- [Voiceover] Production and distribution of City Club Forums and Ideastream Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.

(upbeat music) - Good afternoon, and welcome to The City Club of Cleveland where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that helped democracy thrive.

Today's Wednesday, March 30th.

I'm Dan Moulthrop, I'm the chief executive here, and I'm also a proud member and I am super excited for this forum today, it is part of our Authors in Conversation series.

And today we are going to hear from Luke Epplin, he is the author of Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball.

We do this series in partnership with Cuyahoga Arts & Culture and the John P. Murphy Foundation.

And let me just go ahead and get this out of the way, we are supposed to be a nonpartisan, totally objective neutral platform, but I love this book.

(audience laughs) It is one of the best books I've read in a long time, and I'm not the only one, US senator Sherrod Brown said, "If you love baseball, Our Team is a three run walk off homer in game seven of the world series.

And if you care about justice, Epplin's book is a crucial lesson in the fight for civil rights in post World War II Cleveland."

And that's exactly it, through the history of Cleveland baseball in the first half of the century, Epplin tells a fundamentally important story of America and Cleveland.

It's the story of overcoming historical, systemic, and structural racial barriers.

And at the individual level, it's also a story about economic aspirations, entrepreneurialism, and working around and past individual racial biases that at the time in the first half of the 20th century, so many people just took for granted and questioned all too infrequently.

Luke Epplin is not a Clevelander, which makes this work a little different than it might have been otherwise.

And it's not an accusation at all, (audience laughs) I didn't mean it that way, but perhaps it's the outsider who can see the beauty in our community that we may have forgotten.

At any rate, Mr. Epplin's work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, GQ, Salon, The Daily Beast, and The Paris Review Daily.

Our conversation today will be moderated by a great friend of the City Club of Cleveland, the director of the Cleveland Public Library, Felton Thomas, who played ball in his days in high school.

Should be noted.

If you have questions for Luke or about why Felton's career, baseball career, didn't go further, you can text those questions to 330-541-5794, and that's 330-541-5794, Or you can tweet them at The City Club, we'll work them into the second half of the program.

Those of you here in the audience can of course stand up at the mics to ask your question in the second half of the program.

But right now members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Felton Thomas and Luke Epplin.

(audience claps) - Thank you, Dan.

Thank you, Dan.

I can always count on you for a wonderful introduction.

All right, so I am very thankful and I usually always anytime I get a chance to acknowledge the folks from the library, I would acknowledge them.

I obviously, I know this is not about the library, but Luke said, please acknowledge the folks at the library, especially Terry Metter, John Skrtic, and the staff member who's not here, Mark Moore, for their help with him in researching the book and being able to put it together.

So I wanted to start with that.

(audience claps) I also wanna acknowledge that we're gonna be using the Indian's and Guardian's name kind of moving back and forward between the two.

So just for that, and we'll also be talking, about the Negro Baseball League, so for any folks with sensitivities, we're just putting it out there, letting everybody know.

This is about historical context.

Finally, I just wanted to thank Luke for this book, as Dan said, my great love is baseball.

You know, I love all sports as all of you know who see me walking around with different caps all different times of the year, but baseball was my first love as a young person growing up in the '70s.

But one of the things when I got here to Cleveland, I didn't really know the Larry Doby story.

And it's one of those things I really kind of shamed of not understanding his role and what he did for baseball and what the 48 Indians did.

And so when I read this book, it was just, you know, it blew my mind.

So when Dan asked me to come here and be able to interview, well, I was just like, this is going to be great.

And then Luke said, please don't ask me too many questions.

So, no.

So I just wanna start first.

Dan asked it, you're not from Cleveland, right?

You're from St. Louis.

- No.

I am.

(audience member claps) (audience laughs) - So Somebody's gotta have St. Louis and somebody's gotta rep St. Louis here.

But talk about how you came about the idea of writing this book.

- Well, thank you, first of all, for having me here, this is a real honor.

I couldn't have imagined it whenever I was researching this book.

And as he said, it's equally important to me because to have a representative of the Cleveland Public Library here, when I moved to Cleveland to write this book, and I think that I should qualify that and say, I moved to the Cleveland Public Library to write this book.

I feel like I lived there for about two months, and I was on Terry Metter's floor, and he's been a tremendous help to me.

So many people in this room have helped me as well, I'm looking at Jeremy Feador from the Indians, Bob DiBiasio is here from, I mean, I'm sorry, the Guardians I'm gonna be messing that up and I apologize, and Vince Gurara over here, he read the book before it was even published and gave me notes and so it's just good to see so many great people that have really helped me along this journey.

No author is an island.

I should mention that I am from St. Louis and I grew up as a huge baseball fan.

My dad had tickets, season tickets, to the St. Louis Cardinals, but my grandpa was a fan of the St. Louis Browns.

At that time in the 1940s, St. Louis had two baseball teams, the Cardinals and the Browns, the Browns were usually terrible, the Cardinals were usually great.

For whatever reason, my grandpa took the terrible team.

So he told me a lot of stories growing up and I think that anybody that knows anything about the Browns knows that Bill Veeck was the last owner of the team.

And so I would hear these wild stories about, "Oh, a little person came to the plate.

Or, "No, you don't understand, the fans managed one game," all of these sorts of things.

And I was like, what?

When did that happen?

