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First and foremost, Jackie
was a great baseball player
By MAURY ALLEN
of TheColumnists.com
Last week on April
15 baseball honored Jackie Robinson again with players wearing
his uniform number 42 and varied ceremonies across the country’s
parks to mark that historic date when Robinson integrated the
20th century game.
The most elaborate events on the theme were held in Robinson’s
old home town of Queens, New York where he lived for many years
as a Dodger, and the new stadium for the Mets, Citi Field, now
rises.
Jackie’s widow Rachel, other family members including daughter
Sharon who works for big league baseball, members of the Mets
ownership family, Fred and Jeff Wilpon and city dignitaries gathered
again to honor Jackie 62 years after he broke the game’s
unwritten but strictly held color line.
It is hard to remember in a country with an African American
president what it was like for Jackie in 1947 when he joined
the Dodgers.
First off, just about nobody on the team wanted him. A petition
opposing Robinson, organized by several southern teammates, was
circulated. History is cloudy about Dixie Walker’s role
but others clearly admitted they pushed it, including Bobby Bragan,
Hugh Casey and Eddie Stanky. Some refused, including Pee Wee
Reese, Ralph Branca, Duke Snider and ironically a southerner
named Kirby Higbe, more loyal to the team than to his southern
racial background.
All of it fizzled when Leo Durocher, the bombastic manager of
the team, collected the players at their spring training hotel
in Panama and read them the riot act. He told them Robinson would
play for him, that he was only the first of many to come and
he, Durocher, would play an elephant if it made the Dodger team
better.
In some few weeks Robinson had shown his stuff as a player and
except for a few hardheads he was accepted as just another teammate.
There were some bitter scenes through that first Dodger year
for Robinson but the players pulled together well enough to win
a pennant and make it to the seventh game of the World Series.
Now, 62 years later, Robinson is finally recognized as a brave,
heroic, dramatic American citizen who integrated the Great American
Pastime. Black lawyers, doctors, engineers, businessmen and a
President of the United States, owe him a debt of gratitude.
Who knows where America, especially black America, would be if
Robinson stumbled in his try?
What often is lost in the telling and retelling of Robinson’s
arrival on big league fields in Brooklyn, New York, Boston, Philadelphia,
St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Chicago and Cincinnati is his playing
ability.
This was a guy who revolutionized the game of baseball not because
he was black but because he was good. He was the most exciting
player to ever take the field. Babe Ruth could hit more home
runs and Willie Mays was probably better in every single category
of the game and Sandy Koufax was the best pitcher of his time
but no one electrified a crowd the way Robinson did.
I never covered Robinson as a sportswriter, missing him in Brooklyn,
by a few years but I studied him as a fan. I went to a half dozen
or more Brooklyn games each year at Ebbets Field from 1947 until
he retired in 1956.
There was never anything like Jackie Robinson on third base in
a close game. You think “Dancing with the Stars,” is
fun. Watching Robinson dance off third was more fun.
He stole home 18 times in his career, an unmatched record and
one World Series steal, in game one of the 1947 Series against
the Yankees and a rookie catcher named Yogi Berra, stays in baseball
lore. Berra has a closeup photo of it in his Montclair, New Jersey
museum, insisting he was out, while umpire Bill McGowan is signaling
safe.
“He was out then and he’s out now,” insists the
stubborn Berra.
Robinson did so many incredible things on the field in his short
professional career of 10 years. He was a rookie at 28 when most
big leaguers are peaking and starting to wind down.
His playing legacy changed the game from a clodding Babe Ruth
home run style with the lively ball from the early 1920s until
the late 1940s. He made it fun to watch what average or smaller
men--Lou Brock, Maury Wills and Rickey Henderson--could do on
the bases.
He was as competitive as an athlete could be and was as smart
as any person who ever played the game.
Whether it was racism or his aggressive personality, Jackie was
never offered a job in baseball. He would have made Durocher
and Billy Martin look like pussycats as he battled for his team
and his players.
I’m glad Jackie Robinson’s memory is honored each year
now by big league baseball. Obama does enough on the racial side
of things. Robinson does it all on the baseball side.
©2009 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted April 20, 2009.
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