My regards to NBC’s Erik Ortiz for filling in the details here. Louis Sockalexis was a baseball player for the Cleveland Spiders of the National League in the late 1890s. He had a spectacular but short, three-year career. He was also a Penobscot Indian. And as such is often credited with being the first non-white to play Major League Baseball.
Former English teacher Ed Rice visits the grave site and memorial to Louis Sockalexis in the Penobscot Nation, Old Town, Maine, July 29, 2003. Rice wrote one of three biographies of Sockalexis, published within the past year, that have spurring fresh interest in the outfielder whose brilliance inspired the Cleveland baseball team to become the Indians. (AP Photo/Michael C. York) ORG XMIT: NY300
Racism was more overt in the 19th century. The Spiders became informally known as the Indians. Not to honor Sockalexis. It was a term of derision. The Spiders folded. Sockalexis became an alcoholic… died young and the story was put to bed for 15 years. In 1915 the Cleveland franchise in the American League changed its name to Indians… it was said… to honor the memory of Sockalexis. A clever little piece of revisionist history that ignores the overtly racist origin of the name. The wheels of progress grind slowly. It took 100 years to get rid of Chief Wahoo and another few to eliminate the nickname. This isn’t a case of history versus political correctness. It was used as a slur 125 years ago to specifically ridicule Louis Sockalexis. It’s time to apologize.
Bill Pucko has spent over three decades as a broadcast journalist working in television, radio and print. He was the featured sportscaster on Rochester’s YYN and WHEC-TV, awarded the Rochester Press and Radio Club’s Sportscaster of the Year Award three times and inducted onto the Frontier Field Walk of Fame in 2006.
Bill is a co-founder of Classy Wolf Media, a television and video production company currently syndicating two weekly sports programs, The High School Sports Beat and The Press Box, on WHAM-TV and FOX Rochester. He is the content editor of the website Bylinesports.com and writes a weekly column for the Messenger Post Newspaper chain.
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