Monte Irvin
Henry County native Monford Merrill “Monte” Irvin (1919-2016) played professional baseball as an outfielder for the Newark Eagles, New York Giants, and Chicago Cubs. After achieving renown in the Negro Leagues, he became one of the first Black players to join Major League Baseball (MLB) in 1949.
Irvin was born Hubert Merrill Irvin, on February 25, 1919, to father Cupid Alexander Irvin and mother Mary Eliza Henderson Irvin in Haleburg, a sparsely inhabited town in Henry County near Alabama’s eastern border with Georgia. He was the eighth of thirteen children. When he was eight years old, his parents legally changed his name to Monford Merrill Irvin to honor his sister Eulalia, who died when her appendix burst; Eulalia disliked the name Hubert and always called her younger brother “Monford.” People then gave him the nickname “Monty,” the name he went by for the rest of his life. When he became a professional baseball star, however, the bottom of the “y” in “Monty” overlapped with other players’ autographs on baseballs, so Irvin changed the spelling to “Monte.”
His father, a sharecropper in Haleburg, was repeatedly cheated and threatened by White farmers and business owners. Later in life, Irvin would recall a local shopkeeper who habitually refused to give his father change. When his father objected, the store owner repeatedly told him that he could not do math and was mistaken about deserving change before ordering him out of the store. Nonetheless, he kept shopping there because he had no alternatives. Like most Black people in the state, the Irvins had no recourse to the law and could not expect justice or police support in the 1920s. Fearing for their safety and seeking better opportunities, they were among the millions who departed the South between 1915 and 1970 in what came to be known as the Great Migration. Irvin would continue to live in the North for most of his adult life, partly owing to his memories of the overt and hurtful racism his family encountered in Alabama. Years later, when he visited Alabama for his career with the Negro Leagues, Irvin would recount similar racial humiliation from White business owners.
In 1927, the family moved briefly to Waycross, Georgia, before settling in Orange, New Jersey. Irving attended Orange High School, where he became a star athlete in four different sports and broke the New Jersey record for the javelin throw. Irvin attended Lincoln University, a historically Black university in Oxford, Pennsylvania, where he was a star football player and pre-dentistry student. In 1938, he left the university to play professional baseball with the Negro National League’s Newark Eagles, where he quickly became one of the most notable players in the league. Irvin played on the Newark Eagles from 1938 to 1942, with a short stint in the Mexican Leagues in 1942.
Irvin’s baseball career was interrupted in 1943 by World War II, and he served for two years as part of the 1313th Engineer General Service Regiment, a segregated, all-Black unit in Europe. He saw combat in the Battle of the Bulge that caused him health problems, leaving him with ringing in his ears and negatively affecting his balance. After the war, executive Branch Rickey attempted to sign Irvin to the New York Dodgers, but Irvin declined, considering himself unready after his two-year absence from baseball. Had he accepted, he would have been the first Black player in Major League Baseball. From 1946-48, he played again for the Newark Eagles. In 1946, the Newark Eagles won the Negro League World series, defeating the Kansas City Monarchs, which featured Mobile native Satchel Paige.
By the time Irvin was allowed to join Major League Baseball, he was 30 years old and arguably past his prime. Major League Baseball remained segregated until Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947. When Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey signed Robinson, he wanted to sign Irvin also, but the Newark Eagles’s business manager refused to release Irvin to the Dodgers without substantial compensation. Nonetheless, Irvin was one of the first Black players to play for the major leagues, joining two years after Robinson. The New York Giants paid the Eagles $5,000 for Irvin, who became a star corner outfielder (left field and right field) for the Giants from 1949-55.
When future Hall of Famer Willie Mays joined the Giants in 1951 as a rookie, manager Leo Durocher asked Irvin to mentor and room with him. Mays remarked that Irvin was like a brother to him. In 1951, Irvin, Mays, and Hank Thompson made history by being the first Major League all-Black outfield. That year, Irvin and Mays led the Giants to the first of two World Series for the Giants together. Irvin had the most hits among the team, 11, but the Giants lost to the star-studded New York Yankees four games to two. Despite the loss, that season was his most successful, with 24 home runs and a league leading 121 runs batted in (RBIs). He would place third in National League Most Valuable Player voting, behind the renowned Roy Campanella and Stan Musial. The following season, Irvin was named a National League reserve All-Star. In 1954, the Giants swept the Cleveland Indians featuring future Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Lemon, four games to none. Irvin was less successful in this series as Dusty Rhodes pinch-hit several times for Irvin and led the team in RBIs during the series. Irvin joined the Chicago Cubs in 1956 and would retire the following year after injuring his back.
In the ensuing years, Irvin went to work in public relations for Rheingold Beer, and, later, as a scout for the New York Mets. From 1968-84, he worked as a public relations specialist for Major League Baseball, where he was baseball’s first Black executive. In 1996, Irvin published the memoir Nice Guys Finish First. The title was a response to his friend and manager Leo Durocher, who had written the 1975 memoir Nice Guys Finish Last. Irvin was widely known as an exceptionally kind person, and Durocher was known for aggressive play, cheating, and fighting.
Despite missing out on playing Major League Baseball for a decade because he was Black, Irvin was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1973 for his excellent record with both the Giants and in the Negro Leagues. In 2006, he was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame in Birmingham; that same year, Orange Park, in Orange, New Jersey, was renamed Monte Irvin Park. On June 26, 2010, the San Francisco Giants retired Irvin’s number (20), meaning that no Giants player can wear that number again. In 2013, he won the Bob Feller Act of Valor Award for his military service, named for the Hall of Fame pitcher and fellow World War II veteran. Irvin died on January 11, 2016, at the age of 96 in Houston, Texas. At the time of his death, Irvin had been married to his wife Dorinda Otey Irvin for 67 years; the couple had two daughters.
