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 Jackie Robinson's legacy is not only the integration of African-Americans into major league lineups, but the presence of all races in large numbers. |
Baseball is now integrated
at a scale nobody expected
of TheColumnists.com
The 2007 New York
baseball season will begin this week without a true African-American
in the starting lineup of the Yankees or Mets.
Prejudice or progress? Ahh, that’s the question 60 years
after Jackie Robinson broke the baseball color line with the
Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.
Derek Jeter will be at shortstop for the Yankees. He has a white
mother and an African-American father. He is the Barack Obama
of baseball, too light skinned to be truly black and too black
to be truly an honoree of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
What does this all mean six decades after Robinson survived the
most difficult experience in sports history?
After sauntering through a dozen spring training camps last month,
I realized the changes in the Great American Pastime. Baseball
is no longer the national game, it is the international game.
There are more players from Central America, South America, Japan,
China and Australia than there are kids from the corn fields
of Iowa. If Bob Feller brought his Van Meter, Iowa background
to baseball in 2007, his 100-MPH fastball would be looked on
as routine and his background would be looked on as strange.
About 30 or 40 years ago, in the heat and height of the civil
rights movement, young professor Harry Edwards said the acceptance
of blacks into sports was the grandest racist plot in American
social life. He suggested that blacks were allowed into baseball,
football and basketball (even hockey and soccer now) as a scam
for keeping them out of medical school, dental school, engineering,
business and politics.
Now blacks in the professions are hardly noticed. A black (half)
may be the next president of the United States. Black faces are
seen in theater, movies, television and every other form of American
artistic expression.
I like to think the absence of blacks in baseball is more about
the presence of blacks in business than it is about any form
of American racism.
A walk through a spring training press box now or a regular season
stadium area when the real games begin will show more reporters
of Asian and Latin background than the old fashioned tough, pale,
cigarette-dangling sportswriters of my early days in the late
1950s and early 1960s.
Billy Martin, the late crusty manager of the New York Yankees,
once summed up the attitude of baseball managers about race,
religion and color.
“I’d play Adolph Hitler,” Martin once shouted
when confronted with a suggestion of racial prejudice, “if
he could hit a curve ball.”
After Jackie Robinson broke in and helped the Dodgers to a 1947
pennant and Monte Irvin integrated the New York Giants and Elston
Howard integrated the Yankees in 1955 (Pumpsie Green was the
last to integrate a big league team with a 1959 appearance for
the Boston Red Sox) prejudice really disappeared on the field.
It only mattered if the ball player could play.
There were cases of racism throughout the game’s late 20th
century history, probably no different in degree than in any
American venture. Occasionally there would be a Reggie Jackson.
He was generally hated by his teammates, not for his color (mixed
Hispanic and African American) but for his character. Braggadocios.
Today Japanese players mingle with Hispanic players, white players
dine with Chinese players, Australians socialize with Latin players.
It is truly an integrated game.
Something called the World Baseball Classic put players together
last year as never happened before. A Japanese team beat a Cuban
team for the title and all of the American players who skipped
a good part of spring training enjoyed the experience.
Now there is talk of teams in the big leagues in Europe, Japan
and South America. The World Series, the most mis-named tournament
in sport, may truly become a world event with representation
from dozens of countries.
I truly think Jackie Robinson would be pleased and proud if he
looked around the starting lineups of big league clubs today
and saw the opportunities for salaries in the millions for young
kids from so many countries.
Robinson’s greatest contribution may not have simply been
opening the game to minorities in this country but opening the
game to millions of kids around the world.
This year a professional league will actually begin in Israel
with three former big league players, Art Shamsky, Ron Blomberg
and Ken Holtzman, rare big league Jewish players, managing teams
in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
It won’t be long before one of their players graduates from
the Tel Aviv Tigers to the New York Mets, an instant hero to
the large New York Jewish population.
I am not concerned that no pure African American is in the opening
day starting lineup of the Mets or the Yankees in 2007. It means
they are on the CEO track of big companies, starring as Academy
Award actors, running universities or running for president.
Jackie Robinson was one of the most significant figures in 20th
century America. His legacy really lives on in board rooms instead
of ball fields.
©2007 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen caricature is ©2001
by Jim Hummel. The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection,
1895 Francisco Blvd. East, San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This
column first posted April 2, 2007.
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