When Tom Yawkey was the owner, and Willie Mays played in the Negro Leagues, Mays’s Birmingham Black Barons shared a stadium with a Red Sox minor-league club, which infamously passed on the chance to sign the man who would become an enduring icon of the sport. Just as infamously, the Red Sox would be the last American League team to integrate its roster with the addition of Pumpsie Green in 1959, 12 years after Jackie Robinson made his debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
From that point until what would become the Fenway Sports Group bought the team and put it in direct competition with the Yankees, the Red Sox would bumble their way through decades and close calls without getting over the hump under caretaker owners great and small.