Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  The moments of anger had been relatively few. One explosion had come in Los Angeles the previous year, near the end of Rachel’s pregnancy. Jack had decided to go to his cousin Van Wade’s wedding in Pasadena but would not hear of Rachel’s traveling in her ninth month. When he left the house, Rachel collapsed onto her bed and cried and cried. Of Jack’s not showing his love, according to Rachel later, “he was not yet the kind of man he would become. He wasn’t yet the man who would send me flowers at the least opportunity. He was still inclined to be closed and tight. And I had a certain reticence as well, because that’s the way I had been brought up. But I always knew he loved me.”

  Rachel had other trials as she learned to be Mrs. Jackie Robinson. At first, she had no contact with the other Dodger wives; she waited outside the park for Jack and wondered where the other wives were. Then one day, Norma King, the young wife of the pitcher Clyde King, introduced herself and showed Rachel the usual gathering place, under the stands. Some tension among the wives was inevitable, since their husbands were often in competition with one another, sometimes for the same job. But slowly some friendships formed, especially with Gil Hodges’s wife, Joan, and Pee Wee Reese’s wife, Dottie. (Later, after Carl Erskine joined the club, his wife, Betty, would also be a good friend.) The wife of Vic Lombardi, the diminutive pitcher in his last Dodger year, was always pleasant. “I’ve met most of them now,” Rachel gamely assured a reporter later that first season, “and they’re all congenial. When they gossip I join right in and gossip with them. Of course, they’re more intimate by themselves.”

  Far easier was the Robinsons’ relationship with the local fans; both Jack and Rachel fell in love with Brooklyn. “The feeling in Brooklyn was very supportive, very rich, and we loved it,” she recalled. “Some places on the road I hated, their total intolerance; but Brooklyn was the opposite, and Jack loved it, too.” From the start he made it his business to be kind to fans, especially at home. “He had his favorites, he especially loved to talk with the little old ladies; he would hug them and pat them and chat with them very patiently. He would keep me waiting, and I would wait, because it was important to him and it was nice to see. We all waited for Jack.” Aware that she needed an interest outside baseball and beyond Jackie Junior—and with an eye to the home they expected to have one day in California—she completed a course later in the year at the New York School of Interior Decorating.

  IN JUNE, A LONG home stand against St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Cincinnati saw the Dodgers fight back into a tenuous hold on first place in front of record-setting crowds in Ebbets Field. Against Cincinnati, after Rachel and Jackie Junior received a thunderous ovation when the public-address system announced their presence, Jack responded with his fourth home run of the season. In another game he went four-for-four, in his best hitting day thus far, with two doubles, a triple, and a single. After losses against the Cardinals, Brooklyn rebounded on the strength of Shotton’s cool managing, its splendid infield, and fierce hitting led by Robinson, who batted .381 in June. In St. Louis, the Cardinals seemed friendlier—or so Jack carefully chose to describe them. In the Courier he saluted Joe Medwick, Stan Musial, Joe Garagiola, and the manager, Eddie Dyer, as “a swell bunch of fellows.… They treated me so nice I was actually surprised.”

  Now Wendell Smith reported that Robinson was “definitely one of the Dodgers. He is ‘one of the boys’ and treated that way by his teammates.” In Danville, Illinois, on an off day, Smith reported a remarkable sign of progress. Out on the golf course after lunch at a local club, Reese saw Smith and Robinson trailing his own foursome. “Why don’t you two join us?” Reese asked. “There is harmony and unity on the Brooklyn club,” Smith reported, “and Jackie is a part of it. He is no longer a player apart from the rest of them. He is no longer a curiosity.”

