Opening Day

by Jonathan Eig

  Rickey was so pleased by now with his first baseman’s progress, on and off the field, that he was beginning to consider the next stage of his experiment. To properly integrate baseball, there would have to be more black players. He’d known that much all along. But he wanted to make sure that other teams integrated their ranks, too. In fact, in a rare display of selflessness, he had recently passed up on a couple of terrific Negro-league prospects in the hopes that other teams would snap them up.

  “I think that the other clubs are going to have Negro players in a year or so,” he told the Brooklyn Eagle. “One of our scouts just the other day was investigating one of the colored stars. The boy confessed to him that he had already received an offer from a big league club. I don’t think too many could make good in the National or American [leagues]. We have one—Roy Campanella, the catcher with Montreal. Why, in the not too distant future I look for the thing to take its natural course! The signing of a Negro won’t create any more comment than the signing of a white boy.” Rickey said another team had asked him to pass along the names of any high-quality Negro players “who would not fit into our plans.”

  He went on to praise his first baseman, saying, “In all my years in baseball I can’t recall a player coming into the big leagues and making good in a new position without any previous experience there. And that’s just what Robinson has done. Don’t forget he’d never played first base in his life before we handed him a mitt in Havana.”

  The New York Post said the high opinion of Robinson was fast becoming unanimous, as he carried the team almost singlehandedly through this injury-plagued stretch. The Post also noted that even in the Cincinnati press box, “where bigotry runs high, they are finally conceding that he’s quite a ballplayer.”

  None other than Ben Chapman, Robinson’s loudest attacker, went on the record with praise, saying, “He is a major leaguer in every respect. He can run, he can hit, he is fast, he is quick with the ball. And his fine base running keeps the other team in an uproar. Furthermore, I want to congratulate the colored race for their particularly fine actions at baseball games in which Robinson has participated.”

  • • •

  If Robinson was feeling more secure, he wasn’t saying. Wendell Smith reported yet again that the integration of the team was going smoothly. “Robinson is definitely now one of the Dodgers,” he wrote on June 28. “He is ‘one of the boys’ and treated that way by his teammates. No one on the team seems to resent his presence any more, and Jackie seems to have won them over simply by being himself.”

  The day after Smith’s report, newspaper reporters everywhere noted another sign of racial progress, this one coming at the closing session of the thirty-eighth Annual Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. More than ten thousand people gathered before the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington to hear President Truman deliver a speech on civil rights. It was the first time a U.S. president had ever addressed the NAACP. Eleanor Roosevelt was on hand, too. “It is my deep conviction,” Truman said, “that we have reached a turning point in the long history of our country’s efforts to guarantee freedom and equality to all our citizens. Recent events in the United States and abroad have made us realize that it is more important today than ever before to ensure that all Americans enjoy these rights. When I say all Americans, I mean all Americans.” The nation could not afford to wait another decade to resolve the problem, Truman said. A month later, he took action, issuing one order intended to end segregation in the military and another designed to eliminate discrimination in federal hiring. Four months after that, Truman’s commission on civil rights issued a report called To Secure These Rights. The report presented a stark portrait of a country still very much troubled by racial bias, covering everything from lynch mobs to the imprisonment of Japanese-American citizens during the war. But a brief section intended to celebrate signs of progress made several references to the integration of major-league baseball, and, in particular, to the hope offered by “the presence of a Negro player on the Brooklyn Dodgers.”

  As the baseball season stretched its legs and loped into summer, that Negro player seemed to be making genuine progress with his teammates. Even Walker, a dedicated student of the game, was heard in the locker room giving Robinson tips on improving his swing. But none of that was happening as a result of Robinson’s “being himself,” as Smith had suggested. On the contrary, it was happening because Robinson was going to great pains not to be himself. Robinson’s instinct was to engage Walker on the subject of his racist beliefs. If he’d had his way, he would have argued with Walker, humiliated him even, until the white southerner lashed out in anger or admitted the error of his ways. But he didn’t. He remained quiet among his teammates, by and large. He could be funny when he wanted to, but his sense of humor was a lot like a Hugh Casey curveball: It only worked because he used it so seldom.

  “Say, Jackie,” Carl Furillo said one day during batting practice. “I’m gonna catch you. I’m gonna get hot and pass you up.” He was referring to his batting average, which had fallen below that of Robinson.

  “Good,” Robinson said dryly. “We need hitters on this ballclub.”

  “I’m gonna pass up that Walker, too,” Furillo continued. “Just watch me go!”

  “Fine,” Robinson answered. “Then we’ll have three of us hitting over .300 and we can sure use that.”

  “You said it!” Furillo chimed.

  Robinson grinned. “But you’re not going to do it standing here talking about it all day, Carl,” he said.

  Furillo’s mouth opened but no words came out.

