Juneteenth, 2024

We’re back home in Lexington in time for summer. Which got me to thinking about summer nights, baseball, and the loss of innocence. All three. 

First: summer nights and baseball.

I grew up in a 1,350 square ft. house at 1707 Maplewood St. NE, Warren, OH, 44483. My brother Mike and I shared a bedroom on the second floor. A few years ago, Jennie and I stopped in my hometown. All my family is gone. The only person left from my growing up years is Mick Kundus, whose house was behind ours. We grew up together from the terrible twos through elementary school and, though my family moved and I graduated from a different high school than Mick, our friendship continued and remains to this day. I officiated at his (first) wedding and he was a groomsman at mine. We’ve been through thick and thin over 60+ years, the thick being shared memories of the antics engaged in by our neighborhood pack of boys that we rehearse every time we talk, the thin being the sudden, premature deaths of our fathers (who were as dads to both of us), Mick’s marriages (he told me a few weeks ago he’s engaged), his early retirement years ago with full disability benefits, and my various and sundry bumps and bruises (he has a heart of gold; compassionate to the core).        

On that visit a few summers ago, Jennie dropped us off at our old neighborhood so we could take a walk around the block, albeit slowly (Mick’s knees, hips, and balance are shot – part of the disability mentioned above). As we ambled past my old house, he paused at the end of our driveway between our place (It looks so tiny now) and where the Enyings lived next door. Without saying a word, he pointed to the upstairs window of the bedroom my brother and I shared on the second floor, then pointed to the Enyings’ front yard and said, “Hey Dave, come over and listen to the game!” 

Sweeter words he could not have spoken. With that single sentence, I was transported back to childhood summers in the mid to late 60s and early 70s. My brother asleep in the twin bed across the room, our window open to the cool night air, a voice would hearken forth from next door. 20-year-old Ed, standing where he could direct his voice toward my window, would say the words Mick has held in sacred trust across six decades, “Hey Dave, come over and listen to the game!” 

It was invitation (issued with the permission of my parents in previous summers) for me to get up, scamper down the steps and out the front door in my pajamas, and join Ed, his dad, Mr. Enyings, and a gathering of a half dozen or so neighborhood guys in their twenties in the Enyings’ front yard.  There, sitting on those classic aluminum folding lawn chairs with colorful plaid webbing, me either on Ed’s lap or sitting in a chair of my own next to him, I’d listen in, the guys shooting the breeze, a transistor radio broadcast of Cleveland Indians baseball wafting in the background. 

I trust you can imagine the magic of that setting for an 8-, 9-, 10-year-old with blanket permission to be up past his bedtime, seated cross-legged in a chair reserved just for him amidst a gaggle of young men, the kingpin of whom, the magnet – Ed – personally invited and saved the place of honor for me at his right hand.  Big deal, I tell you!  I belonged, was beloved, was known and called by name by the neighborhood guys. 

The soundtrack to those summer nights was the voices of retired Indians pitchers Herb Score and my favorite – Jim “Mudcat” Grant, the tenor of whose voice was the definition of mellifluous (look it up). Mudcat accompanied Herb Score’s play-by-play with anecdotes and observations seasoned with a warmth and self-deprecating humor that was the icing on the cake of those summer nights.

Anticipating a stop in Warren in early August to see Mick and walk the old neighborhood again, Mudcat’s voice came to mind.  I googled him.  James Timothy “Mudcat” Grant Jr. (August 13, 1935 – June 11, 2021) played 14 seasons as a major league pitcher from 1958 to 1971. He was a two-time All-Star, was the first Black pitcher to win 20 games in a season in the American League, and the first Black pitcher to win a World Series game for the American League. 

Mudcat acquired his nickname at an Indians tryout camp in 1954 through what one writer called “a combination of racial stereotyping and disregard for his geographical roots.”

“In those days,” Grant told a reporter, “They thought all Black folk was from Mississippi.  They started calling me Mississippi Mudcat. I said, ‘I’m not from Mississippi,’ and they said, ‘You’re still a Mississippi Mudcat.’ And it’s been very good to me.”

