Jake Powell

October 6, 1936. The Polo Grounds. The Yankees closed out the Giants 13-5 to win the World Series in six games, and the player who'd carried the Yankees offense all series long wasn't Lou Gehrig and wasn't the 21-year-old rookie center fielder everyone had come to see. It was Jake Powell, a utility outfielder who'd been a Washington Senator four months earlier. He finished the Series batting .455, 10 hits in six games, the best line on either roster.

That's one half of why Jake Powell is still a name in Yankees history. The other half arrived two years later, in a Chicago radio booth, and it's uglier than anything that happens on a baseball field. In July 1938, Powell went on the air before a game and made racist remarks that got him suspended, drew a formal protest from Black civic leaders, and forced Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis to answer publicly for a sport that still refused to let Black players on the field at all. Both stories are Powell's. Neither cancels out the other, and a fair account of the man tells them both.

Path to the Bronx

Alvin Jacob Powell was born July 15, 1908, in Silver Spring, Maryland. He broke into the majors with the Washington Senators in 1930, bounced back to the minors, and returned to Washington for good in 1934 -- a fast, aggressive outfielder with a solid glove and a reputation for playing the game hard, sometimes too hard.

On June 14, 1936, the Yankees traded outfielder Ben Chapman to Washington for Powell, a straight one-for-one swap. It looked like a minor move at the time (nobody in either city wrote it up as a blockbuster). Joe DiMaggio was in the middle of his rookie season, Lou Gehrig was in the middle of an MVP year, and the Yankees had holes to fill around them. Powell filled his -- .302 or better after the trade, seven home runs, a regular spot in an outfield built for October.

Yankees Career

Powell's playing time shrank every year after that first half-season. George Selkirk already held down right field, and as Tommy Henrich and Charlie Keller arrived to join DiMaggio, there simply wasn't enough outfield to go around (the late-'30s Yankees had a bad habit of turning perfectly good players into afterthoughts). He went from 87 games in 1936 to 12 in 1940, mostly a fourth outfielder and pinch-hitter by the end, but he kept collecting rings -- 1936, 1937, and 1938 -- before the Yankees sold him to the minors partway through the 1940 season.

The Unlikely World Series Hero

Nobody circled Powell's name before the 1936 World Series against the Giants (why would they -- he'd been a Yankee for less than four months). He wasn't a star, and Bill Terry's Giants had Carl Hubbell and his screwball to lean on. None of that mattered once the Series started. Powell went 10-for-22, scored eight runs, drove in five, and stole the Yankees' only base of the Series. In Game 6, he went 3-for-5 with a two-run homer off Freddie Fitzsimmons and four RBI in a 13-5 rout that clinched the title.

DiMaggio hit .346 in his first Fall Classic. Gehrig was Gehrig. But for six games that October, the best hitter on the field wore Jake Powell's uniform number, and nobody -- least of all Powell -- had seen it coming.

July 29, 1938: The WGN Interview

Two years later, before a game against the White Sox at Comiskey Park, Powell sat down for a live pregame interview with WGN announcer Bob Elson. Elson asked a routine question -- how did Powell stay in shape during the offseason. Powell answered that he worked as a police officer in Dayton, Ohio, and then, using a racial slur, described beating Black residents with his nightstick as part of the job -- live, on the air.

WGN cut the interview immediately, but it had already gone out over the air, and the station's switchboard lit up with outraged callers for the rest of the broadcast. Accounts of the exact wording differ slightly -- some say Powell mentioned a nightstick, others a blackjack, some add that he claimed to throw people in jail afterward -- because no recording survives and every version comes from secondhand newspaper transcription. What every source agrees on is the substance: a Yankees player, live on the radio, described assaulting Black people as routine and funny.

There's a final, ugly detail that makes the whole thing worse. Powell wasn't actually a Dayton police officer. He'd applied for the job and been turned down.

Suspension and the Reckoning

Three Black civic organizations in Chicago filed a formal protest with Commissioner Landis's office the day after the broadcast. Landis suspended Powell for 10 days.

Ten days was a light penalty for what Powell had said, and plenty of people said so at the time. The Black press -- the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Baltimore Afro-American, the New York Amsterdam News, and others -- used the incident to attack Powell and, more pointedly, to attack a sport that would suspend a player for talking about violence against Black people while still refusing to let a single Black player put on a major league uniform. Lester Rodney, the sportswriter covering baseball for the Communist Daily Worker and one of the era's loudest voices against the color line, covered what he called the "Jake Powell rumpus" and hammered Landis for treating it as a minor lapse in manners rather than what it was.

The Yankees felt the pressure too. Owner Jacob Ruppert also owned a brewery, and word went around that bars in Black neighborhoods of New York might stop carrying Ruppert beer over the incident. According to sportswriter Red Smith's account, the club sent Powell to Harlem to apologize in person -- bar to bar, from one end of the neighborhood to the other, introducing himself and saying he was sorry. Powell finished serving his suspension and went back to playing baseball. Organized baseball's color line held for another nine years, until Jackie Robinson broke it in 1947.

Decline and Departure

Powell's Yankees career wound down quietly after that. He played parts of three more seasons -- 45 games in 1938, 31 in 1939, 12 in 1940 -- buried on the bench behind a younger, deeper outfield, before the Yankees sold him to the minor leagues in the middle of the 1940 season. He resurfaced with Washington in 1943, closed out his career with a brief stop in Philadelphia in 1945, and finished with 11 major league seasons.

His life after baseball didn't settle down. On November 4, 1948, Powell was being questioned at Washington, D.C. police headquarters -- the same kind of building where his 1938 lie had started -- on charges of passing bad checks. He pulled a pistol from his pocket and shot himself. He died at the scene.

Two things are true about Jake Powell, and neither one gets to be the whole story by itself. He hit .455 in a World Series next to Joe DiMaggio and Lou Gehrig. He also went on the radio and bragged about beating Black people for a job he never had. Both belong in the record.