The Professor

I got spanked.

A recent column of mine recounted the story of Joe Nuxhall, who at the age of 15 years and almost 10 months became the youngest player to participate in a major league game. He pitched two-thirds of an inning, charged with five runs against the St. Louis Cardinals on June 10, 1944.

Several readers wrote to say they enjoyed the column, but one person had a very different take; Dr. Harry Edwards, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, and the “father” of the study of sociology and sports – particularly race and sports.

“When I read your original article, I had one  thought:  How can anybody write about 15 and 16 year-old WHITE baseball players being pressed into play in MLB and not even mention the context of that story, the WHITE RACISM throughout the ranks of “MLB” and anti-Negro RACIST SEGREGATION at the time as principal factors in a MLB player personnel/ prospect  shortage both during and immediately after WWII?” wrote Edwards, who is 81.

I should have expected this from Edwards. I’ve interviewed him for columns before, and his views on race and discrimination are as embedded in his soul like a pearl inside an oyster.

I first believed he was right. What must have the great Negro League stars have felt when Major League Baseball would rather keep the game all-white with 15- and 16-year-old boys and even a one-armed outfielder named Pete Grey, who played for the St. Louis Browns?

But the more I thought about it, the tale of Joe Nuxhall and baseball using adolescents and players with only one limb instead of integrating the game, are separate stories. There is cross-over: Nuxhall’s debut was made possible by, among other things, baseball wanting to stay all-white, and the plight of Negro League players was epitomized by a 15-year old getting a chance they would never have.

Professor Edwards is not alone in thinking of how racism permeates culture. He criticized my column because baseball “should” have been integrated in 1944 (or earlier), much in the same way slavery should never have happened. But baseball being integrated – or for that matter any aspect of American society – when Nuxhall took the mound was not going to happen. Opportunities for Blacks were prevented, whether in the workplace, classroom or ball field.

Ironically, since that column, MLB officially adopted records from the Negro Leagues. This means Roy Campanella, who played for the Washington Elite Giants in 1937 when he was 15 and a few months younger than Nuxhall, became the youngest person to ever play baseball at its highest level. (“MLB SHOULD HAVE INCLUDED NEGRO LEAGUE RECORDS IN 1946 when MLB began to incorporate players from the Negro Leagues [typically without compensation to their Negro League teams] in response not to concerns for Black equity and opportunity…”)

Professor Edwards, I believe, sees all aspects of society through the prism of race. When he read my column on Nuxhall, he didn’t see the adolescent boy on the mound in a major league game; he saw Nuxhall as a sign of white oppression, in which the powers that be were determined to keep the game white, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, etc. be damned. Baseball, however, plays a unique role in history as it was America’s Pastime, and its integration was more critical than other sports giving non-whites an opportunity.

Edwards, first and foremost, is a scholar. He earned his Ph.D. from Cornell University and taught at San Jose State University in California and at Berkeley. He’s done the usual academic path: participated on panel discussions, written for academic journals and spoken at conferences. He has crossed over to the non-academic side, such as working with MLB and the NBA to increase the number of Black coaches and done media interviews – including the 50-minute conversation I had with him for this column.

I worked at colleges for more than 25 years, and I learned two things about faculty: the word collegial has nothing to do with college; the other is faculty members rarely, very rarely, change their views. I feel Professor Edwards will chide me for not mentioning how Black pitchers were passed over for 15-year olds as he would chide anyone who did not mention the injustices Negro League players and African-Americans in general endured in any historical situation.

He’s also been an activist, and he proudly (I think) texted me: “I have been not only an athlete, but an academic and an activist – and I’ve worked with so many people of ‘substance’ – Malcolm X, Dr. King, Bill Walsh, Jim Brown and Bill Russell, Muhammad Ali and (Tommie) Smith and (John) Carlos.’ “

In March 2022, the only black member of a girl’s gymnastics team in Ireland was not awarded a medal after a meet, even though all her white teammates were.

In Ireland, there is is a Harry Edwards International Foundation on Sport for Social Change based in Dublin. The Institute’s director, Ken McCue, alerted Edwards about what happened, which left the young gymnast traumatized and withdrawn. Edwards touched base. with Simone Biles and the San Jose State University’s women’s gymnastics team. They all sent videos to the young girl. Hearing the encouraging words on the videos had her dancing with joy.

