​Baseball has never been a sport that looked forward. The lure of the game for many fans is looking back at mountains of statistics and making comparisons to players from years gone by.

But dig beneath the numbers, and MLB tends to get a little uncomfortable. Social and economic change has moved painfully slow through the years. Sure, MLB can tout the hiring of a woman as an assistant baseball coach, with Alyssa Nakken coaching at third base earlier this year for the San Francisco Giants, or Rachel Balkovec managing at the minor-league level for the Florida State League’s Tampa Tarpons. Teams hold Pride Nights to acknowledge gay and lesbian fans.

And certainly, MLB has properly acknowledged the achievements of Jackie Robinson, who broke the modern-day color line in April 1947 when he debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers. But is retiring a number or holding annual ceremonies enough?

As Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts noted in June 1865, “liberty has been won. The battle for equality is still pending.”

MLB has been slow to wage that battle for equality, uncomfortable with those people who create ripples in the otherwise calm sea of baseball. Peter Dreier and Robert Elias take a look at the men and women who fought against racism, sexism and homophobia in the national pastime through the years in Baseball Rebels: The Players, People, and Social Movements that Shook Up the Game and Changed America (University of Nebraska Press; hardback; $36.95; 370 pages).

In his 10-year-after sequel to the groundbreaking 1970 book, Ball Four, former MLB pitcher Jim Bouton wrote that in any human group, family or tribe there are shared expectations of behavior. Any member of that group who deviates from those norms calls the group’s basic values into question.

“It makes them nervous,” Bouton wrote in 1981’s Ball Four Plus Five.
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Many baseball fans already know the stories about Robinson, Curt Flood’s challenge to baseball’s reserve clause and Marvin Miller’s fight for collective bargaining. We are stronger because of their efforts. Robinson endured horrific conditions and epithets during his career; Flood sacrificed his career for a principle that led to players making competitive salaries (some might argue exorbitant these days); while Miller transformed the Major League Baseball Players Association into sports’ most powerful labor union.

Other readers of baseball history are certainly familiar with Moses Fleetwood Walker, who was the last Black to play at the major league level until Robinson came along. And Branch Rickey, who brought Robinson to Brooklyn. Or Bill Veeck, the maverick baseball owner who broke the color line in the American League, hired Larry Doby and Satchel Paige to play for Cleveland.

Dreier and Elias introduce the reader to lesser-known rebels — I prefer to call them pioneers — who, in their own ways, paved the way for future generations.

Dreier channels his love of baseball and politics into this work. He is a former newspaper reporter and is the E.P. Clapp distinguished professor of politics at Occidental College. He has been at the Los Angeles-based college since 1993 and is a professor of urban and environmental policy.
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Like the topics he covers in this book, Dreier has been an active at the local and national level. He was the housing director at the Boston Redevelopment Authority and served as a senior policy adviser to that city’s mayor at the time, Ray Flynn.

Elias is a professor of politics and legal studies at the University of San Francisco. He wrote 2010’s The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad and Baseball and the American Dream: Race, Class, Gender and the National Pastime in 2001.

Both authors have been busy. Two weeks after Baseball Rebels was published, they collaborated on a similarly titled book, Major League Rebels: Baseball Battles over Workers’ Rights and American Empire. I have not read the second book, but it appears to be more focused on the business and labor pioneers in the game.
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Baseball Rebels introduces the reader to racial pioneers like Octavius Catto, a 19th-century activist who pioneered education for Blacks, integrated streetcars in Philadelphia and the U.S. military and founded and starred at shortstop for the Black Pythian Base Ball Club. Catto “sought to lure and organize young Black men into his activist circles,” and baseball was the best way to do so, the authors write.

​Catto would be shot to death in the streets of Philadelphia in October 1871 just before the mayoral elections. His assassination “robbed the freedom movement of a charismatic and strategic leader,” the authors write, but his legacy for baseball led to more Black baseball players and teams. He finally was honored in 2017 when the city of Philadelphia erected a public statue in his honor.

