Tris Speaker - Post Professional Career

Post Professional Career

In 1929 Speaker replaced Walter Johnson as the manager of the Newark Bears of the International League, a post he held for two years. In 1933 he became a part owner of the Kansas City Blues. The announcement of Speaker’s election to the Baseball Hall of Fame was made in January 1937. At the time he was in the wholesale liquor business in Cleveland and was chairman of the city’s Boxing Commission.

In 1939, Speaker was named as the President of the National Professional Indoor Baseball League. The league had teams in New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati and St. Louis. The proposed 102-game schedule was short lived as the league shut down operations after only a month due to lack of fans.

Speaker helped found the Cleveland Society for Crippled Children and Camp Cheerful. From 1947 to his death, Speaker was an adviser, coach, and scout for the Indians. In an article in the July 1952 issue of SPORT, Speaker recounted how Bill Veeck hired him to be a coaching consultant to Larry Doby, who in 1947 had become the American League's first black player and just the second player to cross the baseball color barrier in Major League Baseball. The Indians had signed Doby, the star center fielder of the Newark Eagles of the Negro Leagues, in 1947. A SPORT photograph that accompanied the article shows Speaker mentoring five members of the Indians: Luke Easter, Jim Hegan, Ray Boone, Al Rosen and Doby.

Speaker was the first inductee of the Texas Sports Hall of Fame, entering in 1951.

Speaker is mentioned in the poem "Line-Up for Yesterday" by Ogden Nash:

S is for Speaker,
Swift center-field tender,
When the ball saw him coming,
It yelled, "I surrender."

Speaker died of a heart attack in Lake Whitney, Texas, at the age of 70. He is buried in Section 1, Block 2 of the Fairview Cemetery, Hubbard, Hill County, Texas.

In 2008, Speaker's name was brought up by Marvin Miller, who served as the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association from 1966 to 1982, as a player who should be removed from the Hall of Fame because of alleged membership in the Ku Klux Klan. Miller said, "Some of the early people inducted in the Hall were members of the Ku Klux Klan: Tris Speaker, Cap Anson, and some people suspect Ty Cobb as well. I think that by and large, the players, and certainly the ones I knew, are good people. But the Hall is full of villains." Noted baseball historian Bill James does not refute this claim, but adds that during the 1920s, the Klan had toned down its racist overtures and pulled in hundreds of thousands of non-racist men, including Hugo Black. James adds that Speaker was a staunch supporter of Larry Doby when he broke the American League color barrier, working long hours with him in the outfield, teaching Doby, who mainly played second base before arriving in Cleveland, the center field position; and Doby mentioned Speaker favorably during his Hall of Fame induction speech.