Jackie
Robinson Broke Baseball's I guess we are geared to remember and pay tribute to the deserving by the calendar. It took an anniversary to bring about an "appreciation" of Jackie Robinson in 1997, marking his entrance into Major League baseball 50 years before. But after reading so much nonsense lately about these new "boys of summer money" and their off-the-field negotiation stats, not to mention their off-the-wall antics, I can't help but appreciate this great gentleman more than ever. As a sub-teen in 1947, the year the Brooklyn Dodger organization brought him up from their farm team in Montreal, my only awareness was that a new, potentially great player was going to join our "Beloved Bums" to help us beat our main pennant rivals, the St. Louis Cardinals. This in turn would earn us the chance to finally beat -- no, not just beat -- humble! humiliate! slaughter! those damn Yankees! If there were editorials on the sports pages about the "Negro situation," I didn't know of them. My nose was forever buried in the box scores and stats. Record books on the order of the Louisville Slugger Yearbook, a freebie I sent away for each year from that famed baseball bat manufacturer, showed us "how to play shortstop like Lou Boudreau" but made no mention of race restrictions in our National Pastime. Those were the days before Little League so we played ball in empty lots scattered throughout our Brooklyn neighborhood. I often batted in the lower half of the order, but no one else on the team knew Rogers Hornsby's lifetime batting average or had ever heard of Napoleon Lajoie. Or Zack Wheat, despite his being the first "big name" Brooklyn Dodger all-star. The only "hate" I was aware of was the hate we all shared for the New York Yankees. For someone like a Stan Musial who would come to Ebbets Field and kill us, it was more of a love-hate. He was so good I was forced to rationalize, "Well, if someone had to hit the winning RBI, I'm glad it was him and not some other Cardinal creep!" It was safer to idolize other-than-Dodger-rival heroes, like Ted Williams, of course, for they were in the other league dedicated to beating in the brains of the Yankees. Hah! At the time, I regarded Hank Greenberg's 58 homers as just a stat. It was impressive, but I never heard, "They won't give the Jew a decent pitch to swing at in those last games of the season -- they wanna keep him from breaking The Babe's 60-home-run record" until much later on. (Sixty homers in one season remained an electrically charged stat long after Greenberg's run for the record books. Many Yankee fans rooted against their own Roger Maris's attempt and eventual "asterisk" triumph.* Others said, "Why Maris? It should've been Mantle!") I remember clearly the first game I attended in the 1947 season and how disappointed I was that all the buttons said "Jackie." What about my hero, Pee Wee Reese? I was too innocent to realize the true significance of a black man participating in a previously all-white baseball world. After all, many of my boxing heroes were black, as were college football stars and entertainers, and I didn't know one kid who rooted for Billy Conn in his rematch against Joe Louis for the heavyweight title. "Why
only 'Jackie' buttons?" I asked. "I want a Pee Wee Reese button!" Of course, I soon became an ardent Jackie fan, too, but mostly for his baseball ability -- his stats. Robinson won the National League batting championship in 1949 with a .342 average, and I was ecstatic that a Dodger achieved that distinction -- any Dodger. Batting .342 was a respectable average for a batting champion then as it is now, but again, out of context. The handicap of emotional pressures on Robinson's shoulders was surely worth another 50 points, but it wasn't until later, as an adult working for Civil Rights, that all that Jackie Robinson had accomplished finally came into true focus. Those achievements are excluded in the stats, along with the "bad pitches" thrown to Hank Greenberg and the hate letters delivered to Hank Aaron -- because he was black -- as his quest for 715 career home runs (to surpass Ruth's record of 714) neared its glorious finale. The years have made my love for Jackie Robinson complete. I love him for all the wrong reasons and all the right ones. *The asterisk next to Roger Maris's home run record was because his baseball season was longer than Babe Ruth's. Also, the ball was not as elastic, so it was also harder to hit back then, they said.
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