James L. Ray
Clyde Sukeforth was a backup catcher who played parts of ten seasons in the Major Leagues for the Cincinnati Reds and Brooklyn Dodgers. Over those ten seasons, Sukeforth hit .264 with only 2 home runs and had 96 runs batted in. Although his accomplishments as a player were minimal, Sukeforth’s subsequent years as a Minor League scout and big league coach led him to play key roles in three momentous baseball events: the discovery of Jackie Robinson, the signing of Roberto Clemente, and the decision to send in Ralph Branca to pitch to Bobby Thomson, a decision that led to Thomson’s 1951 “Shot Heard ‘Round the World.”
Clyde Leroy Sukeforth was born on November 30, 1901, in Washington, Maine, a tiny rural town. His father was Pearle Leroy Sukeforth, who as a young man was a cooper but who later became a dairy farmer. Clyde’s mother was Sarah M. Grinnell, known as Sadie. Pearle and Sarah were married in May 1899 and had their first child, a daughter named Hazel, in November 1899.
The Sukeforths received out-of-town news only from the Boston Post, which was delivered by stagecoach every evening to the local library. From the time he was a young boy, Clyde journeyed to that library to read about his favorite baseball players. Most of those players were members of the Boston Red Sox, who just happened to be the best team in baseball during Clyde’s adolescent years.
But Sukeforth did not just read about the game; he played it whenever he got the chance in the brief summers of southern Maine. “Every kid played baseball in my day. That’s all there really was to do. There was no organization to it, but we played seven days a week. And every kid had a ball and a glove,” Sukeforth said in a 1991 interview.
Clyde Sukeforth managed the Dodgers to victories in the
first two games of the season.
In 1916 Sukeforth enrolled in the Coburn Classical Institute, a college preparatory high school in nearby Waterville. By the end of World War I, Maine had become one of the leading paper-manufacturing states in the nation. Massive sawmills, pulp mills, and paper plants popped up around the state, creating jobs and giving rise to a number of company-sponsored baseball teams. After graduating from high school, Sukeforth played two