By Lee A. Daniels
George Curry Media Columnist
Lee A. Daniels
Another baseball season has opened, and with it, Major League Baseball’s annual homage to Jack Roosevelt Robinson, more popularly known as Jackie Robinson. He broke baseball’s color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers and was one of the late 1940s’ harbingers of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
This year, the tribute to Robinson was complemented by documentarian Ken Burns’ superb exploration on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) of Robinson’s life and the American society of the mid-20th century.
As Burns shows, Robinson’s importance to all of America’s 20th century history cannot be overstated. Branch Rickey, the Dodgers owner who considered integrating baseball his mission, “needed a soldier” in the fight for racial equality. As Rachel Robinson, Jackie’s widow, says in the documentary, “someone whose inner strength and unshakable allegiance to Black Americans’ struggle would enable him to stoically withstand the venomous racism within baseball’s ranks, and among many of its fans and other Whites throughout the country.” (One can get a sense of what Robinson endured from the misogynistic abuse hurled now at many female sports reporters and sportswriters via social media.)
But Robinson’s cloaked anger likely intensified his naturally fierce competitive instincts on the diamond. He was smart at bat and swift and daring on the base paths. He won the National League’s Rookie of the Year Award and two years later captured the League’s Most Valuable Player honor. Two decades before the Yankees star, Reggie Jackson said of himself that he was “the straw that stirs the drink.” Jack Roosevelt Robinson was that and not just for the Dodgers. He was that for Black America, too.
This is not to slight all the work civil rights activists were engaged in in the late 1940s.
Rather, it’s to underscore that then, unlike the crowded professional sports world of today, baseball reigned supreme. It literally was worshipped as the uniquely “American” game.
Its mythic designation, which took shape in the 19th century, undoubtedly contributed to the Major League teams’ de facto agreement to bar Black players in 1897-one year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s legalized racism in the infamous Plessy decision.
So, Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier had meaning far beyond the game itself. He “represented” as well as any one individual could.
He gave Black Americans’ confidence in their fitness as American citizens and their unceasing determination to claim their rightful place in American society.
Much of the telling of the Jackie Robinson story has focused on that broader history of the cost of racism to Blacks generally and to him specifically. The latter truth is especially poignant when one considers that because of the Major League’s racist rule, Robinson, who was a multi-sport star in high school in the late 1930s, effectively lost a full decade of a career in the Major Leagues.
But there’s another facet to the Jackie Robinson story that’s too little discussed, or even noticed. That is what racism – the banning of Black players from the Major Leagues – cost Major League baseball itself.
We can see one dramatic example of that by considering Robinson’s pre-Brooklyn Dodgers experience with another Major League team: the Boston Red Sox.
It’s well known that in 1945 Robinson endured a “sham tryout” with the Red Sox, whose owner was fully committed to preserving baseball’s color barrier. The Dodgers and Robinson himself reaped the benefit.
In his rookie year and for five more times during his 10-year career, Robinson and the Dodgers played in the World Series. Each time they played their hated crosstown rivals, the New York Yankees, winning only once.
Meanwhile, after making it to the World Series in 1946, the Red Sox began a 20-year exile from World Series play. In 1951, however, they did have the opportunity to atone for their mistake in not taking Robinson by drafting a “can’t miss” Black teenage phenom from Alabama. But once again they kept to their no-Blacks rule.
That teenage phenom was Willie Mays. He was drafted instead by the New York (baseball) Giants and by 1954 was playing in the World Series. The Red Sox didn’t sign a Black player until 1959 – the last Major League team to do so. They didn’t get back to the World Series until 1967.
Consider this fact: In the 20 years from 1945 to 1965, the New York Yankees were “Baseball’s Team.” With a lineup that included some of the greatest players in the game’s history, they appeared in an astounding 15 World Series and won 10 of them.
Now, imagine a post- 1945 to early-1960s Boston Red Sox team with a lineup that included Jackie Robinson, and Willie Mays, a dazzling outfielder and power hitter, and Ted Williams, arguably the game’s greatest pure hitter.
Ponder this question, How many times during those decades would it have been the Boston Red Sox, not the New York Yankees, in the World Series?
Just in baseball terms, that could be a magnificent debate. In terms of the larger American society, it is stark evidence that racism has always had a cost that is borne on both sides of the Color Line.