by Jonathan Eig
“What are you going to do if the pitchers start throwing at you?” one reporter asked.
“Duck!” said Robinson with a smile.
• • •
While the rest of the team stayed at the Mayfair Hotel in Sanford, the Robinsons were guests of Mr. and Mrs. David Brock, a well-to-do black couple. Rickey had inspected the Brock home himself. The accommodations were fine, but on the second night of the Robinsons’ stay there, the telephone rang. It was Rickey, telling them to leave at once. People in town were complaining, he said, and there might be trouble. The Robinsons fled to Daytona Beach, to the home of yet another black benefactor.
Robinson found himself wishing at times that he’d never come to Florida, never agreed to be a part of Rickey’s experiment. He was afraid he’d be run out of Daytona, too, and wherever else the Dodgers tried to hide him. Some cities canceled games and padlocked their ballparks rather than allow a black man to play among whites. “Suddenly I hated everybody and everything,” he recalled. “I didn’t care about the team or baseball or making good. All I wanted to do was get back home.”
But he stuck it out through spring training and went north with the team to Montreal, where circumstances improved. He won the admiration of his skeptical manager, Clay Hopper, a cotton farmer from Mississippi. Robinson stole forty bases and finished with a league-leading .349 average and 113 runs scored. At one point late in the summer of 1946, Rickey thought about bringing Robinson up to the majors to help the Dodgers in their drive for the pennant. It was a powerful temptation. The Dodgers and the Cardinals were running neck-and-neck, and the Dodgers could have used Robinson at first base or third, where they were sorrowfully weak. Robinson was a fine enough athlete to have handled the transition, though he’d been playing second base all year at Montreal. Even as a pinch hitter and pinch runner, Robinson might have made the difference. Rickey consulted some of his lieutenants, although the lieutenants knew that he would make up his mind alone. In the end, he didn’t want to take a chance by bringing Robinson up too soon, especially under such pressure-packed conditions. Even for a pennant, he decided, it wasn’t worth it. The Dodgers wound up tied with the Cardinals for first place. In a best-of-three-games series to break the tie, the Dodgers lost in two straight.
Robinson remained with the Royals, leading his team to victory in the Little World Series, as the championship contest was known. That same summer and fall, after more than a decade of segregation, professional football welcomed its first black players: Marion Motley, Bill Willis, Woody Strode, and Kenny Washington. The latter two had been Robinson’s teammates at UCLA, part of the Gold Dust Trio. Had he stuck with football, Robinson, too, might have been among professional football’s first class of black athletes. He was certainly more experienced at football than baseball, and his physical gifts were perhaps better suited for the gridiron. But football had nowhere near the broad fan support that baseball had in the 1940s. On the gridiron, his impact on America’s culture would have been negligible. As Motley, Willis, Strode, and Washington joined the game, making only small headlines along the way, their emergence served to remind fans of how far Robinson already had come. With almost no experience playing baseball, learning the game as he went along, he was competing at the highest level of the minor leagues. And he was doing it not as part of a pioneering quartet. He was doing it alone. In one startling summer, he emerged as the best player on the best team in his league—and he was accepted almost universally by his teammates.
“Those who had no prejudices acted toward me the same as they acted toward other fellows they were meeting for the first time,” Robinson wrote a few months later in a newspaper column. “And those who, because of Southern descendancy, had certain feelings about race, quickly set those feelings aside. There were some recalcitrants, of course, but they were in such a minority that they were inconsequential.” Black sportswriters were convinced that if Robinson got the chance, he would do just as well in the big leagues. White sportswriters remained divided. But almost everyone in America by now knew Robinson’s name and saw what was at stake.
After the last game of Montreal’s championship season, a mob of about five hundred white fans chased him, tearing at his clothes, smothering him with hugs and kisses. One wag, Sam Maltin, noted that it was probably the first time a black man had ever been forced to flee a white mob intent on showing its love.
To escape the crowd, Robinson leaped into the car of a stranger. A white woman was behind the wheel. He smiled at her. She smiled at him. And so the great ballplayer rolled away from the stadium, out of Montreal, and on to the big leagues.
