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By “Surely God must have been with me
when I picked Jackie,” Branch Rickey said after he looked back at his
unprecedented signing of Jackie Robinson to a baseball contract in 1947. When Robinson died in 1972 of
diabetes and hypertension, some white sports columnists wrote that his coming
was no big thing and would have happened sooner or later. Others, more cynical, described Rickey’s
motive as greed. But the fact is that
before Rickey no one had done it or even seriously proposed doing it. That’s his legacy. And I guess it’s mine too since when
I received a publisher’s contract to write a biography of Rickey, I knew I
had to find out why so believing and trusting a Christian conservative and
Republican supporter of Cold War policies would dare to change the game he
revered forever. Very quickly I
understood the central role his religious faith played. And for most of his post-Jackie life he
peppered his speeches with references to the absence of fairness and justice
for Black people and other minorities. “Why is there an epidemic of racism
in the world today,” he began a talk on one steamy summer day in the late
fifties in I was born in Actually, we lived a myth, namely
that Until then, Ebbets
Field was my cathedral and passion for the Dodgers my faith. One thing about Rickey was that he
understood the extraordinary hold the team had on its fans. When he was forced out by Walter O’Malley –
he who kidnapped the team and fled to LA (Old joke: An armed “They were wonderful years. A community of over three million people,
proud, hurt, jealous, seeking geographical, social, emotional status as a city
apart and alone and sufficient. One
could not live for eight years in He was referring to a tradition where
speed and technology could never quite supplant his ingrained 19th century
deep-seated belief that baseball, and the profound city loyalties it
fostered, symbolized continuity in a world fractured by irreparable
disruption and unforgivable high crimes.
How, he once asked in a speech, can anyone explain the murders of one
and a half million Jewish children by the Nazis and their allies? In 1936 I saw my first Brooklyn
Dodger game with my Hebrew school class, shepherded by our rabbi’s brother,
sadly a Yankee fan. Bucky Walters, a Philly third baseman converted into a
pitcher with a windmill motion faced my favorite, Fred Frankhouse,
the idol of By the next year or so, with money I
had earned as a delivery boy for a delicatessen and a garment center company,
and regularly fortified with a sandwich and banana provided by my mother who
had somehow begun to understand what baseball meant to me, I took the subway
to Ebbets Field and sat alone in the bleachers. I’ve never forgotten certain special
players now ancient history like Gene Hermanski,
the first Dodger to welcome Robinson and whose photo appears with Rickey on
the cover of my hardcover book and who tried unsuccessfully to get all the
players to wear Robinson’s number 42 because of threats against his
life; slugger and Hall of Famer Joe Medwick who came from
the Cardinals in a trade pushed by cheapskate Cardinal owner Sam Breadon and executed by cheapskate Cardinal GM Branch
Rickey and was promptly accidentally beamed by Cardinal pitcher Bob
Bowman; third baseman Joe Stripp, dubbed without imagination by a sportswriter
“Jersey Joe” because he came from New Jersey and whose major contribution was
being traded for four players for Durocher; catcher Babe Phelps who was afraid to fly
and preferred trains and buses; Luis Olmo, the team’s first Puerto Rican position player; Ralph Branca, who
surrendered the infamous homerun to the Giant’s Bobby Thomson in 1951 (the
Giants stole the Dodger catcher’s signal by telescope, as the Wall Street
Journal reported a half century later), and was an early supporter of Jackie
Robinson; Canadian outfielder Goody
Rosen and Brooklyn-born pitcher Harry Eisenstat, my
favorite Jewish players (there weren’t many but Branca
later revealed he had a Jewish mother)
and Chris Hartje, an obscure backup catcher
in 1939, who hit a double before leaving baseball forever, drafted into the
Army preparing for WWII. To keep up on all their doings I was
a voracious reader of two gossip scandal-drenched and loud-mouthed tabloids,
the NY Daily News owned by the New Deal and FDR-hating Joseph Medill Patterson, and the other Hearst’s Daily Mirror,
sketchy and shallow, which featured Walter Winchell,
who I admired until he became Joe McCarthy’s ugly echo. Both papers though were blessed with
opinionated columnists, as did the Brooklyn Eagle, which to its everlasting
credit hired Walt Whitman for a two-year stint as its editor in 1846. When the Dodgers won the pennant for
the first time in twenty years in 1941, the Eagle spread a 12 pt. “WE WIN” across Page One
and Peewee Rosen and I played hooky to cheer on the players as they were
driven by in open cars in downtown And then there was the Daily Worker,
perpetually blind to Stalin’s monstrous crimes while falsely claiming that
its Party and sportswriters had played an important role in persuading Rickey
to sign Robinson. That Rickey, an
inveterate anti-Communist and Cold Warrior, paid any attention to Communists
is not believable and there is no evidence that he ever listened to
them. Then, too, he would never have
accepted what a non-Communist writer, the late leftist Jules Tygiel, erroneously wrote, namely that the Party and
especially the Daily Worker “had played a major role in elevating the issue
of baseball’s racial policies to the level of public consciousness,” a deeply
flawed conclusion with little or no supporting confirmation. In my opinion, the best article on
the subject disputing Tygiel’s inaccurate judgment
remains Henry D. Fetter’s definitive study, “The Party Line and the Color
Line: The American Communist Party and
the Daily Worker and Jackie Robinson,” which puts the alleged contribution of
the Communists to rest. In truth, as I
also found long before, l was that Rickey’s faith-driven dream and Robinson’s
great courage led the way to the historic end of racial segregation in
baseball. My baseball. A bucolic gamer, endless and timeless. Slow, unchangeable and reactionary, even as
it struggles nowadays to absorb the challenge of analytics and sabermetrics. I
know: It’s excessively commercial,
subservient to corporate control, silent about pointless American wars and
gravely harmed by an inexcusable imbalance between thew
haves and have-nots. I know, I
know. But it’s still baseball, my
baseball. And now, it’s my Mets too. |
