A.S. Young: Writing ‘Wise Words’ about ‘Gripping and Moving Effects’

In the broad sweep of the history of baseball in Cleveland, a special place is occupied by the writers who have told pieces of that history over the years. The work of a few of the more notable among them—Lebovitz, Schneider, Pluto—is represented in the pages of this very journal. Less familiar than theirs by now, perhaps, but in a class unto itself is the distinguished voice of one of the most accomplished black sportswriters in American history, A. S. “Doc” Young.

Young’s career spanned half a century, from the 1940s through the 1990s. Much of his work was published in black publications. He held positions at several black newspapers-the Cleveland Call and Post, the Los Angeles Sentinel, the New York Amsterdam News, and the Chicago Defender. During the 1950s he worked for Johnson Publishing Company, which publishes Ebony magazine. He later wrote for Sepia magazine, which competed with Ebony for black readers. He also authored several books about sports, including Great Negro Baseball Stars, Negro Firsts in Sports, and The Mets from Mobile. One of the first black members of the Baseball Writers Association of America, Young won many honors during his career.

Andrew Spurgeon Nash Young was born in 1919 in Dunbrooke, Virginia, the elder of two children. The family later moved to Bowling Green, Virginia. Young’s father was a high-school teacher with graduate training in divinity. His mother was a homemaker who had graduated from Hampton Institute and earned a graduate degree in music at Columbia University. The son played piano, clarinet, and saxophone. He enjoyed reading books, memorizing stock information and sports statistics in newspapers, and chatting with a local high-school teacher about baseball. His childhood friends nicknamed him “Doc,” which stuck. He disliked his given name, Andrew, and so used the byline A.S. “Doc” Young throughout his career.

Baseball was Young’s favorite sport when he was growing up. He developed a lifelong passion for the art of hitting. In an article in Ebony he wrote with admiration the batting stroke of San Francisco star Orlando Cepeda:

Just before the pitcher starts his motion, Cepeda draws his bat back, far behind his right shoulder. As the pitcher hurls the ball toward home plate, Cepeda fuses remarkably the titanic power of his body with incredible timing, whips the bat around with the speed of light to meet the ball at precisely the proper fractional second, at precisely the right angle, and … by[e] by[e] baby! Home run! 1

In high school, Young dislocated his left hip in a football game. Unable to walk for more than a year, he spent part of his recovery in bed and later used a wheelchair. His left leg was slightly shorter than the other, and he walked with a slight limp for the rest of his life. Young completed his studies with the help of a tutor and ranked among the top students in his class when he graduated in 1937. That fall, Young enrolled in Hampton to prepare for a career in business. He chose Hampton partly because his mother had gone there, and he liked the school’s business department.

Young intended to become a businessman, but gradually he found himself pursuing a career in journalism. An English teacher suggested that he join the campus newspaper. He followed the advice, becoming a reporter and business manager.

After graduating, with honors, in 1941 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration, Young worked as an accounting clerk at Hampton. In 1943 he moved to Los Angeles, where he found work as an assistant manager of a grocery store and as a sportswriter with the Los Angeles Sentinel. While working at the store in 1944, Young met his future wife, Hazel. They married the following year. Settling into their new home together, Young took along twelve baseball bats. The couple eventually had two children, Norman Gregory and Brenda, both of whom would grow up to earn law degrees.

Young’s career took off in 1946 when he joined the Call and Post, where he started out in the sports department. His drive earned the respect of the paper’s editor and publisher, William Walker, and of the managing editor, Charles Loeb. By September of the following year, he had been promoted to sports editor. He covered baseball, football, and boxing and wrote a column called “Sportivanting.” It was there in 1947 that he articulated one of his core beliefs: Sports helped advance the civil rights of blacks. 

Sports are powerful factors for democracy and downright good in these United States. It may not be as intended or as it should be; but, the righteous truth is that the doings of a Joe Louis or a Jackie Robinson have more gripping and moving effects on the thinking of the majority people than all of the long-studied and wise words of a W. E. B. DuBois, a Walter White or an A. Phillip Randolph.2

While in Cleveland, Young covered outfielder Larry Doby, the first black in the American League, and pitcher Satchel Paige after they joined the Indians. Young occasionally defended Doby’ s inconsistent play in 1947, arguing that Indians manager Lou Boudreau did not use him properly and hardly spoke to him. After Doby helped the Indians win the World Series in 1948, Young wrote an article about him for Sport magazine.

Young was supportive of Paige as well. After watching him work out, Young reported the pitcher’s comment about not knowing he was throwing a slider until someone told him. “That statement,” Young wrote, “is testimony to a remarkable arm. The slider is an arm punishing pitch and is, supposedly, one of the causes of Ewell Blackwell’s poor showing this year after a sensational 1947. Paige has thrown the thing for 20 years!”3

Young and his wife often entertained Doby and Paige at their house. Once Paige was surprised when Mrs. Young said she didn’t know how to fry catfish with Cream of Wheat. (Later a friend would explain to her that the Cream of Wheat was used instead of cornmeal to coat the fish.)

While covering the Indians, Young often had occasion to interview Bill Veeck, the team’s enterprising owner during their famous run in the late 1940s. In his memoir Veeck-As In Wreck. he wrote that Young helped him in his attempt in 1942 to buy the Philadelphia Phillies and stock the team with black players. According to Veeck, Young would scout Negro League players to find candidates for the Phillies. (The veracity of his claim that he intended to integrate the team has been disputed but also defended.)

