Fifty years after the Red Sox became the last team in Major League Baseball to have a black player on its roster, they have no blacks on their roster.

Fifty years ago Tuesday (July 21), Pumpsie Green integrated the Red Sox when he entered a game against the Chicago White Sox as a pinch-runner for Vic Wertz. The other 15 major league teams had already used blacks, beginning, of course, with Jackie Robinson in 1947, 12 and a half seasons earlier, and even including the Yankees, who added Elston Howard to the team in 1955.

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Richard Ravitch is a name that will live in baseball infamy. A lawyer who has held a wide variety of bureaucratic leadership positions, Ravitch was the chief labor negotiator who took Major League Baseball owners into the most disastrous strike in professional sports history.

Ravitch was excused from his position in the middle of the strike, but his contributions lived on.

As Michael Weiner the incoming executive director of the players union said, “Ravitch was the one who said initially that revenue sharing and the salary cap were inextricably intertwined, which was a little bit surprising because there would have been an argument that revenue sharing was not a mandatory subject of bargaining.”

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The last time the All-Star game was played in St. Louis, in 1966, the National League team featured a dazzling array of superstars and future Hall of Famers.

Half of the infield – first baseman Willie McCovey and second baseman Joe Morgan – and the entire outfield – Roberto Clemente, Willie Mays and Henry Aaron – would wind up in the Hall of Fame. So would the league’s starting pitcher, Sandy Koufax; the others who pitched for the N.L. in the game – Jim Bunning, Juan Marichal and Gaylord Perry – and Bob Gibson, who was selected for the team but couldn’t play because he developed an arm ailment.

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