by Dan Gutman
I knew I would have my best chance on the first pitch. If I let him throw a few pitches over the plate, he might regain control of himself and I’d lose my advantage.
He threw over to third a couple of times. That gave me a pretty good look at his pickoff move. As he peered in for the sign, I could tell he wasn’t going to throw over again. He was concentrating on the batter.
As soon as he brought the ball over his head to begin his windup, I broke for the plate. I didn’t look over at him after that. It would just slow me down.
It was a race between me and the ball.
The catcher saw me coming home and was bracing himself for the play at the plate. The ball wasn’t there yet, so I had a good chance to beat it, or at least knock it out of the catcher’s hand.
Ten feet from the plate, I started my slide, leaving my feet and extending my right toe in front of me. The pitch must have been a little high, because the catcher stood up to snare it. I heard it smack against his mitt. He brought the mitt down on me and we tumbled across the plate together. I thought I was in there, but you never know how the umpire is going to see things.
“Safe!” called the ump.
The Yellow Jackets were all over me before I could even get up. Everybody was yelling and screaming and pounding me on the back. I hadn’t been in a pileup like that since the riot I started before the season.
When everything had settled down, Coach Hutchinson came over and wrapped an arm around me.
“Where did you learn to play like that?”
“Coach,” I said, “you wouldn’t believe me in a million years.”
TO THE READER
JOE STOSHACK IS A FICTIONAL CHARACTER, BUT THE WORLD he moved through in 1947 was true. Mostly true, anyway. The names of streets, players, movies, and baseball events described in this book are accurate. A few things had to be changed or moved in time.
For instance, Dixie Walker circulated his petition during spring training, not on opening day. Al Gionfriddo didn’t join the Dodgers until May. The Roswell UFO incident took place in June, not March. The real name of the Dodgers’ batboy was Charley DiGiovanna, and he was not bigoted or crazy.
The facts about Jackie Robinson came from many biographies, especially the ones written by Jules Tygiel and Maury Allen. Peter Golenbock’s Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers was also very helpful. To get the flavor of Brooklyn in the Forties, Elliot Willensky’s When Brooklyn Was the World and It Happened in Brooklyn by Harvey and Myrna Katz Frommer were indispensable.
Jackie Robinson’s first year in the big leagues was even more difficult than described here. He came close to suffering a breakdown at one point, and once during the season his sister had to talk him out of abandoning the “experiment.” Luckily for all of us, he didn’t.
At the end of the 1947 season, Jackie was named the second most popular man in the United States (behind Bing Crosby). His teammate Dixie Walker, who requested a trade rather than play alongside a black man, changed his mind and asked to stay with the Dodgers. It was too late. He was traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates after the season. The Dodgers also released Al Gionfriddo. The game in which he made his famous catch was the last of his career.
Two years later, Jackie Robinson had his best season. He led the league with a .342 average and won the Most Valuable Player Award. During Jackie’s ten years on the team, the Brooklyn Dodgers won the National League pennant in 1947, 1949, 1952, 1953, 1955, and 1956. Each time they played the Yankees in a “Subway Series.” They lost every year except once—1955. All of Brooklyn rejoiced.
Two years after winning that one World Series, the Dodger management broke hearts all over New York when they moved the team to Los Angeles. Ebbets Field was demolished in 1960 and turned into a twenty-three-story apartment building.
Jackie Robinson, almost singlehandedly, was the symbol for civil rights in America in the 1940s. Martin Luther King was just eighteen years old in 1947. One year after Jackie broke the color barrier, President Truman initiated desegregation of the armed forces. In 1950, the Supreme Court ended segregation on trains and in colleges. In 1954, they made school segregation illegal.
In baseball, African-American players were slowly signed by other teams. It wasn’t until twelve years after Robinson’s breakthrough that every team in the majors had signed at least one black player. It wasn’t until 1966 that Emmett Ashford, the first black umpire, was hired. It wasn’t until 1975 that Frank Robinson became the first black manager.
One of the sad and forgotten parts of the Jackie Robinson story is that breaking the color barrier signaled the end of the Negro Leagues. After the best black players had been snapped up by the major leagues, all-black teams folded one after the other.
Dan Bankhead was never beaten up in an alley, but he was a real person. He was Jackie Robinson’s teammate, roommate, and the first pitcher to break the color barrier. He died in 1976.
Many of Jackie Robinson’s other teammates are no longer with us. Hugh Casey died in 1951, Bruce Edwards in 1975, Pete Reiser in 1981, Dixie Walker in 1982, Joe Hatten in 1988, Carl Furillo in 1989, and Cookie Lavagetto in 1990.
Branch Rickey, the Dodger general manager who had the courage to bring Jackie Robinson to the majors, died in 1965.
Babe Ruth was in attendance at the 1947 World Series. It was his last. He died ten months later.
During Jackie Robinson’s baseball career, Rachel Robinson had two more children, enrolled in a program in psychiatric nursing at New York University, and became a teacher at the Yale School of Nursing. Today she runs The Jackie Robinson Foundation.
Jackie Jr. struggled to grow up in the shadow of his famous father. While fighting in Vietnam, he became addicted to alcohol and drugs. He went through a successful rehabilitation, but died in an automobile accident in 1971. He was just twenty-four.
After he left baseball, Jackie Robinson became an executive and a civil rights activist. He developed diabetes and other health problems at a very young age. “Jackie just seemed to get older faster than the rest of us,” Pee Wee Reese told Maury Allen in his book Jackie Robinson: A Life Remembered. “It had to be what he went through. I don’t think Jackie ever stopped carrying that burden. I’m no doctor, but I’m sure it cut his life short. Jackie Robinson never could stop fighting.”
Jackie Robinson died at the age of fifty-three on October 24, 1972. He is buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery, in Brooklyn.
PERMISSIONS
The author would like to acknowledge the following for use of photographs:
National Baseball Library and Archive, Cooperstown, N.Y.: 42, 65, 84, 121, 125. Associated Press/ Wide World Photos: 44, 59, 89, 93, 114.
About the Author
DAN GUTMAN is the author of many fantastic books for young readers. Besides baseball, he has written about soccer, basketball, bowling, and aliens. When he is not writing books, Dan is very often visiting a school. Thanks to his many fans who voted in their classrooms, he has received fifteen state book awards and thirty-seven state book award nominations. Dan lives in Haddonfield, New Jersey, with his wife, Nina, and their two children, Sam and Emma.
You can visit him online at www.dangutman.com
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Other Books by
Dan Gutman
BABE & ME
HONUS & ME
Coming Soon
JOHNNY HANGTIME
Credits
Cover art © Steve Chorney
Cover design by R. Gordon
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
JACKIE & ME. Copyright © 1999 by Dan Gutman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusiv
e, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition OCTOBER 2008 ISBN: 9780061973253
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