  With such gestures, Reese played an important role in Rickey’s project. Perhaps his most telling single act was sensational, given the racism of that time: at one point, in full view of the public, he dared to put his white hand on Robinson’s black shoulder in a gesture of solidarity. Exactly when and where this moment came is uncertain. It happened either in Boston (as Robinson recalled) or in Cincinnati, just across the river from Reese’s native Kentucky (as others saw it). Robinson more than once placed it in 1948, but others remember it as happening in 1947. (In Jackie Robinson: My Own Story, published in 1948, Jack makes no mention of the incident.) Much later, Robinson would tell of Reese’s hand touching him, but his earliest published account, filtered through a writer in 1949, does not include physical contact. Opposing players were abusing Reese “very viciously because he was playing on the team with me.… They were calling him some very vile names.” Because Robinson knew that the nasty words were meant for him, each epithet “hit me like a machine-gun bullet. Pee Wee kind of sensed the sort of hopeless, dead feeling in me and came over and stood beside me for a while. He didn’t say a word but he looked over at the chaps who were yelling at me through him and just stared. He was standing by me, I could tell you that.” The hecklers fell silent. “I will never forget it.” According to Joe Black and others, Reese over the years became Robinson’s closest friend on the Dodgers, although Jack would also feel deeply about other players, including Carl Erskine, Gil Hodges, Ralph Branca, Billy Loes, Don Newcombe, Black himself, and—much later—Junior Gilliam.

  In a Boston newspaper, Jack praised his teammates: “I get all kinds of help from these fellows. I wouldn’t be anywhere without it. Walker has mentioned several things to me. And Eddie Stanky is always positioning me for batters.” To the newspaper, Robinson was now “far from the unhappy ballplayer of a couple of months back.”

  A new daring entered his game. On June 24, against Pittsburgh’s Fritz Ostermueller, who earlier had thrown at his head, he stole home for the first time in the majors. That month, too, against the Cubs, he scored all the way from first base on a sacrifice fly. (In this series, after Stanky broke up Ewell Blackwell’s historic attempt at a second consecutive no-hitter, Blackwell scorched Jack, the next batter, with an explosion of racist insults; Jack replied with a single to right.) On Sunday, June 29, four hits in the second game of a doubleheader saw his hitting streak reach sixteen games. To Branch Rickey, that was nothing. “You haven’t seen Robinson yet,” he assured reporters. “Maybe you won’t really see him until next year. You’ll see something when he gets to bunting and running as freely as he should. Just now he’s still in a shell. It’s only occasionally that he pokes his nose out and becomes adventurous.”

  On July 3, Rickey had another victory when Bill Veeck, the general manager of the Cleveland Indians, announced the signing of Larry Doby of the Newark Eagles in the Negro leagues. With Doby leapfrogging the minors, the rival American League now had its first black player. “He is a grand guy and a very good ball player,” Jack wrote of Doby. “I’m glad to know that another Negro player is in the majors. I’m no longer in there by myself.” Later in the season, the St. Louis Browns, also of the American League, signed Willard Brown and Henry Thompson, two former teammates of Jack’s with the Kansas City Monarchs. (In August, both were cut; but Doby was soon a star.)

  On July 4, Jack’s hitting streak ended at twenty-one games (one short of the major-league rookie record), but he soon started another. For the All-Star Game at mid-season, he received more than three hundred thousand votes—“amazing for a rookie,” as the Toronto Star noted, although not enough to make the squad.

  Surging, the Dodgers swept the Cubs to open a lead, then later won seven in a row. At this point, the Cardinals at last began to move. Six Dodger losses in seven games and a seven-game Cardinal streak closed the gap. In the middle of August, the two teams met for a four-game series in Brooklyn. Each took two, but the series was marred by one of the more dangerous episodes involving Robinson. In the seventh inning of the last game, with Ralph Branca working on a no-hitter, Jack’s career “came within an inch of being ended,” as Red Barber and others declared, when Enos “Country” Sla
ughter, a Southern player thought to be one of the ringleaders of the Cardinals’ aborted strike in May, came down hard with his spikes on Robinson’s right foot as Jack stretched to take a throw at first base. Slaughter’s spikes barely missed Jack’s Achilles tendon; as Robinson writhed in pain, Slaughter trotted nonchalantly to the dugout. “Hate was running high in that first Robinson year,” Parrott later wrote of the incident. Jack declared: “Slaughter deliberately went for my leg instead of the base.” But Slaughter always denied trying to hurt him: “I know the truth and that is I never intentionally spiked Jackie Robinson.”

  In yet another incident, the Cardinal pitcher Harry Breechen, rather than throw Jack out easily at first, took the ball to the baseline clearly intending to block his path with a nasty tag. Jack stopped short of Breechen. “You better play your position as you should,” he warned: the next time, he would not hesitate to knock him over.

  On August 24, Rickey made major-league history again by signing the first black pitcher in the majors: Dan Bankhead, formerly of the Memphis Red Sox of the Negro American League. In his first at-bat, facing Fritz Ostermueller, Bankhead hit a home run. But he struggled on the mound. Some observers, including blacks, thought that he choked in facing white hitters.