Young’s domain included not only the Indians but Cleveland’s Negro League baseball as well. He was on hand to report on the Cleveland Buckeyes when they won a Negro American League pennant in 1947. In June 1948 he found himself embroiled in some controversy after having ghostwritten for Jackie Robinson “What’s Wrong with Negro Baseball,” an article that was published in Ebony. Robinson complained about business practices in the Negro Leagues, arguing that players had to cope with a lack of written contracts and with umpiring that was bad and accommodations that were poor. The article met with harsh criticism from defenders of the Negro Leagues.

Leaving Cleveland and settled in Los Angeles, Young in 1949 returned to the Sentinel, where he now served as sports editor. From there he went on to Chicago, where in 1951 be went to work as associate editor for Ebony. It was the first of several positions– his titles, besides associate editor, included assistant managing editor, managing editor, and sports editor– he held with various publications of the Johnson Publishing Company.

Great Negro Baseball Stars, his first book, was published in 1953. The book covers the careers of the blacks who had played in the major leagues during that brief but concentrated period since Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby had broken the racial barrier 1947. There Young offered this trenchant observation on the difference between Doby and Robinson:

In many ways, Doby had been the perfect choice for the pioneering job in the American League. In others, as in his tendency to tighten up, he was a puzzler, a lad who not infrequently confused his closest friends. It might be said that the major difference between Jackie and Larry was this: Jackie, as time was to prove, dressed himself in the cloak of humility and made it into a perfect fit through one of the greatest acting jobs in baseball history; Doby wore the cloak as a gift of nature.4

Ten years later, in Negro Firsts in Sports, Young published a rich collection of brief profiles of athletes ranging from black boxers and jockeys in years past up to the young baseball players who were only now entering the major leagues. The book was cited by the American Library Association as one of the leading reference books of 1963.

While Young was proud of the performance of athletes on the field, he was also alert to their performance off it. He appreciated Jackie Robinson’s business acumen, well-spoken manner, and contribution to the civil-rights cause. Young admired as well Joe Black, a former Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher who became an executive with Greyhound.

Young’s fondness for athletes who developed into well-rounded public figures shone through in his article about Frank Robinson, then with the Baltimore Orioles, that appeared in Sepia magazine in May 1967. Traded by the Cincinnati Reds after the 1965 season, Robinson flourished with the Orioles, winning the Triple Crown and the American League MVP award and helping Baltimore win the 1966 World Series. “Despite his 31 years,” Young wrote,

there is a certain boyishness about his face. He most definitely doesn’t appear to be the fearless, highly competitive baseball star that he is in season, an inspirational leader who, along with Maury Wills, must be ranked among the greatest since Jackie Robinson. Prior to his fantastic season at Baltimore, Frank Robinson had sometimes been portrayed as a “trouble-maker,” as a moody type of player. But, just as numerous fans discovered over the winter, this Sepia writer, who had known Frank before, found a gentlemanly fellow who spoke easily, and articulately, in a resonant tone.5

“Is Baseball Ready for a Black Manager?” In an article under that title, Young, writing again in Sepia a few years later, in 1971, suggested that Robinson, along with Maury Wills, was most likely to become the first black manager in the major leagues. “The fact of the matter,” he wrote,

is that both Robinson and Wills have gained the high regard of white and black players alike in their winter league managerial posts. Robinson has been praised by white players for his understanding managerial style and Wills is one of the best teachers in baseball.

Events would prove Young prescient, as Robinson did go on to become the majors’ first black manager, when the Cleveland Indians named him player manager before the 1975 season. Doby would follow shortly, when he was hired, again by Veeck, who was now with the White Sox, to manage in 1978. Wills became the third black manager in the major leagues, piloting the Seattle Mariners for 82 games in the 1980 and 1981 seasons.

Young’s career took him to Hollywood, where as a publicist he helped promote the movies The Defiant Ones (1958) and Uptown Saturday Night (1974). He was a contributor to The Big Blue Review and Dodger Magazine, publications of the Los Angeles Dodgers organization. The roster of publications for which he wrote would come to include The Sporting News, the Saturday Evening Post, the New York Post, Parent’s Digest, Saga, Negro Digest, Las Vegas Sun, the Los Angeles Mirror-News, and Chicago’s American. He often spoke on radio shows in Chicago, Cleveland, and Los Angeles. From the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a trade group representing black publications, he received President’s Anniversary Sports Award, Best Sports Column award, and Best Sports Section award. In 1993 the Los Angeles Sentinel gave Young a National Service Award.

A peculiar but interesting footnote to his distinguished career in journalism is that his typing ability is legendary. Young typed 125 words a minute while using only one finger on each hand. Observers in the Dodger Stadium press box were impressed as they watched him type up to eight columns for clients during ballgames. Unlike most writers, he seldom paused at the keyboard.

Fond memories of Cleveland stayed with Young to the end of his life. “Others may do it,” he wrote a few years before he died of pneumonia in 1996, “but you’ll never hear me running down Cleveland, Ohio.”6 

 

NOTES

1. A. S. Young, “Home Run King of the Giants,” Ebony, July 17, 1962): 47-53.

2. A. S. Young, “Wherein the Sports Editor Says, ‘Hold Those Handclaps for Later,”‘ Call and Post, October 25, 1947, 8-B.

3. A. S. Young, “Indians Sign Satchel Paige,” Call and Post, July 3, 1948, 1-A.

4. A. S. Young, Great Negro Baseball Stars, and How They Made the Major Leagues (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1953), 56.

5. A. S. Young, “Frank Robinson: The Challenge of ’67,” Sepia, 16 (May 1967): 55-58.

6. A. S. Young, “One for Me & Mr. Grant,” Los Angeles Sentinel, December 23, 1993, A-7.