Integration and the Early Years of Arizona Spring Training

In the history of professional baseball in Arizona, 1947 would be a year that would change the pre-season baseball landscape forever. While it would be a year before spring training in the Grand Canyon state would be integrated, over the winter of 1946-47 the twenty-seven year old, maverick-owner of the Cleveland Indians, Bill Veeck, lobbied his friend Horace Stoneham, Jr., owner of the New York Giants, to move their spring training operations from Florida to Tucson and Phoenix respectively. Arizona offered both owners a fresh marketplace, with little competition, and lots of distance distance from the Jim Crow conditions of Florida and the South.

Both were familiar with Arizona, Veeck having lived in Tucson and Stoneham, Jr. in the Phoenix area. Plus the Giants and Indians were guaranteed good competition because the Cubs and White Sox, as well as the Pacific Coast League teams, trained in California. More importantly, the West Coast offered Pacific Coast League baseball fans who eagerly attended the games thereby providing good gate receipts for the ball clubs.

Veeck’s decision to move the Indians to Arizona mirrored the Brooklyn Dodgers’ move to Havana, which Veeck saw as providing the Dodgers with a spring training home less hostile to integration. The racial problems of Florida in the late 1940s disturbed Veeck and he knew if he was going to integrate his team, those conditions would disrupt his team’s training program. Although neither Stoneham nor Veeck brought any African-American players to Arizona with their teams in 1947, Veeck had already promised himself he would integrate his team that season.

Additionally, when the Indians returned to Cleveland for the regular season of 1947, Veeck’s management team planned for future springs in Arizona and secured the Tucson Cowboys as the American League team’s Class C farm club. Stoneham, not as progressive as Veeck, would not integrate his team until he let Leo Durocher re-shape the Giants in 1949, the year the fiery manager brought Monte Irvin and Hank Thompson up to the big league club from the triple-A Jersey Giants in mid-season.

The early months of 1947 gave fans a chance to see the first spring training season in Arizona since the Tigers warmed up in Phoenix in 1929. With the Giants and Indians out West for the entire spring, major league followers were also treated to an increase in exhibition games against the Chicago Cubs and Chicago White Sox. As before the war, the major league teams, after completing their March training in California, would stop at Arizona communities along their rail route back East. One of the top players to appear in spring training in 1947 was fastballer Bob Feller, who “looked forward to training among the cowboys and the cactus.” Other well known stars on the Cleveland roster who drew fans to the Arizona and California parks that spring were future Hall of Famers Lou Boudreau and Bob Lemon. The Giants kept fans excited with Johnny Mize, player-manager Mel Ott, and Ernie Lombardi, all Hall of Famers today. The New Yorkers also had a phenom named Clint Hartung, who would never live up to his rookie expectations.

The Chicago White Sox and Chicago Cubs also played exhibitions in Arizona that spring, with other Hall of Famers such as Chisox’ Luke Appling, Bill Dickey, and future Yankee great, Eddie Lopat. The Cubs, just two years from their last pennant in 1945, quickly descended to the second division after the league’s other teams returned to their pre-war rosters and did not have a star on their team that would ever qualify for the Hall of Fame. While the Cubs would produce some well-known players in the coming decades. including Hall-of-Fame great Ernie Banks, the loyal fans of the north side Chicago team could not know in 1947 that their team, which had appeared in ten World Se1ies in the first five decades of the century. would spend most of the next fifty years mired in mediocrity.

In the spring of 1948, the majors returned to their spring training facilities in the West, South, and the Caribbean. The Dodgers continued to lead the way in developing African-American players for the big leagues, with Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe joining Jackie Robinson. The Brooklyn team, trained in Ciudad Trujillo, Dominican Republic, to escape the harsh racism of Florida.

Bill Veeck, who would sign legendary Negro league pitcher Satchel Paige to the Cleveland Indians in July 1948, returned his squad to Tucson for a competitive spring against his friend Horace Stoneham’s Giants in Phoenix, as well as the Chicago Cubs in Los Angeles, the Chicago White Sox in Pasadena, the Pittsburgh Pirates in Hollywood, and the St. Louis Browns in San Bernardino. With six teams on the West Coast, the American and National League squads provided the needed competition to prepare for the season, a requirement owners would seek to maintain as long they chose to train in the Far West away from the majority of the teams in Florida.

In Arizona, Veeck did not find a completely hospitable climate for his integrated team; Larry Doby would not be allowed to stay at the Santa Rita Hotel with his teammates in 1948, a victim of Arizona’s own version of Jim Crow. Veeck promised it was going to be the only year Doby and the other African-American players were barred from staying with at the team’s hotel while the Indians trained in Arizona. Unfortunately, Veeck’s promise went unheeded, and Doby and his expanding family, as well as all other African-American players, spent every spring separated from their teammates, segregated to homes of African-American Tucsonans. Despite these prejudicial conditions, Doby strived to break down the barriers facing African-Americans in organized baseball.

The Indians remained the only integrated team among the teams training in the West until Durocher brought Monte Irvin and Hank Thompson back with the Giants to Phoenix in 1950. That spring, the Pacific Coast League integrated when catcher John Ritchey became the first African-American in the stellar West Coast loop. The Indians, with its progressive owner, won the pennant in a tie-breaker against the Boston Red Sox and then defeated the National League Boston Braves in the World Series.

In the first two years of integration, the Dodgers, with Jackie Robinson, and the Indians with Larry Doby and Satchel Paige, had won their respective leagues and played in the Fall Classic. Doby, always second to Robinson, was first with Paige to claim the title as the first African-American champions of Major League Baseball. Doby returned to Paterson, New Jersey, with 10,000 fans waiting to give him a hero’s homecoming.

 

Photo credit

Larry Doby, SABR-Rucker Archive.