The story goes that when Ellis Burks was called up to the majors by the Red Sox in 1987, future Hall-of-Famer Jim Rice, who was at the tail end of his amazing Boston career, told a clubhouse manager to put Burks’s locker next to his.
The reason: they were the only two Black players on the Red Sox, and Rice wanted to take him under his wing.
“Here’s a guy I want to be like,” Burks said of Rice. “When I came up to the clubhouse, we had a long conversation about all kinds of stuff.