In 1987, Los Angeles Dodgers General Manager Al Campanis went on network television and said the reason so few blacks were managers was because they lacked “the necessities” to manage. The Dodgers fired him, and then commissioner Peter Ueberroth contacted Edwards about solving the shortage of black managers.

Edwards formed a committee to assist him, and the first person he hired was Campanis. He knew he would be criticized for this choice – he was trying to solve a problem with the emblem of that problem –- but Edwards realized he needed someone who knew baseball. He asked Campanis (who apologized profusely, said Edwards, who intimated Campanis might have been intoxicated when he made his comments) who he thought would make a good manager. Dusty Baker, said Campanis, and Edwards said the hiring of Baker would have more impact if he were not hired by the Dodgers – that, he said, would have been seen as an empty gesture. Instead, he suggested that Baker be hired by San Francisco Giants, the one-time arch-rival of the Dodgers.

For four years, Edwards worked for MLB and the NBA in efforts to bring more Black Americans into baseball leadership positions aside from managers.

Born and raised in East St. Louis, Edwards followed the exploits of Stan Musial (who he believes is the second greatest player in the game’s history, behind Willie Mays and ahead of Babe Ruth).

His story took a major turn when in high school he was bused across town to a “white” school.

“But I learned a lot of lessons during that period of time. I learned first-hand about racism from teammates, classmates, coaches, teachers, and that put a particular prism before my eyes through which I could look at relationships more generally, because it didn’t just extend to sports. I found the same thing in the classroom often.

“By the time I got to college, where I really experienced first-hand race discrimination because I still lived in the black community when I was going to East Side (High School) in East St. Louis. Even though whatever I learned at East St. Louis Senior High school I forgot on the bus on the way back to the south end because what they were teaching out there, teaching me anyway, had absolutely nothing to do with the life that I was living,” Edwards continued. “So, I had that experience, but when I got to college, it really set in because I began to understand so many dimensions of society.

“I was an athlete in college. I threw the discus and set a national record at Fresno City College in 1960. At San Jose State. I was (and) probably still the only athlete in San Jose State history who was captain of two varsity teams in the same year, basketball and track and field. And I was also on the draft boards of the Minnesota Vikings and the San Diego Chargers. I had thrown the discus far enough to qualify for the Olympics in 1964. But I came through at a dynamic and poignant time,” the professor added.

“One of the first things I had to figure out is not if this (teacher) harbors some racism, but how deeply involved in it, how much a part of his approach to what he’s doing in his classroom is involved with that; how much of it applies? So I had all of those challenges in front of me and it became very, very real.

“But, in a racist society, you cannot take race out of any situation. I found that out when I signed up for my classes; as soon as I went to a class and found out that a guy looked at me and made a statement to the effect, ‘What are you doing in here?’”

For Edwards, the sociology of sports was in the classroom, on the field, and in the home.

“And of course, my father was a tremendous fan of Joe Louis, Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson. And as far as he was concerned, individual sports was the elevator up and out of the degradations for him being a Negro. He was a little pug and a boxer, wasn’t very good, got knocked out a couple of times and finally quit. But he always put an emphasis on sports, but I began to see sports differently,” said Edwards.

“But when I got to San Jose State, I was determined to become not just a good athlete, but a great student. And by the time I graduated, I graduated with honors, had a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, was accepted at Harvard, Cornell, Michigan, (the University of) Chicago and Oregon. So I had a choice of schools to go to, and I went to Cornell rather than going into the NFL or a AFL draft or even trying out for the Olympics. I never lost my vision on the relationship between sport and society. And when they told me at Cornell that I had to make a contribution to the discipline, I did more than that, I created a new sub discipline in sociology called the Sociology of Sport, which is now recognized all over the world.

“The first principle of the Sociology of Sport is that sport unavoidably, inevitably recapitulates society, and the structure of human and institutional relationships, the dynamics of those relationships and the ideologies that justify and rationalize those relationships,” said Edwards.

