The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum’s touring exhibit on the Black and Latin American players who broke color lines, “Barrier Breakers,” opens Tuesday at the San Diego Central Library.
The exhibit includes a special tribute to San Diego’s Johnny Ritchey, who broke the professional baseball color barrier on the West Coast in 1948 with the Padres of the Pacific Coast League.
Ritchey was born and raised in San Diego. At age 15, Ritchey and another black player, Nelson Manuel, played on the Post Six American Legion squad that won the Junior World Series in Spartanburg, South Carolina in 1938, even though neither could play in the tournament because of laws forbidding integrated athletic competitions.
The two were also not allowed to play in the 1940 Junior World Series in North Carolina.
Ritchey played at San Diego High School and then-San Diego State College. His time in college was interrupted by serving in the U.S. Army for 27 months during World War II in a combat engineering unit, seeing service at the invasion of Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge and in the Philippines, rising to the rank of staff sergeant.
Ritchey returned to San Diego State following the war and was the Aztecs’ leading hitter in 1946 with a .356 average. He began his professional career in 1947 with the Chicago American Giants, leading the Negro American League with a .381 batting average.
Ritchey made his Padres debut March 30, 1948, grounding out as a pinch hitter in the ninth inning of a 7-4 season-opening loss to Los Angeles Angels at Lane Field, now the site of a park bearing its name in downtown San Diego.
He batted .323 as a rookie with the Padres in 1948. He also played with the Padres in 1949. He played with three other PCL teams — the Portland Beavers, Sacramento Solons and San Francisco Seals, the Vancouver Capilanos of the Western International League and the Syracuse Chiefs of the Eastern League during his nine-season career in organized baseball which ended in 1956.
Ritchey died in 2003 in Chula Vista at the age of 80. A bust of Ritchey and a plaque honoring him as “The Jackie Robinson of the Pacific Coast League” is in The Draft at Petco Park.
The plaque includes a quote from Ritchie: “It was a thrill to play for the Padres. The fans cheered and my feeling was it was because I was a San Diego boy making good. It had nothing to do with race.”
The opening also coincides with Major League Baseball’s Jackie Robinson Day on the anniversary of his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947.
The exhibit will run through May 31.
The Padres will host the fourth annual Breaking Barriers Forum from 3 to 4 p.m. Tuesday at the San Diego Central Library with Ritchey’s granddaughter Carlee Battle, SDG&E Director of Community Relations Kazeem Omidiji, and California Masonic Foundation President Doug Ismail, telling high school students about their experiences in overcoming life’s obstacles.
