Jackie Robinson (35 page)

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” Slaughter, 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 dreams. 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.

T
HE
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.