Ryne Duren and the Integration of Minor League Baseball

Rinold George “Ryne” Duren, one of Wisconsin’s most famous baseball pitchers, passed away at his Florida winter home on January 6, at age 81.   Born in Cazenovia, Wisconsin in 1929, Duren was not permitted to pitch while a high school student out of fear for the safety of the other players; however, he did star in the amateur adult Sauk County League, where he averaged 22 strike outs per game.

He signed a professional contract with the St. Louis Browns in 1949, and later pitched for seven different major league teams between 1954 and 1965.  He is best remembered as a star relief pitcher for the New York Yankees from 1958 to 1961.  In that role, he was instrumental in the Yankees victory over his home state Milwaukee Braves in the 1958 World Series.

Although his career statistics were fairly modest, a 27-44 won-lost record with 57 saves and a life time ERA of 3.83, Duren was well-known to baseball fans of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.  Perhaps the hardest thrower of that era and one of the first pitchers to have his fastball clocked at over 100 mph, Duren was a three-time all-star who averaged 9.6 strikeouts and 6.0 walks per nine innings for his career.

In 1958 and 1959, he was one of the best relief pitchers in major league baseball, but in most seasons, his lack of control limited his effectiveness.  In 1960, for example, he struck out an average of 12.3 batters per nine innings while holding opposing batters to a .160 batting average.  However, his lack of control, which led him to walk an average of one full batter per inning, caused his earned run average to balloon to 4.96.  Even though he pitched relatively few innings each year, he also several times ranked among league leaders in hit batsmen and wild pitches.

Although he was an accomplished pitcher for several years, Duren was best known as the original “Wild Man” relief pitcher.  (He was the prototype for the Charlie Sheen character in the movie Major League.) Although he was an athletic 6’2”, 190 lbs., Duren had extremely poor eyesight (20/200) and wore coke bottle thick eye-glasses.  He also had a severe drinking problem and frequently pitched while badly hung over and occasionally while intoxicated.  The combination of his wicked fastball, his lack of control, the coke bottle glasses, which he occasionally chose not to wear, and his well known penchant for drinking made him a very intimidating figure.

Duren’s inspirational autobiography, I Can See Clearly Now (2003), tells the story of his triumph over alcoholism in the years following his retirement from baseball.

What has not been mentioned in any of the tributes that have appeared since his death was Duren’s role in the integration of minor league baseball in the American South in the early 1950’s.  In his book  Brushing Back Jim Crow: The Integration of Minor League Baseball in the American South, historian Bruce Adelson tells several stories about Duren coming to the defense of his black teammates.

In 1955, Duren was pitching for the San Antonio Missions of the Texas League.  Even though the Texas League had been racially integrated in 1952, it still had very few black players and included several all-white teams.  Many of the league’s fans clearly resented racial integration.  That year, Shreveport Sports manager Mel McGaha regularly ordered his pitchers to throw at black batters.

According to Duren’s San Antonio teammate Willie Tasby, a black outfielder, Duren would retaliate on Tasby’s behalf by throwing 100-mph fastballs at Shreveport batters.  Apparently, Duren would sometimes take off his glasses and throw at Shreveport batters in the on-deck circle so that they would not be able to take first base when they were hit by his pitch.  Apparently, this tactic worked, and white pitchers stop throwing at Tasby.  The year before, Duren had also reportedly gone out of his way to befriend black San Antonio teammate Joe Durham who was not permitted to room or eat with his teammates in the Jim Crow South.

Playing minor league baseball in the South in the early 1950’s was no picnic for black baseball players, but the existence of sympathetic white teammates like Ryne Duren made it more bearable, and safer.

Duren spent most of his life in Wisconsin and his name appears on the Wall of Honor at Miller Park.  Hall of Famer Ryne Sandburg, born in 1959 in Spokane, Washington, during Duren’s best season, was named after Duren by his Yankee-fan father.

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Did Rock Legend Bob Dylan Steal His Name From Packer’s Legend Bob Dillon?

It is commonly known that Bob Dylan was originally Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota.  The legendary singer left Hibbing in 1959 to enroll at the University of Minnesota, and then less than a year later moved to New York where he achieved fame and fortune as a folk and later rock and roll performer.  Sometime after leaving Hibbing, he began performing under the name “Bob Dillon” or “Bob Dylan.”  There is some evidence that he initially spelled his new name “Dillon,” but changed it to “Dylan” after he arrived in Greenwich Village.  In any event, he legally changed his name to Dylan in 1962 while living in New York.

Why Zimmerman chose the name Dylan has long puzzled his biographers.  Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, Marshall Matt Dillon of TV’s iconic western Gunsmoke, and Dillon Road in Hibbing have all been suggested as possible sources.  Dylan himself has been characteristically vague and enigmatic on the name issue.