Andrew “Rube” Foster and Effa Manley — the first woman elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame — would play a big role in the Negro Leagues during the 20th century, and sportswriter Wendell Smith would lead the crusade in the Black press. Surprisingly, so did Lester Rodney of the Communist Party’s Daily Worker newspaper.

The authors examine the influence of women in sports, including the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Blacks certainly had a hard road to acceptance, but women had a similar bumpy road.

“The female has no place in base ball, except to the degradation of the game,” the authors quote from an 1885 St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial.
Don’t tell that to Alta Weiss, the “girl wonder” who pitched for a men’s semipro team before entering the medical profession. In 1907, an article in The Shreveport Journal notes that Weiss, who was 17 at the time, was a “believer in the subtile (sic) muscle.”

“You don’t have to be ‘knotty’ to be strong,” Weiss said at the time. “Muscle should not obtrude itself until needed.”

She added that she was “born to play ball,” and who could argue.

The authors also tell the well-known story of Jackie Mitchell, who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig during an exhibition game in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1931, when she was 17 years old. The story of Helen Callaghan, who played in the AAGPBL and whose son, Casey Candaele, would play in the majors, also gets fair play.

The authors also write about sexual preferences of players, including the lesbian relationship between AAGPBL player Terry Donahue and Pat Henschel. The two women wrote long love letters to one another, but wanting to keep their relationship a secret, tore off their signatures from their letters.
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The AAGPBL, like MLB, was racially segregated, too. But Black women players like Connie Morgan, Toni Stephens and Mamie “Peanut” Johnson played in the otherwise all-male Negro Leagues. Their barrier-breaking efforts led to pitcher Mo’ne Davis becoming the first girl to pitch a shutout in a Little League World Series championship game in August 2014. Ila Borders would similarly break barriers at the college baseball level and later became the first woman to officially win a game in a men’s regular-season professional league (outside of the Negro Leagues) in 1998.

The authors also document gay men in baseball, including umpire Dave Pallone, who wrote a 1990 autobiography about his “double life,” as his book title implied. Dale Scott, in 2014, became the first male umpire to become the first openly gay official in a major sport while still working.

Players like Glenn Burke and Billy Bean were gay players who did not reveal their lifestyle until after they retired. The authors note that among athletes in men’s U.S. major team sports, only five players have “come out of the closet” while still actively competing.

Being “outed” was a big issue for gay players. The authors present an example of Bean, who, while with the Dodgers in 1989, hid in a video booth when another teammate entered a bookstore he was visiting. Bean had been browsing books in the section about homosexuality and “felt wracked with shame” and was afraid of being caught.

But Bean later became a public figure for LGBTQ rights and was named as MLB’s first ambassador for inclusion in 2014.

That does not mean that everyone in MLB is comfortable. Evangelical or fundamentalist Christian players like Torii Hunter and Lance Berkman have expressed concerns, along with others. The authors note that Hunter told a reporter in 2012 that having a gay teammate would be “difficult and uncomfortable,” while Berkman noted three years later that “tolerance is the virtue that’s killing this country.”

Conversely, Ken Griffey told Sports Illustrated in 2005, “If you can play, you can play.”

The authors end the book with a look at modern-day activists and “an agenda for change.”

There is plenty of talk about freedom of speech in sports until a player voices an opinion that might go against the grain of the mainstream. Carlos Delgado was embroiled in controversy for his refusal to stand for “God Bless America,” explaining that he was not unpatriotic but was protesting “American militarism” because he objected to the way the song was tied with the Sept. 11 attacks to the war in Iraq. Delgado also has spoken out about MLB’s record in hiring Latino managers.

Other players have expressed their support for protests against police abuse. Giants manager Gabe Kapler, who took a knee before a 2020 game, said that “I don’t see it as disrespect at all.”

“I see nothing more American than standing up for what you believe in,” Kapler told USA Today.

