(From left) Luke Easter, Artie Wilson and Johnny Ritchey integrated the minor-league San Diego Padres / Photo courtesy of collection of William Swank
Professional baseball banned black players from America’s pastime until Jackie Robinson broke the “color line” in 1947. That same year, a local black player named Johnny Ritchey made another kind of history when he joined the minor-league San Diego Padres.
Ritchey was the first black player in the Pacific Coast League, which would soon become one of the first fully integrated professional leagues in all of American sports, and one of our first homegrown baseball stars. He’d