From 1952 (the year that Dylan was in the seventh grade) to 1959 (the year he enrolled as a freshman at the University of Minnesota), the Green Bay Packer defensive backfield was anchored by Bobby Dan Dillon, a 6’1”, 180 lb. native of Temple, Texas who played college football at the University of Texas.  Drafted by the Packers in the 3rd round of the 1952 NFL draft, Dillon (called Bob or Bobby) quickly moved into the starting lineup and for the next eight years was one of the few bright spots on a fairly dismal Packer team.  Dillon was a first-team all-pro on four occasions, played in four Pro Bowl games, and was named first or second team All-NFL every year after his rookie season.

There is no evidence that Bobby Zimmerman was especially interested in football or any other sports while growing up in Hibbing.  He did not play sports in high school, and while there are sports references in his later songs, they are principally to boxing and to a lesser extent, baseball.  On the other hand, there is no reason to believe that he wasn’t familiar with the sports figures of his era, at least in a general way.

I am not suggesting that Zimmerman chose the name Dylan to honor his football hero; it is more likely that he was familiar with the name (for reasons explained below) and simply liked the way it sounded.  (Of course, it could also be that the name Bobby Dan Dillon and the football player’s rural, southwestern roots appealed to the young Jewish Midwesterner who was soon to go to great lengths to project himself as a wandering troubadour from the heartland of America.)

Before the creation of the Minnesota Vikings in 1961, most northern Minnesota NFL fans followed the Green Bay Packers.  This is confirmed by former Marquette Law professor Ken Port who grew up in the area around Hibbing in the 1960’s and 70’s and who is an acquaintance of many of Dylan’s Zimmerman relatives.  According to Port, most of the older people he knew growing up had been Packer fans before 1961, and that many of them remained Packer fans after the arrival of the Vikings.

Packer games were broadcast into Minnesota on the radio each season, and from time to time on television as well.  For example, television sets in Hibbing on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1954, could be used to watch the Detroit Lions-Green Bay Packer game on the Dumont Network. (In that game, the Packers almost upset the first place Lions, before falling 28-24.)  It seems safe to say that any Packer fan is the 1950’s would have immediately recognized the name Bob Dillon

However, there was one even more direct Hibbing-Packers connection.  In the early 1950’s, the Packer held their summer training camp in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, which was not terribly far from Hibbing.  Moreover, on August 13, 1953, the Packers actually played an exhibition game in Hibbing against the New York Giants.  Given that Bobby Zimmerman was 12 years old at the time, it is hard to imagine that he would not have known about the game, and he likely would have heard the names of the top Packer players discussed.

As for the legal question in the title of this article, it is hard to believe that the football Bob Dillon would have had any legal recourse against the folk-rock legend even if Dylan did “steal” his name.  First of all, there is a general principle in property law that no one can own exclusive rights to a name.  Moreover, as I noted several years ago in an article on the landmark right of publicity case of Uhleander v. Ericksen (1970), the Minnesota law regarding the right of publicity was almost completely undeveloped prior to 1970.

However, the tort of appropriation of identity was widely recognized in 1959, and presumably existed in Minnesota.  The elements of that tort were (and are): (1) taking, (2) identification, (3) benefit to the appropriator, and (4) lack of consent.  Elements (3) and (4) would appear to have been satisfied, but elements (1) (a taking) and (2) (identification) demand that third parties recognize the identity that has been ostensibly taken and act in a manner that tangibly benefits the taker.  At a minimum, a person whose image is tortuously appropriated must be objectively identifiable; a benefit to the appropriator must accrue before a legal claim arises; and the use must be nonconsensual.  In this particular case, it seems unlikely that anyone listening to Bob Dylan sing or contemplating purchasing one of his albums was ever under the misimpression that the singer-songwriter was the Packer defensive back branching out into a new career.

On a different front, in contemporary intellectual property law, Dillon could conceivably have maintained a trademark action against Dylan.  Fans of sports law probably remember that in 1998, former basketball superstar Kareem Abdul-Jabbar sued NFL running back Karim Abdul-Jabbar for trademark infringement.  The football playing Jabbar, originally known as Sharmon Shah, changed his name for religious reasons in 1995 while still a student at UCLA.  Although the name was spelled slightly differently and the basketball playing Jabbar had been retired since 1989, there were a number of parallels between the two men that suggested some sort of linkage.  Both had attended UCLA and both wore uniform number 33, albeit in different sports in different eras.

Nevertheless, the basketball Jabbar filed a trademark infringement action against his football counterpart, once the latter became established as a rising star in the National Football League.  The case never went to trial, but the football Jabbar conceded the issue and agreed that for commercial purposes, he would play in the NFL under a different name.  After initially playing under the name Abdul, he eventually changed his name to Abdul-Karim al-Jabbar, which was apparently acceptable to Kareem.

The earlier Dillon situation was different for a number of reasons, the first of which was the “undeveloped” state of trademark law in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.  In that pre-dilution era, the primary focus of a successful trademark infringement claim was the proof of likelihood of confusion in the marketplace.

Again, it is hard to believe that anyone in 1959 or 1960 confused the two Dillons/Dylans, particularly given the dissimilar spelling of the names.  Moreover, while it is hard to believe that any knowledgeable sports fan really believed in 1996 that the 7’4” basketball legend Had actually embarked on a new, and apparently successful, career as an NFL running back at age 49 (his age during the football Jabber’s rookie year), it was true that many sports fans at the time assumed that the football Karim (who shared the same uniform number and alma mater with his basketball counterpart) was the son of Kareem Abdul Jabber (which he was not).

