I
was a child in the 60s and I was rocked to sleep each night in the summertime by
a transistor radio singing lullabies of balls and strikes. I loved my parents, but my true heroes wore
crisp white flannel uniforms with bright red Cardinals perched at either end of
a bat on the front. On the backs of the
uniforms were names like Gibson, Brock, Flood, and White. I had (and still have!) multiple copies of
their baseball cards. I watched them on
TV when they played Sunday afternoon games on the road, and 4 or 5 times each
year, my family would venture to the old Busch Stadium (former Sportsman’s
Park) to see them in person. I loved
everything about those guys.
But
since I did not grow up in the 40s or 50s, I did not get to see Jackie Robinson
play baseball. I didn’t know his story
for years. It wasn’t until later in my adolescence
when I learned about Jackie and segregation and racism, both in baseball and in
life. Looking back, it unnerves me to
think that my childhood heroes that I took for granted would not have had the
opportunities and lives they had if it had not been for the bravery and
tenacity of that one man. That first
man. That black man. Today marks the fifth anniversary of the
official Jackie Robinson day in Major League Baseball. It was 66 years ago that Jackie took the
field for the first time playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers. That was 1947.
Yes,
baseball and society are both slow. It
took until 1947 for the first man of color to cross the white lines of the
baseball field. And everything wasn’t
all rosy and warm after that happened.
Robinson wasn’t exactly hailed as a conquering hero; and the other teams
didn’t just look around at each other and say “What were we thinking? Let’s all go get some black ballplayers!” No, that didn’t happen. If you want a good portrayal of what did
happen to Jackie as he broke baseball’s color barrier, go and see the new
motion picture “42”, starring Chadwick Boseman as Robinson and Harrison Ford as
the Dodger general manager Branch Rickey who gave Robinson his shot in the big
leagues. I haven’t seen it yet, but that
will be rectified very soon. My son saw
it this weekend and called it “easily in his top five movies of all time, and
probably his all-time favorite movie”. I’m
glad he saw it and had that reaction.
But
for years, baseball continued to move slowly.
It took until 1959 for the Boston Red Sox to be the last team to finally
promote a black player to the big leagues.
The 60s proved to be an explosion of black stars in the baseball, and
they were generally hailed as heroes, but behind the scenes their lives were
hard as the segregation and racism of that decade persisted. In the book “October 1964” by David
Halberstam, he profiles the New York Yankees and the Cardinals through that
season as they sailed on a collision course to the World Series that fall. But he writes about the two different paths
that the teams took through the early 60s to get to that point. The Yankees were an aging team of white
stars, with very few black players, where the Cardinals were embracing young
black stars like Gibson, Flood and White, and then turned the corner on their
season by acquiring Lou Brock early in the summer.
And
now, looking back, on this fifth anniversary of Jackie Robinson day, I’m
thinking, “Huh?” Only five years of
celebration? What the heck? It took 61 years after the baseball color
barrier was broken for baseball to finally create an official celebration. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a great
celebration! Every player on every team
will wear number 42 on the back of their jerseys today. I cannot wait to watch the Cardinals and
Pirates play tonight in those uniforms.
There will pregame festivities and a video shown at every stadium
highlighting the life and career of Robinson.
Baseball is doing it right. Now,
that it is. But it took way to long. It’s like I said, baseball and society are
slow.