As one of the pioneering Black ballplayers, however, there were innumerable incidents rooted in racial ignorance and animus that were not very good to Mudcat. On road trips in 1958, he roomed with Hall of Famer Larry Doby, the first man to break the color barrier in the American League. Doby became a role model to Grant who learned from Doby how to navigate the stresses and bigotry experienced by baseball’s Black pioneers.

“He taught me just about everything,” Grant said. “I know the history of Larry Doby, because late at night Larry would pace. He would yell, he would scream. This is how he would overcome some of the difficulties that he had to go through. I know it was difficult. And then he taught me, ‘This is what you’re going to have to face [as a Black player]. You’ve got to face it, and when you cross the white lines, you better win. It ain’t about, ‘Oh, this is so bad for me.’ You better win. Because if you don’t win, [it’s] good-bye, see you later.”

In 1960, Grant was the subject of a racist encounter with bullpen coach Ted Wilks. Grant’s version of the incident is as follows:

“I was standing in the bullpen and singing along with the national anthem as I always do. When it got to that part ‘home of the brave and land of the free,’ I sang something like ‘this land is not so free, I can’t even go to Mississippi.’ It was something like that and I sang it in fun.  Wilks heard me and called me a Black so-and-so. I got so mad I couldn’t hold myself back. I told him that Texas is worse than Russia. Then I walked straight into the clubhouse [and went home].”

Grant dressed and left the park without telling manager Jimmy Dykes, who suspended him for the rest of the season without pay, which Grant accepted. Said Mudcat, “Maybe I should have told Dykes what Wilks said, but in a situation like that you can’t think straight.” 

“Jim called me after the game and told me he had made a big mistake,” said Dykes. “I said, ‘Yes you did and there’s nothing I can do about it now. The suspension sticks.’” Wilks apologized for his remarks, which Grant refused to acknowledge. “I’m sick of hearing remarks about colored people. I don’t have to stand there and take it,” said Grant. Wilks left the organization after the season.

My google search also turned up an interview done by syndicated columnist Ira Berkow in 1968 on the subject of Black players in baseball with Mudcat and fellow major leaguer and former National League President Bill White.

Bill White graduated from Warren G. Harding High School in Warren, OH in 1952, two years before my parents, sixteen years before Ed, and twenty-five before Mick. White was president and salutatorian of his class, then stayed in-state to attend nearby Hiram College, a Disciples of Christ college, from 1953 to 1955.  

“When Negroes first came into baseball,” Bill White and Mudcat said, “we were treated separately from whites — particularly in the South. There was always a Negro cab waiting to take us to a Negro hotel. We could only mix with whites on the field. This has changed to a great degree. But the spiritual harm it did Blacks was very deep. Because you couldn’t speak out — being a ‘house ******’ so to speak — made you feel less than you were.”

During his later years, Mudcat dedicated himself to studying and promoting the history of Black players in baseball. Concerned by the decline of Black participation in the 1990s and 2000s, Grant leveraged his voice and influence to promote the game among minorities. In 2007, he released The Black Aces, Baseball's Only African-American Twenty-Game Winners featuring chapters on each of the then-13 Black pitchers to have at least one twenty-win season. He also wrote about Negro League players he believed would have been twenty-game winners if they hadn’t been excluded by the color of their skin. He retired after the 1971 season and began his career as an analyst for the Indians on radio and TV, where I was introduced to him in the Enyings’ front yard on those summer evenings.

In the spring of 1977, my senior year of high school, I drove to my old neighborhood to visit the Enyings. When the door opened, Ed stood before me with a bald pate, his face gaunt.  Seeing the puzzlement on my face, he opened the door and invited me in. The word he introduced me to was leukemia. He was receiving treatments, but the prognosis (another word he introduced me to that cruelly pricked my innocence) was not good. He died a few months later at age 27. 

Little did I know at the time I sat snugly between Ed and Mr. Enyings in those innocent, carefree days of my childhood that there were such things as leukemia working death in beloved human bodies and racism working death in the body of the humanity. 

I’m older and (somewhat) wiser now and back home in Lexington in time for summer.  Which got me to thinking about summer nights, baseball, my loss of childhood innocence … and my growing up into a (somewhat) mature faith in God’s fierce resolve to redeem humanity’s brokenness in all its forms.

If you’re in the area, stop by our place some evening. Come around back. Jennie and I listen to the Guardians games every night.  We’ve got a chair for you.