The controversy over buildings, statues, and awards honoring racists has finally reached the baseball establishment.
On June 19 of this year, the Minnesota Twins removed a statue of former owner Calvin Griffith from in front of Target Field in Minneapolis, the city where a police officer’s murder of George Floyd triggered a nationwide uprising against racial injustice.
Griffith, who inherited the Washington Senators from his father in 1955 and moved the team to the Twin Cities in 1961, had already been the subject of controversy for racist remarks. At a Lions Club dinner in 1978, unaware a reporter was present, Griffith said, “I’ll tell you why we came to Minnesota. It was when we found out you only had 15,000 blacks here. Black people don’t go to ballgames, but they’ll fill up a rassling ring and put up such a chant it’ll scare you to death. We came here because you’ve got good, hard-working white people here.”
After the Star-Tribune quoted those remarks the next day, the team’s star player, Rod Carew, asked to be traded and was soon playing for the California (now Los Angeles) Angels. In response to the Twins’ decision to remove the statue, Carew, a Hall of Fame first baseman who retired in 1985, said, “While we cannot change history, perhaps we can learn from it.”
Now, ballplayers and baseball writers are trying to learn similar lessons about two other iconic and powerful baseball figures who were racists.
Each year the Baseball Writers Association of America (BWAA) bestows a Most Valuable Player (MVP) award to an athlete in both the American League (AL) and National League (NL) as well as an award to a baseball writer for an outstanding career. The MVP award is named for Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball’s first commissioner, who worked from 1920 until his death in 1944. In 1962, the BWAA established the writing award and named it for J. G. Taylor Spink, publisher of the influential Sporting News, long known as the “Bible of Baseball,” from 1914 to 1962. Spink was the first recipient of the award.
Landis zealously opposed baseball integration. It wasn’t until a year after he died that Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey signed Robinson to a contract. By 1949—after leading the NL in batting average (.342) and stolen bases (37) and leading the Dodgers to the World Series—Robinson received the MVP award named after the late commissioner. Since then, half of all 144 MVP winners have been players of color—forty-eight African Americans, twenty-three Latinos, and one Asian.
Landis, a former federal judge, thwarted all efforts to challenge baseball segregation. In 1923, Rube Foster, president of the Negro National League, proposed a series of games between the best Negro League and best Major League teams. Instead, Landis banned white major league teams from playing barnstorming games against black teams, telling Foster, “When you beat our teams, it gives us a black eye.”