Interview: Luke Epplin

Interview: Luke Epplin

By Scott Bolohan

Cleveland fans surely don’t need any reminding, but it’s been 72 years since its last World Series winner.

But as Luke Epplin’s Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series that Changed Baseball shows, the 1948 team was more than just a trivia question—it was the beginning of baseball as we know it today. The book dives into integration and the business side of baseball through the larger-than-life owner Bill Veeck, All-American sensation Bob Feller, talented and reserved Larry Doby, and Satchel Paige, whose charisma was only matched by his exploits on the mound.

Feller was the first to be established in Cleveland, a LeBron James-level star decades before he would grace Cleveland with its most recent championship. He debuted at 17, a whole year younger than James at his debut. Feller was the second major leaguer to enlist in the war, costing him nearly four full seasons of his prime and leaving him feeling that he was owed money. So he spent his offseason barnstorming, often against the legendary Paige—a huge box office draw in his own right. Paige’s success in these games against Feller lead to his long-overdue big league opportunity.

When Veeck became the owner in 1946, he not only wanted fans in the stadium, he also wanted a winner and looked to the Negro Leagues to bolster his roster. He signed Larry Doby out of the Negroe Leagues eleven weeks after Jackie Robinson debuted, making him the second Black player in the majors. Doby had no time to prepare for it, playing in a Negro Leagues game the day before debuting in the majors—and with results that reflected it. Doby put up with the same racism as Robinson, just with less support. It didn’t help when Veeck signed Satchel Paige, who at 42, was nearly two decades older than Doby, who had about as different a personality as you could get in two people.

Yet all four were needed to bring Cleveland it’s last World Series title.

We chatted with Epplin over Zoom about integration, the complexity of the four characters, and the thrilling 1948 season.

This is your first book, how are you feeling right now?

Yeah, I’m petrified. It’s frightening. It is my first book, but I think it’s a very meaty book. It has a lot of different areas that it’s covering, whether the integration angle, the business angle, the Veeck angle where he’s inventing the modern stadium experience. I just hope that I gave enough weight to each of those sections. But ultimately, it’s a book about four individuals and the ways that they intersect and come together and how their themes resonate and play off of each other. So yeah, I feel okay.

How much did you know about this team before you began working on the book?

I knew almost nothing. I knew the basic parameters of each individual’s life. I grew up around the St. Louis area in small town. My grandfather had hearing problems, so he was 4-F during World War II. He went to work in an airplane factory in St. Louis instead of going to fight. He would take streetcars to the St. Louis Browns games and he became a big Browns fan—one of the few. So I grew up knowing a lot about the St. Louis Browns. Bill Veeck was their last owner and he was my gateway into this story, I knew the most about him. I was contacted by a literary agent to write a book on baseball. We were brainstorming topics and we were thinking about doing something with Veeck and the Browns. I was going into the archives reading The Sporting News from Veeck’s career from the ’30s and into the ’40s. While I was reading through the issues, I just kept seeing Feller, Doby, and Paige. The way that these names came up and intersected with each other, I realized here is the book. But then it took me a long time to learn about it. I’m not an Indians fan. I didn’t know much about the team and I had to really get caught up to speed on it. It wasn’t something I grew up hearing stories about.

I knew about the ’48 team because it was the last Cleveland team to win the World Series. Yet, this was the first team with Black players to win the World Series. This is a huge deal. How did this team get somewhat forgotten by history?

It was a team that that was running concurrently with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Larry Doby integrated the Indians eleven weeks after Jackie Robinson came into the league. Doby was, unlike Robinson, a rather introverted character, someone who did not seek out the spotlight. In fact, he was rather uncomfortable with the media. He did not like to submit himself to interviews. The Indians team sometimes feels like a pause between when the Yankees were winning all the World Series. It became sort of a Yankees/Dodgers thing and the Indians were just a little blip there.