And so Bill Veeck was always kind of an obsession of mine.

I read about him, I read his autobiography Veeck as in Wreck when I was a teenager.

And then I returned to it as an adult, and I thought to myself, he's the perfect person to center a non-fiction book on.

So the intention was to write about Veeck and the Browns.

Once I started researching his history, I saw that he had owned the Cleveland baseball team before then.

And it was really while just doing some background research to what I thought was gonna be a book about the Browns that I realized that, wait a minute, all these things we talk about with Bill Veeck, fireworks, promotions, all these sorts of things, they pale in comparison to what he did in Cleveland, which is to integrate the American league.

And I realize there's the story.

And if someone like me, who is a huge baseball fan, doesn't know that story, I imagine there's a lot of people around this country that also don't know it.

So that's how I became a Clevelander.

(audience laughs) (audience claps) - So for those of you who haven't had an opportunity to read the book, it's an amazing way he interweaves the story, so I want to talk a little bit about how you came about the idea of structuring it between the four individuals that you did, Bill Veeck, Bob Feller, Larry Doby, and Satchel Paige, underweaving their stories into one larger narrative.

How did that come about?

- It's an interesting thing.

A lot of people tell me that this book is about the 1948 Cleveland baseball team, and I have to hold my tongue to correct them, 'cause I really think of this book as a story of four individuals.

You've got Bill Veeck and Bob Feller, and then you've got Larry Doby and Satchel Paige.

I went into the New York Public Library Archives and they have bound additions of the Sporting News, which is an old baseball publication, it's still around, but it used to be dedicated solely to baseball and they had them all bound up and so you could check out them by the year and almost read them like a novel.

So I checked out '46, '47, '48, and I read through the entirety of all those years.

And I was noticing that you had these sort of Bill Veeck and Bob Feller, Larry Doby and Satchel Paige, two white men, two black men, and they each represented something larger than themselves, particularly on the issue of race.

You had Veeck as the more sort of progressive owner who was sort of gung ho about integrating, Feller who was a champion barnstormer, this was at a time whenever after seasons people, ball players, would sort of get together on these tours and tour the country to places where people didn't get to see major league baseball, playing exhibition games, they called a barnstorming.

Bob Feller was one of the chief players who did this at the time.

And so he had no problem playing against players like Satchel Paige or the others.

But he was very sort of hesitant about saying whether or not black players would have what it needed to make an into the Major League Baseball.

So I thought of him as more of a traditionalist mindset.

And you had Larry Doby and Satchel Paige, both players from the Negro Leagues, but they were 17 years apart in age.

So I thought they represented different generations of that Negro League, Satchel Paige being the last generation that didn't get to go into Major League Baseball because of the color line that segregated it and Larry Doby of the generation of Jackie Robinson of the first pioneers that come in.

So I thought if you'd put these four men together and in tension with each other, you could represent all the sort of aspects of integration that were happening to that time from the progressive to the traditional.

And so that's why I centered it on those four individuals and I wanted their stories not to be separate where you had a chapter on Feller, chapter on Veeck, chapter on Doby, but to interweave because these men were overlapping, sometimes directly as in Feller and Paige, and sometimes their experiences rhymed like Larry Doby and Bob Feller served in the exact same part of the South Pacific when they were in World War II.

We don't have any indication that they ever crossed paths there, but they were in the same place.

And so like these men were sort of swirling about each other before they finally came together in Cleveland.

- So an interesting point is kind of a starting point really for you within the book is the aftermath of World War II and really the lives and how they kind of led into all four men really leading them to '48.

You wanna talk a little bit about World War II?

- Yeah, so the original intention I had of the book for the structure was I was gonna start it at the moment that Larry Doby goes from the Newark Eagles, where he played in the Negro Leagues to Cleveland.

He literally does this overnight.

He plays a game on July 4th, 1947, boards a train that night, and then he goes to Chicago where the Cleveland Baseball Team is playing the White Sox and the very next day, he is a member of the Indians.

And so it's this tremendously interesting journey that is quite different from Jackie Robinsons who spends a year in Minor League Baseball.

So I thought it would be quite an interesting thing to start the book there.

But as I'm researching, I'm noticing that all of these men, except for Satchel Paige, served in World War II and they all have formative experiences in World War II that really shape within they do in the postwar era, whether you have Bill Veeck and his injury that leads to the amputation of his leg, Larry Doby going into the Navy and experiencing sort of government sanctioned segregation for the first time in its full blunt force or Bob Feller volunteering the day after Pearl Harbor to go into the Navy and losing four years of his prime and going and seeing just tremendous battles that sort of really shapes his outlook when he comes back.

And I realize you can't tell this story unless you start with them in World War II.

And really you can't tell the story of postwar America without sort of seeing the horrors and the sort of formative experiences that all these young people are going through at the time.

And so the first third of the book is really dedicated to the war and what happens there.

- And I think you do an unbelievable job of speaking to them as men.

They are all seen in many ways as heroes, but you talk a little bit more about their struggles as well.

And the one common thing around all four men, they're all lonely.

Loneliness is a big part of this.

Could you speak to that?

- It's a huge theme of the book.

It affects each character in quite different ways.

I think that Satchel Paige is somebody who grows up in the deep south, goes into the Negro Leagues when in the 1920s and sort of builds himself up into a one man franchise.