THREE
THE UPRISING
Branch Rickey believed that Robinson would earn the respect and even the admiration of his teammates once they saw he could help the Dodgers win. He knew some players would be more open to playing with Robinson than others, but he believed that all of them would quickly come to put Dodger blue before black and white.
He was wrong.
The Dodgers in 1947 were distinctly southern in character. Their unofficial captain, Pee Wee Reese, was a Kentuckian, the son of a railroad detective. Their best hitter and the team’s most popular player, Dixie Walker, grew up in Alabama and ran a small hardware store there in the off-season. Their hard-as-nails second baseman, Eddie “The Brat” Stanky, also spent his off-seasons in Alabama. The team’s best pitcher, Kirby Higbe, was a hard-drinking, loud-mouthed South Carolinian. The backup catcher, Bobby Bragan, one of the most popular men in the clubhouse, grew up in Birmingham and spoke openly of his belief in white supremacy. Their top relief pitcher, Hugh Casey, hailed from Atlanta and owned a southern-style restaurant in Brooklyn that served as the team’s favorite postgame gathering place.
Almost every big-league clubhouse at the time felt southern to the core, whether southerners were the majority or not. Conversation revolved around hunting and fishing. Packets of chewing tobacco passed from locker to locker. When Phil Rizzuto joined the Yankees in 1941, the Brooklyn-born Italian kid was struck by the dominance of southern players. They had their own dialects and customs, and they behaved as if those were the official dialects and customs of major-league baseball. Rizzuto was playing in his hometown for a team led by Joe DiMaggio, a fellow Italian-American, and yet he was the one made to feel out of place.
Rickey couldn’t take the South out of the Dodgers, but he made up his mind to take the Dodgers out of the South, moving spring training in 1947 from Florida to Havana. In Cuba, the Dodgers rented a set of rooms at the Hotel Nacional, the country’s most elegant resort, at the considerable cost of twenty dollars per player per day. For some of the men, it was the fanciest place they’d ever stayed. They drank beer, smoked cigars, and splashed like children in the hotel’s enormous pool. But only the big-leaguers were extended deluxe accommodations. Minor-leaguers were assigned to dormitories at the newly built National Military Academy, near the team’s practice fields, at a rate of eleven dollars per player per day. Black minor-league players, including Robinson, were exiled to yet a third tier of housing: the Hotel Los Angeles, a low-rent dive in downtown Havana. Reporters covering spring training didn’t mention the cost of rooms at the Los Angeles, although they did observe that it was “near the slum district.”
Robinson had three other black ballplayers to keep him company at the Los Angeles. They were Roy Campanella, the hard-hitting catcher, with whom Robinson roomed; Don Newcombe, the lanky young pitcher; and Roy Partlow, another pitcher. All of them hated the Los Angeles. Newcombe described it as a place only a cockroach could love. But what irked the men most was the discovery that the segregated lodging had been imposed not by Cuban officials but by Rickey, who hoped to avoid conflict between black and white players. Campanella decided not to complain, to keep his mind on baseball. But Robinson was too angry to stay quiet. Until that moment, he had thought he could trust Rickey to do the right thing. Now some doubt crept in.
The Los Angeles had no restaurant. So while the men at the Nacio
nal could order room service and the men at the Academy could eat in the dining hall, Robinson, Campanella, Newcombe, and Partlow had to fend for themselves. Campy, who spoke some Spanish, would lead them around downtown Havana, searching for anything that resembled American food. They ate in some of the cheapest, greasiest, dirtiest restaurants they’d ever seen—which, for ballplayers, was saying a lot. The People’s Voice, a left-wing Harlem newspaper, said Robinson had been reduced to eating “Jimcro” food. The black newspapers made daily references to Jimcro—or Jim Crow, as it was usually written—to describe laws or customs of segregation. There were Jim Crow neighborhoods, Jim Crow schools, Jim Crow military units, Jim Crow hospitals, and Jim Crow restaurants. Before long, Robinson was suffering Jim Crow stomachaches.
