Trailblazing before Jackie Robinson
Almost a year to the day before Jackie Robinson breaks the color line in Major League Baseball, 27-year-old pitcher Eddie Klep tries to do the same in 1946 as a White pitcher in the all-Black Negro Leagues.
Klep is with the Cleveland Buckeyes 79 years ago today, but is barred from playing in Birmingham, Ala., which has segregation laws prohibiting Whites from playing with Blacks.
Klep – sometimes misspelled as Klepp – eventually pitches in one game for the Buckeyes in 1946, giving up three runs in three innings before they release the 5-foot-7, 171-pound lefty in June of that season.
Three months later, Klep – a native of Erie, Pa. – is convicted of burglary and never again plays pro ball.
The incarceration is not the first in Klep’s life.
Not that Klep’s previous legal entanglements matter to Buckeyes owner Ernie Wright, who correctly predicts in signing Klep, even if simply as a promotional stunt, would bring publicity to his franchise.
“Ernie had the foresight to take a White ballplayer,” onetime Kansas City Monarchs catcher Sammy Haynes decades later tells Washington Post columnist Steve Moore, “knowing that sometimes (Klep) would be denied a chance to play and that it would draw a bigger crowd if they had some excitement.”
At the time, Buckeyes All-Star right fielder Willie Grace is more than cynical of Klep’s signing.
“He couldn’t have pitched in the league nowhere,” Grace says. “He really wasn’t fast enough. We had guys who could throw like a rifle shot.”
Klep, though, is not the first White player to play in the all-Black leagues.
A journeyman infielder named Chick Meade, who constantly is running afoul of the law, caps a six-year, seven-team career in the Negro Leagues – all the time evading the police – with the Harrisburg Giants in 1922.
Over those seasons, Meade appears in only 46 games, batting .138 in 176 scattered plate appearances with two homers and 17 runs batted in.
Meade, like Klep, would spend more time behind bars than he does on a baseball field.