He sort of has a tremendous entrepreneurial sense about him and sort of recognizes that you could build a persona that could excite audiences and sort of get you more than what an average player could get.

And so he becomes this sort of barnstorming figure that can go around and just sell out places and get cuts of the gate.

But it's a very lonely life.

A lot of the times he's just on the road by himself, he's kind of an isolated figure because of how famous he is.

And I think that Bob Feller gets affected by that a little bit too.

Bob Feller is somebody whose origin story I think is unsurpassed in sports.

He grows up in a farm in Iowa.

His dad senses a tremendous ability in him from a very early age.

So he clears out a portion of their farm to build a baseball diamond and Feller, through sort of happenstance, makes it into Cleveland when he is only a high school junior.

In his very first start in Major League Baseball.

Again, age 17, he ties the American League record in strikeouts.

Four starts after that, he ties the major league record in strikeouts.

He becomes so famous that the next year, his high school graduation is broadcast live from coast to coast on NBC radio.

It's an incredible sort of story, but it's also isolating.

It sort of takes him into a realm that his peers are not.

And so Feller sort of has to deal with the sort of pressures and all that, that comes with being in that realm.

And then I think the most lonely character is Larry Doby, who is for the first year that he's in Cleveland, the only black player on the team.

And so he is sort of shunted off into segregated accommodations a lot of the times, he can't go to the same restaurant as his teammates, he is dealing with sort of burdens and slights and abuses that are unknown to his peers on that team.

And so he's kind of suffering them in silence.

And Doby would often talk about how some of the worst things that he would deal with were after a game where he doesn't play particularly well or where he gets a particular amount of abuse.

He can't just go out with his teammates and sort of have a beer or something like that and forget about that, he has to go back to sort of the segregated accommodation and sit there by himself and stew in it all night.

And so it's not like he has things to take his mind off of it.

And so that sort of loneliness in particular with Doby is something that he himself talked about for decades afterwards.

It really sort of penetrated to his core and affected him throughout the rest of his life.

- One of the things that, and I want to kind of transition from the forward to the middle part of the book, which kind of deals with kind of the baseball as the common ground or the space where the teams, the Major League teams and the Negro League teams are playing in the same spaces, right?

One of the folks that is spoken about within is this sub character is a woman named Effa Manley, right?

Who owns a Negro baseball team and is a force, right?

Talk a little bit about her and what you found out about like what ended up being the end of the Negro baseball team.

- Okay, Effa Manley was something that was a revelation to me.

I had no idea who she was.

And then once I started researching her, I had to stop myself from writing about her.

I have 20 pages cut from this book about Effa Manley.

And at one point I went to my editor and said, "Okay, I know the book was pitched as a story about four people, but could it be five?"

(audience laughs) Like she is incredible.

She and her husband, Abe, buy the Newark Eagles, and basically Abe, he ran numbers games, and he sort of enjoys being around the team.

He's a good scout for talent, but it's Effa Manley who is running the show there.

She's doling out the money, she's setting the schedules, she's going to league meetings in the Negro Leagues and sort of representing the team.

And she is force to try to get the more sort of centralized power to the Negro League to try to fight against white owners that are either trying to not give them the money that they deserve or later on, Branch Rickey does not compensate Negro League owners for the players that he takes, such as Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe.

He just says that the Negro leagues are, in his words, a racket and that these contracts are flimsy.

And so he can just sort of pick away.

And Effa Manley is extremely fierce in fighting back against that.

'Cause she recognizes that if they don't get sort of compensation for the players that they nurtured and that they trained and that they went through the process of discovering and sort of bringing up, then the Negro Leagues were going to collapse.

So she was tremendously important in really sort of bringing attention to these issues so that whenever Bill Veeck goes about looking for a player and identifies Larry Doby, the first thing that she says to Bill Veeck whenever Veeck calls is, "What are you gonna give me for him?"

She's not going to give away Larry Doby for free like Branch Rickey got.

She was a tremendous power at that time and yeah, I mean, there have been several biographies written about her.

One that came out last year and I really encourage people to look more about her life, kind of a forgotten figure.

- So there is this transition within the book of folks kind of moving in and Bill Veeck, right, really kind of pushing forward Larry Doby into the Major Leagues and the effect that it had on baseball, right?

Because now this has been done in not one, but two teams.

You write about Bill Veeck as, not only as an entrepreneur, but as some also a kind of a circus character, right?

You know, right?

Talk a little bit about Veeck because he's a very, very interesting character in the fact that he creates what really changes baseball.

But he changed baseball in so many other ways.

- There's so much to be said about a character named Bill Veeck.

I think a lot of people sort of take him as sort of the P.T.

Barnum of baseball and I don't think of him that way.

I think that P.T.

Barnum said there's a sucker born every minute.

And Veeck did not think in those terms.

Veeck had this sort of idea at the time, which was radical, that baseball was a form of theater that had room for both competitive play on the fields and sort of amusing side shows on the side.

And that these two things did not have to be in tension with each other, but could coexist.

And so you could have fireworks, you could have races, you could have crazy giveaways, and things like that.

And it would not only entertain fans, but it would sort of peak interest in the club.

And so you would have people that were not normally sort of into baseball, being like, "Well, I can go there and still have a good time," or, "Who knows what's gonna happen.

It could be really interesting."

