By 1959, even the local N.H.L. team, the Bruins, had employed a black player, Willie O’Ree. But not the Red Sox. As Robinson, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Elston Howard helped their teams win championships in the 1950s, the Red Sox — with Ted Williams in his later prime — never finished first during that decade.

The Red Sox tried out Robinson at Fenway Park in 1945 and rejected him. A Boston scout, George Digby, arranged to buy Mays from the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro Leagues for $4,500. Yawkey and the general manager, Joe Cronin, refused.

“We could have had Mays in center and Williams in left,” Digby told The Boston Globe in 2005. “Cronin sent another scout down to look at him, but Yawkey and Cronin already had made up their minds they weren’t going to take any black players.”

Yawkey’s failure to win a championship — despite spending lavishly on players — partly defined him in the public mind after he died of leukemia. His final full season as owner had ended in a loss in Game 7 of the World Series, the third near miss under his stewardship.

Writing in The New York Times in July 1976, Red Smith eulogized Yawkey under the headline “Man Who Couldn’t Buy Pennants.” Yawkey was a sportsman, Smith wrote, not a businessman, and that set him apart:

“He had little in common with other club owners and they were mystified by him, if not downright suspicious, because he was a strange fish who was in baseball not to make a buck or feed his ego but because he happened to love the game. Not many of the others could understand this, and it embarrassed them. When they were counting their money or posing for television cameras, Yawkey would be off somewhere fishing or hunting with a couple of his players, or in the summer when the game was over and the crowds had left Fenway Park he would put on spikes and baseball pants and a sweat shirt and get Johnny Orlando, the maitre de clubhouse, to pitch to him he could hit line drives off that left-field wall.”