  To offer proof for his theory that Robinson had won acceptance, Smith told the story of a golf outing that took place in Danville, Illinois, before a night-time exhibition game. Robinson and Smith teed off behind a foursome of Pee Wee Reese, Rex Barney, team secretary Harold Parrott, and Times reporter Roscoe McGowan. After about four holes, Robinson and Smith caught up to the quartet, whereupon Reese invited the two men to join their group. Throughout the game, Smith wrote, Reese and Barney “joked and kidded with Jackie and he did the same with them. They were three baseball players and without actually saying it to each other, they admitted that each had something in common.” Robinson knew what the men had in common. It was a uniform, and not much more. Smith looked ever at the sunny side, even though the white men in the press corps didn’t treat him any better than the players treated Robinson. They came to him when they wanted access to Robinson, but they never approached the story the way Smith would have liked, never adopted integration as a cause, as he thought they should have.

  But if Smith nonetheless managed to let the insults and disappointments slide, Robinson remained hypersensitive. He must have wondered why Reese and Barney had preferred the company of a middle-aged newspaper reporter and the team secretary in the first place. Robinson was an avid golfer, and a good one, yet no one on the team had invited him to play. Nor, it seems, had anyone invited him to a movie, or a restaurant, or to go for a stroll. The people around him thought Robinson was a pacifist, letting the insults fly past him. They tended to mistake his quiet anger for acquiescence.

  Years later, Reese, Bragan, Lavagetto, and many others on the team would describe how much Robinson’s friendship had meant to them, how they had felt empathy throughout his struggle, and how they had learned from him the true meaning of courage. Robinson, they would say, made them better men. But they made the claims only after Robinson had established himself as a winner, and only after it had become fashionable to support civil rights. In 1947, when he needed them most, Robinson had no true friends, not among the Dodgers, anyway. Smith had it right elsewhere in his column when he wrote that Robinson “makes his living playing baseball and the first base bag is to him what a work bench is to a carpenter. That is where he labors and turns out a product. When the day is done he goes his way, and the others who work beside him go theirs. The next day is the same thing all over again. He does his work
and they do theirs.”

  • • •

  From Pittsburgh, the Dodgers went home. A road trip that had started poorly ended pretty well. Winning seven and losing five, the Dodgers climbed into second place, half a game behind the Braves, who were led by two of the best pitchers in the league, Warren Spahn and Johnny Sain. (After Spahn and Sain, as the saying went, the Braves would pray for rain.)

  It had been ten weeks since Robinson’s first game in the big leagues, when Sain had handled him with curveball after curveball and when a black man in the white and blue uniform struck almost everyone as a strange sight. Now, as he prepared to face the right-hander again, Robinson was batting around .300, best among everyday players on the team. He ranked among the league leaders in runs scored. He’d struck out only a dozen times, and drawn twenty-seven walks. His defense had been solid, too, with only four errors. The season’s midpoint approached, and a strong case could be made that Robinson was the Dodgers’ most valuable player.

  This time, in the first inning against Sain, Robinson slapped a single to center and scored. Sain won the next two contests, inducing a ground-out and a pop-out. By the time Robinson came to bat in the eighth, the game was tied, Si Johnson on in relief of Sain. Robinson smashed a bullet down the left-field line for a double, no slide required, and when Dixie Walker knocked him home with a single, the Dodgers were winners. Better yet, they were in first place.

  The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, noting Robinson’s success, printed a cartoon showing the Dodger first baseman dressed as a tap dancer, holding a bat as if it were a walking stick and shuffling up a flight of stairs. “Bo Jangles of the Diamond,” the headline read. Others were not so patronizing. “The time has come,” wrote the Associated Press on June 27, “to recognize Jackie Robinson . . . as a major league ballplayer who has come through under extreme pressure to become an important factor in the Dodger’s rise to the National League lead.” On July 4, he ran his hitting streak to twenty-one straight games.

  In addition to all his hits, walks, and sacrifice bunts, he’d been hit by pitches seven times. Rookies often took some lumps, but Robinson seemed to be getting more than his share. No player in either league had been hit more often. That pitchers were throwing intentionally at Robinson, aiming to intimidate if not injure, was never in doubt. But more interesting was the fact that six of the seven plunks had come in April and May. By June, the indoctrination had more or less ended. When Robinson failed to react, opponents saw no further reason to provoke him.

  “Like plastics and penicillin,” wrote one commentator, “it seems like Jackie is here to stay.”

  FIFTEEN

  A GOOD THING FOR EVERYBODY

  Sooner or later, all the Negro-league ballplayers noticed the white men in the grandstands. The parks were mostly empty that summer, as the fans who once rooted for the Newark Eagles or the New York Cubans or the Homestead Grays shifted their attention to Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers. So when the white scouts in their rumpled suits plunked themselves down in the good seats behind home plate and started taking notes, everyone with a bat or glove snapped to attention. They ran out their pop flies, took the extra base when they could, and slid a little more ferociously into second to break up double plays.

  Who would be next? On buses during road trips, on the field during batting practice, even in the dugout during games, that was the question the black ballplayers asked. Was Ol’ Satchel too old? Would the Dodgers promote Roy Campanella from Montreal? Was Monte Irvin of the Newark Eagles ready to make the leap? And how many big-league clubs were prepared to take on black players? Only one or two? All of them? How many jobs were the men fighting for, exactly?

