Sports Views

Earl Wilson, who died 23 April of an apparent heart attack, hit 28 more lifetime home runs than Jerry Remy. What was wrong with that picture? Wilson was a pitcher. In the American League. Yes, children, once upon a time pitchers swung the bat in the American League, and once upon a time was a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox and the Detroit Tigers who took as much quarter at the plate as he did on the mound.

According to Bennett, the bartender asked for his order, then Morehead’s, but refused Wilson rather brutally: “We ain’t serving you. We don’t serve niggers in here.” For Bennett, it was his first brush with racial prejudice on that sort of level of commerce. For the trio of Red Sox pitchers in full, it was an invitation to leave. “To (the bartenders),” Bennett eventually told Red Sox historiographer Peter Golenbock (for Fenway: An Unexpurgated History of the Boston Red Sox), “we were just two white...