Pitcher Sean Doolittle “has become the most outspoken professional baseball player of the twenty-first century,” the authors write.
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The Washington Nationals’ reliever had 29 saves the year the team won the National League pennant (in a glitch, the authors wrote that Washington took the American League title) and the World Series. He has worked with veterans groups and youth baseball players, and Doolittle and his wife (Eireann Dolan) hosted a dinner in Chicago for 17 Syrian refugee families. He has also been an advocate for workers and unions, and after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis the pitcher tweeted that “race is America’s original sin.”

Baseball rebel? “Baseball visionary” is probably a better description for Doolittle.

The authors’ agenda includes getting Flood inducted into the Hall of Fame, ending baseball subsidies for team owners and encouraging the MLBPA to join the AFL-CIO union. They also applaud the hiring of more women in key positions, including Kim Ng, who was named the Miami Marlins’ general manager in November 2020. They also advocate a women’s professional baseball league.
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The authors have chapter end notes and an extensive bibliography. They write clearly and do a nice job digging into those activists who may not have received the same treatment as a Jackie Robinson or a Curt Flood. To be sure, Robinson and Flood deserve every accolade extended to them, but Baseball Rebels is a much more detailed look at activists who also helped baseball progress, albeit slowly in some cases.
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“In the arenas of race, gender and sexuality, baseball has made significant progress, but more must be done to align the sport with the growing movements for social justice,” the authors write.

For baseball fans in Detroit, Willie Horton was appreciated like “a comfortable pair of shoes.”

For 15 years with the Tigers, he was Willie the Wonder, the hometown guy from the Detroit projects who made it big in the major leagues. Eight times during his career — seven with Detroit — he hit 20 or more home runs. Horton had a powerful swing, but he also could play defense. His laser-like throw to the plate to catch Lou Brock in Game 5 of the 1968 World Series was arguably the turning point in Detroit’s comeback victory in the Fall Classic.

Willie Horton: 23: Detroit’s Own Willie the Wonder, the Tigers’ First Black Great (Triumph Books; hardback; $30; 219 pages) is an engaging look at Horton’s career, which was productive despite the racial barriers he faced as a young player trying to break into the major leagues. He collaborates with sportswriter Kevin Allen, who wrote the 2004 book, The People’s Champion: Willie Horton.

Horton, now 79, is a gentleman and a gentle man. Always has been. That says a lot, given the discrimination he endured while trying to break in with the Tigers. Horton could not believe, for example, that he needed to call a Black taxi company to get a ride to Tiger Town from downtown Lakeland, Florida. It was no joke, although he believed the name of the cab company (Wigs) was a gag being played by veterans. Horton walked the seven miles to camp instead.
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These stories are not new to a generation of Black baseball players, but they are still telling. Sometimes the racism was blatant, but other times it was more subtle, Horton writes.

But one would figure that by the time Horton made it to the majors in the second or third wave of Black players to compete, that barriers would have been broken down.

It took longer than that. And I am not really sure we are all the way there yet.
Horton had other issues to contend with. His parents were killed in an automobile accident while Horton was playing winter ball in Puerto Rico. In 1967, Horton stood in uniform on a car in downtown Detroit while riots raged in the city, trying desperately to talk to looters while attempting to bring down the temperature while homes and vehicles burned around him.

Born in Arno, Virginia, Horton grew up in the Jeffries Projects of Detroit, the youngest of 21 children. He tells a charming story about the age gap between himself and his older siblings. One of them once offered him a ride home while Horton was playing ball in Appalachia, but Horton refused, not realizing he was an older brother.

“Suit yourself,” the man said. “I have to stop by to get some fish for mom.”

It later occurred to Horton “that his mom was my mom,” he writes.

Horton had a good network of support from family, friends and teammates.

And even from strangers. As youths, Horton and a friend had sneaked into Tiger Stadium but were caught by a security guard. Cleveland outfielder Rocky Colavito saw what was going on and intervened, taking the youths from the guard’s custody and asked the visiting clubhouse man to give them jobs.
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“Years later, when Rocky and I were teammates, I discovered his big heart wasn’t just a one-day event,” Horton writes. “That’s just Rocky’s way.”