“Sport is not something on the outside of society that can be structurally and in terms of its dynamics…. As far as human and institutional relationships are concerned outside of sport, outside of society, it’s a formal institution of society affirming the basic, fundamental ideologies, authoritative ideologies, as well as the structure and dynamics of human relationships.”

That’s the academic in Edwards. Here’s more of it: when I read his response to the Nuxhall column, I wrote back and said I probably should have mentioned the barring of Black players during WWII. To that, he responded, “Your ‘corrective’ note only compounds the incongruities and errors of the original analytically  de-contextualized  (shown or considered without a context)  assertions and the player portraits based on them.”

Most people would need a translator to explain his purpose there but, having worked at colleges, I’m used to “academic-ese.”

Edwards is the father of the Sociology of Sports. But there was a difficult delivery.

“In my dissertation, which by the way was the longest dissertation and, I think still is to this day, the longest dissertation in Cornell University history, 1,105 type-written pages (about three times the average dissertation done in that era), because my committee didn’t think that sport had any relevance. I asked them a very simple question, ‘You’re telling me that a diad, a two-person social relationship, and a triad, a three-person social relationship which have generated literally hundreds of monographs, dissertations, chapters and articles and anthologies, but 100 million people watching the World Series, or watching the NFL and AFL playoffs and championship game, those are not sociologically relevant?’  I told my committee, ‘somebody here is totally and completely insane, and it’s not me.’ And finally they said, ok, you  can go ahead and write your dissertation on that. But at the end of the day, people in the discipline are gonna be laughing. Well, I’m now some 60 years beyond that point.”

Now back to baseball:

Today, one of Edwards’ biggest concerns is the dearth of African-Americans playing baseball at all levels.

In the 1970s, African-Americans made up 21 percent of major league ballplayers. Today, the figure is seven percent.

“It’s something that I warned both Peter Ueberroth and Bart Giamatti about when I was in the league office and the discussion came up – if you offshore player development (in the Carribean and Central and South America), and do not do likewise in African American communities across this country, under circumstances where baseball at the collegiate level is not a revenue-producing sport, and therefore is principally white to this day. It is just a matter of time before you begin to lose not just Black visibility and participation in Major League Baseball, but at the level of black interest in, even being a fan of or following baseball. And I had that discussion with Bart Giamatti. Bart said, ‘You know, I never thought about it exactly like that.’

“I said, ‘Well, you have white players coming out of college who have to go into the rookie league, who have to go into the minors who have to work their way up to the major league roster. He said, ‘yeah, but that’s different.’

“Giamatti said, ‘We got a chance here to develop our players from the time they’re 12 years old right on up until we bring them in rookie league to the minor leagues.’ And I said, ‘I’m not talking about something set up by some former black players who are concerned about the issue and that Major League Baseball pulls some money out and give it to them every year to support their programs. I’m talking about the same kind of thing that you have in the Dominican Republic, in Mexico and some of these other places… of player personnel development. And so over a period of time, just as I told Bart, and I told Faye Vincent, too; he couldn’t care less.

“I think that the other thing we have to realize is that no group that had a preeminence in a sport and lost it has ever regained that,” Edwards said. “The Irish never regained preeminence in basketball. The Italians never regained preeminence in baseball with DiMaggio. The Jews never regained the preeminence in basketball. The Irish never regained a preeminence in football. The Fighting Irish weren’t named that for nothing. I mean, they were a preeminence in football, but they never regained that. The same will hold for African Americans (in baseball).”

My purpose here is not to debate Professor Edwards on the validity of his viewpoints, but to enlighten readers about another lens with which to view sports.  The games are played by black and white athletes, but what is the significance, past and present and future, about how race plays a role in sports off the field of play?

I wanted to end the piece on a positive note, so I went to an email I received from Edwards. I explained how I was going to delay my writing about him because of the death of Willie Mays. I had a column planned that included Mays, so I moved it up to be posted at the time of his death. Professor Edwards responded:

“ABSOLUTELY NO PROBLEM. To take a backseat to Willie Mays will be an honor—— and to any other great contributor (say, Jerry West) who passes from among us……  I’m just fine with all of it…”