RIP Monte Irvin, Baseball Player And Legend, In That Order

When the Hall of Fame outfielder Monte Irvin passed away at the age of 96 on January 12, less was said about Irvin the ballplayer than Irvin the extremely mellow gentleman. He was "quiet." "Dignified." This is standard obituary stuff, and language that contains some strange and barely buried racial context, but Irvin was quiet, and he was dignified. For as long as people wrote about Monte Irvin, those were the things they wrote about. It was a convenient way of dismissing him.

The chapter on Irvin in Tom Meany's 1955 book The Incredible Giants is titled, "The Solid Man." Jackie Robinson wrote he was "a star of high character and intelligence." In Irvin's own autobiography, pitcher Leon Day, a teammate with the Newark Eagles of the Negro National League, is quoted as saying, "I think Monte could have been the one to break the color line. Jackie Robinson did it and he was hot-headed. Monte was easygoing." Brooklyn Dodgers lefty Preacher Roe says, "Monte… had no controversy." Irvin's manager with the Eagles, Willie Wells, called him "an easy fellow, very nice, easy to get along with." Noting his passing, Hall of Fame president Jeff Idelson remarked on his "affable demeanor."

Then there is this 1981 quote from Eagles owner Effa Manley, which has appeared in many of the Irvin profiles: "Monte was the choice of all Negro National and American League club owners to serve as the No. 1 player to join a white major league team. We all agreed, in meeting, he was the best qualified by temperament, character, ability, loyalty, morals, age, experiences, and physique to represent us as the first black player to enter the white majors since the Walker brothers back in the 1880s."

This is a weird statement, because it didn't matter who the Negro Leagues owners thought should break the color line because it wasn't up to them. This is a bit like the Politburo getting together in 1948 and deciding that Henry Wallace their choice for President of the United States. No one was asking; that's how the color line worked. In any case, Manley thought Irvin was a great baseball player. In John Holway's Voices From the Great Black Baseball Leagues she said, "There's few ballplayers can do all five things—hit, field, run, throw, and think. Even the great stars, many have weak arms. That was one of Irvin's outstanding characteristics. What an arm he had! He could throw a ball from deep in the outfield straight to the catcher on a line drive. Nobody tried to take an extra base on him."

Yet, look at what Manley emphasized as the reasons for making Irvin the Chosen One: temperament, character, again. It's as if everyone who encountered Irvin saw him as baseball's answer to Sidney Poitier, an actor who was rising to prominence at the same time Irvin reached the major leagues. Just as Poitier's poise, the kind of roles he was offered, and the political purposes to which both could be put tended to obscure the man beneath the characters he played, Irvin's sangfroid caused commentators to overlook the gifted and competitive athlete who arrived too late on the major league scene. He was so admirable as a man that his brilliance as an athlete was somehow overlooked. After the 1951 season, the Essex County, New Jersey Democrats put him on the ballot for the state assembly.

A small clue to the truth: In Leo Durocher's autobiography, he called Irvin, "A man for whom I've always had an enormous respect. Cream and sugar. Nicest man in the whole world." Durocher, Irvin's first manager in the big leagues, is giving a qualified compliment, here. Durocher didn't appreciate "nice." His book was titled Nice Guys Finish Last, which perhaps implies something about the feelings that underlay his description. Irvin titled his memoirs Nice Guys Finish First, which definitely implies a difference with Durocher about where Irvin thought he deserved to end up.

We see what we want to see because we lack imagination. You will hear a lot about how Irvin lacked bitterness because the color line kept him out of the majors until he was 30. This is not true. Joe Posnanski perceived it when he and Buck O'Neil met up with Irvin: "Buck, somehow, had overcome his bitterness. He had found a way to look back at a time when he was prevented from playing … and yet he would see mostly joy and wonder… Monte Irvin would admit that he could not quite see the past the way Buck did."

Irvin never hid this. "I lost ten or twelve good years," he told Art Rust, Jr. in 1976. "I came up at 31 years old… I would have liked to have come up when I was 18 or 19. I could have made it then. Yes, I'm a little bitter about it. I lost a lot of money and prestige. You're not happy about it because there's nothing you can do."