For the first week or so of training camp, Robinson attracted scant attention. He was the only one of the four black men with a shot at making the big-league team, but expectations nevertheless remained low. “For what it is worth,” the Associated Press reported on March 5, “not one of the numerous sports writers covering the Brooklyn camp thinks Jackie will be in the Dodgers line-up.” The most obvious reason, beyond race, was that the team had no position for him to play. Robinson had been a shortstop in college and with the Monarchs, but the Dodgers had Reese at short, and there was no chance he would be displaced. Robinson had played second base in Montreal, but Stanky was firmly entrenched at that position. The assumption all winter long had been that Robinson, despite his weak arm, would play third. But during the off-season, the popular Arky Vaughan, a .319 lifetime hitter, announced his intention to come out of retirement and signed a rich contract. He was nearly thirty-five and hadn’t played in three years. Still, he became the instant front-runner for the job, with John “Spider” Jorgensen, formerly of Montreal, also in contention.
All along, Robinson had tried to stay calm. The dingy hotel felt like an insult. His back was aching, probably from a golf injury he’d suffered that winter. He had a nasty callus on his right foot. He had no idea what he was eating much of the time. (Arroz con pollo is chicken and rice? It came as news to him.) And now his stomach was killing him. Worst of all, he was beginning to wonder if Rickey truly intended to give him a chance to make the Dodgers. Then, as the Dodgers and Royals were preparing to fly to Panama for a series of games, one of Rickey’s assistants handed Robinson a first-baseman’s mitt and told him he’d been assigned a new position—one he had never played. First base is a busy place, he thought. And he began to worry that Rickey was stalling. Now the boss would have an excuse; he could say Robinson looked shabby at his new position and needed more time in Montreal. “I was a disgruntled ballplayer,” he later recalled.
But Howie Schultz, one of the team’s two first basemen in 1946, knew right away that Robinson would have no trouble mastering the new position. The two men began working out together for hours on end. Schultz, referred to as “Stretch” because he was six-feet-six and thin as pulled taffy, grew up in Minnesota. Schultz figured out quickly that he would soon lose his job, yet it didn’t matter at all to him that he would lose it to a black man. He could see that Robinson was too great an athlete to be kept out of the lineup for long. He was impressed by the newcomer’s quiet, patient approach. Many athletes with extraordinary gifts carry themselves with an air of superiority, Schultz had noticed, but not Robinson. Schultz heard that some players weren’t happy about the arrival of a black player, but from what he saw in those workouts on the infield in Havana, he had a feeling that would change once Robinson started helping the Dodgers win. “You couldn’t possibly dislike him,” he recalled.
At times, Robinson’s stomach hurt so badly he had difficulty bending. Doctors in Havana said he probably had colitis. But there was little time and much to learn at first base—when to go toward the hole for a ground ball and when to let the second baseman get it; where to stand for cut-off throws; how to field a bunt—so he played through the pain and made quick progress at his new location. And he kept saying all the right things. In a column for the Baltimore Afro-American and other papers in its national chain, written with the help of the black journalist Sam Lacy, Robinson told readers that “the experience is a nerve-wracking one, yet something I would not have wanted to miss for all the gold in the world.” He told white reporters he wanted to be a Dodger only if the Dodger players wanted him. “I wouldn’t want to feel that I was doing anything that would keep them from winning,” he said. And in what may have been his slickest bit of public relations, he said his desire to make the team was not driven by politics or righteousness but by finance. “They’ve got a minimum salary in the majors which is more than I’m getting now,” he explained.
Writers covering the team remained uncertain about his chances. “The only thing keeping Robinson off the Dodgers now, plainly, is the attitude of the players,” Herb Goren wrote in the New York Sun. “If it softens at the sight of Jackie’s skills, he’ll join the club some time between April 10 and April 15. Otherwise, Robinson will spend the year playing first base for Montreal.” Leonard Cohen, writing in the Post, noted that “among the majority of Dodgers there is a positive feeling of antipathy towards Robinson as a possible teammate.”