Horton’s good fortune extended to his baseball career, with pioneering Blacks like Jake Wood and Gates Brown and white teammates like Mickey Stanley befriending him. Wood was a mentor and so was Brown, while Stanley was a teammate who saw Horton as a colleague and an equal.

It is not surprising that both Wood and Stanley wrote forewords to Horton’s autobiography.

Readers will learn how Horton got his nickname, “Boozie.” They will discover how Tigers General Manager Jim Campbell wrote him a $20,000 check to cover his parents’ funeral expenses when they died as a result of an auto accident in January 1965. The check also covered the medical expenses of other family members who were injured in the crash east of Battle Creek, Michigan.

Horton would come to call Campbell “my surrogate father,” who had “a heart of gold” for his friends. But Campbell was also a businessman, so particularly at contract time, “he ruled with an iron fist.”

Horton speaks warmly of his teammates and tells funny stories about men like Denny McLain, Al Kaline, Brown and Stanley. He praises Ray Oyler, a good-field, no-hit shortstop, for his ability to bunt even when batting ahead of the pitcher. And the Tigers had some good-hitting pitchers.

“Heck, Earl Wilson probably hit more homers in one season than Oyler hit in his whole career,” Horton writes.
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I couldn’t resist and had to look. Oyler hit 15 career homers. Wilson, who hit seven home runs twice in a season (1966 and 1968), had 35 home runs during his career.

Horton also mentions the 1970 game when Kaline collided with Jim Northrup in the outfield and “Mr. Tiger” swallowed his tongue. Horton used his boxing background to help Kaline clear his air passage, and even though the Hall of Famer does not remember the play due to passing out, the bite marks on Horton’s hand stands as a reminder.

Even though Horton said his teammates were like family — “I never felt a hint of racism with my Tiger teammates,” he writes — it still rankled him that for many years he was the only Black starter on the team outside of the pitching staff. And at one point, there were only three Blacks on the entire roster.

Horton’s recollections of the 1968 Detroit Tigers — a team that won the franchise’s first pennant in 23 seasons and then rallied from a 3-1 deficit to beat the Cardinals in the World Series — are fun to read.

St. Louis ace Bob Gibson struck out a record 17 batters in Game 1, and Horton was victim No. 17. But Horton would hit a home run in Game 2, and his defensive gem in Game 5 shifted the momentum to Detroit. Horton called the throw that nailed Brock at the plate “the most important moment in my professional career.”

It helped that the Tigers’ scouting report noted that Brock did not slide into home, and catcher Bill Freehan caught Horton’s throw, blocked the plate and tagged out Brock, who was standing up.

“Frankly, I think Brock was shocked that I even tried to throw him out at the plate,” Horton writes. “He was definitely shocked that he was out.”

When the Tigers went on to sweep the last three games of the Series, beating Gibson in Game 7, Horton, who batted .304 in the postseason with three extra-base hits, saw the championship as a way to return harmony to Detroit, which had been battered by riots and unrest the previous year. Horton noted after the Series-clinching win that the Tigers “were put here by God to heal this city.”

He believes that to this day.

“My spirituality just tells me that there was a connection,” Horton writes.

Horton speaks favorably of many of his managers, including Chuck Dressen, Mayo Smith and Billy Martin. He was not enamored with Ralph Houk in Detroit, or with Bob Swift, Dressen’s interim replacement  in 1965. But Martin “extended my career by six or seven years,” Horton writes, because of the manager’s insistence about conditioning and approach to the game.

Horton would take a turn managing, piloting the Valencia Magallanes in the Venezuelan League.

There are more interesting anecdotes. Horton opened a nightclub in Detroit. He once punched a horse — seriously. Horton’s sons had words with some fans in Toronto during the 1978 season, and when the player attempted to intervene he was hit in the head with a billy club by a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The horse came down on Horton’s son, breaking his foot. Horton, reacting to the swat against the head, turned and punched the horse.

“For the next month, people all around baseball were talking about how Willie Horton knocked out a horse,” Horton writes.

