Baseball Remembers: Earl Wilson

It’s hard to defend the Red Sox when it comes to their history with Black players, but I’m going to attempt it anyway, at least in a narrow way. Very narrow.

No, I’m not going to make any excuses for Tom Yawkey’s repeated misdeeds on the subject of race, the club’s delays in signing Black players, promoting them, developing them, etc. Nearly 18 months ago I wrote an edition about Cecil Cooper in which I outlined many of those transgressions over the years, and all of that remains valid. It was Yawkey that set the club’s overtly racist personnel policy, and he, along with the men he hired to implement it (Joe Cronin, Eddie Collins, Pinky Higgins) deserve all the scorn that goes along with it.

But, there is a bit of a misperception when it comes to the circumstances surrounding their decision to finally promote a Black player to the big leagues. Famously that player was Pumpsie Green, who was brought up from the minor leagues in July, 1959. It’s fairly common to see Green described as a utility player, and to mock the Red Sox for promoting a backup to break their franchise color barrier rather than to sign a star player. That’s not exactly right, for a couple of reasons.