From Teaneck To The Big Time

Editor's Note: When this profile was written in 1999, Doug Glanville was with the Philadelphia Phillies. After stints with Texas and Chicago, he rejoined the Phillies at the end of the 2003 season.

His story causes you to shatter any ingrained stereotypes you may have of the black athlete. Or at least reconsider them. That is what Doug Glanville would request, anyway, having risen from the self-described fantasyland of a small suburban New Jersey community, through the University of Pennsylvania, to the world of professional baseball as a first-round draft pick and a potential All-Star at the age of 27. He would request that simple consideration come before judgment, that society get to know him as a person rather than categorize him based on the color of his skin or his choice of a college. Glanville has seen how ignorant classifications can affect a person, he has seen them first-hand. And he has matured into an eloquent spokesman, eager to communicate what he has learned from his experiences, eager to change the minds of those who doubt.

Glanville passes on some of his messages on this cool February morning when he is found via telephone in his home in Teaneck, N.J., the home where has lived his entire life. It is early in February, the month when professional ballplayers prepare to report to their respective teams, and this will not be an ordinary spring training for Glanville - it will be his first in the uniform of his favorite boyhood team, the Philadelphia Phillies. The Phillies traded All-Star second-baseman Mickey Morandini to the Chicago Cubs during the offseason for the rights to Glanville, and he will be competing with All-Star Len Dykstra in the coming weeks for the starting centerfield job. The kid from Teaneck who was called too smart to play the game of baseball has made it to the big time.

From the age of four, Glanville was groomed to be a ballplayer. Not by his parents or a neighborhood coach, but by his brother, Ken, who is nearly eight years older than Doug. Ken started his younger sibling on whiffle ball and things took off from there. Ken breathed baseball growing up and Doug simply followed suit. From Strat-oMatic games to keeping score to attending professional tryouts together, it was Ken and Doug and baseball. Nothing stopped their dreams.

"My brother is an extremely passionate person, especially when it comes to baseball, and I think he taught me a lot about passion," said Doug. "He tried out [for professional baseball] until he was 28, and he would lie about his age, and when you see that, it motivates you to work harder. It definitely rubbed off and gave me the ability to endure the minor leagues and the whole experience there."

But Doug Glanville's story begins before he reaches the minor leagues. It has to. It has to start in Teaneck, a small, racially diverse town that seems out of place in very white and very wealthy Bergen County, New Jersey. Teaneck offered the comforts of a small community, where people got to know Glanville and his family and where race rarely became an issue. It wasn't just a life of baseball for Glanville; his parents wouldn't allow that. Glanville took piano lessons, co-edited the school yearbook and volunteered in the community, helping his mother, a Teaneck High School math teacher, work with African-American youngsters on Saturday mornings. And Glanville was a strong student to boot; he would graduate from Teaneck in 1988 in the top five percent of his class.

To call Teaneck a fairytale world is only partially correct, because not everything was perfect. Despite a prolific baseball career at Teaneck High School, Glanville twice was passed over for the team's most valuable player award, even though his batting average each year nearly doubled that of the award's recipients. After his junior season, Glanville was told by his coach, Ray DiPippo, that the award should go to a senior. After his senior season, one in which Glanville hit .525 and captained the team, he wasn't told anything about the award. Instead, he read in the newspaper about how the award had gone to someone else. Glanville confronted DiPippo that evening at the awards dinner.

"The problem was that I'm not a selfish person but I went angry to the dinner and he said that I won all of the awards and the other guy never did," remembered Glanville. "The more I listened to him, it just didn't sound right, he had one excuse the first year and then another excuse the second year and maybe he just didn't want to give it to me...I remember telling him, this might be good, because you've kind of lit a fire underneath me. Too bad it was lit by an arsonist."

Thats the problem with something as subtle as racism - it is difficult to prove. But Glanville felt the racial overtones and showed the resulting anger. He carried that fire on to the University of Pennsylvania, which he chose to attend ahead of Princeton, Yale, Brown and Duke. He had taken his first recruiting trip to Penn and had liked it, and Quakers head coach Bob Seddon was a north Jersey native himself. More importantly, Penn was the only school that told Glanville straight up that he would have the chance to play in the outfield, a position that he loved.

"Other schools were recruiting me as a pitcher," said Glanville. "But I like to play every day and be involved every day instead of in a rotation. Plus, I enjoy defense and I like to hit."

He grows excited as he makes this comment, talking about all of the different aspects of baseball, and you can tell that he genuinely enjoys all of them. Enjoys the competition. Enjoys the game itself.