Playing for Seattle in 1979, Horton had his greatest power season, slugging 29 home runs and driving in 106 runs. One of his big moments for the Mariners came when he connected for his 300th career home run on June 6 against the Tigers, of all teams.

It was a bittersweet moment, since Horton had spent 15 of his 18 seasons with Detroit.

“I didn’t know whether I was happy or sad,” Horton writes. “Mostly, I was confused. Playing against the Tigers was the most difficult part of my career.”

Horton’s love affair with Detroit would return. The four-time All-Star had his uniform number retired in 2000. Since 2003, he has worked with the Tigers’ front office.

“I still have much I want to do in the world of baseball,” Horton said.

Baseball is better because of men like Horton, who endured tough times but never wavered from his goal of making a difference in the game — on and off the field. His role models cut across racial lines, and he humbly gives credit to those who paved his way to success.
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This is an uplifting autobiography. One does not need to be a fan of the Tigers to enjoy Horton’s take on his career and life.
Just like a comfortable pair of shoes.

Panini America’s 2022 Absolute Baseball offers an interesting mix of players past and present. Certainly, MLB’s current stars take center stage in the 100-card base set, but for nostalgia buffs there are some nice surprises.

I really enjoyed pulling cards with black-and-white photographs of Hall of Famers like Frank Chance, Tony Lazzeri and Cool Papa Bell, and color shots of Gil Hodges (finally in Cooperstown), Ron Santo and Goose Gossage.

The plus of buying a blaster box of this product is that Panini is promising either an autograph or memorabilia card. That’s a nice incentive.
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A blaster of Absolute Baseball has six packs per box and seven cards per pack.
I pulled 30 base cards plus a base retail parallel card of Yordan Alvarez.

While this product features banner lines as part of its design, the overall effect is not as distracting as say, the 2022 Panini Prestige football set. Absolute uses a more subtle approach. The player’s photograph is framed by a thin line that contains a primary color from his team’s uniform scheme. Swatches of that color are featured in the top left-hand and bottom right-hand parts of the card front.

The Absolute logo is stamped in silver foil in the top right-hand portion of the card. The player’s name is near the bottom left-hand part of the card in white block letters against the team’s primary color scheme. The city for the team is directly above the player’s name.
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The card backs have a pleasant mix of colors, with gray, white and the team’s primary colors sharing the spotlight. Beneath the player’s name is a 12-line biography set in ragged center type. Twelve lines may seem like a lot, but because the biography only takes up the left half of the card it does not overwhelm the collector.

There were several inserts in the blaster for collectors to chase.

Rookie Class contains 25 cards, and I pulled a base insert of Seattle pitcher Matt Brash. Included in the blaster were a pair of green retail parallels — Tampa Bay shortstop Wander Franco and Washington pitcher Josiah Gray.

Hall Worthy is a 15-card subset that features several players who have made it to Cooperstown and some who have a decent chance of being enshrined.

​Players in this set who have earned plaques include George Brett, Nolan Ryan and Willie Stargell. It also features players who are working toward a Hall of Fame, like Mike Trout, Miguel Cabrera and Albert Pujols. The base insert I pulled was of catcher Gary Carter, and there was also a retail green parallel of Brett.

Top players in the game are represented in the 10-card Extreme Team insert set. I pulled a card of Milwaukee pitcher Corbin Burnes.

Another 10-card insert set is By Storm. This subset features players who have made an immediate impact in MLB. I pulled a Franco card.

Icons is a 15-card offering that features mostly modern-day superstars, although it does include Hall of Famers like Sandy Koufax, Jimmie Foxx and Kirby Puckett. The card I pulled was of Atlanta outfielder Ronald Acuna Jr.
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The final insert in the blaster I bought is Statistically Speaking. There are 15 cards in this subset, and I pulled two cards — a base card of Miami shortstop Jazz Chisholm and a base retail parallel of Alvarez.

