Mr. Robinson

Sixty years ago today, the Brooklyn Dodgers hosted the Boston Braves in Ebbets Field on Opening Day of the 1947 baseball season.  Four players made their major league debuts in that game.  Boston firstbaseman Earl Torgeson would play 15 years in the bigs.  For the Dodgers, Spider Jorgensen would be the everyday thirdbaseman for that season, though he’d be out of the game by mid-1951.  Young Marv Rackley was a Brooklyn pinchhitter in that game; he’d last only into early 1950.  Brooklyn won the game, 5-3, the first of the club’s 94 victories on their way to the National League pennant.

Then there’s the other player making his major league debut before 26,623 Dodger fans that long-ago afternoon.  Rookie Jack Roosevelt Robinson, 28 years old, played first base for the Dodgers in that game, going 0 for 3 with a walk and scoring a run.  Not a particularly auspicious debut, until you come to understand that he was the first African-American to play in the majors since (if you consider the 1882-1891 American Association a major league) brothers Fleet and Welday Walker played for the 1884 Toledo Blue Stockings.

In his ten seasons with the Dodgers, Jackie Robinson put up some damn fine numbers.  He was a career .311/.409/.474 (batting average/on-base percentage/slugging percentage) hitter, Rookie of the Year in 1947 (the first year the award was given), and National League MVP in 1949.  The Dodgers won six pennants and finished 2nd three times—by 2 games (1950), by 1 game (the famous 1951 playoff series against the Giants), and by 5 games (1954).  Their worst finish during Robinson’s years was third place (7 1/2 games out) in 1948.  He was six times an All-Star, winner of the batting title in 1949, best on-base percentage in 1949, two-time stolen base leader.

But even if he hadn’t been a superb player, worthy of his 1962 induction into the Hall of Fame, Jackie Robinson’s symbolic importance would be immense.  In 1947, Jim Crow was still fully in force.  The American military was still segregated.  When blacks were not being reviled and discriminated against, they were simply invisible to American society.  Neither Robinson’s signing by the Dodgers in October 1945 nor his debut in the majors solved the problem ... as evidenced most recently by the Imus mess, we continue to struggle with this, perhaps the central angst our nation has failed to fully grapple with from its inception.

There was much more to Jackie Robinson than the breakthrough we celebrate today.  He was an extraordinary athlete, of course, but that brilliance was not merely in baseball.  During his high school career in Pasadena and his college days at Pasadena JC and UCLA, he was a bigger star in football, track (he set a national JC record in the long jump), and basketball than baseball.  Had other events not interfered, he might well have become an Olympic long jumper.  Such prowess ran in the family—his brother Mack was a long jumper on the US team chosen for the WWII-canceled 1940 Games. 

Aside from his sports career, Robinson was an important figure in the civil rights movement.  While serving as a lieutenant in the (segregated) Army during World War II, he was arrested and subjected to a court-martial, occasioned by his refusal to sit in the rear of a military bus.  The overt racism of his accusers was so apparent that Lt. Robinson was acquitted on all counts.  After leaving baseball, Robinson was a leader in the integrationist civil rights movement, working with business leaders in New York and elsewhere to develop opportunities for African-Americans.  It seems bizarre in today’s political environment, but Jackie Robinson generally identified with the Republican party—the GOP of Abraham Lincoln, that is.  He supported Richard Nixon over Jack Kennedy in 1960 and backed Nelson Rockefeller in 1964.  For that and other non-militant stands while the movement boiled over in the late ‘60s, in his later years Robinson was called an Uncle Tom.  Before his untimely death from severe diabetes complications in 1972, when he was just 53 years old, Robinson had come to understand the Republicans’ betrayal of their Lincoln roots and to see some of the accomplishments of more confrontational tactics.

What Jackie Robinson represents, I believe, is what we could be, what we could do, if we were able to.  Robinson’s strength of character, his confidence in his abilities and capacities, his pride in his race—the human race, that is—showed us all what we might be, if only we could get past our obsessive prejudices.

While baseball today celebrates its international diversity—for example, the starting lineup of my local team, the Seattle Mariners, consists of two Japanese, two Dominicans, a Venezuelan, a Cuban, a Puerto Rican, an American-born Latino, and a white American—the proportion of African-Americans has fallen precipitously since its 1975 peak.  Thirty-two years ago, and just 28 years after Robinson’s debut, approximately 27 percent of the players in the majors were African-Americans.  Today, it’s down to about eight percent.  The Mariners have just one African-American on their current 25-man roster, with three more on the 40-man (actually, 42-man, due to a couple of guys on the 60-day disabled list) roster.  Those percentages are 4 and 10, respectively.  To pick another example, the Red Sox have only one African-American on their 40-man roster.  MLB appears to have belatedly begun to recognize this situation, though there doesn’t yet appear to be much of an action plan yet.

I wonder what Jackie Robinson would think about this, sixty years after his first major league game.

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