If the article had instead highlighted some other team, say, the White Sox, and their decision to pass on signing Mays, would White Sox fans have reason to freak out about being treated unfairly? Good grief. The Yankees passed on Willie Mays, likely because of race issues. Deal with it.

1) The story of how he (Mays) got away is a window into a time when the Yankees (no other team is mentioned) resisted baseball integration with discriminatory policies…

2) Their scouts (Giants) were astonished at his advanced skills. That was also the first time the Yankees chose to ignore Mays.

3) The tactics of Weiss’s scouts and the relationships in the front office demonstrated the team’s institutuionalized discrimination (pretty damning claim).

4) When the Yankees did explore the Negro Leagues market, they did so with the help of Tom Baird, a white man who owned the Kansas City Monarchs and was a registered member of the Kansas Ku Klux Klan. Baird felt such kinship with the Yankees that he once wrote to their farm director, Lee MacPhail, “I feel like I am part of the Yankee organization.” (what can you take away from that statement other than that the author is trying, not so subliminally to say, that there was a link between the Klan and the Yanks; how “unfair to the Yankees” is that).

Bottom-line is Klima’s entire Times article was meant as an advertisement for his book and he chose to do it in the most sensational way he could; by “lobbing” some racial based bombs against the Yanks. While the “Yankee” portion of the book may be minor the author’s Times article was all about the Yanks. I guess we’d both would have to read his book to see if other teams “institutionalized discrimination” “Klan connection” or “resistance to integration” is mentioned but I doubt it.

“Your wrong though in saying that no one is lobbing things against the Yanks; that is the point of this whole conversation!!!!”

No. The post we’re all responding to is about a VERY short excerpt from a book that notes that the Yankees could have signed Willie Mays but decided to pass. Nobody’s saying the Yankees were the most racist organization in baseball. The Yankees passed on Willie Mays, and that’s a fact. Find me one quote on this page where someone said something about the Yankees being more responsible for their role in segregation/integration than they actually were. Actually, don’t bother, because I can just tell you what you’ll find: Nothing.

“Some author (not a “phantom”) is trying to sell a book and generate publicity by saying the Yanks, for racial reasons, passed on Mays.”

No. Again, you’re twisting facts to fit your false narrative that the Yankees are unfairly persecuted. The book is called: “Willie’s Boys: The 1948 Birmingham Black Barons, The Last Negro League World Series, and the Making of a Baseball Legend.” It’s not about the Yankees and how horribly racist they were, it’s about Willie Mays and has a very short part about the Yankees declining to sign him. The part about the Yankees passing on Mays is all of 150 words long. Go to the Amazon.com page for the book, and tell me that’s a book about the Yankees. This author isn’t causing some sort of sensational controversy by saying the Yankees failed to sign Willie Mays when they had the chance, and by doing research leading him (and any reasonable person) to believe that Mays’ race may have been a significant factor in that decision. Nothing about that conclusion is new or controversial or unfair to the Yankees.

“How do you not see that?”

Because it didn’t happen.