The Orioles' First Black Player

Unlocked for all subscribers: Commemorating Black History Month, here's the story of the obscure pitcher who integrated the Orioles. Post includes my narration of my Baltimore Sun article about him.

Jehosie Heard

In 1953, the year before they moved to Baltimore and became the Orioles, the St. Louis Browns had one Black player - the legendary Satchel Paige, who’d pitched for pay since he was a skinny teenager in the Negro leagues in 1927. Working mostly out of the bullpen more than a quarter-century later, he was still effective enough to make the American League All-Star team in 1953 as, in theory, a 46-year-old. (Joe Durham, in his Bird Tapes interview, recalled batting against Paige in an exhibition game that summer and thinking the ancient right-handed looked closer to 60.)

Paige had pitched for the Browns since 1951; if he had re-upped in 1954, he almost surely would’ve become the Orioles’ first Black player. But a divorce ensued. The Orioles’ new ownership didn’t want to pay Paige’s generous salary. And Paige didn’t want any part of playing in Baltimore, where Jackie Robinson had been harassed as a minor leaguer in 1946 and, unlike in every other major league city, the downtown hotels were still strictly segregated.

Instead of Paige, a far-lesser-known player integrated the Orioles. Jehosie Heard, a diminutive left-handed pitcher, made the roster out of spring training in 1954, rode in the back of a car in the parade through the city before the first game at Memorial Stadium and became the first Black player to appear in a game for the Orioles when he came on in relief against the Chicago White Sox at Comiskey Park on April 24.

Heard’s winding journey to his history-making appearance was neither easy nor atypical for a Black athlete seeking a place in pro sports in his era. Before World War II, Heard dropped out of his segregated high school in Birmingham, Alabama, to help his mother, a single parent, make ends meet. According to a Society of American Baseball Research profile of Heard, he was introduced to baseball on an Army base during the war. Exhibiting promise, he caught on with the Birmingham Black Barons in 1946 and spent the next five years pitching for them and other teams in the Negro leagues.

Although he was just 5 feet 7 and 155 pounds, Heard commanded an array of off-speed pitches and mixed in a sneaky fastball to pile up strikeouts. The Browns reportedly spent $100,000 to purchase his contract and a teammate’s in 1951. Thus, Heard entered organized “white” baseball at 30 years old, his start having been delayed by war and prejudice, his best years on the mound likely behind him.

A bare trickle of Black players were in the major leagues in the early ‘50s. Even though the Dodgers had broken the color line with Robinson in 1947, most teams continued to limit opportunities for Black players or deny them altogether. The Pirates, Cardinals, Reds, and Senators didn’t integrate their rosters until 1954. The Yankees waited until 1955 and the Tigers, Phillies and Red Sox waited until even later in the decade.

Mirroring the doubt that existed for years at the quarterback position in football, teams were especially hesitant to use Black players at “thinking” positions such as catcher and pitcher. Waiting for his chance, Heard spent 1952 and 1953 with the Portland Beavers, a Browns affiliate in the Pacific Coast League, and the Victoria Tyees, a Beavers affiliate in the Western International League. Although he threw a no-hitter and posted a 20-win season, he wasn’t called up to the majors.

The Browns’ move to Baltimore helped his prospects. Paige’s departure was part of a roster shake-up that left the nascent Orioles short on left-handed pitching. As the only Black player in camp at spring training in Yuma, Arizona, in 1954, Heard impressed manager Jimmy Dykes as the Orioles posted a 12-5 record in the Cactus League. At long last, he had a job in the majors when the season began.

His place on the roster wasn’t strictly a baseball-related calculation. According to later reporting, the Orioles’ ownership and front office wanted to proceed with integrating the club, as opposed to joining the list of clubs holding out. They wanted a player with a demeanor enabling him to endure any animus he might face, and Heard, quiet by nature, seemed to them like the right person.

The Orioles trailed the White Sox, 10-0, in the bottom of the sixth inning on April 24 when Dykes summoned Heard from the bullpen to replace Mike Blyzka, who was getting shelled. It was a chilly Saturday afternoon in Chicago. Less than 10,000 fans were at the park but a national television audience was watching on ABC’s “Game of the Week” broadcast. Heard performed well in what was his major league debut as well as a moment of Orioles history, retiring all four batters he faced before giving the ball to teammate Martin Stuart, who allowed four more runs in what ended as a 14-4 defeat for the Orioles.

The Baltimore Sun didn’t mention the racial implications of Heard’s appearance until the eleventh paragraph of its story about the game in the next day’s paper, noting that he was “the first member of his race ever to appear in an Oriole uniform in a regular-season game.” Several weeks later, on May 17, the United States Supreme Court issued its unanimous ruling in the landmark case known as Brown v. Board of Education, effectively ending legal segregation.

But despite his clean first outing, Heard wasn’t in the Orioles’ plans. That became evident when he didn’t pitch again for more than a month, finally taking the mound on May 28 in the fifth inning of the first game of a doubleheader against the White Sox at Memorial Stadium. He didn’t allow a run in the fifth, but things fell apart for him in the sixth as he yielded six hits, three walks, a grand slam and five runs all told.

A week later, the Orioles sent him back to Portland. Although they said his demotion was strictly a baseball decision, the Baltimore Afro-American reported “a more salacious reason” for the move. As noted in the SABR profile, Heard’s neighbors had reported a domestic disturbance between Heard and his wife in mid-May. The disturbance included broken furniture and blood smears.

Later that season, the Orioles called up Joe Durham, who became the club’s first Black position player and the first Black Oriole to hit a home run. But the pace of integration was as tepid in Baltimore as it was elsewhere in the majors. The Orioles of the late ‘50s featured Connie Johnson, a pitcher who’d starred in the Negro leagues, and Bob Boyd, a first baseman who, in 1950, was the first Black player to sign with the White Sox, but otherwise, their roster was almost all white. And it was entirely white in 1962, leading Civil Rights groups to consider picketing Memorial Stadium.

Frank Robinson, in his Bird Tapes interview, correctly suggested that he became the Orioles' first Black star when he arrived via trade in 1966. “I think the team was ready” for it “but I don’t know if the city was,” said Robinson, whose wife was turned down by white landlords when she sought to rent suitable housing for their family while her husband was at spring training in 1966 — an issue Orioles owner Jerry Hoffberger had to step in and handle.

Heard never pitched in the majors again after the Orioles demoted him in 1954; his major league career consisted of two appearances. He went on pitch professionally for several more years, earning paychecks in the minors and winter ball into the late ‘50s. After he retired, he returned to Birmingham, found work in a dye factory and eventually became a supervisor. An avid fisherman, he maintained a circle of friends from his baseball days. He died in 1999.

A few years later, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the integration of the Orioles, the Baltimore Sun asked me to write a story about Heard. I traveled to Birmingham and spoke to his relatives, who told me he was proud of his role in having helped integrate the major leagues.

To hear me narrate the story I wrote about Heard, which ran under the headline “The Quiet Pioneer,” hit the play button below: