From Batboy to Pro Baseball Player: The Story of the Youngest Player of All Time Who Stole HR on His Debut

Joe Louis Reliford It was where it always was when visiting Blue and Gray Park, home of the Fitzgerald Pioneers of the Georgia State League: beyond the field fence next to the city train tracks. That’s where he and his friends played their own games of baseball as they watched the professionals practicing below.

But today, Reliford’s mind was elsewhere. His mother, who suffered from arthritis, was raising 10 children alone (his father had passed away years before) and the 10-year-old felt he needed to get a job to help out. He loved baseball, so why not be a batboy of the local team just a few blocks from your home?

There was a problem: It was 1950 in the Deep South and Reliford was black. The chances of an all-white team in an all-white league in a virtually all-white sport hiring a 10-year-old black boy seemed unlikely. There’s a reason Reliford and his friends were watching from the railroad outside the stadium – that’s the closest they were allowed to get.

He went directly to manager Ace Adams and told him his story. He asked if he could be the team’s batboy. Adams, a bit surprised by the request, told Reliford that he had to clear things up with his mother. Once he was inside and made sure he would take care of his son, the job became his. Sixty-eight dollars every two weeks.

But no one – not Joe, not Adams, not anyone associated with that early part of the story – would believe that two years later, Reliford would do something that would place him in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. “I’ve heard the story so many times, I remember it all,” Gwendolyn Reliford tells me from her home in Douglas, Georgia.

(Joe sadly had a stroke and was not available for an interview. But his wife Gwendolyn was more than happy to tell her husband’s story.) “She said she always felt bad that her mom had to take care of all her siblings without a dad,” recalls Gwendolyn.

So Joe, who wasn’t tall enough to go to most amusement park rides (4ft 11in, 68lbs), hit the road with a group of grown white men.

He shined shoes, carried bats and balls, and drew water for the players. There were hateful comments at away games and occasionally from some Pioneer players. “There was a man who had a seizure,” says Gwendolyn. “Just because it was black.”

“Only one or two wanted nothing to do with me,” Joe once said in an interview. “They were both pitchers, and they couldn’t win anyway. When they took them out of the game, they threw the glove on me.”

But for the most part, the team protected Joe and liked Fitzgerald’s new batboy. His closest confidante was player / coach Charley Ridgeway. “Charley Ridgeway always called [Joe] his son, “says Gwendolyn.” And when they were on the bus, he always sat with him in the front. “

“Mr. Ridgeway was a pretty good player and he took me under his wing,” Reliford told MiLB.com in 2007. When the team was banned from eating at roadside restaurants, Ridgeway and the team went elsewhere or they ate on the bus.

“When they found places to eat and they went to restaurants and there was a black boy there, [el restaurante] It said, ‘We don’t feed blacks,’ “Gwendolyn tells me.” They were leaving. They weren’t eating in the restaurant … Charlie wasn’t. They would go and find one [que se llevara a Joe]”

As the years passed, Ridgeway allowed Joe to practice on the field with the team. For the kid who grew up watching Satchel Paige pass through Georgia and remembered Josh Gibson doing at-bats in local Negro League games, warming up with professional players, professional white players, seemed unimaginable.

“Joe loved baseball,” says Gwendolyn. “Not only did he shine shoes and keep up with the team, they actually let him go out on the field and pitch and hit and practice with the players. He was actually a very good player, even though he was small.”

“I went out and played catch with all of them, and they threw it at me pretty hard,” Joe told the Courier-Herald. “This is how I learned to catch. If you keep practicing and learning something steadily, you’ll soon get pretty good at it. Before long, he could catch ground balls and catch pop flies, and then he could hit the ball, too. ”

And then, on July 19, 1952, the impossible happened. Joe Louis Reliford, a 12-year-old black boy, was playing in a professional baseball game. The youngest to do so in the history of organized baseball.

The Pioneers were playing an away game in Statesboro, Georgia, and were defeated 13-0 in the eighth inning. They were also in the middle of a terrible season, 14 games under .500 and 20 games out of first place. The large and boisterous crowd due to an Elks Club promo night wanted something different. Something funny.

“[Los Pioneros] they were so far behind that the score was terrible, “says Gwendolyn.” The fans wanted to have fun and when they saw [Joe] outside, they thought, ‘Well the batboy couldn’t be worse than the players, how could he be?’ So they kept yelling, ‘Put on the batboy!’ “.