And while they're there to see that entertainment, they then will have to be kind of forced to watch the baseball game on the field.

So it can cultivate fans among people that would not have thought that they were gonna be baseball fans.

And so it was a way of sort of building the base of the city organically.

And a lot of owners at the time thought that any sort of hippodrome stuff or circus stuff was denigrating the sort of the national pass time and that this was not dignified or something like that.

And Veeck just didn't have any time for that.

He was not doing this simply to put on a circus, he was doing this for very calculated reasons that paid off with the fact that he shattered all attendance records in 1948, basically across the board, whether it was in the post season or in the regular season, night game, day game, whatever, it was just the entire city responded to what he was doing.

And I think that this idea of Veeck as the father of the modern stadium experience is a good one.

Like if you go to a cavalier game, they're playing tonight, you're gonna see t-shirt cannons, you're gonna see dancers and all this sort of stuff.

Anytime you see that you should think about Bill Veeck, 'cause that is what he did.

But at the same time, I think that even that does a disservice to his legacy because yes, that is extremely important, but he was an incredible baseball mind.

He took Cleveland, they were in sixth place in 1946, they had a pretty good base of players, but he wheeled and dealed the Indians to a championship within a year and a half basically.

And he did this, not only through shrewd trades, like getting Joe Gordon and some others, and by signings, but he did it by looking in places where other people were not looking, the Negro Leagues.

I mean, signing Doby is one thing, but imagine being Bill Veeck and signing Satchel Paige in the middle of a pennant run.

Satchel Paige was 42 years old.

To put that into perspective, Albert Pujols, who was just signed by the Cardinals yesterday, is 42.

He is the oldest player in Major League Baseball this upcoming season.

I don't think anybody thinks Albert Pujols has much left to him, but like Satchel Paige, he was just getting started.

That guy could have just kept pitching.

But I mean, just imagine the sort of courage it took to do that and then to give him the sort of confidence to go out and pitch in these crucial games at that season.

He was a baseball mind that was top notch at the time.

And I think that that sometimes can get overlooked in this idea of him as like a circus guy, but he combined all of it, he was the complete package.

- And then, so to Satchel Paige, one of the things that, I mean, as someone who loved baseball, you would hear about Satchel Paige, but the stories you tell about Satchel Paige are just incredible where folks literally would stop what they were doing to come visit wherever he played, whether it was black audiences or white audiences.

And literally he helped them set records.

- It's amazing.

Whenever, I mean, when he was in the Negro Leagues, they would say that he was the only player who could get a crowd at the edge of their seats simply by walking onto the field, just like the way that he sort of slow walked with that sort of poker face, it just sent crowds into a frenzy.

The sort of had this incredible sort of innate knowledge of how to excite crowds and he used it to his tremendous, not only sort of personal advantage, but financial advantage.

He understood the worth of his name, his image, and he certainly cashed in on it a lot.

And in 1948, whenever Bill Veeck signed him to the Cleveland Club, I mean, I think somebody said it was like, it would be like if you signed Paul Bunyan, he was just kind of a legend.

And like people wanted to come out and just see, is he real?

Because I talked to Eddie Robinson who was the only living member of the Indian squad from 1948 at the time, he's since passed away.

And he said that even if a white person had not seen a Negro League game or seen black players play at that time, they knew who Satchel Paige was.

He was just a name that was in the American bloodstream.

And so whenever he finally made it over into Major League Baseball, it was just like people couldn't wait to see him.

In Chicago, where he pitched one of the games in August, 1948, fans were so eager to see him, they literally ripped out the turn styles.

The stadium held 50,000 people, more than 75,000 were in there.

And Bill Veeck later said, there wasn't a place in that stadium that wasn't covered with flesh.

It was just, everybody was there.

And you have to imagine this other thing, Satchel Paige at that time was 42, a lot of people thought he was much older, imagine if as a 42 year old, you imagine that somebody has passed their athletic prime, what if he comes into the league and gets shelled?

Then the legend is deflated.

I mean, it was a huge personal risk on Paige's part even to finally come in after, you know, he is past his prime, but for him to do what he did and uphold that legend, I mean, we'll never see another figure like that.

He was incredible.

I mean, what can you just say?

- So we haven't talked about Feller as much and what was very interesting to me, hearing that the Feller kind of legend moving here was also kind of see the kind of downfall of Feller as we went through it and his slump at the end kind of spoke to the long suffering of Cleveland fans.

And you speak about how Cleveland fans at one point in time during slump would boo the Indians just because they assumed we were going to lose, right?

You know, we were in first place at the time.

Speak a little bit to the Cleveland psychology of our fans here.

(audience laughs) - [Audience] Go get some police protection.

- [Felton] Yeah.

- It's such an interesting thing, 'cause you saw in the paper that Cleveland, I can't remember who said this, I think it was Shirley Povich of the Washington Post, that if Cleveland was in first place, you knew it was still spring.

(audience laughs) And that was sort of the attitude.

And so during the 1948 season, whenever the Indians just come charging out of the gates and they're in first place through June, the fans are reflexively booing the Indians, even in games they're winning, in anticipation of the fall.

It's not like they're playing poorly, they're just like, "Yeah, but this is gonna make the heartbreak be that much worse."

And so that's how it is.

