Ninety Minutes at Fenway

The instinct here is right. The timing is off by twenty-one years.

April 16, 1945. Jackie Robinson, Sam Jethroe and Marvin Williams work out at Fenway Park for about ninety minutes. It took over a year to arrange, and it only happened because a Boston city councilman named Isadore Muchnick threatened the club's Sunday game permits, with sportswriter Wendell Smith picking the players. Coach Hugh Duffy and Larry Woodall ran it. Joe Cronin watched from the stands. Nobody called. Nobody wrote.

Ted Williams was not there. He was a Marine Corps flight instructor in Florida that spring, five years into a career that would lose nearly five full seasons to two wars.

But here is the thing. In July 1966, at his own Hall of Fame induction, Williams stood at the podium in Cooperstown and said he hoped Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson would one day be added as symbols of the great Negro Leagues players who were absent only because they never got the chance. Nobody asked him to say it. Paige went in five years later.

Sam Jethroe, meanwhile, won National League Rookie of the Year in 1950. For the Boston Braves. Across town.