  Reporters at some of the white papers seemed to think the Boston Red Sox might be the next team to step up. Others said Cleveland, or Pittsburgh, and some reporters even suggested that Ben Chapman had been thoroughly cured of his prejudice and that his Phillies were ready to sign Reese “Goose” Tatum, who played baseball for the Indianapolis Clowns and basketball for the Harlem Globetrotters. No one expected much movement from the ball clubs in the circuit’s most southern cities: St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Washington, D.C. Still, the consensus among writers seemed to be that every team, or nearly every one, would be integrated inside a couple of years.

  So the scouts scribbled their notes and wired their reports back to the home offices. Older black ballplayers like Oscar Charleston, believed by many to be one of the best ever to play the game, found work as scouts thanks to their long-running associations with the Negro leagues. But most of the work remained in the hands of the white men who had been trawling the sandlots and schoolyards in search of white players for so long. Suddenly these men—skilled with stopwatch and scorecard, not psychology—were being asked to conduct interviews and evaluate the character of the black men they were evaluating. Bias remained, and team owners worried far more about the personalities of their prospective black players than they did about the white ones. It was one thing to find a black man who could play the game, the thought went, and quite another to find one who could handle the sort of challenges that had greeted Robinson.

  It was a thrilling time to be a Negro-league player, and a frightening one, too. Gone was the world they had known and in which they had thrived. For some, the new world would offer undreamed-of opportunities and unimaginable wealth and fame. For many more, it would mean the end of their careers in baseball. It almost certainly augured the end of one of the longest-running and most popular black-owned businesses in the country.

  “We were delighted that Jackie had gotten the chance,” said Monte Irvin. “We knew what it meant. It was going to make it easier for the rest of us to follow. We weren’t jealous. A little envious, maybe.” Irvin had more reason than most to be envious. Had a poll been taken in 1945, most black ballplayers in the country probably would have selected Irvin as the black man most likely to succeed in the majors. “Monte was our best young ballplayer at the time,” the Negro-league legend Cool Papa Bell said. Branch Rickey knew all about Irvin, too. He had met Irvin at about the same time he first met Robinson, in 1945. On paper, Irvin did indeed look like the better candidate to break baseball’s color line. Like Robinson, he’d played with white boys in high school, had been to college, and had served his country in the war. Like Robinson, he didn’t drink or run around. On the question of baseball experience, Irvin, having already established himself as a big star with the Newark Eagles, had Robinson beat hands down. He was a can’t-miss prospect, as the scouts said, with a gorgeous swing, a strong arm, and terrific speed. But Irvin, like a lot of black men who had fought in the war, had suffered an injury not directly connected with bombs or bullets.

  The army had assigned Irvin to a battalion of black engineers trained to build and destroy. Be it a road, bridge, mess tent, or latrine, Irvin and his men could set it up fast and take it down faster. The battalion spent more than a year and a half in Europe, touring England, Belgium, and France. But the men never saw action and never got to do the work for which they’d been trained. Instead, they followed a battalion of white engineers, cleaning up after them. Their biggest battle, it turned out, was to maintain their own dignity.

  “We were like janitors,” Irvin recalled years later. “I was disgusted. Here we were, sacrificing, and we were being treated like we weren’t even human. Our own [white] soldiers seemed to resent the fact that we were in the army. . . . There was a lot of trouble with our own soldiers, a lot of name-calling. . . . You couldn’t go here, you couldn’t do that. Here we were, fighting to make the world safe, and we were treated like second-class citizens. . . . It affected me. . . . It affected me mentally and physically.”

  Irvin would have preferred combat. He would have preferred anything that would have lifted him from the doldrums of indentured servitude. Yet it was not to be, and after the war, the despair lingered like a long rain delay. When he met Branch Rickey in 1945 to talk about joining the Dodgers, Irvin could tell that Rickey seemed interested. Yet the bal
lplayer himself mustered only mild enthusiasm. He didn’t feel like getting back to baseball, didn’t feel like doing much of anything. So off he went to Puerto Rico, hoping to work himself back into shape with some Negro-league teams. There he played with little pressure and few expectations, away from white men in uniforms. He joined the Eagles in 1946, feeling somewhat better, hitting the ball on the button, and helping that team win the World Series of the Negro leagues. But even then, he said, he didn’t have “the enthusiasm and the love for the game I once had.” If a championship and a batting average of around .380 couldn’t shake his apathy, he wondered, what would?

  In 1947, he signed on for another season with the Eagles. But by now everything was different. As Irvin listened to Red Barber on the radio and snuck over to Ebbets Field to see a black man compete with and against whites, he felt a spark. Perhaps he hadn’t been cut out to be the first man. Perhaps he’d merely been a victim of bad luck and bad timing. No matter now. Robinson had done the hard part. Providing reinforcement was all that anyone would ask now of Irvin, and he was more than ready to offer it. “We said to ourselves, ‘If Jackie can do it, we can do it,’ ” he recalled. “It made us want to succeed that much more.”