And Feller really becomes the target because when he comes back from the war, he does these elaborate barnstorming tours where he rents out planes, he teams up a Satchel Paige, he plays in stadiums, and he pitches just constantly through October and into November.

And he becomes very invested in making money off of his name.

He gets a radio show, he writes his autobiography, he does a newspaper column, he advertises this and that.

And so whenever Feller starts to kind of falter in 1947 and particularly in 1948, fans believe that he's too focused on his outside investments and they start to really boo him whenever he's suffering.

And it is kind of like, he starts the book, in my book, as this sort of boy wonder, all-American hero that continues through the war.

And then he has this sort of precipitous downfall.

And the way that I've structured the book is that I start with Bob Feller and I end with kind of Larry Doby.

And I wanted to see, as one goes down, the other kind of goes up.

And I think that we kind of look at the Bob Feller story, that sort of farm to majors thing, and this like amazing narrative that was told across the country and that every school boy would've known as like the quintessential baseball story, but Larry Doby's story is as improbable, is as amazing.

He is somebody who goes directly from the Negro Leagues to the Major Leagues, he completely flops his first season in Major League Baseball in 1947, he bats 156, he only starts one game, he does not look like a major leaguer, I think any other owner except for Veeck probably would've cut him.

They move him to the outfield, a position he's never played, he has to learn it on the fly in 1948, and he turns around and bats 300 and hits a home run in the World Series that really kind of puts the Indians over the top.

It is as improbable as the Bob Feller story.

We just don't recognize it 'cause there's a few more steps in there.

And so it's like you start off with this sort of quintessential white baseball story and then you end with the quintessential sort of black baseball story at that time.

And so there's this sort of great role reversal that is happening there.

- Well, you also speak to the fact that, and speaking on Larry Doby, is the fact that his story just gets lost somewhere.

And part of it is his personality, right?

And part of it is the fact that there was a thought that there was going to be a significant change coming out of '48 and it does happen, but it doesn't happen right away.

Speak to that.

- Yeah, Doby is a very introverted individual.

I think that I said in the book that he seemed to submit to interviews like someone settling into a dentist chair.

He did not enjoy them.

And he didn't have that sort of...

I would say that he and sort of Satchel Paige were such opposites, Satchel Paige knew how to sort of present himself to the media, how to tell stories, how to sort of, you know, to sort of advance himself as a sort of persona and superstar.

Doby was quite shy and diffident and other sorts of things like that.

But it's also just a natural thing that as time goes by, we remember the first and the second gets relegated to a trivia question.

And I thought that the fact that we know so much about Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey, rightly so, is because we still know their narrative.

We know how Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson, we know the sort of dictates that Branch Rickey put upon him, we know the sort of how Robinson struggled, and all of these sorts of stories that are still associated with his life.

And what I thought was what was missing with Larry Doby, at least outside of Cleveland, I'm sure a lot of Clevelanders do know his story quite well, was that we know of him as a second black baseball player, but we don't have a good narrative attached to him.

And so what I really wanted to do in this book was write it in a very sort of novelistic vivid way so that this narrative is revived and to show that this narrative that was happening concurrently with Jackie Robinson is just as meaningful as the Robinson narrative in Brooklyn, it's just different.

And we have room in our culture for both of these narratives.

We don't just have to have the one narrative of integration.

And so, yeah, there was a way to sort of, I guess, vivify the narrative.

- So we're gonna be turning it over the questions.

I just want to ask you one last question, it's about your writing style, we talked about this in the green room of about the fact that for all of you who like just great writing, this book is great writing, it's very illustrative, and illustrative, and I was saying almost as like you wrote, like they used to write in the '40s, right?

Because before TV, the writers, the journalists, had to write in this style to really show everybody all of the details and all of that.

And I really appreciated about that, but you had a great answer to that.

- Well, yeah.

I mean, I fell in love with the writing, first of all, because it is so vivid and flowery and all this, and these writers were writing at a time in the 1940s before television.

And so they really did need to sort of capture the feel of games and dugouts and things like that in a way that maybe writing writers today don't have to do with clip shows and television and all that sort of thing.

And so I was finding myself injecting more and more of their writing into the book.

And then I was finding myself writing like them and it sort of infected the way that I wrote, but it's so fun.

There were so many great writers in Cleveland at the time, a guy named Gordon Cobbledick who wrote for The Plain Dealer, my favorite was a guy named Franklin Lewis who wrote for The Cleveland Press at the time, he was just a knockout writer, but I mean, Cleveland was blessed with four newspapers at the time.

And it's so much fun to go into those archives.

There's such vivid writing.

So I wanted to sort of honor them by mimicking their style.

- That's great.

So, now?

- Yes, yes, yes.

Luke Epplin, ladies and gentlemen.

(audience claps) And of course our good friend, Felton Thomas, and now we are about to begin the audience Q&A.

We welcome questions from everyone, City Club members, guests, students, and those of you joining us via our livestream at cityclub.org.

If you're here in person, please raise your hand and remain seated until a staff member indicates it's your turn to step up to the microphone.

Looks like we've got our first question right over here.

Corrigan, get over there.

And our livestream viewers, please tweet your questions at the City Club or text them to 330-541-5794.

The number again is 330-541-5794.

And we will work them into the program.

Go ahead.

- [Questioner] Thanks for writing this book.

- Hey, my pleasure.

- Just super.