The big hit in the blaster was a memorabilia card. The Rookie Threads card of Atlanta pitcher Spencer Strider, one of 61 subjects, had a generous white uniform swatch and was produced on thick card stock.
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Not a bad haul. Absolute has an attainable base set and some nice inserts to chase. The design is pleasant, and while I still prefer designs with more of a full bleed look, Absolute was nevertheless an attractive set.

Panini Prestige Football was released just in time for the NFL’s preseason. And there is more to look for if you are a set builder.

The base set grew from 300 cards in 2021 to 400 this year. There are 300 cards of NFL veterans, with 90 rookie base cards and 10 short-printed rookies.

A blaster box contains six packs, with 11 cards to a pack.

The blaster I bought had 46 base cards and seven rookies (cards numbered 300 or higher). Also, there were Xtra Points premium green parallel cards of Devin Singletary and the Broncos’ Justin Simmons, numbered to 249.
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The design follows the pattern of Prestige from the past two years and is buoyed by some excellent action photography. The blurred background effect also works well for the veterans. For rookies, a solid color is used as the background behind the player.
None of the rookies were short-printed.

On the negative side, there are too many White banner-like lines across the top of the card. There are two at the top, with three shorter ones underneath the Prestige logo. It takes away valuable space that could have been employed better the action shot.

A full bleed would have worked nicely, for example.

There is a subtle use of foil that is effective. The Prestige logo is stamped in the upper left-hand corner of the card in silver, while the player’s name is in silver foil block letters at the bottom. The team logo is at the bottom left-hand corner of the card, and while tasteful, the box surrounding it could have been smaller.

Again, to devote more space to the action shot.
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Honestly, it’s not a terrible design, but I guess I am more of a minimal list.
The card backs feature a horizontally cropped version of the front photo. The cards also use one of the NFL team’s primary colors for highlighting purposes. That includes two banner-like lines at the top of the card.

Each player has a five-line biography that is displayed in ragged-right type. The statistics lines are limited to two, with 2021 results on one line and career totals underneath.

As promised on the blaster box, there were Xtra Points Diamond parallels, with one per pack. Two were rookies (DaMarvin Leal and Phidarian Mathis) and one was a Pro Football Hall of Famer (John Elway). The player’s name and the Prestige logo are stamped in gold foil, and when you tilt the card it gives off a nice look.

The blaster I opened had three different types of inserts.
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Living Legends is a 30-card subset that relies heavily on foil. As the name implies, the subjects depicted are NFL greats (or near greats).They are very shiny cards, and I pulled two of them — Shannon Sharpe and DeMarcus Ware.

Prestigious Moments is a 20-card subset, and I found two of these inserts: 40ers kicker Robbie Gould and Ravens kicker Justin Tucker.

The Highlight Reel insert has 20 cards, and I pulled Bills quarterback Josh Allen.
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Overall, not a bad set. The blaster gives the set collector plenty to work with, and the Diamond parallels are a definite plus. The overall design could have been better, but that is a matter of taste; I prefer more traditional designs.

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about Norah Jermaine, a 13-year-old girl from California who has amassed a sizable collection:

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/13-year-old-california-girl-hustles-to-collect-cards/

​Cleon Jones’ new autobiography is a joyous tale of an athlete who never forgot his roots. Life was not always joyful for the former New York Mets outfielder, but he remained focused, humble and candid.

He had a pretty good career, too.

Coming Home: My Amazin’ Life with the New York Mets (Triumph Books; hardback; $30; 239 pages) is a collaborative effort with Jones, who turned 80 this year, and Gary Kaschak, a veteran sportswriter and columnist with more than four decades of experience.

During his 13-year career in the majors — 12 with the Mets — Jones compiled a .281 lifetime batting average and hit over .300 twice, reaching his peak with a .340 mark in 1969.

Two things I hoped would be addressed in this book were covered thoroughly. To my delight, Jones leads off his book recalling the final out of the 1969 World Series. Jones caught a deep fly ball in left field hit by Baltimore’s Davey Johnson to complete the Mets’ “amazin’” world championship season. Jones caught the ball and genuflected (some say kneeled, including Jones, but my Catholic upbringing suggested a more reverent gesture).