The team also broke up pretty soon after that. Bill Veeck left after ’49, Paige went with him, and Feller declined on the field pretty fast. There was the expectation that Doby was going to be a much better player than Jackie Robinson and he was going to be the one that was now going to step into the spotlight. He has an uneven season and in 1949, and you start reading some profiles where Doby gets characterized by sportswriters as sullen, moody, withdrawn. These are usually white sportswriters that are not necessarily seeing the context in which he’s operating and the pressures that he has to deal with all the time. Instead, he gets pegged as this surly character that is very different from how a player like Feller, who is also quite touchy and outspoken, gets written about in the white media. Doby just doesn’t become the media darling that was predicted in 1948. Then fast forward all of these decades where the living memory starts fading away. We always remember the first, and the second becomes a footnote. You have all of these Jackie Robinson celebrations that happen every year, and rightfully so, but it crowds out memories of other people. Doby is now just, ‘Oh, he’s the second Black player.’ He was the first Black player in the American League. What I really wanted to do with this book is show that his story, and what he went through was every bit of significant, meaningful and I think most importantly, fricking exciting, man. That season is so awesome! His story is every bit as interesting as Bob Feller’s. Feller goes from the cornfields to the majors. It’s this tremendously exciting folkloric story. Doby had a similar story, he went from the Negro Leagues to the major leagues in one day. He completely falls on his face the first season and then comes back and helps the Indians win their last World Series. It’s folklore. And I want to convey how exciting and incredible that was.

Before reading this book, Doby was a trivia question in my mind. But he was a complex person and a really great player.

In Veeck’s autobiography, he says something along the lines of, ‘If Larry Doby had come up even five-to-ten years later, he would have been one of the best players ever to play the game, he would have been Willie Mays.’ He had every single thing that you could imagine. You can see that whenever someone like Tris Speaker starts working with him and he’s just like, ‘Oh, my god, this guy has got it all.’ But Doby was very sensitive. And on top of that, the sort of stuff that he had to deal with as the first and only Black person on the team for a year before Paige joins, I think it really, really weighed on him and he’s very open about that. If he’d come whenever there had been more of a path and a community, that could have perhaps eased it a little bit, and he could have really shone through. He says himself in many interviews that it’s one thing to play the game, it’s another thing to play the game and have to deal with all these other burdens that aren’t burdening other people. I think it really did drag him down. It prevented him from being Willie Mays basically.

Why did you decide to tell it through though that lens of those four players?

I think there are many ways that you can tell the story of this season. And I think that if you’re a Cleveland Indians fan, a very valid question you could have asked me was why Lou Boudreau wasn’t included as one. I think when the Indians fans think of the 1948 season, they think very much of Boudreau, who won the MVP that year and was the manager. He was the darling in Cleveland.

But what I really wanted to do was take each of these four characters that I think each represent a different facet of the integration experience. You’ve got two white characters and two Black characters. In Veeck you have a more forward-looking individual who is not only sympathetic to the larger causes of integration and desegregation, but also looking at Black players from the Negro Leagues as tremendous assets that can help him win the World Series as quickly as possible, which is his goal. He’s very upfront about that. You have Bob Feller, who I don’t think he was a racist, but I do think that he was a traditionalist in his thinking. I think that his story, the rise from the cornfield to the majors, really affected his worldview. He’s of the mindset that if you work hard, if you believe in yourself, and have the rugged individualism to pull yourself up, you can make it. He makes those statements frequently to the press and you can hear him say, ‘Well, the Black players aren’t here because they’re not good enough. They haven’t done these things.’  He’s not seeing the systemic barriers that are preventing them from doing this individually. That’s a view that I think, frankly, is still with us today.

And then you have Doby and Paige who represent different generations in the Negro Leagues that had differing ideas of how to act, and how to approach integration—to the point where they just simply did not get along. They were oil and water in terms of how they were shaped and formed. I think that’s a really interesting tension between them. But I thought that not only could you tell the integration story through four different prisms, but you could also construct other things that were going along this time. I think, with Feller and Paige, in particular, you can look at the rise of the athlete as a brand and businessman. I think they were two of the best athlete businessmen that have ever existed. What Paige managed to do, making tremendous amounts of money for himself in a time of such severe segregation is just extraordinary. It’s really incredible. Then you have Veeck, who’s inventing so much of what we take for granted now at games and causing almost a frenzy. Along the way, you just have so many different interesting aspects that you can explore through these four men.

That team really has a lot of makings of what we would recognize as the first modern baseball team.

The introduction is about Paige’s start in mid-August where he shuts out the White Sox. The White Sox are first coming on the field, there’s a big circus tent in the outfield, Paige is warming up on the mound. There’s a contortionist that’s clowning around. And the White Sox come out, and they look out and they’re like, ‘What the heck is this?’ It’s something that is so weird to them. But now during the pregame there’s going to be entertainment. You have to remember to the players on the other team, they’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is something completely new.’