A couple names that are touched on, and I just wanted to know what stories about them you had to leave out.

Joe Gordon, who in a sense was brought to Cleveland by Bill Veeck too and was at least in the part I'm recalling was one of the people who was a little more open to Larry right out the box.

And then Harrison Dillard, and there were all he played, the native Clevelander who supported Larry.

- Yeah, so Joe Gordon, he was somebody that was brought over by Veeck in a trade for Allie Reynolds.

It seems like there's still debate on whether or not that was a good trade.

(audience laughs) He was somebody who was older at the time.

He'd already won an MVP.

He was actually older than the manager, player manager, Lou Boudreau.

And so Boudreau really relied on him to sort of take care of like player personnel issues.

If there were sort of interpersonal things that were going on between the players and none more so than Larry Doby struggled to integrate himself into the club.

There were a lot of, not a lot, but there were some members of the Cleveland Club that did not welcome Larry Doby, to refuse to shake his hand, were sort of out and out either indifferent or hostile toward him and Joe Gordon was somebody who really embraced Doby, shook his hand vigorously, would often on the field play catch with Doby, was really sort of somebody who on the train would slide in next to him and sort of talk to Doby during these trips.

Doby would later say that he was the most sort of instrumental player or player during that first year.

So yeah, it just seems like a man without sort of prejudice in that sense.

Larry Doby also credited Jim Hegan, Bob Lemon, and another coach by the name of Bill McKechnie as being people who really helped him through there.

Harrison Dillard didn't come onto the Indians until 1949.

Bill Veeck signed him to be in the public relations department, but I did get to talk to Harrison before he passed away and Doby at the time, in 1948, lived with this man named Arthur Grant.

He was an ex-Negro Leaguer for the Cleveland Buckeyes, who then became a sanitation worker.

And he was very well known among sort of the black community of Cleveland.

And I talked to his daughter, he's since passed away, and they said that it became sort of a gathering house for Cleveland athletes.

Like Jesse Owens was always there, Harrison Dillard was always there, Jackie Robinson would pass through if he was in Cleveland, that would be just sort of where a lot of the black community would gather.

And Larry Doby and his wife lived on the second floor of Arthur Grant's house during that time.

So Harrison Dillard was instrumental in sort of introducing Larry Doby to the community and helping him out there.

- So you mentioned Doby struggles in '47, but it seemed like he wasn't getting regular playing time, he'd go days on end without playing, and then maybe pinch it.

Was this because Boudreau thought he was too green or were the racial overtones in Boudreau's lack of playing time for Doby?

- It's a complex answer.

Larry Doby was a second basement in the Negro Leagues.

When he comes to Cleveland, obviously you have Joe Gordon already at second, Lou Boudreau at short, so there's no room for him there.

Ken Keltner is on third, so obviously he's stationed, first base, you had Eddie Robinson and Les Fleming splitting playing time.

Eddie Robinson at that time was 26 years old, he'd been through the minor leagues, he'd been through the war, this was really his shot to prove that he was now a full-fledged major leaguer and he was struggling pretty bad.

He went to Lou Boudreau about two weeks before Doby was signed, 'cause Boudreau had benched him several times during the 1947 season and said, "Lou, what's going on?"

And Boudreau said, "Don't you worry about it.

You're our first baseman, you're gonna be our first baseman.

Everything is fine."

Then Larry Doby comes in and Doby in his only his second game on the Indians, gets slotted into first base for that game.

Eddie Robinson at the time, not only will not give Larry Doby his first base glove, because Doby doesn't have one, he quits the team on the spot.

He said, "If that's what's gonna happen, if I'm gonna lose playing time to Larry Doby now I'm out."

And he doesn't dress for the game, he stays in the locker room throughout that game.

Bill McKechnie has to come down and basically talk Eddie Robinson off the ledge and say, "Look, you know, you don't want this to happen because people are gonna think you did this because Larry Doby is black and that's gonna follow you for the rest of your life."

And Eddie Robinson thinks about it, dresses, comes up about midway through the game, and all the Indians pat him on the back.

The very next day, all the newspapers basically kind of take Eddie Robinson's side.

And it's an interesting thing because Boudreau had said before that series that he was going to put Larry Doby at first base throughout the year.

Larry Doby never plays first base after that.

And so I think that I don't have any sort of way of knowing this, but it does seem that Boudreau sort of sensed that you take away playing time from another player for Larry Doby and you could risk a mutiny going on here.

And so the way that Veeck sort of integrated the team by not sort of prepping players and by just sort of shunting Larry Doby onto the team, there were a lot of people that thought Doby should have gone to the minors to pay his due, there were people that were fighting for playing time.

And I think that Boudreau, again, I wasn't able to speak to Boudreau, but it does seem like he assesses the situation and then the next week he says, "I thought I was gonna play Doby at first, but now I don't think I'm going to."

And so I think he recognizes the sort of perils that could happen by moving Doby too quickly into the Indian's lineup.

- Thank you.

I'd like to first thank you for your book and my sense is, and you correct me if I'm wrong, is this story was really never fully covered or covered in Ken Burns' Baseball, which is considered like the best of what's been happening so far.

But my question really relates to impact and what can happen in the future.

I got to play in the Cleveland sandlots in the '70s, and my memory was at least for The Cleveland Plain Dealer League, it was very integrated and you had a lot of black owned businesses who backed teams.