“It was a sigh of relief and it was a moment of gratitude,” Jones writes.

Amen to that. It was a spontaneous reaction to a season that had an improbable script.

The second landmark moment Jones addressed from that 1969 season was the July 30 game at Shea Stadium, when Mets manager Gil Hodges slowly walked out to left field after Johnny Edwards doubled down the line and removed Jones from the game.

Reports at the time suggested that Jones loafed after the ball, and that was the reason Hodges yanked him from the game. More recent reporting noted that the outfield grass was slick and puddled from rain, and Jones, nursing an injured ankle, did not want to risk further injury.

Jones sets the record straight.

“Look down at what we’re standing in,” Jones said he told Hodges, who noticed that their feet were under water.

Both agreed that it was a good idea for Jones to leave the game, but reporters believed Hodges was trying to send a message.

Jones agrees but adds that the message was not limited to him.

“I didn’t think for one second Gil was trying to embarrass me, but that’s what they (reporters) were asking,” Jones writes. “I thought he was trying to make a statement, not to me, but to the team.”
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It was a wakeup call for Jones and his teammates. The rest, as they say, was history.

Jones came from a city that had its own glorious baseball history. Mobile, Alabama, produced Hall of Famers Satchel Paige, Henry Aaron, Willie McCovey, Billy Williams and Ozzie Smith.

Jones writes about his childhood spent living in the Africatown section of Mobile, where a teacher and his grandmother were the biggest influences during his youth. His parents were basically out of the picture, but Jones writes that home “was always the driving force.”

“People say Cleon Jones made Africatown,” Jones writes. “No. Africatown made Cleon Jones.”

Jones was a four-sport star in high school and was doing well at Alabama A&M when he was seriously injured when a car hit the vehicle he was sitting in and sent him through the windshield. After recovering, Jones decided to stay with one sport, choosing baseball.

Jones writes about the racism he encountered as an up-and-coming player in the Mets’ minor league system. He recalls an incident while playing for Auburn in the New York-Penn League and needed surgery due to painful hemorrhoids and told his manager as much.

“I could hardly walk, let alone play ball,” Jones wrote.

His manager “ignored what I had to say and put me in the lineup anyway.”

Curiously, Jones does not name the manager, but the Auburn team in 1963 was piloted by Dick Cole, who led the team to a first-place finish. Jones batted .360 at Auburn that year, going 18-for-50. Later that season he went to Raleigh in the Carolina League and batted .305.

I am not sure if this incident was necessarily racism or the case of a stubborn manager who did not want a player to dictate when he could play; I have no context and I certainly was not there. Certainly, Jones saw it as racism, suggesting that white players with lesser injuries were afforded more sympathy. I am not going to question his perceptions or his sincerity.

“I don’t know everything he said (to the Mets front office officials) even up to this day, only that he said some things that he didn’t need to say, like I was lazy and selfish,” Jones writes.

A more blatant display of racism occurred while Jones played for Raleigh in 1963, and he took a bold stand. His wife-to-be and future mother-in-law came to a game they were told they would have to sit in the segregated section down the left-field line. Jones refused to play unless they were allowed to sit behind home plate, and Raleigh’s general manager stepped in and made it happen.

Jones also recalls a 1964 incident in Jacksonville, Florida, while he was playing for Buffalo in the International League. A restaurant owner refused to serve Buffalo’s Black players but reluctantly capitulated after police told him his discrimination was against the law. But when a waitress refused to serve the players the next night, the manager fired her. She returned the next night and apologized to the players.

The woman eventually became a friend and a fan to all of the players, even attending some of the games.
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“It felt real good that a situation like that could take a new course,” Jones writes. “We’d made a friend.”

Jones also writes about his interest in the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to land in the U.S., just before the Civil War. Africatown was founded by the survivors from the illegal human cargo vessel  after the war, and Jones writes that “this sense of community I carry took root” as he learned more about the 100-foot ship that came to Alabama from Africa.
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The schooner lost for years in the Mobile River, was finally found in 2019. The wreck site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in November 2021.