Unfortunately, all of this would be tested during his first two years at Penn, as the kid from Teaneck emerged from his shelter and was exposed to a wider community. The problems began on the baseball team as the low-key and reserved Glanville was pushed and pushed by his teammates who felt he wasn't working hard enough in practice.

You're the fastest guy on the team, why aren't you finishing first when we do our runs?

Oh, you were born with everything. I work 10 times harder and you're still doing better.

God gave you everything, you didn't work for anything, you didn't earn where you are now. God just genetically put you in the position to succeed.

Affirmative action, affirmative action. The only reason you're at this school is because you're black. The only reason you're at this school is because you're an athlete.

Glanville heard all of it and more, and he endured his first two years on the team with frustration and anger mounting inside of him. Towards the end of his sophomore season, things had gotten to be so bad that Glanville considered not playing baseball anymore. He had a long talk with Coach Seddon, who encouraged him to understand the jealousy of his teammates and work harder to prove them wrong.

Glanville spent the summer following his sophomore season playing baseball in the nation's top summer league in Cape Cod. The challenge was right there in front of him. He would be playing against the best prospects in the nation from the top baseball programs and he would have to prove he could hold his own. And oh, did he ever hold his own.

Glanville finished the summer hitting .331, third in the league with 59 hits. He was named the Top Pro Prospect of the summer league, and began to be considered as a first-round draft pick. He hit .414 during his junior season, was named first team allEIBA and was courted by a number of teams, projected to be drafted midway through the first round.

It was also during his junior year at Penn that an incident in Teaneck altered his perspective on life. Teaneck police officer Gary Spath, a white man, shot and killed a fleeing black youth who he thought was reaching for a gun. Suddenly, people in and around Teaneck were doubting the town's diversity, doubting the fairytale world that allowed peaceful and friendly coexistence among the town's residents could ever be restored. And doubting that it had existed in the first place. Glanville saw these generalizations as hurtful.

"I think that's the danger when you go through any experience, if you start globalizing your assessment because of the act of an individual or a small group," said Glanville. "But that's what Teaneck protected me from. For every person whom I felt was treating me with some bias, I felt like there was another person who wasn't. Exposure [to different groups of people] is a big part of the first step, and Teaneck provided that."

Growing up in Teaneck had helped teach Glanville values to which he clung closely. He had developed a high moral sense from his family, one that he soon learned was not shared by many in the cutthroat world of professional baseball. The clash between the two value sets began a maturing process that eventually taught Glanville to pick his spots to battle. It would be a slow and difficult process.

In late April of 1991, two months before the baseball draft and at the peak of scouting, Glanville chose to sit out the Temple game in order to study for a final exam the following morning. Unfortunately, he made the decision late and scores of professional scouts were in the stands to watch him play. The decision added to growing criticism about the Penn junior. That he lacked the necessary desire to evolve into a top player. That the Ivy League had not prepared him well enough for professional baseball. That he was concentrating too much on his academic work. Heck, this was a kid who had declined a spot on Team USA in 1989 because he didn't want to have to miss midterm exams during the fall tour to Taiwain.

"I've always had a pretty reserved demeanor, been pretty low key," explains Glanville. "You have to be around me to know that it doesn't mean I dont care about things."

But the clash of the two different worlds continued. Time and time again, Glanville was asked about his commitment and time and time again, he re-emphasized his desire to play professional baseball. Glanville had passed the word around to interested teams that he would sign with them following the June draft, but that his contract would have to allow for him to return to Penn in order to graduate on time in 1992. Asked why it was really necessary to return to school by a Detroit Tigers scout, Glanville snapped.

"My dad came to this country [from Trinidad] when he was 31 and my mom is another first generation college student," he remembers telling the scout. "They broke their backs their entire lives to give me the opportunity to go to college, and they spent no telling how much money on the University of Pennsylvania to give me the three years that I had and the least I can do is to walk away [from baseball] now knowing full well that all I'm missing is half of an instructional league, not like Im missing a season. You must be out of your mind if youre going to question that. As soon as I complete this [academic] obligation, I'll be sure to commit to whatever I have to do baseball-wise in the same fashion, but all you have to do is give me this semester."

There. Simple. How could that possibly be so difficult to understand? And yet it was. Glanvilles commitment to return to school was viewed as a lack of interest in baseball. The Chicago Cubs organization drafted him with the twelfth pick of the first round that June, but the doubts persisted. Glanville played in an instructional league and then returned to school in the fall. He took a leave of absence from Penn in the spring in order to play baseball but then returned again and graduated in the fall of 1992, surprising the doubters all along the way who never believed in that commitment to academics. His senior project in engineering mixed his two loves, as he explored the possibility of building a new stadium above the 30th Street Railroad Station in Philadelphia, deeming it a poor site due to transportation and traffic concerns.

