He was a teammate of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, and other stars on the Yankees from 1930 through the middle of the 1936 season.

Although he played only 91 games at third, he led the AL in errors, and after Joe Sewell was acquired in the offseason, Chapman was shifted to the outfield to take advantage of his speed and throwing arm.

His 1931 total of 61 stolen bases was the highest by a Yankee since Fritz Maisel's 74 in 1914, and was the most by any major leaguer between 1921 and 1961 (equalled only by George Case in 1943).

[2] In a 1933 game, his intentional spiking of Washington Senators' second baseman Buddy Myer[3] (who was believed to be Jewish)[4] caused a 20-minute brawl that saw 300 fans participate and resulted in five-game suspensions and $100 fines for each of the players involved.

The player the Yankees received in return was Jake Powell, who would become infamous for a 1938 radio interview in which he stated that he liked to crack Blacks over the head with his nightstick as a police officer during the off-season.

[2] Chapman rebounded following the trade to finish the year with a .315 average, again making the All-Star team, scoring 100 runs and collecting a career-high 50 doubles.

The Senators sent him to the Boston Red Sox in June 1937, and that season he led the AL in steals for the fourth time with 35.

The Chicago White Sox then picked him up, but after he batted only .226 over the remainder of the year, his major league career appeared to be finished.

Chapman had replaced Freddie Fitzsimmons as manager of the Phillies in 1945 with that team buried in last place (winner of only 17 of 68 games).

The Phillies climbed to fifth place in 1946, the first year of the postwar baseball boom and the last season in which the color line was in effect.

Chapman's Phillies were not the only NL team to oppose racial integration – several Dodger players tried to petition management to keep him off the team[10] – but during an early-season series in Brooklyn, the level of verbal abuse directed by Chapman and his players at Robinson reached such proportions that it made headlines in the New York and national press.

The backlash against Chapman was so severe that he was asked to pose in a photograph with Robinson as a conciliatory gesture when the two teams next met in Philadelphia in May.

This incident prompted Robinson's teammate Dixie Walker to comment, "I never thought I'd see old Ben eat shit like that.

"[12] Robinson went on to stardom and a 10-year career, a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and a revered position in American sporting and civil rights history.

[14] In an interview with journalist Ray Robinson in the 1990s, Chapman stated, "A man learns about things and mellows as he grows older.

The newspaper headline "Red Sox beat Yanks 5–4 on Chapman's Homer", a possibly intentional pun on the title of John Keats' poem "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer", is mentioned in Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel Pale Fire (lines 97–98), where it is misinterpreted by the character Charles Kinbote.