In contrast, no one ever suggested that they thought that Bob Dylan was Bob Dillon’s son (especially since the football Dillon was only eleven years older than the singer).

Unless Bob Dylan someday reveals where he got the idea for his name, we will be left to speculate on the matter.  For the reasons stated above, however, I think it highly likely that Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota went through adolescence already familiar with name that he would eventually adopt as his own, albeit with an altered spelling.

Professor Adam Kurland of Howard University Law School can attest to the fact that I have been making this “Bob Dylan got his name from the Packers’ Bobby Dillon” argument since the late 1980’s when we were both colleagues at Chicago-Kent, and I first learned that there had been a Bob Dillon who played for the Packers.

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Origins of Native American Team Names, Part II

I am trying to track down the history of “Indian” team names among professional sports teams in North America.  I am particularly interested in the period before 1897 when the success of major league outfielder Louis Sockalexis, the travelling Nebraska Indians baseball team, and the baseball and football teams of the Carlisle Indian School produced an equation in many American’s minds between athletic success and Native American ethnicity.

I know that many, mostly amateur, pre-1876 nines used Indian names for their clubs–I am relying upon Marshall Wright’s list of clubs in his history of baseball before 1870 for this assertion–and that most 19th-century nicknames for professional clubs were unofficial.

(The incorporation of the territorial exclusivity principle into professional baseball in 1876 made team names less necessary, since there could be only one Boston team in the National League or, for that matter, only one New Castle, Pennsylvania team in the minor-league Iron and Oil Association.)

Based upon the information on team names in the Baseball America’s Minor League Encyclopedia, 3rd ed., it appears that the practice of identifying professional baseball teams by Indian names largely began in 1887 (interestingly, during the season following the passage of the Dawes Act in February 1887).  That year, one finds teams like the Oneida Indians, the Wichita Braves, the Springfield (Mo.) Indians, the Fort Smith Indians, the Scranton Indians, and the Zanesville Kickapoos.

(I don’t count the London (Ont.) Tecumsehs of the International Association of 1877 and 1878 as a team with a Native American name, because that club was named after an individual Native American who was at the time treated as a Canadian national hero.  Portraits of Tecumseh in a red British general’s uniform were not uncommon in 19th-century Canada.)

It is easy to understand why Indian names would be attached to teams in towns like Oneida and Wichita since those are tribal names as well as city names.  I suppose that in the 1880’s places like Springfield, Missouri and Fort Smith, Arkansas were still close enough to their frontier origins (and to Indian Territory) that people might still associate Native Americans with those communities.

However, I have no idea why a team in Scranton would be called the Indians, especially since the same team was also referred to as the Miners, which makes sense given that Scranton was so closely linked to the anthracite coal industry.

I do know that local histories of Scranton in the late 19th century emphasized that the land on which the city was situated had been purchased by William Penn from the Delaware Indians (and Scranton’s county has an Indian name, Lackawanna), but presumably similar stories could be told for most American communities.  Perhaps there been an earlier, amateur club in Scranton called the “Indian Baseball Club” and the name somehow got attached to the town’s first professional team.

Most baffling is the team known as the Zanesville Kickapoos.  The Kickapoo were a real tribe, but by the 1880’s they had long been relocated to the west.  Moreover, their Midwestern base had been in western Indiana, not eastern Ohio, and there is, as far as I can tell, no reason to associate them with Zanesville.  Maybe it was a hidden reference to the team’s penchant for “kicking” (complaining), or possibly local sportswriters thought the name sounded funny and thus adopted it.  But that is just a guess.

Rosters for the 1887 Scranton and Zanesville teams can be found in the Baseball-Reference.com database, but none of the players on those teams have obviously Native American names.

On a related note, one of the truly bizarre team names in the history of minor league baseball is the Terre Haute Hottentots.  (Hottentot is a European-coined term for certain native tribal groups in southwestern Africa, and its usage is almost always viewed as derogatory.)

The name became associated with the Terre Haute team when it returned to the professional ranks in the early 1890’s.  It was apparently used to describe all of Terre Haute’s entries in various mid-western leagues until 1910 when the team name was changed to “Stags.”  However, the Hottentot name was revived in 1921 as “Tots” and was used continuously until the Terre Haute franchise went out of business after the 1937 season.

I can find nothing that discusses the origins of the name, or how it came to be attached to the Terre Haute team.  However, my suspicion is that it refers in a good-humored, racist way to the Terre Haute team’s previous employment of noted black baseball players Bud Fowler and Moses Fleetwood Walker.  Fowler played with the team in 1888, and Walker, a former major-league catcher, participated in the 1890 pre-season, but apparently did not play in any regular season games.

Moreover, “Hottentot” sounds a little bit like “Haute and Terra” and there is a certain alliterative quality to “Terre Haute Hottentots.”  Such things may have passed for humor in late 19th-century Indiana.

Comments on any of this would be much appreciated.

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