Separate Games by David K. Wiggins

Author:David K. Wiggins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610756006
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press

The East West Classic offered a unique platform to black baseball. At no other time did the game command as much attention. In August 1942, Satchel Paige became the target of the black press for his answer to the question: how would you would feel about playing baseball in the major leagues? “It wouldn’t appeal to me,” Paige responded, much to the dismay of black sportswriters and editors who sensed that World War II was energizing the campaign for integration. Paige forthrightly said he would not relish the hostility of white major leaguers nor would he welcome what for him, at least, would have been a cut in salary. Paige, who made $37,000 in 1941, then earned far more than all but a handful of white major leaguers. The firestorm his candor ignited convinced Paige that he needed to confront the question in a public forum; he chose the 1942 East West Classic. He missed his chance to explain himself before the game when he showed up late and Hilton Smith started in his stead. The game was tied 2–2 when Paige arrived at the ballpark and he was not sent in to pitch until the seventh inning. But Paige had something to say before he threw his first pitch. Using the Comiskey Park public address system, he told the 42,000 fans there that he had been misquoted. Not only did he not object to black players joining the major leagues, he slyly suggested that major league baseball would be even better served by accepting an entire black team.21 Paige, who understand the economics of baseball as well as any player, probably realized how far-fetched an idea that was. Major League Baseball owners were not eager to share their revenues with one another, much less newcomers.

Historically, the equation of slavery and work on the one hand, freedom and play on the other, had all but defined African Americans out of the mainstream of American sport. And when increasing numbers of immigrants from Europe used sport as a way to Americanize, African Americans had been largely left out. Though the failures of Reconstruction and its legacy of sharecropping and segregation, as well as Social Darwinism, did their worst to prevent African Americans from negating this binary, the Great Migration allowed many African Americans to finally gain both more leisure time and enough political space to pursue sport. In that sense, the East West Classic was all about play, a pulsating, joyous, recognition of African American freedom. The fiesta, Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria argues in his Cuban Fiestas, involves an array of activities, from “games, music, and dancing to acting, cooking, eating, and drinking, all happening in a special place to mark an exceptional time.”22 With ballpark food during the game, and jazz and the blues afterward, the East West Classic became a secular holiday for African Americans able to get to Chicago for a couple of days each summer.

No other moment during the 1930s and 1940s bathed black baseball in more flattering light.

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