Spring training brought civil rights legacy to Arizona

     Although most people who attend games at any of the numerous venues for Arizona’s Cactus League spring training season may not know it, the annual event has its origins in early efforts to gain civil rights for all American ballplayers.
     That is, to help to break the color line for Major League Baseball.
     It begins in December of 1946, when Bill Veeck Jr., the new owner of the Cleveland Indians, relaxed at his small cattle ranch in the foothills of the RinconMountains near Tucson. Reclining on his porch, he kicked back on his chair and tried to find a comfortable position for his right peg leg, acquired after an amputation the month before. His entire hacienda, wired for sound with his remarkable 100-record phonograph, was alive with wild Dixieland jazz. He lit up his cigar as he admired jagged purple and a lustrous, cloud-cluttered sunset of red and gold cumuli laced with bands of light, It’s winter, but you could never tell. The saguaro and prickly pear cacti glittered in the dusky light. Birds were everywhere. The breezes were sweet and dry.

(left) Bill Veeck

     Bill Veeck was on the verge of yet another radical decision. Health, recovery and renewal were very much on the mind of the maverick impresario. Veeck was recuperating from a wound suffered in 1944 while serving with the U.S. Marines in the South Pacific. He admired the desert climate, the 80-degree days and cloudless skies, the lack of distractions. A restorative time for the body and soul. The replenishing Veeck realized: Imagine what this place could do for a whole baseball team …
Tucson businessman and longtime family friend Roy P. Drachman was on the telephone almost every day. Pleading. Cajoling. Sunshine this, temperature that. Finally, the idea was beginning to make sense to Veeck. I could get out to the ranch more often, he might have thought.
     The Indians trained in Clearwater, Florida, the previous year, but a change was in order. Veeck wanted to introduce African-American ballplayers to his team, a difficult proposition in a southern state like Florida. Specifically, it was Larry Doby, who would become the American League’s first black ballplayer. And support was enormous among the Arizona booster groups to bring the annual spring ritual of baseball out West. Veeck was convinced Arizona would suit his needs, but he needed another ballclub.

(left) Larry Doby

     First, he tried the Chicago Cubs, but they wouldn’t budge from their spring training hideout on Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles. Then, he and Drachman tried Horace Stoneham, owner of the New York Giants. Now there was a man with westward leanings.

     It was Sunday afternoon in 1946 when Veeck and Drachman drove north to visit Stonehan in his Paradise Valley home on Camelback Mountain near Phoenix. That night, they dined at the elegant Hotel Westward Ho. As they talked it over, Veeck prodded Stoneham on how both the Indians and the Giants had a tradition of barnstorming together. Instead of leaving Florida in March and barnstorming their way north, he argued, the Indians and Giants would work their exhibition trail east from Arizona.
Right there, Veeck and Stoneham tentatively made their I-Will-If-You-Will agreement, imagining what it would do for both baseball teams, Stoneham said it sounded like a good idea, that he would study the possibilities and get back to them. That preliminary handshake was the only binding agreement the budding Cactus League would need until well into the 1950s.

     And Larry Doby became the first African-American in the American League a year later. It took a 20-year effort that began in the 1930s by community booster groups to help make the Cactus League a reality, but finding a way to break the social barriers of racial discrimination is one big reason why today the Cactus League contributes millions of dollars each year to the state’s economy.

~ Douglas McDaniel