“When I first found out it was true, I did a little dance,” Jones writes.

Coming Home is not just about social issues, although it plays a strong and necessary role. There is plenty of baseball, too. Mets fans from the 1960s — and even baseball fans who enjoy reading about that era — will enjoy Jones’ keen impressions and stories about players like Ken Boyer, Warren Spahn, Ralph Terry, Al Jackson, Tommie Agee, Jerry Grote, Bud Harrelson and Tommy Davis. The Mets, lovable losers when they debuted in 1962, slowly evolved into a strong baseball team, and by 1969 had put together a squad that had a memorable, magical season.

Jones touches on many subjects in his autobiography and presents keen snapshots of the players and managers he interacted with. Casey Stengel “had a great mind for the game.”

Hodges “set the tone for a new Mets attitude” during the team’s first meeting in 1968. His calm presence and philosophy earned the players’ respect, and they responded. It is clear that Jones respected Hodges and was devastated when the Mets manager died of a heart attack in early 1972.

And of course, there is lots of play-by-play and insight from Jones, who provides a locker-room view of the 1969 World Series and the “Ya Gotta Believe” season of 1973.

He also provides perspective on the "shoe polish" incident in Game 5 of the World Series. Jones claimed he was hit on the shoe by a Dave McNally pitch, and Hodges brought the baseball to the attention of umpire Lou DiMuro, who awarded Jones first base.

Shades of Nippy Jones for the Milwaukee Braves in the 1957 World Series. And the ball clearly caromed off Jones' foot.

Jones said he liked Yogi Berra as a player but did not consider him a good manager, and he provides the background to some of the disagreements that eventually led to the player’s release and the manager’s firing in 1975. That included a shouting match in the dugout after Jones pinch hit for Ed Kranepool and then was inserted into the game before he could put on a knee brace that was necessary for him to play the field. “I blew up,” Jones writes.

“Don’t get me wrong. Yogi was a decent person,” Jones writes. “He just didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.

“And I revered his friendship, but I didn’t think he did a good job with that.”
Jones later notes that Berra “was a good person and good for baseball, but certain manager’s instincts he didn’t possess.”

Jones also addresses the van incident earlier in 1975, when the outfielder remained in Florida to rehabilitate and was accused of indecent exposure on May 4. Police found him in a van with a woman, but Jones was never prosecuted. He later issued an apology to the New York media at a news conference.

“The next morning all I heard was that I was naked in a van, having sex with a young white girl,” Jones writes. “Naked! In a van! Never happened then, never would in the future.”

Jones called the incident and the media coverage that followed it “a hurtful lie that would never go away no matter how long or how hard I maintained it as gospel truth.”

Jones signed with the Chicago White Sox in 1976 but only got into 12 games before he was released four weeks into the season. He later became an instructor for the Mets during the 1980s, working with future major leaguers like Lenny Dykstra, Kevin Mitchell and Mike Fitzgerald.
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Jones, who would be inducted into the Mets Hall of Fame in 1991, returned to his Alabama roots. His nonprofit Last Out Community Foundation is helping revitalize the Africatown area by fixing and building affordable homes while providing programs for youths.

If there is a flaw in this book, it is due to some bad editing in places. The names of Monte Irvin, Dick Ricketts and Jake Peavy are misspelled, for example (as Irving, Rickets and Peavey), and there are some grammatical flubs that should have been caught by the book’s copy editors. “Regiment” when the proper word was “regimen,” for example.

Those glitches do not diminish the importance of what Cleon Jones has to say. He celebrates with the knowledge that while he will not be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, he still made a difference in the community he calls home.
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And that’s joyous.

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about the return of five expensive sports cards to a shop owner in Chicago.

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/chicago-card-shop-owner-recovers-5-high-end-cards-stolen-in-late-may/

Here's a story I wrote for Sports Collectors Daily about the 2022 Topps Formula 1 Racing set, which comes out in mid-September:

www.sportscollectorsdaily.com/2022-topps-formula-1-racing-boasts-new-inserts-dramatic-designs/​