Number 42

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.