment” was supposed to be over, a foul-mouthed boor in one of the first-base field boxes worked on Doby with a voice like a foghorn and a mind like the Paris sewer system.

It went on and on and finally, with Doby in the batting circle, it got even more personal than it had been on all the previous trips to Sportsman’s Park put together.

It focused on Larry’s wife Helyn.

“That was it. I snapped,” Doby said when he finally told me the story years later on the eve of his induction into the Hall of Fame (He died in 2003). “I went straight for the railing and had a leg up on it. If I had gotten over it, I would have been out of baseball forever and, the way things were, who could say when another African-American would get the chance in the American League?”

Then Bill McKechnie, an Indians coach, moved so quickly he was merely a blur in visitors’ gray as he hurled himself at Doby. He grabbed him around the waist and hurled him to the ground.

“He saved me,” Doby said, his face a wellspring of emotion as he spoke. “I wouldn’t be here tonight. Hey, I wouldn’t have even had a career. He understood and he cared, he and Joe Gordon and a handful of others on that 1947 Cleveland team I will never forget them.”

Whenever he would discuss Gordon, his mind would reach back to the night of July 5, 1947, when he joined the Indians in Chicago. He was 23 years old when he walked down the tunnel, up the dugout steps, onto the playing field and into history. Suddenly, he was never more alone in his life. All around him he heard the familiar pop of a dozen baseballs hitting the pockets of the gloves of those warming up. He was surrounded by men who were supposed to be his teammates.

But nobody threw him the ball. He stood there half-frozen between heartache and anger.

Then Gordon came over and said, “Hey, rookie, you gonna stand there all day and pose or are you gonna get loose with me?” They paired off and threw the ball back and forth. Unlike many others who now offer a revisionist version of history, Gordon was there for a friendless 23-year-old pioneer when it counted. And Doby needed him. For Robinson, there was a whole dugout of teammates and supporters. For Doby, well, there were times when he felt as though he were sleeping with the enemy.

Manager Lou Boudreau had him pinch-hit for a batter who already had two strikes on him. Told him to play first base the next day, a position he had never played. His own first baseman refused to loan him his glove.

With Jackie, it was Brooklyn and Robinson against the world that year. But with Larry, it was Doby and a couple of volunteers against the universe.

That was 1947. A year later, he was the first black man to play in a World Series and the first to hit a home run in one. At Doby’s Hall of Fame induction years later he told of how he and Indians pitcher Steve Gromek jumped into each other’s arms in shared triumph:

“That picture ran in every paper in the country – a guy who happened to be white and a guy who happened to be black embracing. It ran on front pages all over the country. America needed that picture and I’m so glad I could play a part in giving it to her.”

Today, there is a statue at the edge of the Larry Doby Ball Field at East Side Park in Paterson, N.J. It is 6-foot-1 and weighs 600 pounds. It meticulously echoes in detail Doby’s signature moment, the way he held the bat ear-high before he dropped it down and the straight-up power of his body all melted into the short stride that was his punctuation mark when bat hit ball and it wasn’t a question of “if” but rather of “how far?”

The land doesn’t change. We borrow it. We use it wisely or abuse it. But it never belongs to us. This patch of land is no exception. The dirt infield is gone, in its place the velvet of baseball grass. Once, home plate faced the other way. And once, the men who played on the field were part of the heart and soul of Paterson … games where 2,000 people crammed sardine-tight into wooden bleachers or stood just beyond the foul lines and the sponsors passed the hat during the seventh-inning stretch.

Doby was a three-sport natural at East Side High School, but the man who shaped him in this park left no room for anything but baseball. He managed a semipro team called the Smart Sets. His name was Pat Wilson, and all around the country on sandlots and in public parks in those days there were a thousand like him.

If anyone taught this gifted natural the little “extras” when his baseball skills were maturing, the man was Wilson. The Smart Sets comprised African-Americans like Wilson and Doby. The teams they played against were mainly white former minor leaguers who had been as far as they could get to the fair and now played for the same reason the 15-year-old high school kid from Paterson played – they played the game because they loved it.