Rickey and Robinson by Harvey Frommer

Author:Harvey Frommer [Frommer, Harvey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor Trade Publishing
Published: 2013-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Number 42

With a blue number 42 on the back of his white Brooklyn Dodger home uniform, Jackie Robinson took his place at first base on April 15, 1947, at Ebbets Field. It was two years less a day since he had tried out at Fenway Park. It was thirty-two years to the day since Jack Johnson had become the first black heavyweight champion of the world.

Many of the 26,623 at that tiny ballpark on that chilly spring day were not even baseball fans but had come out to see “the one” who would break the sport’s age-old color line. Rachel Robinson was there with the infant Jackie Jr.; Clyde Sukeforth, who had first seen Jackie Robinson in Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1945, was there as interim manager of the Dodgers. Many in the crowd wore ‘’I’m for Jackie” buttons and badges and screamed each time the black pioneer came to bat or touched the ball.

He grounded out to short his first time up. It was a very close play and probably could have been called either way. Umpire AI Barlick called Robinson out. A scowl on his face, Robinson stepped toward the umpire, ready to protest. Then he backed off and returned to the Dodger dugout. Argument, Rickey had told him, might win a battle, but restraint would win the war. He was retired on a fly ball to left field in his second at-bat. He grounded into a rally-killing double play in his final appearance at the plate. “We had spoken on the phone a few days before,” remembers Willa Mae Walker, “and he said he was doing it for his people. I listened to that game, and I was sitting down and shaking all the time.” The Dodgers won the game, 5-3, nipping Johnny Sain and the Boston Braves. For Robinson, it was a muted performance, but the first of his 1,382 major-league games was now in the record books—and he had broken the color line forever. “I was nervous on my first day in my first game at Ebbets Field,” Robinson told reporters later, “but nothing has bothered me since.”

Duke Snider recalls that first game, too. “I never played with or against Jackie until spring training that year in Havana,” Snider remembers. “While he was with Montreal, I wasn’t even put on the Dodger roster until the latter part of spring training. All the attention that day was directed toward Jackie, and rightfully so, since he was the first black man in the major leagues. He played first base and did a fine job.”

Lee Scott, then a reporter for the Brooklyn Times, remembers the scene at the start in the Dodger clubhouse at Ebbets Field. “Jackie had a spot on the right side, a little two-by-four. It was not as large as the other lockers of the regulars on the Dodgers. He was really almost all by himself on the other side of the clubhouse. I guess it was because we had a few guys from the Deep South and Rickey wanted to keep them apart.

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