So the league in Cleveland had a history of not integrating, but that's a place you just found tremendous integration and that's kind of been lost.

So I'm hopeful, do you see how we could impact and get minority youth and city youth to see baseball as an opportunity?

Because as I tell people, there's nine spots on a team in basketball, there's just five and one ball, and you could have very diverse skills and still play baseball.

So I'm hopeful this dialogue in the city can really become a hotbed, again, citywide for baseball.

- Yeah, I mean, I can't really speak about Major League Baseball's efforts to reach out to minority communities.

I know that they do have a lot of programs in place to do so.

If we're gonna relate it to my book, I will say this, that at the time, baseball was really the sport where you could make a good living.

Football was just coming up, basketball was in its infancy.

And it's interesting to me to note that Larry Doby grew up in Patterson, New Jersey, and he went to an integrated high school, and he was the captain of both the baseball, basketball, and football team.

He was a tremendous football player.

His team won the state championship.

I talked to one of his high school teammates who's still alive and he said for all the good that Doby was on football and baseball, basketball was his best sport.

They said that at a time where people were just shooting set shots, Larry Doby had moves.

There Doby is flying through the air like Elgin Baylor.

And so I wonder if Larry Doby had come up 20, 30 years afterwards, if he would've chosen baseball.

From what I understand, a lot of people didn't think it was his best sport.

And so you now have you now have more competition for athletes.

And so I don't know.

I mean, I think that Doby chose baseball simply because that was where he could make a living.

But apparently according to these teammates at least, it was his third best sport.

So yeah, and I mean, he was so amazing in high school that Patterson High School or East Side High, where he went to high school, convened a sort of testimonial dinner in his honor when he was a senior, they wrote poems about him, they had music written about Larry Doby, they gave him a gold watch.

I mean, he was just recognized as such an extraordinary person.

And it's so interesting that that would happen considering the East Side High maybe had, in his class, 10 African American students out of the class of hundreds.

And so for them to do that for sort of an African American player was truly extraordinary.

And it speaks to just how amazing of an athlete Larry Doby was.

- Okay, Luke, we've got a text question.

- [Luke] Yeah.

- If you could please tell the story of Satchel Paige's tryout.

(Luke laughs) - Okay, so in 1948, the Indians are sort of in first place, but they're struggling, Bill Veeck is trying to get pitching all he can.

He hires Abe Saperstein, Saperstein, Saperstein however you pronounce it, who was the founder of the Harlem Globetrotters.

And he sort of hires him as a scout to sort of look through the Negro Leagues.

After one game in which the Indians got particularly shelled, Veeck was like, "What are we gonna do?"

And Saperstein is like, "It's time.

And we need to bring in Paige."

And so they call him in and Bill Veeck wakes Lou Boudreau up from his sleep one morning and says, "Come to the stadium, I've got this prospect I want you to see."

Boudreau is like, "Just have someone else look at him."

And he is like, "Oh no, you want to be here."

And so Boudreau goes there and he is expecting to see like a 20 year old, but he says he's a 42 year old, and it's Satchel Paige.

And if you can imagine this, he's probably the most famous baseball player that you can imagine, he's in his forties, he's been proving himself his whole life, and he's now having to try out in front of nobody, an entirely empty stadium and then a couple of, you know, the Indian's brain trust over here.

And apparently according to legend, he leans into his Satchel Paigeness.

And so he takes out a handkerchief, folds it into eight, tells Boudreau, put this wherever you want to on the plate.

So Boudreau puts it on the inside corner, Paige throws pitch after pitch at it, he moves it over the outside corner, pitch after pitch.

Boudreau grabs a bat, comes in against him, remember Boudreau leads, Boudreau wins the MVP in 48.

Boudreau is at the height of his powers.

Boudreau tries to hit him, pops a few flies, slaps a few grounders, nothing really resembling a hit.

He throws down his bat and he says to Veeck, "We need him."

(audience laughs) And so, yeah, and I think the most poignant scene is that afterward in the locker room, Bill Veeck himself comes over to page with the jersey and he not only says we need to talk about your contract, he apologizes that this hadn't happened earlier in his career.

- Luke, this is what you call a softball question, but I understand the movie rights have been optioned and a script is being written even though there's no guarantee we'll ever see it on the big screen, hope does spring eternal, despite the Cleveland psychology.

So I wondered if you had any thoughts about who should play Bill Veeck if you've got a say in the casting.

(audience laughs) - Okay, so yes, the movie rights have been sold.

They're writing a script.

(audience claps) Thank you.

So apparently in the 1980s, Bill Murray, who is a huge baseball guy, had been trying to option Veeck as in Wreck, which is Bill Veeck's autobiography and no studio wanted it.

I don't know why, but he wanted to play Bill Veeck.

And man, he would've been awesome to play Bill Veeck.

I think he has the perfect sort of, you need an imp to play Bill Veeck.

You need somebody with a little bit of, you know, just mischief about him.

So I don't know because you know Bill Veeck was 32 when he bought the Indians.

So it can't be someone like Tom Hanks or something like that, it's gotta be a younger man who sort of exudes both extreme charisma and extreme mischievousness.

So you got me.

I'm glad I don't work in Hollywood.

I mean, who's gonna play Satchel Paige?