With his team going through so many races, the crowd never stopped and knowing that Joe could hold his own against the pros, Ridgeway relented: he told Joe to “grab a bat.” Although it was against the rules to play your Batman, Ridgeway thought Joe had earned a chance.

Reliford would replace Ray Nichting, who, as Joe described, was the Pioneers’ version of “Mickey Mantle.” He was nervous. He thought Ridgeway was teasing him at first and was “as scared as can be”. He used a fungus bat, the lightest on the shelf, and went into the box.

There it was, it’s almost too incredible to be real: a 5-foot-12-year-old boy versus a 6-foot-24-year-old man named Curtis White. The crowd was nervous, happy that they got what they wanted, and excited for what might happen next.

And White didn’t give in to Joe.

“He shot him like he was a grown man,” says Gwendolyn. “He didn’t give in because he was a kid.”

White threw a first pitch fastball to Joe’s right and then even though he didn’t do what he wanted and hit it “out of the park,” Joe somehow made contact on the next strike. He started the ball to third, but the third baseman made a big play on the hole and knocked it out a step.

“The fans went crazy,” says Gwendolyn, laughing. “They never expected him to hit the ball.”

That might have been enough for a legendary story, the fact that he put the ball in play. Who would believe it? No one would ever get over it.

But that was only the first act of Joe Reliford’s debut.

“Mr. Ridgeway gave him a glove and said, ‘Go ahead,'” says Gwendolyn.

The crowd was delirious. Joe jogged into right field and, unlike any of us if we were put to a professional baseball game when we were kids, he actually wanted to get hit. And well, they hit him the balls.

Joe kicked out a runner trying to go from first to third – “I guess he was thinking the little kid can’t kick me out” – and for the last out of the inning, he made an all-ages play.

Statesboro’s top player, Harold Schuster, came up to the plate. He had a 21 hit streak in play. He was looking for a home run, looking in the direction of the little boy in right field. Sure enough, Schuster hit a fly ball to the right-field fence.

“The fence wasn’t that high, but when he raised his hand, it almost hit the top of the fence,” says Gwendolyn. “It would have been a home run, because he would have jumped the fence.”

Stolen from a home run by a 12-year-old who could barely reach over a five-foot fence. The crowd lost it. They ran across the field, running toward their new baseball hero. Joe didn’t know what to think.

“I was scared,” Gwendolyn tells me. “He thought they were going to come looking for him and hurt him because he stole a home run.”

“The stands were emptied and I was terribly scared,” Reliford said years later. “I caught a ball and I wasn’t even supposed to be on the field. All those targets were coming at me and I thought they were doing it because I caught the ball. But they were happy for me and I didn’t.” I know.”

Spectators patted him on the back and shoved money into his pockets. Ridgeway sang the praises of Reliford on the bus ride out of town. But shortly after the game, once the headlines hit the local news, the league fined and suspended Ridgeway for putting Joe in the game. The referee was fired and Joe was finally fired.

“He was a black guy and he wasn’t supposed to be out there anyway,” says Gwendolyn. “That was the last time he played there.”

Joe’s celebrity (and talent) status landed him a job playing for a local Negro League team called Lucky Stars and he was a star soccer, baseball, and basketball player in high school. He was awarded a scholarship to Florida A&M, but a broken collarbone in his senior year derailed his future in sports. Instead, he became an electrician and then, after moving to Douglas, Georgia, after college, he was hired as the city’s third black police officer.

Gwendolyn says she didn’t fully realize what he had done until they were married in the late 1960s and she found a book in the library called “Strange But True Baseball Stories.” Joe’s batboy debut was there. Since then, there have been many local stories recounting the feat of Reliford and Sports Illustrated made a big profile in 1990. He was also invited to Nationals games to make the first pitch and sit in the owners’ box. Ted Turner, a former owner of the Atlanta Braves, gave Reliford a lifetime pass to games.

So that’s the story. This is how a 10-year-old boy, who just wanted to help his mother, ended up with an exhibition at the holiest institution in baseball and integrated professional ball into one of the most racially divided and brutally segregated areas in the country. He believes the attention his appearance received helped pave the way for future black stars like Willie McCovey, Hank Aaron and Willie Mays to play for the whites in the South.

Who could doubt him?

Matt Monagan / MLB.com