  In September, with sixteen games to go, the Dodgers arrived in St. Louis leading by only four and a half. Jack, who had missed some games with a bad back, was now moved in the batting order from the second spot to cleanup. In response, he got eleven hits in his next twenty-four at-bats. But the pennant race led to more nastiness. In the second inning of the first game, the St. Louis catcher, Joe Garagiola, hitting into a double play, stepped on Jack’s foot at first base in a less dangerous reprise of the Enos Slaughter incident. When Robinson came to bat in the next inning, he and Garagiola exchanged angry words. The catcher threw down his mask, the stadium roared in anticipation, and Clyde Sukeforth stormed from the dugout. Quickly, the plate umpire, Beans Reardon, “broke up [the] incipient rhubarb,” as the Sporting News reported. The next time at bat, Robinson hit a home run with a man on; Brooklyn won, 4–3. (Like Slaughter, Garagiola always denied spiking Robinson on purpose.)

  In the last game, on September 13, another incident, of a radically different nature, also excited much comment. Catching a twisting foul ball, Jack was saved from tumbling into the Brooklyn dugout by the protecting arms of his teammate Ralph Branca. The sight of a black man in a white man’s arms overwhelmed some watchers, but to Branca it was nothing. (The catch, coming in the eighth inning, helped Brooklyn win the game, 8–7.)

  On September 22, a loss by St. Louis against the Cubs finally put the Dodgers over the top and sent the people of Brooklyn into paroxysms of delight. The next day was Jackie Robinson Day at Ebbets Field. Brooklyn had much to be grateful for. Only the ballpark’s small dimensions held down the number of paying fans that season to 1,828,215, a Club record. (The Yankees, in their larger stadium, attracted 2,200,098.) Although Jackie Robinson Day was conceived by the People’s Voice newspaper, it was soon taken over by others, including the borough president, John A. Cashmore, and the celebrated dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who saluted Jack as “Ty Cobb in Technicolor.” (“I have tried to study Cobb’s base running methods,” Jack had acknowledged about Cobb, “and apply them this season in the National League.”) A long list of gifts included cutlery, silverware, a television set, and a light gray Cadillac. To Jack’s special delight, his mother, Mallie, had made her first airplane flight to help honor him.

  Three days later, with the regular season ended, a motorcade took the entire team from Ebbets Field to a reception in front of Borough Hall that attracted a vast throng. On that day, J. Taylor Spink of the Sporting News, which had opposed the integration of baseball and derided Jackie Robinson as a prospect, handed him its first “Rookie of the Year” award. “The sociological experiment that Robinson represented, the trail-blazing that he did,” Spink emphasized, “did not enter into the decision. He was rated and examined solely as a freshman player in the big leagues—on the basis of his hitting, his running, his defensive play, his team value.” On September 22, taking a broader view of his success, Time placed Robinson on its cover.

  But as a player he had done very well indeed. He led the Dodgers in several categories: runs scored (125), singles, bunt hits (14), total bases, and stolen bases (with 28, he led the league). In 46 tries at bunting, he failed only 4 times either to reach first base himself or to move runners along with a sacrifice. On his team, he tied Dixie Walker for the most doubles and Pee Wee Reese for the most home runs (12); he also drove in 48 runs. He hit well in Brooklyn (.290) but slightly better on the road (.304) for a season average of .297. Dixie Walker himself pronounced: “No other ballplayer on this club with the possible exception of [catcher] Bruce Edwards has done more to put the Dodgers up in the race than Robinson has. He is everything Branch Rickey said he was when he came up from Montreal.”

  “So we’re in it and fighting those powerful Yankees,” Jack wrote excitedly about the World Series. “It’s really a thrill. I love it.” In the first game, Jack captivated the sellout crowd with his daring on the bases, including an entertaining escape from a rundown; he also seduced pitcher Frank Shea into a balk. But the Yankees took that game, and the next. Brooklyn looked dead. In the third contest, at Ebbets Field, Robinson singled twice, scored a run, sacrificed once, and completed two double plays in a hard-fought Dodgers victory. The fourth game pulsed with drama as the Yankees’ Floyd Bevins denied Brooklyn a hit until the bottom of the ninth inning. Then Cookie Lavagetto, pinch-hitting, crushed his famous two-run double off the wall; the Dodgers won, 3–2.