I mean, gosh, Denzel, maybe?

- All right, we've got another text question.

So many consider the use of sports as a platform to fight for black civil rights to be this new cancel culture thing, think Kaepernick and LeBron wearing an I can't breathe tee.

How does the influence of these players differ from or pave the path for the current civil rights fights of athletes today?

- Oh boy, that's a good question.

The thing that I always talk about with Kaepernick is that Jackie Robinson, at the end of his life in the 1970s, wrote a book called I Never Had it Made.

It is a tremendous book.

It's really one of the great sports autobiographies that has ever been written and I highly recommend it.

He starts the book off with a scene from the '70s where he's brought to a Los Angeles Dodgers game and he is gonna be honored there.

And the national Anthem starts playing and Jackie Robinson realizes that he can't stand up for it.

He remains seated throughout the entire time.

He realizes that that all the things that he had to go through, which basically caused sort of a premature death because of it, basically, I think that that's probably not uncontroversial to say, he can't stand up, and that's the sort of thing of the beginning.

And he says that for all of these cheers and everybody here, I never had it made.

And I always think about that with Kaepernick, that what Kaepernick did was not singular to him.

Jackie Robinson was talking about that decades ago.

And I mean, in this book, you have that scene of Larry Doby hitting the home running game four of the 1948 World Series.

Steve Gromek, the pitcher at the time, afterward in the locker room embracing him and just almost like cheek to cheek right there.

And that picture goes off across newspapers across the country.

It's a very unusual sight to the country at the time to see something like that and African American newspapers in particular write very great, beautiful pieces about the symbolic nature of that picture showing what can happen if places integrate like that.

But then the epilogue of my book shows that when Larry Doby went home to Patterson, New Jersey after winning the World Series, they held this big parade for him, they gave him a key to the city, the mayor talked about him, Doby got $6,000 for winning the world series from his share and he and his wife decide they're gonna buy their first house.

Nobody will sell to him.

And it doesn't matter that he's this tremendous hero.

Everybody knows he is a tremendous hero.

Nobody wants to live next to him.

And so Doby says in January of 1949, a mere three months after winning the World Series, I feel more like a hero in Cleveland than I do here in my hometown.

And then he goes to spring training in March, probably the big thing that puts him over the top to win the World Series was his play.

He's still in a segregated accommodation.

He still can't stay with his teammates.

And Doby just says the clock turned back.

So you see this sort of cyclical nature happening in sports throughout our history.

- I guess it's my turn.

I'm Sal Russo, senior, formerly from Russo Stop & Shop Supermarket.

- [Luke] Cool.

(audience claps) - And I'm lucky enough to be Dan's father-in-law.

- [Luke] Oh, cool, nice.

- So Dan said be careful.

So for Christmas, he gave me your book.

- [Luke] Dan, thank you.

- And I also got a Christmas gift of the book, how they made the movie, The Godfather.

- [Luke] Nice.

- And if you guys are looking for another good book.

(audience laughs) So I started with the godfather, being Italian, of course, and I couldn't put that book down and Dan kept asking me, did you start Luke's book about the 1948 Cleveland Indians?

And I said, "No, not yet, Dan, I gotta finish this other book," but once I started it, I couldn't put it down.

There's so many things in there that I didn't know.

I was eight years old and my father liked baseball, but I never went to any of the games, never went.

And I kind of held it against him for a while until I got older and I realized that that wasn't his priority.

He was working too hard to be successful.

But anyway, this is a point of interest, not really a question, a couple nights ago, well, first of all, how many of you, raise your hands, watch jeopardy?

All right.

You probably saw this, but a couple nights ago, the final question was who was the black player that was instrumental in the Cleveland Indians winning the World Series, which they haven't won since.

And of course, everybody got the answer, including me, 'cause I read your book, Luke.

- [Luke] I wish they would've referenced my book.

(audience laughs) - I said, that's Satchel Paige.

And all the three contestants had the right answer, including myself.

But thanks for writing the book 'cause I couldn't put that book down either.

- [Luke] Cool.

And if you guys don't buy that book today at half price, you're missing the deal of your life.

(audience claps) - I will just say based on that, that I've never been to a baseball game here in Cleveland, which is like kind of hard.

I mean a little sheepish for me to admit this, but I can't imagine what it must have been like to be in that municipal stadium with 80, 85,000 people in that place.

I mean that 1948 season, I spent so much time trying to imagine what that must have felt like.

And I remember asking Eddie Robinson, what did it feel like to play in front of 86,000 people?

And he himself couldn't put it into words.

So, yeah, it boggles the mind.

(audience claps) - Today at The City Club, we've been enjoying a forum in our Authors and Conversation series, featuring Luke Epplin, he's the author of Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series.

It's available for purchase here in our lobby thanks to our book sellers at a cultural exchange.

Moderating our conversation today was the inimitable Felton Thomas Jr., executive director and CEO of the Cleveland Public Library.

(audience claps) And that brings us to the end of our forum today.

Thank you, Luke.

Thank you, Director Thomas, and thank you members and friends of The City Club.

It's been so good to share this with you all today.

Our forum is now adjourned.

(audience claps) (bell dings) (upbeat music) - [Voiceover] For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of The City Club, go to cityclub.org.

(upbeat music) - [Voiceover] Production and distribution of City Club Forums and Ideastream Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.