I want to talk about barnstorming because it’s almost hard to wrap your head around how important these players were to people. The fact that Bob Feller and Satchel Paige were going to pitch would bring 20,000 people out to go see a game that didn’t matter is incredible.

You have to remember that most of the teams were in the Northeast and the Midwest. They were in select cities and certain cities had two teams. There were even many large cities that simply had no teams. And there was no television. The only way that you could see these players often was whenever they would barnstorm around at the end of the season. It was a way for them to bring baseball to the outer reaches of the country. Players at that time were under the reserve clause so they were more limited in their salaries and this was a great way for them to line their pockets. And then you have the racial aspect to it where they’re able to play baseball not only in a different way, but against different opponents than they could in the normal season. It almost becomes like a different sport, very different than what the major league games are. Dizzy Dean was really good about capitalizing on this, Babe Ruth was, but Feller was like, ‘I’m going to make this a business. I don’t want any agents setting this up. I don’t want to publicist that I have to pay. I’m doing it all myself.’ Feller during that 1946 season, does this incredible cross country tour, pitching one day in Philadelphia, flying to Baltimore the next day to line up stadiums to book for his team, flying back to hook up with his team, pitching the next day, flying out to another city. He just exhausts himself doing this. It’s an incredible feat. He’s making himself into the front name of that. And then, unfortunately, television and comes the next year and then integration starts happening. A lot of the stuff that brought people to the park starts to wane. People can see these players now, so barnstorming goes on the decline.

It ended up doing very different things for Feller and Paige too.

Feller comes back from the war in ’46 and he has just an unbelievable season. Then he barnstorms and makes so much money. People are writing very laudatory stories about him about like, ‘The All-American boy has now turned into the man in the gray suit.’ He’s become a businessman. But in 1947, he doesn’t have as good of a season. And suddenly the narrative flips and it’s like, ‘He’s too distracted. He’s not paying attention to what he should be doing on the field. He only cares about making money. He’s greedy, blah, blah, blah.’ You see that all the time with athletes now, they’re doing too many commercials, or they’re dating somebody that’s in the media. It’s this narrative that doesn’t go away. If they’re not doing well, suddenly, people start looking at their outside interests.

With Paige, there was an idea of doing the book just through 1947 and 1948, but I didn’t think you could understand how Paige gets to the majors if you don’t understand the barnstorming that he’s doing. He’s pitching incredibly for the Negro Leagues and everybody knows who he is. But he’s barnstorming for three straight seasons in ’45, ’46, and ’47 against major leaguers, consistently getting them out. That’s what is really putting to rest any doubt that he’s lost it, or that he’s too old, or that he can’t get major leaguers out. I think without the barnstorming he might not have made it.

Did you end up having a favorite character?

That’s s a tough one. I liked the different aspects of each character. I know that he’s the most written about of them all, but how could you not love Satchel Paige? You read these interviews that he’s giving, he’s speaking extemporaneously and it’s almost like his words were written for him. He is such an incredible speaker. He’s so fast on his feet. I think he is one of the most intelligent athletes that we’ve ever come across. His story is incredible, a real American original. I play around in the book about the idea of these people being larger than life because that’s how they were often depicted at the time. But I think for that era, they were. They’re sort of folkloric individuals, all of them except for maybe Doby, who just didn’t quite know how to use his story to his advantage the way that the other characters do. The other characters are so expert at taking their own narrative, shaping it, and using it to their advantage—and to their monetary benefit. Each of the other characters, Paige, Veeck, and Feller each writes more than one autobiography. Their story is their currency and they’re continually retelling. Doby never writes an autobiography. What I was kind of showing at the end was that his story is every bit as crazy as the other ones. Getting amazing lines out of Doby is such an accomplishment for a journalist, so whenever he does say something revealing, it’s almost like, ‘Oh, wow, this is so great.’ Because he, too, is so intelligent. Some of those quotes he gives about the burdens he’s under and how he had to learn to live with white people all over again. Incredible stuff.

Luke Epplin’s writing has appeared online in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, GQ, Slate, Salon, The Daily Beast, and The Paris Review Daily. Born and raised in rural Illinois, Luke now lives in New York City. Our Team is his first book. You can follow him on Twitter.

Scott Bolohan is the founder of The Twin Bill. When he was 20, Bob Feller told him to “get your facts straight before you start talking to a Hall of Famer.” He has taken this advice to heart.