‘Our Team’ of Guardians

Review by Bill Doughty––

Navy and Marine Corps veterans play a pivotal role in bending the arc of history toward justice in “Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series that Changed Baseball” by Luke Epplin (Flatiron Books, 2021).

Sailors and Marines as guardians of democracy have key roles in this fascinating book about baseball’s history. It’s a timely book as the team from Cleveland plays its last home game as the “Indians” September 27. The team has been renamed the “Guardians,” as announced by the team owner Paul Dolan and as presented in a powerful video by Tom Hanks*.

Seventy-five years ago the Cleveland team was led by owner Bill Veeck, who enlisted in the United States Marine Corps after Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor/Oahu (and after Veeck said he saw the military drafting young fathers). Veeck would be wounded in an artillery accident at Bougainville in the South Pacific and would return to quickly rebuild the postwar Cleveland Indians.

Feller takes the oath from boxer Gene Tunney and joins the Navy.

Cleveland’s star pitcher and a national sports icon was Bob Feller. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Feller signed up for the Navy at the encouragement of heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney, who told Feller he would help recruit young Americans if he, too, joined. Feller reported to gunnery school and became a chief petty officer in charge of an antiaircraft battery aboard USS Alabama (BB 60). He served in the North Atlantic and South Pacific.

Larry Doby in WWII

One of the team’s eventual top hitters and outfielders worked his way up from the Negro Leagues and became the first African American in the American League: Larry Doby. (Doby would forever be in the shadow of Jackie Robinson, the first African American to break the color barrier and play in Major League Baseball.)

Veeck (rhymes with “heck”) would eventually lose part of his leg to his war injury. He was known as one hell of a showman. Epplin calls him “the most eccentric and forward-thinking executive of his era.” Veeck brought fireworks, gate prizes, bands, clowns, vaudeville acts, tightrope walkers, and quiz shows to baseball stadiums. He oversaw the planting of ivy along Wrigley Stadium. He was one of the first owners to embrace radio broadcasts and night games. Later in his career, Veeck famously recruited 3'7" little person Eddie Gaedel to bat, creating an impossible strike zone for the opposing pitcher.

In the mid 1940s, Veeck, the Marine Corps Veteran, took a swing at integrating baseball and connected. He recruited Negro Leagues veteran pitcher Satchel Paige and Navy veteran Larry Doby as well as Major League Baseball’s first black executive, Louis Jones, the Cleveland team’s director of public relations.

Satchel Paige and Bill Veeck

Jackie Robinson, Army vet.

The great Jackie Robinson is justifiably honored as the first African American to play in the major leagues, recruited by the Brooklyn Dodgers of the National League after being discharged from the Army. But what the Cleveland team created with Satchel Paige, Larry Cody, and Louis Jones –– combined with Veeck’s relentless welcoming of black fans –– also deserves the spotlight.

Fortunately, “Our Team” enlightens readers with great storytelling about the ups and downs and behind-the-scenes lives of interesting and complicated characters, none more complicated than Veeck, Feller, Paige, and Doby. The stories are set in an era of Jim Crow segregation and discrimination, when black baseball players could not stay in most white hotels or eat in white restaurants, especially in the South. It was also a time when the military had not yet embraced equality of opportunity.

When Larry Doby joined the Navy after attending an integrated high school in Paterson, New Jersey, he was “shocked” by what he experienced at Great Lakes Naval Training Station in a segregated section for black sailors. Doby said he dealt with the indignities of segregation by shutting down. “I didn’t crack up,” Doby recounts, “I just went into my shell.” Epplin writes:

“It was a familiar feeling for many black recruits arriving at Great Lakes. For decades, no branch of the armed services practiced segregation as rigidly as the Navy. Almost immediately after the battleships docked in the wake of World War I, the Navy closed its ranks to black Americans. They were allowed to enlist again in 1933, but solely as stewards and mess attendants, tending to white troops during the day and retiring to separate quarters at night. The bombing of Pearl Harbor spurred change, but only to a degree. Though black recruits soon would be admitted as apprentice seamen, they were not treated equally. Clark Clifford, who acted as President Harry Truman’s naval adviser during World War II, looked back on the compulsory segregation of that period with disgust. ‘I thought the Navy at times resembled a Southern plantation the had somehow escaped the Civil War,’ he wrote in his memoirs.”

