The Immortal Pumpsie Green

Serious baseball fans know that Pumpsie Green is, in fact, immortal.  He wasn’t a great player (although he was better than people of his generation realized because he drew an awful lot of walks for a middle infielder and finished with a career .357 OBP), but he is remembered today as the first African American to play for the Boston Red Sox, the last team in the majors to integrate in 1959.

Scott Ostler wrote a terrific article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle about Pumpsie.  He’s now 75 years old and living in El Cerrito, the town were he attended high school.  He got his start in professional baseball when he was signed by the old Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League and sent to one of the Oaks’ minor league teams (back in the days before the Giants and Dodgers moved to San Francisco and Los Angeles, the PCL was the most independent of the minor leagues and most the teams had their own farm teams in the West, since most freshly signed 18 and 19 year olds weren’t good enough to play in the PCL right away).

Ostler stole my thunder a little bit with his article.  I had thought about writing a post about the first American American player to play on each of the sixteen major league teams existing in 1947.  Ostler presciently provides this list at the end of his article.

I may yet write a piece about the first African American players to play in the majors after Jackie Robinson with more color than Ostler’s list provides.