• • •
Had the 1946 Dodgers been a fluke? That was the other question facing the team as it came together in Cuba for the start of the 1947 season. The answer was not clear. The entire team had hit a paltry fifty-five home runs in 1946, and only one pitcher had won more than fourteen games. Yet, almost as if by magic, the Dodgers had piled up ninety-six wins against sixty losses. How? Where had the runs come from? The consensus seemed to be that Leo Durocher, their manager, had pulled off some sort of managerial magic, that he had willed his team to score, or else scared them so terribly that they were afraid to lose. The Dodgers in ’46 led the league in walks, stolen bases, and triples. In other words, they were burglars, taking bases that didn’t belong to them, and making off with victories before their opponents knew what had happened.
Leo Ernest Durocher built the Dodgers in his own image. As a player, he had used cleverness and lip to make up for a lack of size (he was five-feet-nine, 160 pounds) and talent (his lifetime batting average was .247). He began his career with the Yankees of Ruth and Gehrig and yet displayed little appreciation for the respectability of Yankee pinstripes. From shortstop, he would urge Yankee pitchers to throw at the heads of opposing batters. “Stick it in his fucking ear!” he would cry. If Durocher spoke a sentence without curses, it was probably an accident, soon to be corrected. The Yanks shipped him to Cincinnati, Cincinnati sent him to St. Louis, and though he was the centerpiece of a brilliant Cardinal infield for five seasons, St. Louis sent him to Brooklyn. Nowhere did he stay out of trouble, and never did he shut up. But he found his calling as a manager. Branch Rickey must have been troubled by his manager’s love affairs, his divorce, and his rumored gambling. Some of Durocher’s own players were said to be mired in deep financial debt to their manager from their losses at cards. While Durocher thrived on animosity, not all his players did, and some Dodgers despised their skipper. But Rickey looked past all of that because he loved Durocher’s winning percentage, which was .570 in his eight years with the Dodgers.
In 1947, Durocher would have roughly the same unimposing roster he had managed in 1946. Reese was his most important all-around player. The diminutive shortstop had a face like a basset hound, and a personality to match. His quiet affability, a perfect narcotic to Durocher’s mania, helped ease the tension in the Dodger clubhouse. After three years in the U.S. Navy during the war, Reese had come back to baseball in 1946, and, at the age of twenty-eight, quickly rediscovered his winning form. Though his batting average in 1946, at .284, was merely respectable, Reese gave the Dodgers what DiMaggio gave the Yankees: poise. He did all the little things and many of the big things. He made it known by the way he played that he expected others to match his intensity.
His double-play partner, the second baseman Eddie Stanky, needed no reminders. Stanky,
another man of modest size, was as tough as the leather palm of an old infielder’s glove. Like Durocher, he was not a gifted athlete, and, like Durocher, he was foul-mouthed and stiff-necked. He didn’t hit much, so he would foul off pitch after pitch, often hoping for a walk. And though no one was afraid to throw him strikes, he still ranked among the league leaders in walks, year in and year out. “He can’t hit, he can’t run, he can’t field, and he can’t throw,” Rickey once said. “But if there’s a way to beat the other team, he’ll find it.”
With Stanky and Reese at the center of the infield, and with the speedy Pete Reiser in center field, the team was strong on defense up the middle. But the Dodgers’ best hitter—the only player to hit better than .300 and drive in more than 100 runs in 1946—was Dixie Walker, the right fielder. With a lineup full of scrapers, scratchers, and scrap-heap reclamations, the Dodgers needed at least one man who could be counted on to hit the ball hard. Walker was the man.
It was no accident that the right fielder had become the most popular ballplayer in Brooklyn. Walker was built like a Louisville Slugger, long, lean, and strong. He was a humble, blue-collar southerner, the sort of aw-shucks fellow who had been gracing outfields since the game began. His jaw curved slightly one way, his nose the other, twisting his face into the approximate shape of a question mark. At thirty-six, his features were softening, crow’s nests spreading at the corners of his eyes, giving him the perpetual appearance of calm. He looked like the sort of man with whom one might pull up a chair, knock back a couple of beers, and not say a word for the first twenty minutes or so. Walker was a second-generation big-leaguer, following in the steps of his father, Ewart Walker, who pitched briefly for the Washington Senators. Dixie’s younger brother, Harry, was also a big-leaguer, and would lead the National League in hitting in 1947.