In 1951, after he had hit .312/.415/.514 with 19 doubles, 11 triples, 24 home runs, and a National League-leading 121 RBI and was in the midst of one of the great World Series, with 11 hits in 24 at-bats, Irvin had said the same thing: "I just wish this was ten years ago. I'd have really shown them something then. I was twice the ballplayer [then] that I am now. There wasn't anything I couldn't do. I was much faster and I was a far better hitter. My reflexes were wonderful, just like Willie Mays' are now. I will always wish that these fans who were here at [Yankee] Stadium today could have seen me then."

It's ironic that Irvin spent much of his post-playing career working for Major League Baseball, because all his frustration, from the way his career was delayed to his legacy as more of a "nice guy" than a great player, is baseball's fault. The game's racism cauterized the careers of Irvin and players like him, both directly and indirectly. This was not limited to the simple refusal to let men of color play; the indirect effect was to consign them to the Negro Leagues, organizations whose records were habitually vague.

In the final analysis, the way we remember baseball players is through their statistics, and Irvin's, like those of all Negro Leaguers, are maddeningly incomplete. Given that, we reflexively created a shorthand for Irvin: Quiet. Uncontroversial. Good guy. We know these things. The information that might characterize him in a baseball sense we are less certain of. It's gone. This has the effect of robbing Irvin for a second time, and it makes everyone who blows him off this way an accomplice.

Here's what we can say about Irvin the player. He was, as Manley said, a gifted all-around athlete, a four-sport star in high school and the winner of a football scholarship to Michigan. Financial pressures forced him to turn it down. He joined the Newark Eagles at 18, and by the time he was 21 he was a star. Different sources quote different batting averages, but it seems safe to suggest Irvin won two batting titles with averages around .400. He also demolished leagues in Puerto Rico and Mexico, though he perhaps did somewhat less well in Cuba.

And he might have broken the color line. Indeed, Branch Rickey signed him. His service in World War II, when, unlike Joe DiMaggio, he had a military occupation (in an engineers unit) rather than a spot on a service ballclub, atrophied his skills and Irvin asked Rickey to wait. Then the machinations of Manley, who demanded to be paid for Irvin's contract (a precedent Rickey did not want to set) caused the Dodgers to drop him.

One hint as to Irvin's abilities is his record in the white minor leagues, .375/.509/.683 in 160 games. When the Giants sent him down at the beginning of 1950, he hit .510 with 10 home runs in 51 at-bats, earning a very quick call to New York. By then, though, it was almost over. Irvin had the great 1951, but in the spring of 1952 he tried to abort a slide into third base during an exhibition game in Denver. His spikes caught.

"His face tight-lipped, Doc Bowman, the Giants' great little trainer, squatted beside Monte Irvin holding a shattered right leg with the foot which was dangling at almost a 90-degree angle firmly in his grasp lest the slightest movement make things worse," Arch Murray wrote. "Mays… lay sprawled by the bag weeping and beating his hands in the field dirt." Though Irvin came back surprisingly quickly and hit well both in the remainder of that season and in 1953, by all accounts he was never the same player. He suffered the indignity of being sent back to the minors in 1955, had a decent encore with the Cubs, tried the minors again, and succumbed to back problems created by favoring the busted ankle.

Today you will find many stories calling Monte Irvin a trailblazer, an integration pioneer. This may be factual, but it misses the point. Sure, he, along with Hank Thompson, integrated the Giants on July 8, 1949. It wasn't a fate he would have chosen for himself. He wanted to get there sooner. He wanted respect commensurate with his baseball skills. Focusing on integration and symbolism doesn't do that. Deserved or not, it makes Irvin a saint, when what he really wanted to be was the MVP.

Irvin went into the Hall of Fame via the Negro Leagues Committee. He would have preferred to go in the same way that DiMaggio, Williams, and even Jackie Robinson did, through the front door. He and Robinson were almost precisely the same age; it could have happened. Look again at that 1951 season. Imagine ten more years just like that. That's likely what Irvin was denied.

Think of him with the same wistfulness with which you might recall Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, or any of the other greats who were denied by prejudice. The Giants, who retired his uniform No. 20 in 2010, said of his passing, "Monte was a true gentleman whose exceptional baseball talent was only surpassed by his character and kindness."

Weren't they listening? He would have said they had it exactly backwards.