After graduation, Glanville committed full-time to the Cubs organization, but the bumps continued. Glanville received criticism and fought back, preferring to have an intelligent discussion rather than simply accept the negative appraisal. At one point when Glanville was playing in the New York Penn instructional league, he had been accused of stealing baseballs from the club when the manager spotted four balls in his locker. Instead of simply apologizing for something he hadn't done and moving on, Glanville had fought back, pulling the baseballs out of his locker in order to show the manager their imprinted covers from leagues other than the New York Penn, proving he had not taken the balls. Baseball people weren't used to this type of reaction, and they didn't know how to deal with Glanville. Said Cubs roving outfielder instructor Jimmy Piersall, in a 1993 article in the Cubs newsletter, Vine Lines:

"Coming from an Ivy League school, Doug was never used to the discipline it takes to play baseball. He got away with not having to take extra practice. He had to join a lot of other ballplayers with us and find out that he had to do drills and work. It was hard for him.

"It was hard for me to adjust to what was going on in his mind. One day I looked over and he was in the locker room area talking to his parents, hashing over where he was going to live at school. I said, I'm losing you. I've had over 400 kids over the years, and I've never understood something like you."

Glanville's story is full of these battles against the establishment. The resolute Glanville was not well accepted by baseball people and he didn't understand where they were coming from either. Glanville moved slowly up through the ranks of minor league baseball, but he appeared to be stuck at the Cubs Triple A team in Des Moines until the winter of 1995 in Puerto Rico.

Ironically, the wintertime provided a crossroads in Glanville's career in the summer sport. Much like the Cape Cod Summer League had put Glanville at the top of the national collegiate map, his performance in winter ball resuscitated his career. The country was perfect for Glanville and provided solace from the bitter feelings he had felt from the Cubs organization. Here, everyone accepted him, and didn't ask demeaning questions about his intelligence or his race. Here, he was a person, just like everyone else.

"Puerto Rico was the best experience of my life," said Glanville. "My mom always says that it was a validation experience, that I needed to do that and go away to an accepting environment. Maybe I was beating my own path in certain ways or maybe my background was unique in baseball and a lot of times I felt like I was on an island. Then, when I was literally on the island [of Puerto Rico], the people were great, I got to practice the language. So, I came away with so much more than just being a better player."

He returned to the United States, having been named the MVP of the winter league, with a refreshed outlook on his career. He had face-to-face meetings with all of the Cubs top executives to explain his approach to the game. And he resolved to not worry about the things and preformulated opinions that were beyond his control. He resolved to just play ball.

Midway through the 1996 season, he got the call up to the major leagues, and he has been a fixture ever since. In 1997, he started 104 games, 75 of them in left field, and became the first Cubs right-handed hitter to hit .300 since Ryne Sandburg in 1993. And now, Glanville will be back in Philadelphia, back close to home and to Penn. He has no regrets about going to Penn and remains close with Coach Seddon and several of his teammates.

"I really enjoyed the university, the classes, the city, everything, I really did," said Glanville. "It was just that I had a tough time the first two years adjusting, just like probably everybody does, but I wouldn't change a thing with respect to where I went [to college]. Overall, it was a great experience and a great education and I definitely keep in touch with a lot of people there."

Being back in Philadelphia will allow him to renew acquaintances with several of his professors from Penn. Glanville would enjoy the opportunity to become a systems engineering consultant after his baseball career is over, and being in Philadelphia will allow him to lay the groundwork for that to happen.

But before we worry about life after baseball, there is that matter of his current career, which has clear All-Star potential. Ironically, Glanville will now have the opportunity to play for the team he followed growing up, the Phillies - a team that he had been attracted to by their teal blue road uniforms of the 1970s, complete with the Red P across the chest. This season, he will wear white with red pinstripes, and the modern look includes the Phillies name spelled out across the uniform, something Glanville hopes to change.

"I mentioned [the teal uniforms] to the Phillies organization and told them that's why I loved the team," said Glanville. "The [current road] greys are pretty cool, but I like that P they used to have, I don't really like the Phillies across the front. We'll see what we can do. Maybe if I establish myself a little bit, I can try to lobby for a change back [to the teal uniforms]."

With the success he had last year, they better start searching for the old teal thread in Philadelphia.

-- Dan Rosenthal

***Please note, this story was written for a previous Ivy League Black History Month celebration. It is reproduced here for archival purposes and has not been updated.***