  In the fifth game, when Joe DiMaggio’s home run and Frank Shea’s pitching helped the Yankees to victory, 2–1, Jack drove in the lone Dodger run. The sixth game would be remembered for Al Gionfriddo’s relentless, game-saving pursuit and capture of a magnificent drive by DiMaggio (“I’ve played a lot of ball,” Jack wrote the next day, “but I’ve never seen the likes of that”). Brooklyn won, 8–6. But the “powerful” Yankees would not be denied. They took the seventh and final game of a World Series many considered the most enthralling ever played.

  Jack had played well but not spectacularly; he batted .296 (almost identical to his season average) and played error-free at first base.

  After the last game, Jack made his way to each of his teammates. Disappointed to lose, he did not give up his poise. “It was a pleasure to play with you,” was the gist of his farewell, according to a reporter. “Thanks for all you’ve done for me.” In turn, “each one of them looked at him seriously. What he saw in their eyes made him feel good.”

  The 1947 baseball season had been a spectacular triumph for Robinson. His impact, and that of Branch Rickey’s epochal experiment, had gone far beyond the baseball field. Indeed, Robinson’s role in ending Jim Crow in organized white baseball hardly measured his achievement that year. Over a period of six months, from his first stumbling steps to the victories that closed the season, he had revolutionized the image of black Americans in the eyes of many whites. Starting out as a token, he had utterly complicated their sense of the nature of black people, how they thought and felt, their dignity and their courage in the face of adversity. No black American man had ever shone so brightly for so long as the epitome not only of stoic endurance but also of intelligence, bravery, physical power, and grit. Because baseball was lodged so deeply in the average white man’s psyche, Robinson’s protracted victory had left an intimate mark there.

  Blacks, too, had been affected. “Many of us who went to the ballpark when Jackie played,” the novelist John A. Williams would recall about his youth in Syracuse, “went there to protect him, to defend him from harm, if necessary, as well as to cheer him on.” Slavery and Jim Crow had often sparked heroism in blacks, but also so much doubt and even self-hatred that many feared to demand justice for themselves. As their champion, Robinson had taken their hopes into the arena of baseball and succeeded beyond their wildest dream
s. He had been stoical, but the essence of this story was the proven quality of his black manhood. To blacks, he passed now into the pantheon of their most sublime heroes, actual and legendary—the slave revolutionary Nat Turner and the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the steel-driving John Henry and the roustabout Stagolee. Neither blacks nor whites would be quite the same thereafter in America.

  CHAPTER 9

  A Most Valuable Player

  1947–1950

  He’s entitled to all the rights of any other American citizen.

  —Branch Rickey (1949)

  THE 1947 BASEBALL SEASON left Jackie Robinson not only the most celebrated black man in America but also one of the most respected men of any color. In November, a nationwide contest placed him ahead in popularity of President Truman, General Eisenhower, General MacArthur, and the comedian Bob Hope, and second only to America’s favorite crooner, Bing Crosby. Among black Americans, he was even more revered. From a bellboy at the Eaton Hotel in Wichita, Kansas, who named his baby daughter Jackie (because Robinson was a “good sport” and a gentleman, “something our race needs as bad as they do a square deal”), to C. C. Spaulding, the insurance millionaire, who advised Jack that “the whole nation is looking to you,” black Americans hailed him. In New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Chicago, testimonial dinners sang his praises.

  This was also a good time, Jack knew, to make some money. In certain newspapers, Branch Rickey was often ridiculed unfairly as “El Cheapo.” Jack did not support this portrait of Rickey as a skinflint, but in 1947 the Dodgers had paid him only $5,000, the minimum amount allowed, while his presence had meant a windfall for the Dodgers and every club they visited (Walter White of the NAACP estimated the extra income for the league at $200,000). None of that money reached Jack; Happy Chandler, the baseball commissioner, had forbidden clubs from paying an end-of-season bonus to players. In addition, Rickey had barred Jack from taking money for endorsing products during his first season. “I was being watched critically by millions of Americans,” Robinson wrote, “and, if I had allowed myself to be exploited commercially, I would have cheapened myself in their eyes.” Thus he had lived with the irony of turning down hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to a reliable estimate, while living in a single hotel room and a tenement.