African-American baseball player Larry Doby was an unlikely Civil Rights pioneer. Unlike Major League Baseball's first Black player, Jackie Robinson, Doby was "shy, quiet, and unassuming"; he'd grown up in integrated Patterson, New Jersey, attended predominantly white Long Island University and lived a life far more sheltered from the stings and arrows of racial prejudice than the vast majority of African Americans. Yet it was Doby, even more than Jackie Robinson, whose courage and determination helped transform Major League Baseball into a national pastime for people of all races. In 1947, Doby became the first African-American player in the American League; he was also the first player to jump straight from the Negro Leagues to the majors. He later integrated Japanese baseball in 1962 and went on to become the sport's second Black manager and one of its first African-American executives. However it was in his...