Doby played baseball for the Great Lakes black Bluejackets. Later, Bob Feller, after returning stateside from fighting in the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot aboard USS Alabama, would oversee the white Bluejackets baseball team at Great Lakes.

USS Alabama (BB 60)

In building and promoting his team, Veeck took advantage of the great migration of blacks from the South to industrial centers, including Cleveland, to bring in massive crowds and record-breaking profits, embracing a slowly building wave of greater integration.

Veeck told the press, “I don’t think any man who has the ability should be banned from Major League Baseball on account of his color.”

Epplin writes, “It was (Veeck’s) belief that the war had ‘advanced us in regard to racial tolerance.’” But Veeck was a realist. He advised Cody –– just as Jackie Robinson had been advised –– to never show anger and to not respond to racial taunts by white supremacists.

Veeck valued and rewarded military veterans. Navy veteran Eddie Robinson played first base for Cleveland. Veeck recruited two young Cleveland pitchers –– Gene Bearden and Bob Lemon, who together had starring roles in the World Series of 1948 –– both Navy veterans.

USS Helena (CL-50), center, fires during the Battle of Kula Gulf, just before being torpedoed and sunk. The next ship astern is Saint Louis (CL-49). Photographed from Honolulu (CL-48). Official U.S. Navy photograph, National Archives, 80-G-54553.

Writing about Bearden, Epplin reports:

“While serving in the Navy during the war, he'd shipped out to the South Pacific aboard the USS Helena. During a skirmish with Japanese forces in the Solomon Islands in 1943, three torpedoes struck the ship, flooding its interior and throwing Bearden from a ladder. An officer, slinging the unconscious Bearden over his shoulder, lugged him onto a rubber life raft. There, they bobbed about before being saved by a rescue team. Bearden had a fractured skull and a crushed right knee. Aluminum plates were slotted into both.

“Some doctors told him that his pitching days were done. But Bearden was persistent. Unable to lift his right leg high during his windup, the southpaw compensated by learning to throw his own peculiar version of a knuckleball.”

Feller visits his teammates before shipping out.

Cleveland’s star pitcher and combat veteran Bob Feller goes under the microscope and is revealed as a somewhat tarnished “hero.” In Cleveland’s run toward the World Series Feller sets up a military-grade telescope to spy on other teams’ pitching signs from the opponents’ catchers. Feller had obtained the three-foot-long telescope from USS Alabama! The sign-stealing "espionage" by Feller and some of his teammates wouldn't be revealed till decades later.

A remarkable entrepreneur, Feller established a transactional relationship with Satchel Paige in barnstorming exhibition games. Feller nevertheless was a product of his time regarding race issues. “He seemingly continued to view racial matters through the prism of his own life story, which sometimes blinded him to the barriers that grit, hard work, and self reliance alone couldn’t topple.”

Characters from the past drift in and out of this book, a treasure trove for baseball history aficionados: Leo Durocher, Dizzy Dean, Buck O'Neill, Branch Rickey, Effa Manley, Abe Saperstein, Joe DiMaggio, Lou Boudreau, Warren Spahn, and Fay Vincent, among others.

You have to read this book to get the full effect and meaning of a special photo that personifies advances in baseball in the pivotal year of 1948. The iconic photo, included with other photos in the book, is of teammates Steve Gromek and Larry Doby at the end of game four of the World Series.

Steve Gromek and Larry Doby embrace after game four of the 1948 World Series.

The true standout hero in this book, though, is maverick Bill Veeck, a man who was a forward-thinking innovator who worked to bring greater equality to American society through baseball. What he lost along the way because of his singleminded passion is also an important part of this book, which in many ways is written for and about guardians of our democracy.

*Tom Hanks video announcing the Cleveland Guardians above.

Top Photo: Marine Corps Private Bill Veeck reads.